TOPICALIZATION IN CHILD LANGUAGE

Abstract

In this paper we will analyse certain aspects of the syntax of one child who was acquiring English. 1 We will try to show that this child did not at one stage manifest the subject-predicate construction for his sentences in the way that adult English speakers do. Even though nouns appeared to be used as the subjects of subject-predicate constructions, further analysis of the data disclosed that these nouns act as the topics of topic-comment constructions. Such topic-comment constructions appear at times in adult English speech. For instance, in the sentence salt, taste it in this food, salt is the topic, and I taste it in this food is the comment. This sentence would have the tree structure shown in Figure 1. In this figure an ordinary English sentence, showing a subject-predicate construction, is dominated by S'. This S', which in turn is immediately dom inated by S, is the comment. The NP immediately dominated by S is the topic. On the other hand, the NP and VP immediately dominated by S' are S

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