Elizabeth Evison (Linguistics, ’10) will present her comps research on Thursday, 15 April, at 4:30 pm in Goodsell 03.
*****
Resolving the Topic Debate: A Case Study in Japanese
Elizabeth Evison
I present a unifying syntactic theory of topic utilizing aspects of seemingly orthogonal viewpoints. I argue for a universal definition of topic that it is shown to be found on constituents bearing D-linked information that are given emphasis, and that therefore also supply an “aboutness” or “contrast” reading on the sentence. There are no universal constraints on where topic can be found in a sentence, and it manifests either through stress, pitch, or movement to the left periphery of a sentence. I innovate in this analysis with a case study on topic in Japanese declarative sentences and prove that Japanese has two distinct projections, Top1 and Top2, which serve these “aboutness” and “contrast” functions of topic respectively.
*****
A reception immediately follows this talk. All are invited to attend.