Search

Recent research has highlighted the existence of expletive(-like) elements in various languages that are related to discourse, serving as fillers for designated topic/focus positions and/or contributing specific discourse–pragmatic effects. Such elements pose a number of challenges and opportunities, both for our overall conception of expletives and for our understanding of the syntax–discourse interface, although work in this area to date has mainly focused on the phenomenon in individual varieties. In this study, we critically survey the current state-of-the art on this topic and discuss four main areas where we see particular challenges and opportunities for research: (i) categories and definitions, (ii) typological correlations, (iii) theoretical modelling and (iv) language change. Overall, this article brings together a broad array of empirical findings and theoretical approaches on the phenomenon of discourse-related expletives and highlights the many avenues for future work in this area.

Left peripheral topics and foci often differ with respect to resumption: in languages such as Italian, Tzotzil Maya, and Warlpiri, while fronted topics may be co-indexed with a pronominal form in the corresponding argument position, fronted foci correspond to a gap. However, this contrast does not universally apply. In languages such as Anyi and Baule, two Kwa languages of Côte d'Ivoire, subjects and animate objects must be resumed by a pronoun whenever they appear in the left periphery – independent of information structure. The question is whether this instance of cross-linguistic variation arises through differences in the syntax of left peripheral positions in various languages or in the conditions of resumption. The present study examines data from Kwa languages and concludes that the difference lies in the conditions of resumption, which are orthogonal to the syntactic differences between topics and foci. Resumptives have a dual nature in these languages, serving as anaphoric constants (true resumptives) in topicalization and as bound variables (apparent resumptives) in focus constructions. A survey of the relevant facts in further Kwa languages reveals that resumption is determined by factors that are independent from information structure and relate to the recoverability of empty argument positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Referents with a topical or focused status have been shown to be preferable antecedents in real-time resolution of pronouns. However, it remains unclear regarding whether topicality and focus compete for prominence when co-present in the same narrative, and if so, how differential prominence affects prosodic realization of a subsequent pronoun. Building upon the general understanding that stress on pronouns signals an unusual, less accessible interpretation, we take advantage of the conditional bi-clausal construction in conjunction with homophonic 3rd person pronouns in Chinese. We manipulated the information status of two referents that were introduced into a six-clause narrative in succession, specifically (i) Topic and (ii) Focus, and also (iii) the Reference of the Pronoun (either the first or second referent). Our acoustic analyses showed that pronouns were produced with higher F0s when the first referent was topicalized than when it was not topicalized under conditions where the second referent was focused. Pronouns referring back to the first referent were uttered longer when the referent was not topicalized than when it was topicalized. These results suggest accessibility statuses of referents vary dynamically in response to different prominence-lending cues, and these variations can be captured by the prosodic features of a following pronoun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Wolof (Niger-Congo), focus is expressed morphosyntactically via specific focus constructions. This article deals with two of them, namely the subject-focus and the complement-focus constructions. I propose to analyse them as copulaless cleft constructions of the form focus | topic, that is, constructions in which the focus and the topic are juxtaposed. In such clefts, the topic of the sentence is expressed by means of a noun phrase which is headed by the definite article la when the focus corresponds to the syntactic object, and by the morpheme a when the focus corresponds to the syntactic subject of the sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This typological study based on data from a parallel text corpus is a two-step investigation of selectives (“topic markers”). First, a set of selectives in 81 languages from all continents is compiled on the basis of their occurrence with emphatic personal pronouns in contrast constructions. In a second step, it is explored how this set of markers is used across 19 subordinate clause domains. The results indicate that, despite much crosslinguistic diversity, the distribution of selectives across subordinate clauses is strongly constrained. Selectives in subordinate clauses are distributed following a tendency scale (no strict hierarchy, but no blatant exceptions): general relative clauses rank highest followed by conditional and temporal clauses with concessive and purpose clauses ranking lowest. No postposed subordinate clauses attract selectives. It is further found that selectives tend to occur at the end of the constituent which they have scope over where there is minimal risk of scope ambiguity. Despite the frequent occurrence of selectives on conditional clauses, selectives tend not to be conditional connectives unless this happens to be their grammaticalization source.

