The Semantics and Pragmatics of Topic Phrases

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Topic PhrasesAuthor(s): Paul Portner and Katsuhiko YabushitaSource: Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), pp. 117-157Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25001699 .

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PAUL PORTNER AND KATSUHIKO YABUSHITA

THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF

TOPIC PHRASES*

1. INTRODUCTION

In this paper we discuss the analysis of sentence-initial topic phrases. Focusing on the case of Japanese, we argue that an appropriately enriched semantic modeling of the conversational context is superior to two other sorts of analyses. The first has been proposed by Vallduvi (1990) and utilized for the analysis of certain Japanese facts by Heycock (1993). According to this approach, a hearer's beliefs should be represented as a set of file cards, a metaphor derived from Heim (1982); these cards are not given interpretations, but rather are wholly independent of semantics. The other approach, following especially Fintel (1994) and Roberts (1996), attempts to reduce the notion of topic to that of 'question under discussion'

within focus semantics. Our analysis will allow us to understand several semantic and pragmatic phenomena unaccounted for by the other theories.

Our discussion will proceed within the general paradigm which views the meaning of a sentence as its effect on the conversational context in

which it occurs. This view of interpretation has allowed aspects of meaning which have historically been treated by semantics and some which are

traditionally seen as pragmatic to be analyzed within a unified framework. Within this general view, however, there are two conceptions of the nature of the conversational context. We will label these the REPRESENTATIONAL and NON-REPRESENTATIONAL theories. The former make crucial use of a

non-syntactic level of linguistic representation. In the vein, versions of Discourse Representation Theory have been used to account for the ac

cessibility of discourse referents (Kamp 1981, Kadmon 1987), modal sub ordination (Roberts 1989), propositional attitude verbs (Asher 1986, 1993), and plurals (Kamp and Reyle 1993). The theory of Vallduvi likewise

makes essential use of such a level of representation, the file, in its mode of explanation. In the non-representational theories, on the other hand, the context is modelled through structures built up of non-linguistic enti

ties, for example set-theoretically. Chierchia and Rooth (1984) investigate accessibility of discourse referents, Roberts (1987) discusses modal subor

* We would like to acknowledge the valuable input we have received from Noriko Kawasaki,

Manfred Krifka, Nicholas Asher, Carlota Smith, Greg Carlson, and two anonymous L&P

reviewers. Remaining shortcomings are of course our responsibility.

Linguistics and Philosophy 21: 117-157, 1998.

? 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.



118 PAUL PORTNER AND KATSUHIKO YABUSHITA

dination, Heim (1992) and Portner (1997) examine attitude verbs, and Krifka (1996) accounts for plurals in these terms. In this paper we will

argue that the effects of topic phrases can be better analyzed within a

non-representational framework. The identity of a sentence's topic will affect the precise way in which the sentence is used to update the context; in this way we give a semantic account of topic phrases, since meaning is viewed as context-change. The effect is not in general truth conditional, however, even though it leads to truth conditional differences in some cases.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 we discuss two alternative accounts of the nature of topic phrases. Then, in Section 3 we present an overview of File Change Semantics (FCS), as this provides necessary background to our proposal. In Section 4 we examine the relation between the semantics of FCS and Vallduvf's insights. Section 4.1

argues for the need for a semantics in our understanding of the file, while 4.2 shows how to enrich Heim's semantics so that it can incorporate a semantic version of Vallduvi's ideas. Section 5 shows how this modified FCS can account for the crucial data brought up earlier in the paper. Section 6 provides a brief conclusion.

2. FILES AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE

In this section we discuss two alternative approaches to the semantics/prag matics of topic phrases, focusing on how they might apply to the -wa marked topic phrases of Japanese. The first, which we discuss in Section 2.1 and label the 'topics-as-entities' view, takes them to denote individuals which the sentence as a whole is 'about'. The alternative, discussed in Section 2.2, takes topicality to be related to a concept of 'question under discussion' in conversation.

While it is quite possible that both notions are relevant for natural

language, we argue that the former is more appropriate for understanding topic phrases in Japanese. We agree with Vallduvi (1990) and McNally (1997) that it is important to frame the discussion of topics in terms of the analysis of particular, independently characterizable linguistic con

structions, as 'topic' would appear to be a term which is susceptable to a

wide variety of construals. To this end, we will concentrate on the

Japanese data, only occasionally bringing in facts from English to the extent that we must in order to accurately portray the views of other



THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF TOPIC PHRASES 119

scholars. Future research will be necessary to determine how well the

analysis of -wa extends to other varieties of 'topics'.1

2.1. The Topics-as-Entities Theory

The theory of FCS is motivated by Heim (1982) with reference to a

metaphorical understanding of the process of interpretation as the manipu lation of a set of file cards. For example, when the first sentence in (1) is

comprehended, one adds cards to the file which represent the man and the cat. These cards are numbered 1 and 2 due to the indices on the NPs.

