Topic Marking and Illocutionary Force

Abstract

The main goal of the paper is to determine whether topic marking of a constituent of a clause requires that the clause have independent illocutionary force. To do so, four types of topic marking constructions and, in addition to independent clauses, three types of dependent clauses are investigated. It is shown that for the constructions that mark an aboutness topic it holds that in order for a clause to allow the marking, the clause does not need to have the capability to perform a speech act; however, it also holds that these topic markings cannot occur in just any type of dependent clause. The topic markings with this intermediate status are called weakly root-sensitive. A threeway distinction can be found. Next to the weakly root-sensitive markings there exist one type of topic marking which can only be hosted by a clause with full illocutionary force and one type that may occur in any kind of clause. Other non-truth-functional/non-descriptive phenomena (e.g. question tags, interjections, modal particles, expressively coloured expressions) are also studied to determine their distribution. Among them a three-way distinction can be found as well. Some of the phenomena are weakly rootsensitive, i.e. they have the intermediate status, others can only be hosted by a clause with full illocutionary force, and still others may occur in any kind of clause. The paper aims to characterise the property of being weakly root-sensitive and thereby gain some insights about what semantic/pragmatic properties a clause must have in order that marking of an aboutness topic may occur in it. In this regard, the concept of a judge (cf. Krifka 2017) is crucial. The paper arrives at a classification of three types of non-descriptive phenomena and of three types of clauses as well as correlations between these two classifications.