Secondary topic as a relation in information structure

Abstract

Information structure may be understood as the pragmatic structuring of a proposition in terms of the speaker's assumptions concerning the addressee's state of mind at the time of the utterance. The commonly assumed binominal partition of the information structure into topic-focus, theme-rheme, topic-comment, focus-open proposition, or focus-presupposition is sometimes insufficient. The paper addresses the notion of secondary topic, which, although sometimes used in research on information structure, has not been studied closely. The main focus of the paper is Ostyak (Uralic), where the secondary topic is systematically expressed by object agreement. The results of the paper indicate that multiple topic constructions suggested in the literature do not necessarily involve topicalization as (multiple) adjunction but, rather, argue for the possibility of two clause-internal argument topics. The paper suggests some independent criteria for identifying secondary topic and shows how it interacts with other information-structure relations, as well as with syntax and semantics. This further raises the question of cross-linguistic variation in the grammatical realization of the secondary topic function within a clause.