On card number 1 is entered the information that it represents a man who

found the thing represented by the second card.

(1) [A man], found [a cat]2. He, took [the cat that he, found]2 home.

(2) 1 2

man cat

found 2 found by 1

The file is updated in a similar way once the second sentence is encoun tered. Heim (1982, Chapter III) eventually abandons the use of files in this literal sense as part of her analysis of definite and indefinite NPs.

However, other scholars have argued that there are facts which show that

something like the file must be part of semantic and pragmatic theory. The Japanese topic construction is an example of such a case. Japanese topics are marked morphologically by the particle -wa. Consider the fol

lowing discourse:

(3) Otoko-no-hito ga neko o mitsukemashita

man NOM cat ACC found

A man found a cat.

1 We note that the analysis of Jackendoff's B accent by Roberts (1996), McNally (1997), and Buring (1997) shows it to be a rather different phenomenon from the one we are

discussing. It gives rise to an obligatory narrow scope reading for quantifiers in certain circumstances and may be applied to any sort of phrase. In each of these ways, it differs from topical -wa marking, which gives rise to obligatory wide scope, as we show below, and which is limited to NPs. Roberts treats B accent as a type of focus, we believe correctly, but Biring and McNally consider it as topic marking.




*Aru onna-no-hito wa sono neko o uchi ni

some woman TOPIC that cat ACC home LOC

tsurete-kaerimashita

taking-return home

A woman took the cat home.

The second sentence here is impossible because of the fact that it contains a topic phrase which refers to an unfamiliar entity. This illustrates the fact that topics must be definite - that is, that they must only be used to add information to an already existing file card.2

Next consider (4), which illustrates a second important property of

Japanese topics. The sentence can be considered as a description by a waiter at Good Eats Caf6 of one evening's events:

(4) [Chiisana kodomo o tsureta onna-no-hito]2 ga mazu

small child ACC taking woman2 NOM first haitte-kimashita. Kanojo wa chikin fraido steeki o

entering-came she TOPIC chicken fried steak ACC

chuumon shimashita.

order did

A woman with a small child came in first, and she ordered

chicken fried steak.

Tsugini, [tenisuraketto o motta wakai otoko-no-hito]3 next tennis racket ACC holding young man3

2 Kuno (1973) notes the definiteness of Japanese topics. The literature discusses two sorts of problems for the view that topics are always definite. Prince (1981) claims that the referent of an English topic need not already exist as a discourse referent, but can merely be in a suitable set-relation to one that is:

(i) Three boys arrived. John, I like-but the others ....

It is not clear to us that these are not simply examples of accommodation. Lotscher (1992) brings up cases of indefinite topics in German. Indefinite topics occur in

English as well:

(ii) Three boys arrived. One, I like-but the others ....

Within our framework, the natural way to treat these examples, and perhaps Prince's too, is by proposing that the domain of quantification is the true topic ('Of the three boys who arrived, I like one'; see Section 4.2 for discussion of the relevant Japanese facts). If one is focused, as it most naturally is, it would then be interpreted as contrasting with the others.




ga yatte-kimashita. Kare3 wa kanojo2 ni raketto o

NOM came he3 TOPIC she DAT racket ACC

tewatashite, baa ni biiruo tori ni ikimashita.

handed bar DAT beer ACC get to went

Next, a young man holding a tennis racket came in. He handed the racket to her, and went to the bar to get a beer.

Betsu no otoko-no-hito to onna-no-hito ga okurete

other of man and woman NOM being late

kimashita. Eiga o mini itte-ita yoo-deshita.

came movie ACC watch going-were seemed

Another man and woman, who were late, came in. They seemed to have been to a movie.

a. Chikin fraido steeki o chuumon shita onna-no-hito2 ga chicken fried steak ACC order did woman2 NOM

ichiban sakini kaerimashita.

first early returned

The woman who ordered a chicken fried steak left first.

b. ??Otoko-no-hito3 ga raketto o tewatashita onna-no-hito2

man3 NOM racket ACC handed woman2

ga ichiban sakini kaerimashita. NOM first early returned

The woman who the man had handed a racket to left first.

The examples in (4) illustrate that a discourse entity can be most readily picked out with information that has been attributed to it while it is the

topic. The (a) version is natural because kanojo ('she') was topic when it was asserted that she ordered chicken fried steak. In contrast, the (b) case is not as natural because of the fact that kare ('he'), not any phrase

referring to the woman, was topic in the sentence which said that she

received the racket.3 As we will go on to see in more detail, this data

3 As pointed out to us by Noriko Kawasaki, for some, but not all, speakers there are ways

to improve (4b), for example by using a passive or having only one man in the context. This

seems to be due to these speakers' tendency to interpret otoko-no-hito ('man') in the subject

position of a relative clause as referring to a uniquely identifiable man in the context.

