| This study provides a unified analysis of discourse topics, grammatical subjects, preposed objects, and existential there sentences. Previous analyses of these constructions have tended to treat preposed objects and existential there sentences as unrelated constructions. Furthermore these constructions have been analyzed almost exclusively from either a generative or functional perspective. The analysis presented here, however, provides a psycholinguistic investigation of these constructions. Moreover, it challenges the established claim that the distribution of preposed objects and post-verbal NPs is motivated by purely pragmatic factors. Instead, it is argued that these constructions are motivated by limitations in the cognitive resources involved in the processing of language. These limitations are expressed by the light subject constraint and the one new idea constraint found in previous analyses.; The data used in this study are taken from a variety of sources. The first source is a corpora of written data taken from a set of narrative texts. The analysis of this data provides the foundation of this study and indicates that speakers prefer grammatical subjects to be animate, definite, and topic related. Next, a production task along with several forced choice paradigms are used to investigate the relationship between discourse topics and preposed objects and post-verbal NPs of existential there sentences. It is demonstrated that the noun phrases occupying these grammatical roles are not necessarily topic-related nor do they consistently tend to be animate or definite. The results obtained from these tasks also indicate that referentiality is more closely associated with grammatical role than either animacy or definiteness.; Finally, this study challenges the notion that the various levels of linguistic representation are autonomous. Rather, it demonstrates the importance of an integrated approach to the study of language. It also emphasizes the value of psycholinguistic methodologies and the need to explore the role of cognitive processes used in the processing of language. |
