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1 Structural Topic and Focus without Movement Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King Introduction One of the challenges in presenting a syntactic analysis of free word order languages like Urdu and Turkish lies in motivating the various p ossible p ermutations of a given sentence For ex ample diering word orders have b een motivated in terms of case theory adjunction or head movement eg Maha jan Within a Minimalist approach a p ossible analysis could even b e p osited in terms of an optional scramble feature which must b e checked M uller Alternatively in declarative constraintbased theories like LexicalFunctional Grammar word order p ermutations have b een taken to b e merely a statement ab out a language particular constituentstructure exibility Grammatical functions are disso ciated from word order and are co ded in terms of functionalstructure see eg T Mohanan and Butt on HindiUrdu However a deep er explanation and understanding of word order eects in these languages elude these approaches 2 3 We prop ose to analyze the free word order in Urdu and Turkish as basegenerated p ossi bilities which reect diering information structures of a sentence We prop ose that the varied word orders are optional from a purely syntactic p oint of view they are not motivated by case or agreement Instead they are motivated b oth by semantic factors such as sp ecic vs non sp ecic interpretations and discourse considerations such as topic and fo cus In particular we investigate an intriguing interaction b etween preverbal structural fo cus and the nonsp ecic interpretation of preverbal ob jects in Urdu and Turkish Word Order and Discourse Functions Urdu and Turkish are rightheaded SOV languages However unlike in Japanese or Korean the surface order of elements is not strictly headnal so a sentence with a sub ject verb and ob ject can have all six p ossible orders We take the p osition that languages like Urdu and Turkish are discourse congurational in that discourse functions are enco ded syntactically and thus aect word order E Kiss The various word orders in Turkish and Urdu primarily have a pragmatic eect in that they express diering ways of conveying some particular information Gambhir Erguvanl Homan As such in order to determine the syntax and phrase structure of these languages it is necessary to analyze how discourse functions are licensed ie which p ositions corresp ond to which discourse function interpretations of the arguments found there Theoretical Considerations Vallduv for Catalan and English and King for Russian argue that the traditional bipartite divisions of a sentence drawn in terms of topicfocus themerheme old informationnew information are b est understo o d in terms of a tripartite distinction Vallduv 1 We would like to acknowledge the invaluable help we received from Beryl Homan Umit Turan and Tara Mohanan in their willingness to answer questions ab out Turkish and Urdu data and for their enthusiastic partic ipation in discussions ab out fo cus topic and incorp oration in general We would also like to thank Jo e Eskenazi Veerle van Geenhoven Michael Inman Louise McNally Chris Pi non Peter Sells Rob ert Underhill and the audiences at the LSA and a Stanford University Collo quium for comments and valuable input 2 The South Asian language Urdu is closely related to Hindi which is mostly sp oken in India In this pap er we primarily draw our data from the dialect of Urdu sp oken in Lahore Pakistan and the dialect of Hindisp eaking informants from New Delhi India 3 The data and claims for Turkish are taken mainly from Homan who bases her ndings on a corpus gleaned from the childes database Mac Whinney and Snow transcrib ed collo quial sp eech and contem p orary novels Further data is taken from Kornlt and additional eldwork conducted indep endently denes the relevant notions in new terms in order to avoid p otential confusion with existing terminologies He views the information structure of a sentence as instructions to the hearer on how to up date hisher current knowledge store He couches the idea of a knowledge store in terms of a Heimian collection of lecards Heim The focus part of a sentence can b e seen as an instruction to up date a given lecard or to add an entirely new one The ground represents the information that is already known However a distinction is made b etween the kind of information that represents a link and the kind that is contained in the tail The link p oints the hearer to the le card that is to b e up dated while the tail further sp ecies how the new information ts onto the given le card Here we will refer to the link as topic and the tail as background Choi prop oses an extension of Vallduvs system whereby there is a fourway distinc 4 tion based on