Re: topic/focus or theme/rheme

At 03:46 PM 2/21/99 +0000, Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>That German fronting is topicalization (thematization?) he shows by:
>TOPIC/THEME         COMMENT/RHEME
>Meine Mutter   ist 85 Jahre alt.
>Diesen Mann    kenne ich seit zwanzig Jahren
>Auf dem Tish   steht eine gro=DFe Lampe.
>
>And similar word orders are possible in English, tho the 2nd & 3rd
>sentences would probably be considered poetic and/or archaic:
>My mother is 85 years old.
>This man have I known for 20 years.
>On the table stands a large lamp.
>
>That this is not focussing is shown by:
>(i)
>A: Was hat sie ihm zum Geburststag geschenkt?
>B: Zum Geburtstag hat sie ihm ein Buch geschenkt.
>
>What has she given him for his birthday?
>For his birthday she's given him a book.
>
>(ii)
>A: Wird sie ihm zu Weihnachten ein Buch schenken?
>B: Nein. Ein Buch hat sie ihm zum Gerburtstag geschenkt.
>
>Will she give him a book for Christmas?
>No. She gave him a book for his birthday.
>
>In each case speaker B begins by taking up a known element from speaker A,
>i.e. speaker B puts the topic first. In the first sentence the focus is
>"ein Buch", (and in Welsh we'd answer by putting "Llyfr", the focus, first)
>and in the second sentence "zum Gerburtstag" is the focus.
You're right, it's quite clear that the fronted constituent in a German main
clause is a topic, not a focus, and thus that German is a clear exception to
the "focus-immediately-before-finite-verb" tendency.  However, it's
interesting to note that German _does_ clearly have a focus position, as
your examples show: it's immediately before the place where the finite verb
_would_ be if the word order were verb-final (as it is in subordinate
clauses, and as, if I'm not mistaken, it's thought to have been in
Proto-Germanic).  Thus, it looks as if the focus position was originally in
the "default" place, but that somewhere in the course of the evolution to
modern German, the (finite) verb moved but the focus position didn't move
with it.

It's also interesting how German and Welsh both do this trick of separating
the verb into a finite auxiliary and a non-finite lexical verb, which don't
have to be adjacent, but end up using it in very different ways.  In Welsh
you have:

[focus] - auxiliary - subject - lexical verb - everything else

While in German you have:

topic - auxiliary - everything else - [focus] - lexical verb

In some ways they're almost mirror images of each other.  In Welsh the
focus, if any, is first; in German it's almost (but not quite) last.  In
Welsh the focus-marking is very clear but the topic-marking is fuzzy (in
fact, there doesn't seem to be any way to mark a non-subject as topic).  In
German it's the opposite: the topic-marking is clear but the focus-marking
is fuzzy (you still need intonation and/or context to tell you where the
boundary is between the focus and the "everything else" part -- or, for that
matter, whether there's a focus at all).

This business of finding various ways of using word order to mark topic and
focus is something that I've been fasinated by since shortly after I started
subscribing to this list.  I keep obsessively trying to figure out the
"optimal" scheme -- while of course my rational side knows perfectly well
that there is no optimal way of doing it.  If there were, all languages
would have found it by now, after who knows how many thousands of years of
linguistic evolution, and they'd all have the same basic word order.  I
think that at least part of what makes an "optimal word order" impossible is
that there are at least two conflicting motivations at work.  On the one
hand, iconicity seems to dictate that old information should go first and
new information last.  On the other hand, there's a tendency to say what's
uppermost in one's mind first.  Both these principles are "intuitively
obvious", but the first dictates a topic-initial, focus-final word order,
and the second, a focus-initial order.  I guess you could say that the first
is dominant in most SOV languages and the second in most VSO languages (with
SVO languages being all over the map).  But whichever one is dominant in a
given language at a given time, the other one is going to be constantly
undermining and destabilizing it.  Barry Blake, in _Australian Aboriginal
Grammar_, says that the two basic principles that determine word order in
the Australian languages are: (1) topic before comment; (2) focus first.
Obviously these two "rules" are mutually contradictory, because the focus is
part of the comment.  So there's a constant tension between them that may be
one of the driving forces behind language change.  (There are similar
competing motivations in many other areas of grammar.)

Well, I guess that's enough windy speculation for one night.  But I do have
some questions for you:

1.  What's the basic word order of subordinate clauses in Welsh?  (And is it
the same in the other Celtic languages?)

2.  How do Latin and Greek use word order to mark topic and/or focus?

-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

The human mind is inherently fallible.  It sees patterns where there is only
random clustering, overestimates and underestimates odds depending on
emotional need, ignores obvious facts that contradict already established
conclusions.  Hopes and fears become detailed memories.  And absolutely
correct conclusions are drawn from completely inadequate evidence.
        - Alexander Jablokov, _Deepdrive_ (Avon Books, 1998, p. 269)