Focus as a Guide to Topic

As discussed in §(2.1.1), I have resisted the common tendency to conflate the notions of topic and background on one hand, and the notions of comment and focus on the other hand. Therefore, the fact that topic and comment are defined as being in complementary distribution and that background and focus are defined as being in complementary distri- bution doesnotentail that topic and focus are in complementary distribution. Rather, this becomes a matter that requires empirical investigation. In this subsection, I will describe the occurrences of sentences that are frequently used to argue that a sentence topic is some- times a focused constituent, though I will refrain from taking a position on whether such sentences successfully show this. Instead, I will treat these sentences as cases where focus should not be used as a guide to topic. Identifying these types of ‘exceptional’ sentences therefore serves to demarcate the ‘unexceptional’ sentences for which there is widespread agreement within the literature that the topicisa constituent outside of the focus. Given that most examples within following sections will be of the ‘unexceptional’ type, this subsection establishes that focus may be used as a guide to the identification of topic in the majority of cases with which this thesis is concerned.

The frequency with which the literature conflates topic with background and comment with focus indicates the common impression that topic and focus normally do not overlap. Indeed, it is generally accepted that, for occurrences of sentences where the focus consists of a single constituent which is a proper part of the sentence, there will be a sentence topic consisting of some part of a constituent outside of the focus. That is, for an occurrence of a sentence such as the following, the literature converges on the notion that some proper or improper part of the subject or object DP will be the sentence topic:

8. Zaid [BURNed]F everything in his yard.

The primary challenge to the hypothesis that topic and focus arealwaysin complementary distribution emerges from the potential for occurrences of sentences with sentence-wide fo- cus or with a fall-rise accent.Sentence-wide focus, orall-focus, arises when the focus includes all lexical items within the sentence, which yields an occurrence congruent with QUDs re- flected by sentences of the form ‘What happened?’ or ‘What’s new?’. A constituent receives afall-rise accent(originally discussed in Jackendoff (1972)) when it is marked with a rising pitch contour, and when a distinct constituent is marked with the falling pitch accent charac- teristic of focus. Occurrences of sentences that have sentence-wide focus or fall-rise accents are often thought to lack a non-focused element that is available as a suitable topic, from which some have inferred that a sentence’s topic and focus may overlap.

Nevertheless, the existence of such focus choices remains compatible with the thesis that a sentence’s topic and focus are always disjoint. To see this, first consider cases of sentence- wide focus, such as the following:

Lambrecht (1994) (p.137) explicitly states, and Reinhart (1981) (p.70.) implies, that occur- rences of sentences with sentence-wide focus simply lack topics, rather than having a topic that is part of the focus. If this is the case, then the position that a sentence topic can only ever be a constituent outside of the focus may be upheld. While it would follow that focus cannot be used to determine sentence topic for occurrences with sentence-wide focus (since there is no topic), the potential to use focus to identify topic in other cases would remain unaffected.

Next, consider cases of sentences with fall-rise accents. Krifka (2007) (p.44) argues that such sentences include ‘an aboutness topic that contains a focus, which is doing what focus always does, namely indicating an alternative. In this case, it indicates an alternative about- ness topic’. Alternative topics will be relevant in situations where an interlocutor wishes to signal that their assertion does not pertain to the topic on which information is sought, but instead addresses a sub-topic, super-topic or independent but related topic. In contrast, B ¨uring (1999) and B ¨uring (2016) treat the stronger fall accent as marking the focus, whereas the weaker fall-rise accent indicates a topic with a specialised use. B ¨uring (1999) (pp.144-7) identifies three main uses of accented topics: to move the conversation away from an entity given in the preceding discourse (‘contrastive topic’), to narrow down a given QUD (‘partial topic’) and to convey that the speaker wishes to discuss a different QUD (‘purely implicational topic’). He claims that the accented topic induces alternative questions, which are indepen- dent of the focus-induced alternatives.

B ¨uring (1999) gives the following example, where ‘/‘ marks a fall-rise pitch accent and ‘\’ marks a falling pitch accent. B ¨uring wishes to assign it the topic and focus indicated in (10b), whereas Krifka thinks it should have the topic and foci indicated in (10c):

10. (a) On fifty- /NINTH street I bought the SHOES\. (b) [On fifty- /NINTH street]T I bought [the SHOES\]F.

(c) [On [fifty- /NINTH]F1street]T I bought [the SHOES\]F2.

It should be clear that, were we to endorse B ¨uring’s view, then the hypothesis that topic and focus are always in complementary distribution would stand uncontested; in contrast, should we accept Krifka’s view, then it would follow that they may overlap. Nevertheless, the possibility of their overlapping would arise only for sentences with the distinctive accent pattern.

In summary, the following generalization may be accepted: for an occurrence of a sen- tence without a fall-rise accent or sentence-wide focus, the sentence topic will be a con- stituent outside of the focus. Furthermore, even when occurrences of sentences with fall- rise accents and sentence-wide focus are taken into account, it remains possible to uphold the claim that topic and focus are always in complementary distribution. However, I will remain neutral with respect to whether a topic and focus may ever overlap. Neutrality on this matter is compatible with using focus to narrow down the candidates for sentence topic with respect to cases that involve neither a fall-rise accent nor sentence-wide focus. Fortu- nately, almost all of the examples to be considered in the following sections are occurrences of sentences of this ‘unexceptional’ type.