Procedimiento de análisis de la estructura metálica del Parque N°1 Urb 2 de

I have endorsed the idea that a sentence topic indicates an aboutness item represented by a file card in the CG, under which the information conveyed about that item is stored. How- ever, an immediate concern is that many approaches that invoke file cards or similar items (e.g. Karttunen (1969), Heim (1982)) solely associate such items with DPs that are taken to denote an individual. I shall refer to DPs thatcan be (though frequently are not) anal- ysed as denoting an individual asindividual-denoting DPs, a group that consists of proper names, DPs headed by ‘a(n)’, along with DPs headed by ‘the’ and ‘some’ when the restictor

6_{As will be discussed in §(3.4), it is not always the case that pisadded to the file card associated withα,}

since contextual factors might cause information to be added to a file card distinct from (but related to) the one associated with the sentence topic. Nevertheless, even in such cases we might maintain that the selection ofα

as the topic serves tosignalthat pshould beadded to the file card associated withα, with discourse participants possibly ignoring this signal when contextual features render a related file card available.

is grammatically singular.7_{In contrast,irreducibly quantificational DPssuch as ‘every cat’ and}

‘no king’ cannot be analysed as denoting individuals. We might therefore wonder whether irreducibly quantificational DPs may occur as topics (that is, whether they are ‘topicable’).

In this subsection, I will begin by clarifying the reasons for the popularity of the tradi- tional view that only individual-denoting DPs are topicable. I shall then describe the per- missive view that some have adopted whereby a broad range of non-individual-denoting expressions may be topics, including NPs and VPs. The aim is to demonstrate support within the literature for views that challenge the traditional position that only individual- denoting DPs are topicable. I will conclude that the current framework is compatible with treating irreducibly quantificational DPs as topicable.

The traditional notion that only individual-denoting DPs are topicable appears to be based on the idea that it only makes sense to have file cards that represent individuals. On this view, individual-denoting DPs are uniquely topicable due to the potential to link them to file cards that represent the individual associated with their denotations. Such a view of file cards is presumably taken due to a recognition of the difficulty of establishing what item the file card for an irreducibly quantificational DP should represent. Clearly, it must represent a set rather than an individual; however, there are several options regarding the set that should be represented, and it is debatable which option best captures what a sentence with a topical DP is intuitively about.

In order to challenge this line of thought, I shall go on to argue that sets are reasonable items to represent by means of the file card system, and that careful selection of the set allows us to capture the intuitive item that a given sentence is about. However, I shall begin by motivating the position that it is not untenable to claim that expressions other than individual-denoting DPs may be topics.

One author who endorses the idea that NPs may occur as sentence topics is Krifka. Krifka (2007) (p.42) points out that Reinhart’s definition of ‘topic’ allows the information expressed by occurrences of sentences of the form ‘Det Nβ’ to be stored as comments about the extent to which the property expressed by ‘β’ holds for the elements of the set denoted by ‘N’. Of course, from the fact that the definition of ‘topic’ does not exclude NPs, it does not follow that speakers ever construe NPs as topical. Yet Krifka gestures towards an argument for allowing NPs to occur as sentence topics by observing that this is one way to explain the fact that all natural language quantifier expressions denote conservative quantifiers; though he does not elaborate on his reasoning in this regard.

A more compelling argument in favour of permitting NPs to act as sentence topics is developed in Portner and Yabushita (2001). They discuss data from Japanese, where the particle ‘wa’ marks expressions that determine what the sentence is about.8 In Japanese, there are settings where ‘wa’ felicitously attaches to the NP, and where infelicity results when it is used to mark the entire DP.9_{The authors make the plausible assumptions that this}

particle acts as an explicit topic marker in Japanese, and that the constraints on information structure within sentences of one language can provide insights about the constraints on information structure within other languages. If these assumptions are accepted, then it

7_{More technically, individual-denoting DPs have minimal witness sets (see §(2.2.1)) containing one singleton}

set. Hence approaches that diverge from theories of generalized quantifiers often take treat the individual in the singleton set as the DP’s denotation.

8_{Portner and Yabushita (2001), p.273.} 9_{Ibid., p.276.}

follows that NPs may occur as topics within other languages, including English.

An even more permissive position is endorsed by B ¨uring, who holds that sentence topics may be any set-denoting lexical item. Although B ¨uring does not argue for such a position, he gives an example where a determiner is the sentence topic in B ¨uring (1999), and one where an adjective is the sentence topic in B ¨uring (2007). Similarly, Reinhart (1981) states that expressions other than DPs, with the possible inclusion of ‘predicates’, may occur as sentence topics. One argument in favour of this permissive position consists of arguing for the topicability of some irreducibly set-denoting items, before pointing out the arbitrariness of precluding the topicability of any other set-denoting items, when there appears to be no relevant lexical or denotational difference between them.

For the purpose of this thesis, there is no need for me to take a position on the exact class of topicable expressions. However, I will claim that irreducibly quantificational DPs are theoretically topicable. In order to support this claim, in §(2.2) I will show that suitable file cards may be associated with irreducibly quantificational DPs. In §(2.3.3), I shall argue that the topicability of DPs goes beyond mere theoretical possibility, since it is straightforward to produce examples of irreducibly quantificational DPs that are actual sentence topics. In some later chapters (e.g. §(4.3.2)), I will allow the possibility that NPs and PPs are topicable. However, my central arguments in this thesis will only ever depend on the topicability of DPs.