In this paper we offer a longitudinal Conversation Analysis of talk lasting 18 months between a father and son, which reveals changes in the child's level of Interactional Competence (IC). We propose an index of developing IC based upon Sacks' distinction between "invited" and "volunteered" stories. While stories have a "socialization function" we suggest stories may be tracked in terms of IC also. What has been called "today narrative" routines ("What did you do at school today", etc.), initiated by the father, predominate in a series of conversations. The analysis reveals how the child is encouraged to take extended turns through the father's questions and comments, which are developed into a storytelling sequence. We observe that the child's responses to the initial inquiries become more elaborate over time. Furthermore, there is a gradual resistance to the invited story format because it inhibits how the child organizes his stories. Volunteered stories obtain a more personal 'voice'. The paper showcases the nexus between socialization and interactional competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a usage-based account of a largely productive pattern of dative experiential sentences in Modern Hebrew that stand in contra-distinction to their parallels in Indo-European languages. In the pattern under consideration, the dative-Experiencer is non-topical, following an invariable predicate in masculine singular form. The paper seeks to prove that the construction in Hebrew is essentially a subjectless construction. Its origin is traced back to Biblical Hebrew, but its proliferation in present-day language is assumed to be contact-facilitated by a parallel subject-like dative-Experiencer construction widespread in Slavic and Yiddish languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research article offers empirical evidence from Standard Arabic (SA) that an existing structural case assigned on an element by one head can be overridden by a new structural case assigned by a different head as long as the element (or one of its copies) has not become part of any previous transfer domain defined by the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) (see Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Roger Martin, David Michaels & Juan Uriagereka (eds.), Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Our main evidence comes from the patterns of case assignment of the overt complementizer ʔinna in SA. ʔinna can only assign case to elements that otherwise bear default case, including a topical object or a topical subject as well as elements that are assigned case by T0 such as a contrastively focused subject. On the other hand, ʔinna never assigns case to a contrastively focused object (that is located in CP) which is argued to be base generated in its thematic position within the transfer domain of v*P. These facts are taken together as evidence that a structural case assigned to elements within a phase is temporary (as it can be overridden) until the transfer takes place. We attribute this to the workings of a transfer principle labelled as The Case-Chain Uniformity Principle (CCUP) that demands that a non-trivial chain (i.e., a discontinuous entity) be only assigned one case value in the interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the vast literature which has accrued on the fine structure of the Romance left periphery, there exists no diachronic account of the emergence of the considerable microvariation between Romance varieties today. Focussing in particular on the syntax of French and Venetan varieties, this article suggests that certain northern Romance varieties have diverged maximally from an Early Medieval Romance norm in which each left-peripheral Head attracts a wide variety of suitable Goals for movement, unlike the 'innovative' Romance grammars which emerge in the post-medieval period where the suitable class of Goals becomes restricted along categorial or information-structural grounds. The account predicts that the most 'conservative' Modern Romance grammars allow widespread argument fronting via movement, whereas their most 'innovative' counterparts show heavy restrictions on such operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A topic-wa-phrase is analyzed here in written recipes and the corresponding spoken instructional cooking discourse. Despite the possible assumption that the topic phrase is not used in recipes, the analysis shows that ingredients of a recipe are selectively topicalized. Those topicalized are the primary ingredients which are given with substantial procedural descriptions, when these procedures represent a parallel relationship to each other. The topicalization connects the parallel segments so that they constitute coherent discourse and properly represent the intended structure of the recipe. Also, in the spoken discourse, a topic-wa-phrase is used in a side-sequence (a digression) to connect with the main segment. These functions of representing important information and connecting parallel elements are consistent with observations in other genres of discourse. On the other hand, the analysis also suggests discourse type-based variations. In the instructional discourse, the “digressions” are connected as part of the coherent discourse. This contrasts with (non-instructional) casual spoken discourse, in which digressions are not topicalized and are detached from the main segment. These variations imply speakers’ different pragmatic intentions based on different types of discourse, which are reflected on their choice of referential forms.

