(3)
A.Who called?
B. Pat said SHE called.
If SHE refers to Pat, it is referentially given in virtually every possible sense. The intended referent is presupposed, specific, referential, familiar, activated , in focus, identifiable, hearer old, and discourse old. But the subject of the embedded sentence is at the same time relationally new, and therefore receives a high pitched accent here. It instantiates the variable in the relationally given, topical part of the sentence, x called, thus yielding the new information expressed in (2B).
(3) An old preacher down there, they augered under the grave where his father was buried. (Prince 1985)
1. The Logical Form of a sentence, and the expressed proposition which is an Œenrichment¹ of that form, is a topic-comment structure, where the topic is what the proposition is about and the comment is the main predication about the topic. Sentences with non-familiar topics will be well-formed, provided that the topic is referential, and thus capable of combining with a predicate to form a full proposition.
2. Topic-comment structure determines how the information expressed in the proposition is assessed in order to derive Œcontextual effects¹, assessment being carried out relative to the topic. Utterances with non-familiar topics yield no Œcontextual effects¹, since assessment can only be carried out if the processor already has a mental representation of the topic. Such utterances are thus Œirrelevant¹, and therefore pragmatically deviant.
Like other pragmatically based effects, the familiarity restriction on topics can be suspended under appropriate conditions. Thus, sentences like (3) are not pragmatically deviant since contextual effects can be derived without assessing the truth of the proposition in relation to the topic (or assessment could be or carried out only nominally with respect to the familiar phrase that the topic is anchored in), In such cases, the proposition is simply accepted as Œnew information¹ without actually checking whether it contradicts, strengthens or otherwise adds to existing assumptions. This account receives support from the fact that when assessment is essential, dislocation of indefinites becomes incoherent, as in (4b).
(4) a. The old preacher down there, did they auger under the grave where his father was buried.
b. ??An old preacher down there, did they auger under the grave where his father was buried?
Thus, while the topic-comment (presupposition/focus ) relation is clearly linguistic in nature, the familiarity condition and corresponding Œdefiniteness effects¹ of topics, follow from general pragmatic/cognitive principles. They are not part of the grammar.
References
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About the PLC23 Committee
Previously held Penn Linguistics Colloquium: PLC22 (1998), PLC21 (1997)
Penn Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania