Relative clauses -- TOPIC or FOCUS?

[Joan Bresnan]

Chris remarks:

>>>Chris Manning said:
 > On 20 March 2000, Joan Bresnan wrote:
 >  > Aaron Broadwell's interesting notes from Mayan suggest that the
 >  > relative verb in actor voice might be specifying FOCUS of the head
 >  > WITHIN THE MATRIX (HIGHER) CLAUSE.  This would imply a job for
 >  > constructive morphology (inside-out fn application).  Within the
 >  > relative clause, the relative element itself could still be "topical"
 >  > or a "theme" in accordance with the previous work mentioned.
 >
 > Back on Mayan, I found this hard to see.  Don't the alternate voice
 > markings cited have to refer to function in the relative clause? -- the
 > relativized on word is in both cases the subject (and presumably topic)
 > of the higher clause.

Consider these contrasts from Aaron's messages:

(contrastive focus)

It was the dog that John grabbed (not the cat). grab is neutral voice
It was John who grabbed the dog (not Mary)      grab is actor focus voice

As for the dog (TOPIC), John grabbed it         grab is neutral voice
As for John (TOP), he grabbed the dog           grab is neutral voice
                                                     [corrected gloss]

Assuming that the Mayan structures are similar in embedding structure
to the English paraphrases Aaron gives (a big assumption), one could
say that actor focus voice is used when the subject within a clause
(whatever its topic/focus status within the clause) is identified with
a FOCUS (possibly outside the clause).  In other words, actor focus
voice would be used when the subject or the subject's antecedent was
focused.

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But of course it's very hard to get a feel for what's really going on
based on a few English paraphrases of data.  The actual factors that
govern such referential relations in Mayan would involve things like
obviation, if Judith Aissen is right.

Joan