Re: Italian Particles

At 10:49 AM 4/21/2000 -0400, Muke Tever wrote:
>
>How about something like Spanish "Me gusta comer manzanas"?  Where "comer
>manzanas" is the subject of the verb _gustar_.
>
>('Me' isn't topic; to make the speaker topic wants "A mí me gusta...")
My knowledge of Spanish is limited, but I think what's happening here is
that there's more than one kind of topic.  (See Matt's comment about
"sentence-level topics" vs. "discourse-level topics".)  In your first
example, "me" actually _is_ the topic (and as such, it's fronted even
though it's not the subject), but it's a sentence-level topic and old
information, and therefore doesn't get any emphasis.  (If it were the
subject, it wouldn't be a separate word at all, but would appear only as a
first-person singular agreement suffix on the verb.)  In your second
example, "a mí" is introducing a new discourse-level topic, and therefore
it's both fronted and stressed.  The unstressed sentence-level topic "me"
is still there, even though in this case it happens to be coreferential
with the contrastive discourse-level topic.

- Tim