The study on information-structural notions, such as topic and focus started much longer before the linguistic term information structure was proposed in 1967. Before the
advent of modern linguistics, they were touched upon by some medieval grammarians.18 In modern linguistics, according to Firbas (1974), the notion of topic/theme originated from the “point of departure” of a sentence in the French scholar Henri Weil’s book De l’ordre des mots dans les langues anciennes comparées aux langues modernes (The Order of Words in the ancient languages compared with that of modern languages) published in 1844 and from the “psychological subject” in V. Ertl’s book Mluvnice česká II (Skladba) (A Grammar of Czech II (Syntax)) published in 1926. In addition, Hermann Paul’s book Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Principles of the History of Language) published in 1880 already highlighted the pragmatic use of focus in question-answers pairs (Krifka & Musan 2012). Moreover, the given-new discourse principle that known information precedes new one was proposed in one of the Germanic historical linguist Otto Behaghel’s five laws at the turn of the 19th century and the 20th century (Harris & Campbell 1995).
With the blooming of linguistics in the 20th century, abundant of works on information-structural notions, especially topic and focus, came out from diverse perspectives. For instance, linguists in the Prague School and Systematic Functional Grammar dichotomized a clause into theme and rhyme (Firbas 1959, 1974, Halliday 1967b, 1969, 1974, 1985, Halliday & Matthiessen 2004).19 Different definitions and classifications of information-structural notions were proposed in Dik (1997), Erteschik-Shir (2007), Gundel (1999), Krifka & Musan (2012), Lambrecht (1994), Reinhart (1981), Strawson (1964), Vallduví (1992, 1994), and Van Dijk (1977) among others. They nurtured our understanding of information structure but sometimes brought us confusion usually as a result of the unfamiliarity with their individual theoretical
18
It has even been argued by some linguists that the great work of the Roman rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutio Oratoria, already presented such notions as topic and comment (Ledgeway 2012). 19 The notion of focus originated from Halliday (1967b), which stated that “[information focus] involves the selection, within each information unit, of a certain element or elements as points of prominence within the message. (p.203)”
frameworks and the lack of their mutual compatibility.20
The gestation of information-structural notions in LFG started from Bresnan & Mchombo (1987), which analyzed TOPIC as an independent grammatical function in f-structure based on the evidence of Chicheŵa. Since then, information-structural notions officially entered this framework. As mentioned in Section 2.2.1, because of King’s proposal, they were relocated in i-structure in later LFG works, termed as discourse functions. In addition to TOP (topic), more discourse functions were proposed, such as FOC (focus), BCK (background) and COMP.INF (completive information)(Butt & King 2000, King 1997). Choi (1997, 1999, 2001) refined the inventory of discourse functions with two partitioning discourse features [±New] and [±Prom] to distinguish four information types: TOP (topic), CONT.FOC (contrastive focus), TAIL (tail), and COMP.FOC (completive focus).21 [±New] stood for newness, differentiating whether or not the information was new to the addressee and [±Prom] stood for prominence, differentiating whether or not the information was highlighted by means of prosody-marking or morphosyntax-marking and stood out in the foreground. TOP (topic) was defined as non-new and prominent information. CONT.FOC was defined as new and prominent information. TAIL was defined as non-new and nonprominent information. COMP.FOC was defined as new and nonprominent information. The classification is illustrated in the following table from Choi (2001:148):
20
Schlobinski & Schütze-Coburn (1992) and Szwedek (1990) even suggested that the notion of topic should be abandoned because of its inconsistent definitions in different works.
21 In linguistic literature, there are other terms for these notions. Contrastive focus is also termed as “narrow focus”, “identificational focus”, or “operator focus”. Tail is also termed as “background information”. Completive focus is also termed as “wide focus”, “information focus” or “rheme”.
Table 2-1 Choi’s (2001) Discourse Features & Functions
[+Prom] [−Prom]
[−New] Topic, Link Tail
[+New] Contrastive Focus Completive/Presentational Focus
There are two strengths on Choi’s feature-based information structure. First, it enhances the accuracy of the definition of each discourse function as long as discourse features are clearly defined. Second, as pointed out by Choi (2001:92), “[o]ne of the advantages of this feature-based information structure is that it can crossrefer to more than one distinct information type.” This advantage will be manifested in the mapping theory proposed later in the present thesis.
Choi’s classification however has its own limitations since cross-linguistically, more than four discourse functions have been identified, and there is no doubt that more discourse features are needed to differentiate them. For instance, there are languages, like Gawwada (an African language) and Finnish, which syntactically mark contrastive entities without making any differentiation on whether their information is given or new (Konietzko & Winkler 2010, Molnár & Winkler 2010, Payne 1995, Tosco 2010). It has been proposed by some linguists that contrast (or “kontrast”) should exist as an autonomous information-structural notion (Molnár 2002, Neeleman & Vermeulen 2012, Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998).22 The distinction between contrast and newness has also been proved in phonetic research (Katz & Selkirk 2011). It follows that the two partitioning discourse features [±New] and [±Prom] do not suffice to explain diverse linguistic phenomena.
The present thesis will preserve the strength of Choi’s insight, that is, the use of
22 Some linguists proposed that contrastive topic was a composite of topic and focus rather than a topic plus contrast (Buring 1997, Erteschik-Shir 2007, Krifka 2007), while some argued against the independent existence of contrast (Repp 2010).
discourse features, and expand the inventory of discourse features to accommodate more discourse functions in i-structure in order to account for the empirical facts in Squliq Atayal. One may argue against this feature-based approach since linguists can never exhaust the possibility of postulating new discourse features.23 As long as we are willing, we can classify information to the extent that every piece of information itself is an independent category with its own unique feature. In other words, the number of both discourse features and functions seems infinite. This worry nevertheless is unnecessary because linguists only focus on the features and functions having a bearing on linguistic research.