two features New and Prominent Following Choi we assume that the information structure must b e further divided and make the following prop osal based on her two features Topic and fo cus share the discourse function feature Prominent which dierentiate them from their relatively less prominent pairs background and completive information resp ec tively Completive information and fo cus share the feature New since they b oth introduce new information into the discourse While fo cuss ma jor function is to ll the informational gap 5 b etween the sp eaker and the hearer completive information provides information which is new to the hearer and hence New but which is not of primary imp ortance to the information structure of the discourse at hand and hence Prom New fo cus Prom completive information Prom New topic Prom background information Prom In this pap er we incorp orate the extension of Vallduvs prop osal into the structural approach to topic and fo cus E Kiss King The remainder of this section discusses how Turkish and Urdu enco de these discourse functions Topic In Urdu and Turkish the rst element in an utterance is interpreted as topic Topics o ccur in clause initial p osition in matrix clauses as in and in clauses with complementizers as in 6 a hassanko naadyaane toi dii T HassanMDat NadyaFErg toeeFNom givePerfFSg To Hassan Nadya gave toee Urdu b bu kitab Hasan bana verdi T this b o okAcc HasanNom IDat givePastSg This b o ok Hasan gave to me Turkish 4 Chois use of these features is dierent than ours in that her division of fo cus dierentiates b etween con trastive focus and completive focus as in i We do not discuss contrastive fo cus in this pap er i S fo cus ground fo cus New contrastive Prom completive Prom ground New topic Prom background Prom 5 This is what is often refered to as newinformation and presentational fo cus Dik et al Ro chemont Ro chemont and Culicover 6 The in the Urdu examples is intended to enco de that the case markers act more like clitics than b ound morphemes T Mohanan which are indicated by h a anjumne dek aa ki hassanko naadyaane toi T T AnjumFErg seePerfMSg that HassanMDat NadyaFErg toeeFNom dii givePerfFSg Anjum saw that to Hassan Nadya gave toee Urdu b Zeynep cocuklar b enim okula goturdugumu biliyor T ZeynepNom childPlAcc IGen schoolDat takeGerSgAcc knowProgSg Zeynep knows that the children I to ok to school Turkish We prop ose that these topics b e represented in a p osition which is situated ab ove the default p osition of the arguments In particular the topicalized constituent is in Sp ecIP compare Bresnan and King for Russian Dwivedi for Hindi In sentences like those in and in which a nonsub ject argument is topicalized its app earance in Sp ecIP results in noncanonical word order in which the nonsub ject argument precedes the sub ject On the other hand sentences such as in which the sub ject is in initial p osition can have two structures naadyaane hassanko toi dii (T ) NadyaFErg HassanMDat toeeFNom givePerfFSg Nadya gave toee to Hassan Urdu 0 0 naadyaane ::: ::: No topic Topic naadyaane IP IP I I The rst and dominant reading is one in which the sub ject is topicalized and hence is in Sp ecIP Since the sub ject already precedes the other nonsub ject arguments this movement do es not result in an overt dierence in word order although it must appp ear in Sp ecIP in order for the sub ject to b e licensed as a topic The second reading is one in which the sub ject is not in Sp ecIP and hence is not interpreted as a topic In this case has no topic or has a nonovert continuing topic from a previous utterance in the discourse Focus Focuss ma jor function is to ll the informational gap b etween the sp eaker and the hearer and hence provides new information relevant for the discourse structure If there is only one fo cused constituent in the sentence then it must app ear immediately preverbally This is illustrated in 7 for Urdu and for Turkish We prop ose that fo cus is licensed in Sp ecVP As discussed in section ?? this licensing interacts with that of nonsp ecic ob jects a naadyaane hassanko toi dii F NadyaFErg HassanMDat toeeFNom givePerfFSg Nadya gave TOFFEE to Hassan Urdu b naadyaane hassanko toi dii F NadyaFErg HassanMDat toeeFNom givePerfFSg Nadya gave toee to HASSAN Urdu bu kitab Hasan bana verdi T F this b o okAcc HasanNom IDat givePastSg This b o ok Hasan gave to ME Turkish In addition to the preverbal fo cus p osition in situ fo cusing of a phrase is p ossible when there are multiple fo ci This in situ fo cus is always a case of contrastive fo cus relative to the preverbal fo cus as illustrated in i In this example the fo cus on Hassan is only p ermissible in a context in which Hassan is contrasted with another p ossible recipient We will not consider
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