IP-internal topic and focus phrases

It is shown that postulating a Focus Phrase above vP enables us to explain such diverse phenomena as the Malayalam question word's position contiguous to V, the ‘remnant’ in English pseudogapping, the clause-final ‘floated’ focus marker in English, and the position of the ‘cleft focus’ in English and Malayalam clefts. Assuming a Kaynean view of the underlying structure of SOV languages, we argue that the ‘canonical’ positions to which the verb's internal arguments are moved in these languages are above this Focus Phrase. Postulating an iterable Topic Phrase above the Focus Phrase (and above the ‘canonical’ positions in SOV languages) enables us to account for the definiteness/specificity constraints on clause-internal scrambling in Malayalam, German and Dutch, and on object shift in Scandinavian. Finally, it is shown that all the functions attributed to an ‘outer’ Spec position of vP are better fulfilled by the Topic/Focus positions above vP that we postulated.