Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background, Given/New.

Thanks Henrik, that's very helpful.

The 2003 post you cite distinguishes very clearly between focus, emphasis
and topic,
although it doesn't actually mention the given/new distinction. Perhaps I've
been confusing
two concepts of newness:

(1) a new referent, a concept not previously active in the discourse; and
(2) new information, a link between two concepts which is new to the
listener (i.e. the new
     application of a predicate to a subject). Typically at least one of
these concepts is
     not new(1).

So, when you said:

>If it's information that is newly introduced, it's not the topic.  Of
>course, one must define 'new' correctly: 'new' does not mean 'first
>mentioned in the conversion'.
... you were using new(2), and I think you are right in saying this. There
remains however
the question of whether a topic(alised referent) can be new(1). My suspicion
is that the
answer to this question is also 'no'.

A topic must of course always be introduced somehow, in English often using
the phrase 'You
know X? Well,...'. Often the speaker is perfectly well aware that the
listener 'knows' X,
and the phrase is used simply to introduce a new topic into the discourse.
If X is analysed
as the topic in this context, it would constitute a counterexample to my
conjecture; I
would find it difficult to argue that any other part of the sentence ('you',
for example)
should be analysed as the topic. Maybe this construction is simply
topicless.

Hmmm.

ObConlang...

Henrik wrote:
>a) What's your name?        My name is Jonathan.
>b) Who's name is Jonathan?  My name is Jonathan.
>In the answer in a), 'my name' is the topic.  In b), 'Jonathan'
>is the topic.
T4 would say (in very schematic paraphrase):
a) name-belonging-to-me Jonathan.
b) person-having-name-which-is-Jonathan me.

...with a zero copula in each case. The way I think of this is:
(1) T4 tries to get as much of the 'given' information as possible into the
first half of
     the sentence.
(2) The assertion of the existence of the referent of each half should not
itself convey
     new information [in sense (2)] to the listener.

Thus, (a) entails 'There is a name belonging to me.' = I have a name.' and
'Jonathan
exists.', and (b) entails 'There is at least one person called Jonathan.'
and 'I exist.'
Each of these sentences must be unsurprising to the listener (to the best of
the speaker's
knowledge) for the whole utterances (a) and (b) to be pragmatically
appropriate.

Jonathan.

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