On the Question of Topics in Topic Prominent

For twenty-five years, interlanguage researchers have accepted an early period of topic prominence in the language of a native speaker of Hmong learning English (Huebner 1983). The study was based on Li and Thompson's Typology of Subject-Prominent and Topic Prominent language types. Since Huebner only examined properties of topic prominent languages without also looking for evidence of subject, I revisit the study and show evidence for subjecthood from grammatical relations, semantic functions, and properties of behavior and control. An investigation of one of the properties, namely that topics control co-referential constituent deletion, suggests instead evidence for subject in serial verb constructions. After finding evidence for at least three properties of subject as a basic subject-predicate construction in the interlanguage, I propose an alternative analysis that the learner’s early interlanguage must be re-classified as both subject and topic prominent