Topic, Contrastive Topic and Focus: What's on Our Minds

Abstract

This talk attempts to characterize how various interesting phenomena of information structure reflect our plan/design or control in our minds. Our minds work differently for Topic, Contrastive Topic and Focus, in designing the discourse relational pragmatics/semantics, grammatical and functional relations, and prosodic intonation patterns involved in the phenomena. The working of our minds is particularly well attested in the phenomenon of Contrastive Topic and this phenomenon has been given special attention by linguistics anew lately. It is both topical and in a sense focal, as recently claimed (Krifda 1991) and advocated with Korean, Japanese, English, German and Hungarian data(Lee 1973 & 1996 & 1999, Buring 1994m vib Fubtek 1994m, Roberts 1996, Choi 1997, Cho 1997, wWe 1997, Molnar 1998, Han 1998, (Uechi 1999). The talk essentially tries to show how 'Contrastive 'occures and how it is distinguished from typical Topic and from wide and narro('Exclusiver') Focuses at various levels of linguistic analysis. Contrastive Topic in its narrow sense is also distinct, in tis design, From list additive topicw, contra Krifka (1998)and Kuno(1998)