Comments by "⃠" (@U20E0) on "OSV: Why is this word order so rare in languages?" video.

same
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@LowestofheDead it could and is more likely to be “I”, but it could be “the dog” too. It’s hard to come up with examples though. “i see the dog” as an answer to “is the dog visible?” could be an example but i’m not sure.
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@LowestofheDead note that i am not an expert on this. Also, it appears that historically topic and subject were in fact not distinguished. And really, they are not that distinct in the first place ( in English ) outside of corner cases, so you do still have a point.
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Subject is not a conflation of Topic with anything. Subject, Object, and Agent* are defined by semantics, Topic and Focus are defined by pragmatics. Word order is semantics. You can’t talk about the Topic in context of word order because that simply does not work. in “it is raining” there is no Subject, the Focus is most likely “raining” and the Topic is the current environment. ( also the verb is almost never the Topic ) *Subject is also a conflation of Agent and Subject. wtf linguists.
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@LowestofheDead fuck. After indecisively editing my comment for like 30 minutes trying to make it not sound offensive &c i just confused myself and made highly ambiguous nonsense. ( also i use Focus as a synonym for Comment, as is sometimes done ) (( also long warning )) ((( also I can’t see your comment or my comment or your other comment or most of what i’m writing because mobile, so expect issues caused by that ))) What i meant, is that you can’t logically have a conflation of Subject and Topic. in “the dog will not eat that”. SVO word order overrides T-F order, so which is which is unclear ( although it’s more likely to be S ) in “that, the dog will not eat”, T-F order overrides SVO word order, so “that” is clearly the Topic and the rest the Focus, and since can’t have a Subject standing alone in English, “that” must also be Object. You can’t really argue here that Subject is a conflation with Topic when they are clearly separate here. As for why i said what i originally said, i failed to find a suitable expression for “you can’t put Topic into a word order” ( as it is most often an abstract thing, not a clause or word ) You also can’t put topic in a word order because that’d imply that none of SVO can be T since T is separate (((( Note that linguistic terminology is as bad as terminology can get, so we may be using terms with different definitions in mind )))) “Would the concept of Subject/Object be necessary if we had not invented them ( but still had, […]? Consider this: “i see the dog” - Agent: “I” - Patient: “the dog” - Topic: could well be “the dog” - Focus: could well be “is seen by me” “the dog is seen by me” - Agent: “I” - Patient: “the dog” - Topic: probably “the dog” - Focus: probably “is seen by me” You can’t distinguish the two using Agent/Patient alone. Topic/Focus are useless for describing a sentence out of context because they are defined by context. And yet they may have completely different meanings. You need to have Subject and Object to accurately distinguish these.
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