Practitioners of syntactic reconstruction have not acknowledged that arbitrariness and iconicity influence syntactic change, and that they therefore need to be incorporated into methods of reconstruction. I argue that iconicity creates a directional tendency in syntactic change, privileging structures that are more iconic. I propose a method for incorporating this fact into methods of syntactic reconstruction. I demonstrate the application of this method on two pieces of reconstructed syntax: orientation serial verb constructions and left-peripheral topics. Both case studies are from Proto-Sogeram, the ancestor to ten languages of Papua New Guinea. A third, briefer case study concerns Proto-Carib. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate a puzzle for standard accounts of reference in natural language processing, psycholinguistics and pragmatics: occasions where, following an initial reference (e.g., the ice), a subsequent reference is achieved using the same noun phrase (i.e., the ice), as opposed to an anaphoric form (i.e., it). We argue that such non-anaphoric reference can be understood as motivated by a central principle: the expression of agency in interaction. In developing this claim, we draw upon research in what may initially appear a wholly unconnected domain: the marking of epistemic and deontic stance, standardly investigated in linguistics as turn-level grammatical phenomena. Examination of naturally-occurring talk reveals that to analyze such stances solely though the lens of turn-level resources (e.g., modals) is to address only partially the means by which participants make epistemic and deontic claims in everyday discourse. Speakers' use of referential expressions illustrates a normative dimension of grammar that incorporates both form and position, thereby affording speakers the ability to actively depart from this form-position norm through the use of a repeated NP, a grammatical practice that we show is associated with the expression of epistemic and deontic authority. It is argued that interactants can thus be seen to be agentively mobilizing the resources of grammar to accommodate the inescapable temporality of interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the emerging alternative to the field of Information Structure, termed here Multifactorial Information Management (MIM). This framework regards the process of information structuring as an interplay of diverse language-specific categories and discourse strategies, belonging to various areas of linguistic inquiry. The paper illustrates the application of this approach to cross-linguistic findings and suggests perspectives for future research. It also demonstrates how a multifactorial approach to information management eliminates the need for idiosyncratic concepts such as topic, focus and dedicated cognitive models associated with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Chinese as a Second Language Research is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on the theory proposed in Frascarelli (2007), according to which the interpretation of null subjects depends on an Agree relation between pro and a specific type of Topic (i.e. the A-Topic, cf. Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007), the first objective of this paper is to evaluate this theory from an acquisitional perspective on children from 3 to 9 years old. Furthermore, since the A-Topic is argued to be systematically associated to specific discourse, prosodic and syntactic properties, a second objective of this paper is to check whether the relevant acquisition correlates with information-structural and interface-related competences. Based on an original experiment designed to examine Topic chains in children's narrative, evidence is provided that this productive ability is not fully acquired at the age of 9 and that its progress proceeds in three steps, involving different levels of grammar. Specifically, in a first phase children tend to assume their personal experience and discourse intentions as familiar to their interlocutors. Hence, they start their narration linking null subjects to silent A-Topics, without overt links for their interpretation ('Emperor Strategy'). Then, at the age of 6 the creation of Topic chains seems to be part of children's competence at a discourse-syntactic level and overt copies are progressively produced in the chains. Nevertheless, since children still assume their 'hero' to be a familiar entity, G[iven]-Topics are frequently realised as first link for null subjects. Finally, at around 7–7.11 the adult-like association between discourse-syntactic and prosodic properties is attested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Referents with a topical or focused status have been shown to be preferable antecedents in real-time resolution of pronouns. However, it remains unclear regarding whether topicality and focus compete for prominence when co-present in the same narrative, and if so, how differential prominence affects prosodic realization of a subsequent pronoun. Building upon the general understanding that stress on pronouns signals an unusual, less accessible interpretation, we take advantage of the conditional bi-clausal construction in conjunction with homophonic 3rd person pronouns in Chinese. We manipulated the information status of two referents that were introduced into a six-clause narrative in succession, specifically (i) Topic and (ii) Focus, and also (iii) the Reference of the Pronoun (either the first or second referent). Our acoustic analyses showed that pronouns were produced with higher F0s when the first referent was topicalized than when it was not topicalized under conditions where the second referent was focused. Pronouns referring back to the first referent were uttered longer when the referent was not topicalized than when it was topicalized. These results suggest accessibility statuses of referents vary dynamically in response to different prominence-lending cues, and these variations can be captured by the prosodic features of a following pronoun., (© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.)

