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TYPOLOGICAL STUDIES IN LANGUAGE (TSL)
A companion series to the journal “STUDI
IN LANGUAG)
Honorary Editer: Joseph H. Greenberg,
General Editor: T. Givin
Edi‘orial Board
Alton Becker (Michigan) Margaret Langdon (San Diego)
Wallace Chafe (Berkeley) Charles Li Ganta Barbara)
BernadConrie (Los Angeles) Johanna Nichols (Berkeley)
Gerare Ditiloth (Chicago)
R.M.W. Dixon (Canberra Frans Plank ‘Hancver)
John Flaiman -(Winnipep) Dan Siobin (Berkeley)
Paul Hopper (Binghamton) Sandra Thompson (Los Angeles)
‘Andrew Pawley (Auckland)
‘Volumes in this serizs will be functionally and typolagically oriented, ceve~
ing specific -opics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety
‘cf languages and language typologies. The orientation cf the volumes will Ee
substantive rather than formal, with tre aim ef investigating universals of
human langage viaasbreadly defined adaiabaceas posite, ieaniag toward
cross-linguistic, diachronic, developmental and live-discourse data. The
ies 3, in spicit as well asin fect, a contir uation of tne tradition initiated ky
C. Li (Word Order and Word Order Change, Subject and Topic, Mechanisms
for Syntactic Chaage) and sontinusd by. Givén (Discourse end Syntax) and
P. Hopper (Tense and Aspect: Between Se-nantics and Pragmatics).
Volunse 3
T. Givor (ed)
TOPIC CONTINUITY IY DISCOURSE:
A QUANTITATIVE CROSS-1 ANGUAGE STUDY,
TOPIC CONTINUITY IN DISCOURSE:
A QUANTITATIVE CROSS-LANGUAGE STUDY
edited by
‘T. GIVON
Linguistics Department
University of Oregon, Eugene
and.
Ute Language Program
Southern Ute Tribe
Ignacic, Colorado
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
‘Amsterdam/Philadelphia
1983 ‘TOPIC CONTINUITY IN DISCOURSE: AN INTRODUCTION
7. cIVON
Linguistic Department
Unweratty 07 Oregon, Eugene
and
Ute Language Program
Southem Ute Tribe
Ignacio, Colorado INTRODUCTION, 5
1. The topic’ strand: Miera trations
‘The intuition, expressed under whatever terminology, which led to shifting
the atcention of the linguist from the pare'y s:ructural notion of ‘subjec:
toward the snore ditcours:-functional notion of topic’, or under seme other
fuises ‘theme’, may be traced back to a number of sources, among which Ifind
1myself disinclined to apportion historical primacy. The sources most of us wi
became invclved with the renascent “topiz ovement in the early rineteer
seventiss tended - and til teed to ete move often werr either the Prague
School (ef. Fitbas, 1956a, 19560), the Fithian troditior. (ef. Halliday, 1967) cr
Bolinger (1952, 195%). In one fozm or another, che various strands of this
tradition tended to divide sentences (‘clauses’) into two distinst components
one of them the ‘Toc: theme’, ‘comment, ‘new infecmation}, the other the
‘topic’ (theme ‘ld infomation’). And it wes the second, the topic, which a}
carly practitioners wcald then ink o disurse structure, eonmunizatve intent,
‘communicative dynamism, functional sentence perspective ete, in ways that
tended to be often both vague and rayster ou
In tse early 1970, when a number of us became iavohed in studying th
Paonomena of ‘topic’ and ‘subject’ (ef. Hawkinson and Hyman, 1974, Li,(ed.)
1976, inter alli), we tended to incorporate uncritically cur predecessox view of
‘topic’ as an atomic, discrete entity. a single consttuen: ef the clause. When we
worried about the relation between “topie’ and ‘tubject in one way cr another
‘we gravitated toward viewing the subjec: as granmnicalized rapie (ef, Givén,
1976s). And some o° us went further and proposed typologies. wherce ‘topis
rominant languages exhibited paucity in such gremmaticalization, while
“subject prominent lanzuaje™ disphyed richer giammaticakzation cf “topic's
weich soon tumed out to mean morpholagzavion (ef. Li and Thompscn, 1975)
But already then, there was « range of rather recekitrant data which suggested
that, at feast at the funeticnal level, “top” was not an atomic, disrere anti.
Ore could consider, for example, the commonplace phenomens of 3- and L-
dislocation, a in
(a Ldistovation: John, we sew hina yesterday
>. Raislocation: We saw him yesterday, John
cc. Simplex: We saw John yesterday
In both (Lah) above, the conventional visdom went, “Johr’ is the topic, Bu:
then, what was the status of the subject we"? Obviously, the clause could have
‘more thar ore ‘topic’, one zrarmaticalized as ‘subject’, the other of a differen:
(Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 210) Johannes Helmbrecht, Stavros Skopeteas, Yong-Min Shin, Elisabeth Verhoeven-Form and Function in Language Research_ Papers in Honour of Christian Leh.pdf
