The Dragonfly and Raven

The Dragonfly and Raven

Monday, July 9, 2018

A Short Overview of Topic and Focus


Throughout the course of daily communication, people of all walks of life find it necessary to highlight some part of their speech, drawing the attention of the listener to it. This can be done via morphology, intonation contours, syllabic stress, or, as is of interest in this essay, syntactic means.
Before examining specific languages, a discussion of two important terms in information structure management must be had—these being topic and focus. A topic is a discourse-level constituent that “sets the stage” for the predication of the sentence. This can be the subject of the sentence (which is a sentence-level constituent), as it typically is in English, or it can be used to give context to the predication of the sentence. Below in (1) is an example of the later in Classical Chinese.

(1) Yenhui ye yi zhi ren ye
Yenhui TOP benevolence GEN person PTCL
'Yenhui, he's a benevolent person.'1

This is also seen in English's left-dislocation.2

(2) a. (Original Sentence) I'll never be able to give up coffee.
b. (Left-Dislocation) Coffee, I'll never give it up.3

This is different than focus, which is the drawing of attention to a constituent in a non-topical manner, typically to serve some sort of contrastive purpose. This can be seen well with word order in Klamath, a language with what has been described as “pragmatic” word order. In Klamath, when there is surprising information that the speaker wants to highlight, the speaker fronts the constituents to the beginning of the utterance. For the following example, it is important to know that five sacks of beads is a large amount and that Weasel being able to produce as much as Marten is surprising, hence their respective frontings.

(3) t'on'ip wilisik yamnas sael Ɂena
5 sack bead Marten take
'Marten takes five sacks of beads'
c'asqay c'is ton'i panti wilisik yamnas Ɂena
Weasel also 5 sack bead take
'Weasel takes five sacks of beads too.'4

English also has a start of sentence focus, known as clefting, where an argument is taken to the front of the original sentence and the rest of the original sentence forms a relative clause that is subordinate to the argument that was taken out of the original sentence.

(4) a. (Original Sentence) Alex paints figurines in the afternoon.
b. (Clefted Sentence) It's Alex who paints figurines in the afternoon.

Note that with both focus and topic, the arguments in focus tend to come at the beginning of the sentence. Regarding focus, constituents can also appear at the end of a sentence to be put into focus. English's right-dislocation does this.

(5) a. (Original Sentence) I hate that you call coffee bean-juice.
b. (Right-Dislocation) I hate it, your calling coffee bean-juice.

There are also languages that use participles or affixes to mark focus. Such is the case with Boro. The suffix -nw can be added to a verb to denote that the action as depicted by the verb is contrary to what the listener believes. This is one of a number of suffixes, whose finer granularity is not completely understood, in Boro that provided information to the listener about the event depicted by the verb. Another such suffix is -bw, which is considered an additive, saying that the speaker is or has already done the action that the speaker has stated.5

As for an explanation of the locations of topic and focus, topic appears first, before the predication of a sentence, because given information tends to come first in communication. After all, the stage must first be set before the play can be performed. However, exciting information within a play can occur at many different parts of the play, thus the allowance for focus to be found anywhere. Though, like in a play, there is a tendency for the beginning and end to be where focus is generally located. Even within the Boro examples above, these suffixes appear on the end of words. This is because at a psychological level, humans tend to pay attention to the beginnings and ends of things more so than the middle.

Another issue that I would like to discuss is the use of the terms topic and focus. While I believe that focus is a fine enough term, I do have issues with the term topic, as it is also used in at least informal speech to describe what a sentence or story is about (i.e. the predication or some greater theme, such as a moral or ethical issue). Topic, it seems to me, returning to the play analogy, provides a backdrop for the predication. In some sense, the topic grounds the predication in the shared conceptual space of the listener. Thus, I feel ground would be a better term for topic, while its predication (known as the comment) could be better described as the figure that stands atop or before the ground. Both topic and focus do lead to some problem in the initial learning of the terms, as both are used non-linguistic contexts to discuss concepts that are related but distinct from their linguistic uses. That being said, I think that once learned, the difference is not all that incredibly difficult to comprehend.
Thus are some of the syntactic means by which languages single out constituents for special attention along with a discussion of topic and comment and the usefulness of these terms.

1 Taken from Scott DeLancey's Yenhui Classical Chinese (Simplified) problem set for LING 452.
2 This is referred to as left-dislocation because on a written page, English is written from left to right and is typically an SVO language. Thus, left-dislocation is taking a constituent and moving it to the “front” of the sentence. A better term for this is fronting, which is how I will refer to the process in regards to Klamath below.
3 Example taken from Scott DeLancey in the class of LING 452 Spring 2018.
4 Example taken from Scott DeLancey in the class of LING 452 Spring 2018. a gloss of p'anti was not given at the time. This example was included, however, to highlight the ordering of information in non-PIE languages and in particular, an indigenous language of the Americas.
5 Information taken from Scott DeLancey in the class of LING 452 Spring 2018.

The "Recoverability Problem"


The “recoverability problem” is the name for the issue of determining the role that the head noun of a noun phrase plays in a subordinate relative clause. This “problem” is more or less a problem for generativists, who try to isolate languages into individual sentences that can be understood completely as independent units. In reality, that is not how language works. Through the context of discourse and clarifying questions, if need be, the speakers in a conversation will understand the role of the head noun in its subordinate relative clause. Such is the case with the following example from Japanese.1

(1) boku -ga kiji -o kaita resutoran
1.SG SUBJ article OBJ wrote restaurant
'The restaurant which I wrote an article in.'
'The restaurant which I wrote an article about.'

