Topic/Focus

[Larry LaFond]

Thanks for your response, Holger.  Clearly you are right in pointing out
that the reintroduction of the calling event is what makes this
pragmatically odd.  But sentences such as B4 are the very evidence that some
syntacticians cite that syntactic constraints are more important than
information structure or discoursal constraints in English.  Of course, they
would not put two question marks in front of B4, because B4 is a perfectly
well-formed sentence, and they would assume that B1 is an ellision of B4.  I
am suggesting that B1 is better thought of as an ellision of B2, with the
result that the difference between the encoding of information structure in
English as opposed to Italian would simply be that English makes use of
ellision (though the new topic originates as a right-edge constituent) where
Italian uses right-edge constituency for new topics without the ellision.
Any thoughts?

> >> A: Who was that on the telephone?
> >>    B1: Mary.
> >>    B2: That was Mary
> >>    B3: ?It was Mary who called.
> >>    B4: ??Mary was on the telephone.


Mary as a discourse referent _is_
>introduced (mentioned) _first_ in the B sentences. Mary happens to be
>the answer B is giving to the question, leaving to A to somehow
>"assign" Mary to "the one just having called" (this view is somewhat
>oversimplified - in essence, A believes that he will know the caller,
>i.e. he has a set of possible assignments for the discourse referent
>he is opening. Then the answer by B rules out any other candidates
>than Mary).


it is the re-iteration of the "calling event" that is confusing. I think
>(disclaimer: I am _not_ a native speaker, so bear with me) a
>felicious answer to As question could be
>
> B5: It was Mary who wanted to know about ...

>Holger Schauer                         CLIF - Computational Linguistic Lab
>                                       Freiburg University, Germany