TOPIC and FOCUS in Mayan-- a reconsideration

[George Aaron Broadwell]

Colleagues,

I've been reading and thinking about the apparent problem for Kaqchikel
relative clauses that I mentioned earlier.  To recap, I said

>For example in Kaqchikel, the facts are as follows:
>
>(interrogative focus)
>
>Who did John grab?             grab is in the neutral voice
>Who grabbed the dog?   grab is in the actor focus voice
>
>(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
>
>Compare this to topicalization, which doesn't use the 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
>
>Now the problem is that relative clauses show the same pattern as focus
constructions, and not the pattern seen in topic constructions:
>
>The dog John grabbed has mange.                        grab is neutral voice
>The man who grabbed the dog is my uncle                grab is actor focus
voice
>
>That suggests to me that the head of the relative clause has the discourse
role FOCUS, and not TOPIC.
>

After thinking more carefully about this pattern (and rereading Aissen's
work),
I think that the breakdown isn't actually focus constructions vs. topic
constructions  but  rather "movement" vs. "non-movement".  The AF verb form is
restricted to cases where there is a gap corresponding to a transitive
subject.

Aissen (1992) showed nicely that in Tzotzil there are island effects for
contrastive focus  vs. no island effects for topicalization.  She suggests
that
there is a coreferent null pronoun in a case like "Xun (TOPIC), [the woman he
treated pro] became well".  But there is a trace/gap in the comparable *"Xun
(FOCUS), [the woman he treated t] became well."

So my initial question suggested that the division between neutral voice and
actor focus voice was TOPIC vs. FOCUS.  I now think it's more likely to be
long-distance dependency of the filler-gap type vs. dependency of the
antecedent-anaphor type.

That does raise the natural question of why interrogatives, relatives, and
focussed elements should be formed with gaps, while topics are not.  But that
at least seems like property found in many languages.

Aaron Broadwell
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
George Aaron Broadwell,  g.broadwell at albany.edu
Dept. of Anthropology, UAlbany, Albany NY 12222
(518)-442-4711   Web page: http://www.albany.edu/anthro/fac/broadwell.htm
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"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than
diagramming sentences."   Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 1935.
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