That being said, there is evidence to show that languages do try to help speakers in helping their listeners “recover” the role of the head noun in its subordinate relative clause.
One possible solution to the “recoverability problem” is known as “the gap strategy.” Essentially, it is a strategy that uses contrasting case marking. Take for example the following two sentences from Tibetan.2

(2)(a) stag bsad -kyi mi
tiger kill GEN person
'The tiger that the person killed
(b) stag -gyis bsad -kyi mi
tiger ERG kill GEN person
'The tiger that killed the person.'

English utilizes a non-marked strategy for recovering a head noun which is the object of its relative clause, which is to simply put the subject of the relative clause adjacent to the head noun.

(3) The padawan he trained betrayed him.3

English also does this through so-called WHIZ-deletion (the deletion of a 'who is' phrase) when the head noun is the subject of the subject its relative clause.

(4) The emperor electrocuting Luke Skywalker will soon be killed.

Another strategy would be the relative pronoun strategy. This can be seen in many Proto-Indo-European Languages, including English (though it is quickly degrading in English), with relative pronouns 'who', 'whom', 'whose', and 'which'. 'Who' traditionally marks the head noun as the (human) subject of the relative clause, 'whom' as the (human) object, 'whose' as the (human) possessor, and 'which' is used for non-humans or inanimate things. Though nowadays the use of 'whom' and 'whose' are almost entirely used to mark a formal register and they are not used in common parlance. All of these relative pronouns can also be replaced with the all-encompassing relative pronoun 'that' as well. This suggests that the “recoverability problem” is not nearly as much of a problem as generativists believe it to be, as English had a solution to the “problem” but its speakers are abandoning it.

1Example from Scott DeLancey in LING 452 at the University of Oregon during Spring Term of 2018, 23 April 2018.
2Ibid.
3Specifically, the padawan betrayed him by falling to the Dark Side of the Force and overthrowing the established Galactic Republic and leading the extermination of his master's entire religious order.

The Relationship Between Nominalization and Complementation


The relationship between complementation and nominalization is a relatively close one. After all, a complementary clause is simply a clause that functions as one of the arguments of the main clause verb in a sentence. This is exactly what nouns do—serve as arguments of verbs. Now, there are generally different complement constructions for different types of verbs. The main three categories of verbs, according to Givón (Syntax 2001), in regards to complementation, are verbs of modality (end, attempt, start, etc.), verbs of manipulation (demand, make, direct, etc.), and perception-cognition-utterance (PCU) verbs (look, shout, think, etc.). All of these different types of verbs can take different types of complementary clause construction. Some languages may have more complementary types, such as a supine form (as is seen in Cariban languages) or forms for different degrees of manipulation (e.g. successful versus attempted) or indicative or subjunctive. The later two examples can be seen in Spanish, with the infinitive in (1)(a) serving as both a complementary clause and a periphrastic nominalization.

(1)(a) Juan quir -e viaj -ar
Juan want 3.SG.PRS.IND travel INF
'Juan wants to travel.'
(b) Juan quir -e que viaj -e
Juan want 3.SG.PRS.IND COMP travel 1.SG.PRS.SBJV
'Juan wants that I would travel.'

Nominalization (of verbs) takes a verb and turns it into a noun. Thus, one can argue that nominalization is a form of complementation, as it takes a verb and makes it the argument of another verb. In fact, for some languages, this is how complementation works. Such is the case for Bodo.

(2) nwŋ [i -khw tháŋ -nai] sebaŋ -khw la
2.SG [3.SG.M OBJ go NMZ] how_much OBJ take
'Take how much you need.' (Lit. 'You take amount you needing.')1

According to DeLancey, this is how all complement clauses are formed. Assuming that this is true, then the all complementary clauses are just nominalized clauses.

In English, there is the gerundive verb form, which is a nominalized form (as it can take determiners and genitives), that is acting as the complement of main verb. This is a relatively well accepted nominalized complement clause form.

(3) Their gleeful purging of the Jedi Order resulted in the death of tens of thousands.

Slightly less clear as a complementary clause would be lexically derived nouns, such as 'assassination' or 'decimation'. Both of these forms are verbs that have undergone morphological derivation to act as a noun in the clause of another verb, thus, it seems to me that the nominalization has also complementized these verbs, as discussed above, even though we consider them to be full nouns, as they are derived. The last form of nominalized complementation in English would be the periphrastic nominalization, or rather, the infinitive construction. The best example of this is the idiom, 'to err is to be human.' In this, the infinitive 'to err' is acting as the subject of the main verb 'is'. What makes this verb form a nominalization is that it shares the same external distribution within the sentence as a noun phrase. This is the case with all other forms of non-nominalized complement clauses in English—they do not share an internal structure with noun phrases, but rather, they share the same external distribution. For example, in the sentence 'I believe that cats are amazing,' 'cats are amazing' is the complementary clause, introduced with the complementizer 'that'. Again, this shares the same external distribution as a noun phrase. One could easily say, “I believe Yoda.' Alas, with English, the 'that' in the above example is not obligatory, to the chagrin of L2 learners. Thus, while complement clauses may not share the same internal distribution of a noun phrase, they certainly share the same external distribution as a noun phrase in many instances. From this, I argue that complementation is a form of clausal nominalization.

1Example from Scott DeLancey in LING 452 at the University of Oregon during Spring Term of 2018, 11 April 2018.