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.
