A syntactic typology of topic, focus and contrast

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we argue for a typology of various information-structural func-tions in terms of three privative features: [topic], [focus] and [contrast] (see alsoVallduvı́ and Vilkuna 1998, Molnár 2002, McCoy 2003, and Giusti 2006). Aboutness topics and contrastive topics share the feature [topic], new-information foci and contrastive foci share the feature [focus], and contrastive topics and contrastive foci share the feature [contrast]. This typology is supported by data from Dutch (where only contrastive ele-ments may undergo A’-scrambling), Japanese (where aboutness topics and contrastive topics must appear sentence-initially), and Russian (where the new-information foci and contrastive foci share the same underlying position). To the best of our knowledge, there are no generalizations over information-structural functions that do not share one of the features adopted here. 1.

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