In this article, which is taken almost verbatim from parts of Agreement Beyond Phi (Miyagawa, Shigeru. 2017. Agreement beyond phi. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.), I focus on a puzzling observation about subject pro across languages: in languages such as Japanese and those of Romance, the subject pro behaves exactly like a pronoun in being able to freely refer to entities in the discourse with reasonable context, and also to refer sentence internally to a subject, an object, or other phrases. However, in Chinese, the subject pro is extremely limited in its reference potential: it is able to refer to a discourse entity in very narrow contexts, and sentence internally, its antecedent is limited to the subject. I show that the Chinese subject pro demonstrates the principles of Strong Uniformity, by depending on ϕ-feature agreement for sentence-internal reference, and when that option isn't taken, switches to the Topic feature to refer to a discourse entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article gives a first account of the background marker ná in Barayin, an East Chadic language spoken in the Guera region of Chad. The article describes the marker's syntactic distribution and the semantic and pragmatic contexts it occurs in. It commonly occurs following a sentence-initial noun phrase or adverbial and it also commonly follows a sentence-initial dependent clause such as a conditional clause. The material preceding ná is background information which provides a context for the interpretation of the following proposition, which is the main point of the communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues, against the position recently advocated by Fanselow & Lenertová (2011), that German has a functional phrase (FocP) in the clausal left periphery whose specifier position is dedicated to hosting a focus expression. It provides novel evidence that two sentences that are minimally different in that one has an in situ focus expression while the other has an ex situ (preposed) focus expression are different in semantically relevant ways in pre-spell-out syntax. An ex situ (identificational) focus expression E′ is semantically different from an otherwise identical in situ (informational) focus expression E in that the former employs the most complex and the latter the simplest semantic type that is available for E/E′ and licenses semantic composition by functional application. While such a difference in employment of semantic types for expressions does not result in a difference in truth conditions in most cases, it does have truth-conditional effects in some cases and focus-structural effects that prevent optionality between focus in situ and ex situ even without truth-conditional effects in still other cases. The paper discusses problems of applying the argumentation concerning German to English, but suggests that it holds for English as well.

