Page 214 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
is thus related both to sentences (utterances) and terms like 'topic' and 'theme' are applied to entities larger discourse units, resulting sometimes in an which differ essentially in ontological status. The
explicit formulation of a distinction between sentence topics and discourse topics. On the whole, however, research has restricted itself to an analysis of sentence topics.
1. Terminology
Topic-comment research is, unfortunately, char- acterized by the absence of uniformity in terminology. First, different terms are used in the literature to refer to the notion of 'topic.' There is the term 'topic' (e.g., Chomsky 1965; Hockett 1958; Hornby 1971; Lyons 1968; Reinhart 1981; Schank 1977; Sgall, et al. 1973; Strawson 1971, to mention just a few of the earlier approaches), but one also finds the term 'theme' (e.g., Danes 1974; Firbas 1966; Halliday 1967; Kuno 1980 and many others after them) and, now slightly out of use, 'psychological subject' (e.g., Von der Gabelentz 1868; Hornby 1972; Paul 1880).
A second point is a difference often found in what may be called the 'categoriality' of the terms for 'topic' and 'comment.' Often, the second term is meant to refer to something which is categorically different from what is denoted by the first. Thus one finds a bicategorial pair topic-focus in, for example, Dik (1978) and Sgall (1979). The first term of this pair is usually formally defined in terms of 'aboutness,' the second in terms of 'informational status' such as new or most prominent information in a sentence.
The last point concerns structural, notional and/or ontological differences in term designation. Not all authors use the same term to refer to topics of struc- turally different levels. Some reserve different terms from the set of terms available to refer to different kinds of topic, for example, the term topic to denote a sentence topic and the term theme to denote the topic of a paragraph (Givon 1983:7-8).
Some authors use terms like 'topic' and 'theme' to refer to notions that differ categorially from the 'topic' or 'aboutness' notion. Chafe, for example, reserves the term for 'the frame within which the sentence holds' (1976: 51). The topic 'sets a spatial, temporal or individual framework within which the main predi- cation holds' (1976:50). Chafe applies the term topic primarily to specific structural phenomena in so-called topic-prominent languages. But also temporal adverbia, which occur in English in sentence-initial position, are considered to be equivalent mani- festations to which this term applies. Thus, in the English sentence 'Tuesday I went to the dentist,' the adverb Tuesday is 'topic' (1976:51). The grammatical subject /, on the other hand, is identified with what the sentence is about: 'the subject is what we are talk- ing about' (1976:43). Similar uses of either the term 'topic' or the term 'theme' are found in Dik (1978) and Li and Thompson (1981).
Definitions of the notion 'sentence topic' show that 192
terms are applied not only to entities on the level of semantic extension, that is, the referents of linguistic expressions, but also to the linguistic elements them- selves. In the first case, the topic of a sentence is formally defined as an entity in the world (or an n- tupleofsuchentities)thatthesentenceisabout(e.g., Lyons 1968, Wason and Johnson-Laird 1972). Sen- tence 'aboutness' is thus assumed to be a two-place relation between a sentence S and an entity e that sentence S is about. Here terms like 'topic' and 'theme' are applied to e.
The application of these terms to linguistic entities may differ according to the 'aboutness' relation that is assumed. First, there are authors who define a sen- tence topic as a sentence part that refers to an entity in the world the sentence is about (Dahl 1969; Hornby 1971). Sentence 'aboutness' is here assumed to be a two-place relation between a sentence S and the exten- sion |s| of a structural element s in S. Terms like 'topic' and 'theme' apply to s. Second there are authors who, surprisingly, define a sentence topic as a sentence part the sentence is about (Davison 1984; Ryle 1933). In this case, sentence 'aboutness' is characterized as a two-place relation not between a sentence S and the extension |s| of a structural element s in S but between a sentence S and the structure element s itself. In both
cases the term used does not apply to entities in the world but to linguistic expressions which designate such entities.
2. The Kind of Phenomena Explained
The notions 'sentence topic' and 'discourse topic' are considered to function as explanatory principles for particular linguistic phenomena. The former often functions as an explanatory principle for specific, often assumed to be nontruthconditional differences in sentence (utterance) meaning. Many authors assume that these meaning differences are caused by differences in topic-comment modulation of the sen- tences in question. The following three sentences illus- trate the differences in sentence meaning these authors wish to account for. The differences are marked by the position of the primary sentence accent which is rendered notationally by the use of capitals:
(a) (Who hit Bill?) (1) JOHN hit Bill.
(b) (What did John do to Bill?) John HIT Bill.
(c) (Who did John hit?) John hit BILL.
The explanation proposed is, in general terms, that the constituents which belong to the topic part of the (question-answering) sentence remain unaccented. Therefore, the accented constituents can have no topic function. The authors who give such an explication