MoLE (version 1.0.1)

TOPICFIRST: Put topic in first position

Description

Put topic of the utterance in first position if such a tendency was observed in and therefore generalization was made on the basis of previous utterances.

Usage

TOPICFIRST(speakerID, proposition)

Arguments

speakerID

Pointer to speaker agent

proposition

Proposition in which topic argument is to be moved

Value

a proposition, i.e. a list:

external

representation of the external argument, possibly including role marking

internal

representation of the internal argument, if identified, possibly including role marking

verb

representation of the action argument, possibly including person indexing

target

target event to be described

, in which the topic argument is put first

References

Tomlin, R. S. (1986). Basic word order: Functional principles (Vol. 13). Routledge

Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. (2014). Why might SOV be initially preferred and then lost or recovered? a theoretical framework. In: Proceedings of the 10th international conference (evolang10), pp. 66-73.

Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1987). Competition, variation, and language learning. Mechanisms of language acquisition, 157-193.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
FOUND()
situation=SITUATION(1)
proposition=PROPOSITION(1, situation)
PRODUCE(1, proposition)
proposition=TOPICFIRST(1, proposition)
PRODUCE(1, proposition)
# }