Are topics truly recursive?
Diana Travado Amaral1
PhD thesis
Recursion of topicalization has been widely accepted in the literature (Cinque,
1990; Rizzi, 1997; Zubizarreta, 1998). The same has been said for Portuguese (Duarte,
1987; Ambar, 1996).
Recursivity is possible with any type of sentence – declaratives, interrogatives,
exclamatives. However, this doesn’t show the exact place of topics in the structure.
Occurence of two non-adjacent topics is possible:
(1)[TOP O João], [WhP como ofereceu [TOP à Maria] a rosa]?
(2)[TOP À Maria], [WhP como ofereceu [TOP a rosa] [FinP o João]]?
to Mary
how gave
the rose
the John
Examples with more than two topics lack context and are doubtful.
Questions arise:
what motivates the realization of topics in different positions?
how many topics can we have in a sentence?
if we have three left-dislocated elements, what is the discursive value of the
third element?
Based on data from Portuguese, we will argue that there are only two topics per
sentence with different discoursive properties. Those topics must relate to two positions:
GTopP (generic topic), STopP (specific topic).
-
We will defend that topics aren’t truly recursive. There are two topic positions
available in the structure and those positions may be filled with a topic.
References
Amaral, Diana (2011) “Tópico Marcado - quatro construções, duas estruturas, um tipo
de derivação”. Presented at XXVII Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa
de Linguística, UNL, Lisbon.
Ambar, Manuela (1996) “Aspects of Focus in Portuguese”. In Tuller & Rebuschi (eds.)
The Grammar of Focus. John Benjamins, 23-53.
Cinque, Guglielmo (l990) Types of A´- dependencies. MIT Press.
Duarte, Inês (1987) A Construção de Topicalização na Gramática do Português:
Regência, Ligação e Condições sobre o Movimento. PhD Dissertation, FLUL.
Rizzi, Luigi (1997) “The fine structure of the left periphery”. In Haegeman (ed.)
Elements of Grammar: Handbook of Generative Syntax. 281-337. Kluwer.
Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (1998) Prosody, Focus, and Word Order. MIT Press.
1 Lisbon University; [email protected]