On the Syntax, Phonology, Semantics and Pragmatics of the So-Called "Contrastive Topic" in Hungarian and German

Abstract

In linguistic tradition, the standard view of informational structuring maintains the strict dichotomy of the involved relevant notions figuring in different theoretical frameworks under different labels such as theme vs. rheme, topic vs. focus, topic vs. comment, background vs. focus, etc. In several recent syntactic and semantic theories of focus and in both traditional and modern theories about Hungarian sentence structure, this dichotomy is most often discussed as the "topic-focus articulation" of the sentence. The main purpose of this study is to address some of the problems faced by traditional theories in relation to the concept of "contrastive topic". The notion of contrastive topic, here considered as representing an intersection between topic and focus, is a phenomenon for which the traditional view cannot apparently provide a satisfactory and convincing explanation. An analysis of its syntactic, phonological, semantic and pragmatic properties demands a better understanding of topicalization and focussing mechanisms. It also requires an internal differentiation of the two concepts (a new topic and focus-typology) and a new way of modelling the relationship between them which, according to the hypothesis of this paper, can also include the interaction between topic and focus, provided that certain restrictions are observed. Although topic and focus are defined here as inherently pragmatic, discourse-relevant notions (cf. Molnár 1991), their structural correlates and semantic (logical) properties are relevant for their identification, interpretation and differentiation. The analysis of "contrastive topics" takes into consideration both the pragmatic and grammatical properties of this notion, comparing its realization in two languages, German and Hungarian, these being languages with different topic-focus articulation options.