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Do contrastive topics exist?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2012

ELENA TITOV
ELENA TITOV*
Affiliation:
University College London
*
Author's address: Research Department of Linguistics, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper investigates a phenomenon that has been referred to in the linguistic literature as contrastive topic. Traditionally, contrastive topic is analyzed as an independent information-structural notion that is linked to a particular interpretation and intonation. The paper, however, argues that the information-structural notion of contrastive topic is redundant and can be reduced to that of contrastive focus. The apparent dissimilarity between contrastive topics and contrastive foci is attributed to a difference in the structures that contain them rather than any particular difference between the associated information-structural notions themselves. The structures that host contrastive topics and contrastive foci are claimed to be distinct due to the nature of an additional focused element obligatorily present in the sentence. Contrastive topics and contrastive foci themselves, in contrast, are shown to be associated with identical interpretations, which results in their identical syntactic distribution, strongly suggesting that they in fact represent one and the same information-structural phenomenon in two different types of construction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , July 2013 , pp. 413 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

[1]

Material from this paper was presented at the workshop on New Approached to Russian Syntax that took place on 2 June 2010 at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen as part of the TABU Dag conference. I would like to thank the audience for useful comments. I would also like to thank Klaus Abels, Nathan Klinedinst, Rob Truswell, Hans van de Koot and Reiko Vermeulen, as well as three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees, for detailed comments on this paper. This research is supported by the AHRC.

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