The Topic Status Of English Clause-initial NPs

Studies of topic have long been in difficulty due to terminological profusion and confusion, and underlying conceptual vagueness as well. On the sentence level, various perspectives and views exist. For example, topic is considered one of the functions of subject; topic needs to be confined to clause-initial position; topic is the starting point for the message which is conveyed by the sentence; and topic is speaker-oriented prominence, to mention just a few. These studies either focus on the functional aspects of topic while neglecting the formal expression, or simply take the pragmatic category of topic for certain syntactic constituents and confuse topic with its grammatical representation. The notion topic has not been fully understood until Lambrecht (1994) comes up with a systematic account of topic by regarding it as an important parameter on a par with focus in the whole theoretical framework of information structure. On the observations that the study of information structure bridges functional and formal approaches to language, he introduces the notion 'topic expression' so as to make distinctions between the pragmatic property of topic and its formal expression. As Lambrecht (1994) puts it, a constituent is a topic expression only on condition that the proposition expressed by the clause with which it is associated is pragmatically construed as being about the referent of this constituent. It is exactly this demarcation that makes possible the discussion of topic from a more or less formal perspective.The originality of this thesis lies in the correlation of the morphosyntactic form of a discourse referent with mental states of interlocutors, through which an attempt is made to find out possible relationship between a topic expression, its prosodic features (accentuation, attenuation), and the cognitive states of its referent (active, accessible, and inactive). In particular, the thesis aims to establish possible correspondence between the topic status of clause-initial NP and the discourse functions of .the syntactic constructions in which the initial noun phrase is coded.In view of the cognitive states and morphosyntactic features of topic expressions, the present thesis applies some well-known topichood tests, i.e. the as-for test, the about test, and the question-answer test, to clause-initial NPs in subject-predicate constructions. By showing that the referent of clause-initial NP is "under discussion".