Volume 26, Issue 2-3

This article discusses the discourse-semantic properties of Greek preverbal and postverbal object foci. Greek preverbal object foci are compared with their postverbal counterparts with respect to exhaustivity, contrastivity and discourse topichood. It is shown that preverbal and postverbal object foci do not differ with respect to exhaustivity and contrastivity. In particular, preverbal and postverbal object foci can receive a non-exhaustive interpretation. Preverbal as well as postverbal object foci can be interpreted contrastively. It is argued that preverbal object foci differ from their postverbal counterparts with respect to discourse topichood. Greek preverbal object foci obligatorily function as discourse topics. In this respect, the fact that object foci can occur preverbally is due to the fact that they are discourse topics. Evidence for this claim is provided by backward anaphora resolution and by a continuation test. The continuation test has been carried out by means of a questionnaire.

This article provides a detailed investigation of the prosody and syntax of dislocation in Durban Zulu, an Nguni Bantu language spoken in South Africa. With focus elements obligatorily appearing in an immediately after the verb position, non-focused elements within a verb phrase have to be right- or left-dislocated. We discuss the asymmetries between right- and left-dislocation, showing that only left-dislocated elements can be topics. We argue that aside from a pre-subject Topic position, there is also a Topic position between the subject and the verb phrase. The prosodic phrasing cues in Zulu show that both the CP and the vP phases play a crucial role in determining the alignment with Intonational Phrases.

This article deals with the syntactic and pragmatic properties of left dislocated constituents in Yucatec Maya. It has been argued that these constituents are topics, which implies that a particular structural configuration, namely left dislocation displays a 1:1 correspondence to a particular discourse function. We present evidence that the discourse properties of left dislocation are not uniform: only a subset of the left dislocated constituents qualify as topics in the strict sense, while other instances of left dislocation are better explained if we assume a structural constraint that bans the postverbal occurrence of subject constituents in a particular syntactic configuration. Our empirical findings show that though the occurrence of word order possibilities in discourse is not random, it is not necessarily determined by a unique licensing condition.

In this article the reasons for an argument to be chosen as sentence topic are discussed. I argue that a topic expression can be prototypical or not, depending on how its thematic/semantic properties reflect humans' preference to talk about certain things and not others. Although subjects are mostly prototypical topics, I show that a non-subject topic is prototypical with predicates that select a patient subject and an IO with protoagent properties but volition (psych-verbs, unaccusative verbs). Constructions like passives or arbitrary subjects may also have a prototypical topic object. As for nonprototypical topics, they are generally left dislocated direct objects. Their presence is justified by the fact that discourse needs may overrule the requirement of a topic to be prototypical. In particular, they are used in contrastive contexts. It follows that whenever a topic is non-prototypical, it is automatically interpreted as contrastive.

This article discusses the information-structural status and the syntax of left and right dislocation constructions in Dutch. Four orthogonal information-structural features are proposed, and their distribution is systematically investigated. Furthermore, it is argued that hanging topic left dislocation, backgrounding right dislocation and afterthoughts are a particular kind of parenthesis. They do not involve movement, and do not show reconstruction effects. Contrastive left dislocation, on the other hand, behaves on a par with topicalization; both involve contrast, and show signs of A-bar movement. The demonstrative pronoun is analyzed as an apposition to the topicalized phrase. Finally, it is shown that right-dislocated constituents, like appositions, are parenthetical secondary predicates of an anchor in the host clause.

This article reports on the analysis of prosodic marking of topical referents in the German prefield by 5- and 7-year-old children and adults. Natural speech data was obtained from a picture-elicited narration task. The data was analyzed both phonologically and phonetically. In line with previous findings, adult speakers realized topical referents predominantly with the accents L+H* and L*+H, but H* accents and unaccented items were also observed. Children used the same accent types as adults, but the accent types were distributed differently. Also, children aligned pitch minima earlier than adults and produced accents with a decreased speed of pitch change. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed. Contrast – defined in terms of a change of subjecthood – did not affect the choice of pitch accent type and did not influence phonetic realization, underlining the fact that accentuation is often a matter of individual speaker choice.

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.

Traditionally, the relation between a topic and its comment in Chinese is characterized by an aboutness condition (Chao, A Grammar of Spoken Chinese, University of California Press, 1968; Chafe, Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view, Academic Press, 1976; Li and Thompson, Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar, University of California Press, 1981; Xu and Langendoen, Language 61: 1–27, 1985), though the precise nature of aboutness has never been made clear. In this article, we attempt to provide a more explicit characterization of the aboutness condition by decomposing it into two conditions, i.e., a licensing condition and an interpretation condition. The licensing condition stipulates that a topic is licensed if there is a variable in the comment and the set generated by this variable produces a non-empty set when intersecting with the set denoted by the topic. The interpretation condition requires that the topic forms a subject-predicate relation with an element inside the comment, with the topic being the predicate and the element in the comment the subject. It is shown that the two decomposed components of the aboutness condition have the advantage of unifying both gapped topic structures and the gapless ones within a single account.