Cross-linguistically, both subjects and topical information tend to be placed at the beginning of a sentence. Subjects are generally highly topical, causing both tendencies to converge on the same word order. However, subjects that lack prototypical topic properties may give rise to an incongruence between the preference to start a sentence with the subject and the preference to start a sentence with the most accessible information. We present a corpus study in which we investigate in what syntactic position (preverbal or postverbal) such low-accessible subjects are typically found in Dutch natural language. We examine the effects of both discourse accessibility (definiteness) and inherent accessibility (animacy). Our results show that definiteness and animacy interact in determining subject position in Dutch. Non-referential (bare) subjects are less likely to occur in preverbal position than definite subjects, and this tendency is reinforced when the subject is inanimate. This suggests that these two properties that make the subject less accessible together can ‘gang up’ against the subject first preference. The results support a probabilistic multifactorial account of syntactic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Composite utterances are utterances that are built from multiple signs of multiple types, meaning that in any conversational 'move' speech, gestures, eye-gaze, intonation patterns, physical stance, etc. all participate in the utterance, and the meaning derived from it is constructed by the composite of these participant types. likewise considers utterances as multimodal ensembles. The present study investigates how the notion of composite utterance plays out in a signed language such as ASL. Articulated in the same modality as are gestures, the distinction between language and gesture has seemed less clear, leading some to ask whether signers even gesture at all and some to suggest that gestures and formal signed language are substantively different systems. On the other hand, others have posited a continuity approach to gesture and signed language especially in light of grammaticalization studies. Here I examine topic-comment constructions and perspectivized clauses in ASL through the lens of Enfield's composite utterances proposal, looking at component parts and how they function to ground elements in the discourse and guide the interlocutor through the textual structure. I use Enfield's conventional versus non-conventional type categories in examining lexical and prosodic elements in topic and perspective-taking constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this study is the copy-verb construction { verbal_stem=discourse_clitic final_verb} in the Tibeto-Burman family, with particular emphasis on two languages, Burmese and Pumi. Both languages show a highly diverse functional span of this construction, thereby offering insights for its analysis and for our understanding of the interaction of verbal categories with information structure and context. The copy-verb construction of Pumi and Burmese is subsequently compared with parallel phenomena in Tibeto-Burman and is situated in a wider crosslinguistic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most previous research on turn-taking mechanisms has not centered on extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching, although brief overlaps have been discussed (e. g. Schegloff [2000, Overlapping talk and organization of turn-taking for conversation, Language in Society 29, 1-63]). This study departs from conversation analysis (CA) perspectives and attempts to uncover extended concurrent speech as a strategy for guānxì (relationship) management employed by non-familial equal-status Mandarin speakers in everyday practice in a southeastern city of mainland China. Spontaneous mundane conversations were analyzed and interpreted by means of a discursive-interactional approach, inclusive of interactional sociolinguistics. The participants were found to co-construct extended concurrent speech to maintain or enhance guānxì without any manifestations of negative evaluation. The study suggests the importance of situating research in local and large contexts, including the participants' relational history, occupation, age, sex and social distance, and the necessity to examine extended concurrent speech, floor taking and topic switching in different varieties of Chinese. The findings can promote our understanding of intercultural communication that involves native Chinese speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss the extraordinary syntax of the enclitic -(m)a: as different from other enclitics it does not cliticize to a set of words like nu, mān, etc. However, as different from -pat with its free distribution within the clause -(m)a attests a very clear tendency to be positioned after the first stressed word. To make things even more complicated, in the focusing function it attests a seemingly free position in the clause. The paradox of -(m)a is that most of the details of its aberrant syntactic behavior, save some clause internal usage which we are demonstrating for the first time, are perfectly well known, but several pieces of evidence have never been brought together. The main one is the fact that the set of words which does not host -(m)a as well as -ya is precisely the set of words which is not taken into consideration when the second position of such constituents as relative pronouns in determinate clauses, subordinators maḫḫan and kuit is determined. The paper also provides a unitary explanation of both topicalising -(m)a in the left periphery and focusing -(m)a in the preverbal position: the common feature might be the prosodic boundary to the left of both hosts triggered by information structure to the left of the host of both topicalizing -(m)a/additively focusing -ya in the left periphery and focusing -(m)a/ya preverbally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has a