Topic agreement in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands)
-
Onno Crasborn
Abstract
In this article we investigate topics in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands). NGT is a topic-prominent language in which sentences start with the topic(s) and the remainder of the sentence is interpreted as a comment about that topic. Topics are identifiable in NGT first and foremost by their prosody: they always form a separate prosodic unit. We show that NGT has different types of topics that can precede the rest of the sentence: argument topics and spatio-temporal topics. Both types of topic occur sentence-initially, but when both are present in one sentence, argument topics precede spatio-temporal topics. The main aim of our article is to argue that all types of topics can be referred to by sentence-final indexes, contra Bos (Pronoun copy in Sign Language of the Netherlands: 1–3, Signum, 1995) who claimed that copied sentence-final indexes always refer to subjects. We will analyze these clause-final anaphoric pronouns as an instantiation of topic agreement. Thus, we argue that NGT has topic agreement.
©Walter de Gruyter
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Topics cross-linguistically
- Greek marks topics instead of foci
- Where's the topic in Zulu?
- The interaction between topicalization and structural constraints: Evidence from Yucatec Maya
- On the semantic and contextual factors that determine topic selection in Italian and Spanish
- The left and right periphery in Dutch
- The prosodic marking of topical referents in the German “Vorfeld” by children and adults
- Topic agreement in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands)
- Decomposing the aboutness condition for Chinese topic constructions
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Topics cross-linguistically
- Greek marks topics instead of foci
- Where's the topic in Zulu?
- The interaction between topicalization and structural constraints: Evidence from Yucatec Maya
- On the semantic and contextual factors that determine topic selection in Italian and Spanish
- The left and right periphery in Dutch
- The prosodic marking of topical referents in the German “Vorfeld” by children and adults
- Topic agreement in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands)
- Decomposing the aboutness condition for Chinese topic constructions
