Contrastive Topic In Vietnamese

The main concern of the paper is to establish a hypothesis in which the form thi is treated as a particular Contrastive Topic marker in Vietnamese sentence structure. We have investigated that the form thican be placed after a topical nominal or verbal to compose a Contrastive Topic phrase. Not only the subjects or objects but predicates in Vietnamese can have a CT interpretation with the marker thi. The thi-phrase not only refers to an entity or event the speaker wants to talk about, but also indicates that there exist contrastive alternatives the speaker wants to talk about. The nature of the contrastive topic decides the nature the alternative set and the choice of the topic of the implicated proposition. When the set of alternatives does not have the characteristic of scale, we have a descriptive opposite implicature. Again, if the contrastive set is a scalar set, we gat a denial-of expectation implicature.