twofold goal: (i) In the context of negation in general to provide a clear conceptual distinction between internal and external negation, which is summarized as follows: Internal negation/ predicate denial: the negative statement is about the topic of the sentence. It provides new negative information about the topic of the clause. External negation: it is a statement about a statement; it provides information about the truth value of the root proposition, i.e., reverses it; (ii) In the context of the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (=JBA) to present an analysis according to which lāw is marked for external negation, while lā is the unmarked negator, which usually appears in internal negation. I propose that in various contexts lāw, which historically functioned as a complete clause, was reanalyzed as an independent negator and thus grammaticalized as an external negation. The support for this hypothesis comes from historical, syntactic, and functional evidence. Moreover, this paper demonstrates a connection between its two goals: although Jewish Babylonian Aramaic is a historic language, its data still provoke a discussion on negation in a more general way. The following claims have been stated among those who argue that with respect to negation the TL framework is more suitable for natural languages: (i) Standard negations represent predicate denials and (ii) Natural languages do not express external negations without subordination (it is not the case that/it is not true that...) Following our analyses for the data from JBA, it becomes clear that claim (2) is not true. Moreover, paying attention to the environments in which the lāw appears in JBA reveals contexts that should be classified as cases of external negation even when it is not marked syntactically, for the distinction which has been made between the two categories is a conceptual one and not a syntactic one. Accordingly, claim (i) is also not accurate, as in other languages, we do find standard negations in such contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Topic' is a construct of great practical importance in the fields of language teaching and assessment. Topic organisation featured prominently as an object of early Conversation Analysis (CA) research (for example in Sacks's () lectures) but has fallen from the research agenda and become the Cinderella construct in discourse studies in recent years. This article considers two institutional settings in which 'topic' is foregrounded and becomes a prominent interactional organisation which drives the institutional business, namely language assessment and language teaching. The argument is that much remains to be discovered about how topic becomes adapted to institutional goals. In these specific settings, topic has developed a 'dual personality' in service to the institutional goals; 'topic-as-script' is the homogenised topic which examiners give to candidates and teachers give to learners, whereas 'topic-as-action' refers to the ways in which candidates and learners talk a topic into being. The movement from 'topic' as a single homogeneous script to a heterogeneous series of responses by different learners/candidates (topic-as-action) is the main focus of interest in this study. In both teaching and assessment settings, this transformation of 'topic' provides a basis for the analysis and evaluation of learner/candidate performance. : 541) argues, in relation to ordinary conversation, that topical organisation is an 'accessory' to turn-taking and sequence. By contrast, topic is, in the language classroom and language testing settings examined, employed in multiple ways on multiple levels as an organising principle for the interaction; topic is both a vehicle and a focus of the interaction. It is suggested that research into institutional talk should investigate more closely how topic becomes adapted to the institutional goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of the paper is non-canonical, non-final verb position within the clause in genuine Hittite texts. It is demonstrated that, contrary to current standard descriptions, two such positions can be delimited in a Hittite clause: clause internal position and clause leftmost position. Both positions are defined structurally: clause internal position is to the left of the immediately preverbal position and to the right of a direct object. Clause leftmost position is in the left periphery. The difference correlates with two other syntactic features. First, it is the position the verb moves around: when the verb moves into the left periphery, it moves around subject and object; when the verb moves into clause internal position, it moves around the immediately preverbal position. The verb may move into the left periphery around the immediately preverbal position, but only if the subject and object are not fully stressed in the clause. The second difference is in the information structure status: whereas verb fronting into the left periphery is information structure motivated (as contrastive focus etc.), verb movement into clause internal position is not homogeneous: it may be evacuational or unconditioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interaction of DOM with information structure in Mandarin Chinese. Despite the large amount of works on this topic, much remains to be explained, in particular with respect to some alternations that do not easily fit the explanations proposed so far in terms of affectedness, animacy and definiteness. Through the analysis of text excerpts taken from the Corpus of Modern Chinese of the Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) of Peking University, we argue that, in addition to previously identified constraints, DOM in Mandarin Chinese performs another important function in discourse, namely that of signalling the high identifiability of the marked referent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrastive topics and non-contrastive topics in Japanese generally receive separate treatments in the literature: although they are both marked by the particle wa, the former carry tone prominence and only optionally move to clause-initial position, while the latter (Kuno's [1973] 'theme') do not carry tone prominence and typically occupy clause-initial position. This paper presents arguments that contrary to this standard view, topics in Japanese, contrastive or non-contrastive, must occupy clause-initial position. Evidence comes from examining the syntactic and interpretive properties of both types of wa-marked phrases in various discourse contexts. First, a tonally prominent wa-phrase must move to clause-initial position in contexts that require a contrastive topic. Second, in contexts that allow a tonally prominent wa-phrase to remain in situ, the relevant phrase is not interpreted as a topic and cannot move to clause-initial position. Third, tonally prominent wa-phrases displaced to clause-initial position show the syntactic distribution of topics that are predicted by considerations at the syntax-information structure interface, but those in situ do not. Finally, despite the general consensus, there are limited circumstances in which tonally non-prominent wa-phrases can occupy a non-initial position. The article presents syntactic and interpretive evidence that such wa-phrases are also not topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Krifka (The origin of topic/comment structure, of predication, and of focusation in asymmetric bimanual coordination, 2006, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS): Working Papers of SFB 632 08: 61-96, 2007b) suggests that asymmetric bimanual coordination and ultimately the evolution of lateralization in humans may be the cognitive basis of linguistic topic-comment structure and foreground-background structures in general. As asymmetric bimanual constructions abound in sign languages and are also found in their possible precursors, cospeech gesture and homesign, sign languages may serve as a test ground for the hypothesis. Asymmetric bimanual constructions are indeed used for differentiating foreground and background in sign languages, but some of these constructions are derived from indexical gestures, not manipulation, i.e., they draw on visual attention. Signed topics may be marked by nonmanual features derived from signals of visual attention, and the defining feature of signed topics is eye contact with the addressee, needed to establish a communicative common ground. There, thus, seems to be not one embodied origin of topic-comment structures, but several. Finally, signed topic-comment structure demonstrates how attention shifts in the course of the entire structure, thereby explaining how topics can be described alternately as foreground (e.g., Talmy, Attention phenomena, Oxford University Press, 2007: 265) and background (Jacobs, Linguistics 39: 641-681, 2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using conversation analytic methodology, this paper investigates one function of the discourse marker so in everyday German conversations. In particular, the paper describes how speakers of German use so to manage sequences of actions (both verbal and embodied actions). With the production of so, speakers indicate that they view the prior action as complete and that they are ready for the next action. Specifically, so is placed between two types of actions where the second action can be considered a “logical next phase” in the overall design of the activity. The article contrasts German so with other types of sequence closings in German and other languages. The findings of this paper contribute to our understanding of how co-participants structure and coordinate their own conduct, and how sequences and turns are designed. Moreover, it speaks to the various functions of different discourse markers in interaction and raises questions of cultural specificity and translatability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Head marking and dependent marking are considered to be major parameters of syntactic diversity, and are traditionally related to the geographical distribution of languages. Some areas such as Standard Average European favor dependent marking, while head marking is preferred in the New World. However, head and dependent marking may also occur in the same language, either in different domains of grammar or – more interestingly – in competing constructions that are used to convey the same propositional content. In Italian, for example, the choice of head or dependent marking is strongly conditioned by pragmatic factors. Head marking mainly expresses topical information, while the focus is usually conveyed by dependent marking. Moreover, head marking is preferably used in the spoken informal language, while dependent marking prevails in the written formal register. This indicates that structurally different language types may be similar in the organization of pragmatic information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to compare the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of two left-detachment constructions in French, introduced respectively by quant and en fait de. Although both have been described as topic-marking constructions, they appear to differ substantially in each of the following parameters: the characteristics of the detached constituent, its relation to the matrix clause, and its embedding possibilities. Most of these differences can be accounted for by the fact that the detached constituent in the en fait de construction is non-referential and therefore cannot fully acquire topic status, unlike the detached nominal in the quant construction, which is a prototypical topic-marking construction. More specifically, the quant and en fait de constructions are shown to differ crucially in terms of two semantic attributes of topichood: addressation and frame-setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]