However, even if the original description is replaced by one which is minimally different in that it does not contain otoko-no-hito, e.g., raketto o uketotta onna-no-hito ('woman who




reflects the fact that a sentence is intuitively 'about' the entity denoted by its topic phrases. We have provided other examples of this phenomenon in the appendix.

Vallduvi (1990) utilizes the idea of the file as a representation of dis course structure to account for facts of this sort in Catalan and English. He argues that linguistic theory should include a level of representation labeled INFORMATION STRUCTURE, designed to encode linguistically relevant differences of cognitive status and saliency for discourse entities and the information which is stated about them. He analyzes a wide

variety of facts traditionally considered to be pragmatic in nature in terms of directions from a speaker to a hearer as to how to enter the information of a sentence into his or her knowledge-store. This knowledge-store is

represented as a file. Of primary concern for us is his concept of LINK, a subcase of the traditional notion of topic. According to Vallduvi, a sen tence's link is the phrase which denotes the discourse entity on whose file card the sentence's information is entered. In this way, Vallduvi proposes that the file is indispensable for analyzing linguistic meaning.

As an example, consider again (1). Assuming that the subject of the second sentence is its link (and that the first sentence is linkless, and

incorporated as in (2)), we will end up with the following file:

(5) 1 1

man cat

found 2 found by 1

took 2 home

When the second sentence of (1) is processed, the information that the man took the cat home is entered only on the first file card, the one

associated with the link. Selectively updating only the first file card in this instance represents the idea that the link tells what the sentence is 'about', a traditional way of understanding the function of topic phrases.

With this way of making reference to the file card through the notion

of link, one can describe the functioning of links as follows:

(6)a. Presupposition of Definite NPs A definite NP ai is only felicitous if the information that it

represents an a is already entered on card i.

received a racket'), the resulting continuation in (4b) is still worse than that in (4a). We

therefore conclude that the effect which we seek to explain is not due to any uniqueness

requirement on the part of otoko-no-hito.




b. Linkhood

(i) Definiteness: A link ai is definite, and

(ii) Aboutness: when it is felicitous, the information in the rest of the sentence containing ai is entered on card i.

The condition in (6a) (which a reviewer aptly dubbed the 'strong familiar

ity condition') applies to all definite NPs in Japanese. It feeds into Vallduvi's two-part analysis of links in (6b). The analysis in (6b) is derived from a number of previous approaches in the literature. Prince (1981),

Ward (1985), and Ward and Prince (1991) also have 'two part' analyses of topics, with a topic phrase representing the 'backward looking center' to which an 'open proposition' is applied; neither of these concepts repre sents the 'aboutness' idea in the way that Vallduvi's file card theory does, however. Somewhat closer are Li and Thompson (1976), who attribute to

topics the following two properties, among others: they are definite and

they "limit the applicability of the main predication to a certain restricted domain" (p. 464). The latter may represent an intuition similar to

aboutness, though it does not have the same information packaging function. Chafe (1976) considers -wa to represent 'given' information, and

explicitly frames his proposal in terms of information packaging; however, there is still no clear analysis of the aboutness function which Vallduvi

represents through the structure of file cards.4 More recently, Givon (1992) and Lambrecht (1994) treat topics as addresses within a Vallduvi-style knowledge representation system. Neither presents a semantics for topic phrases, however, and so the criticisms we make of Vallduvi's theory, and the refinements which we propose below, may be seen as applying equally to theirs.

(6a)-(6b) allow us to understand what is going on in our example (4). The information that the woman ordered chicken fried steak is entered on the woman's file card. Thus, it is possible to use the NP chikin fraido steeki o chuumon shita onna-no-hito ga ('the woman who ordered chicken fried steak') to resume reference to this woman. In contrast, the informa tion that the woman was handed a tennis racket was introduced into the

file on the man's card, and so the phrase otoko-no-hito ga raketto o

tewatashita onna-no-hito ga ('the woman who the man handed a racket') cannot be readily used to refer back to the woman. In this way, aboutness

plays a role in understanding the function of topics.

4 Chafe's views on topics (of which -wa marked phrases are apparently not an example) are

rather like Li and Thompson's. His claims about the psychological status of subjects is based

on their being 'what the sentence is about', though the concept of aboutness is not given a

precise semantic/pragmatic analysis.




The analysis of (4) in terms of (6) takes (4b) to be a case of presupposi tion failure. The felicity conditions of otoko-no-hito ga raketto o tewatash ita onna-no-hito ga ('the woman who the man handed a racket') are not satisfied because no phrase referring to the woman was topic when we learned that the man handed her the racket. This diagnosis requires some further discussion, since, as a case of presupposition failure, it is not

immediately certain how unacceptable it should be expected to be. As is well known, in many cases presupposition failures pass virtually unnoticed due to the application of a process of presupposition accommodation. The fact that (4b) is interpretable, even though seriously awkward,5 indicates that accommodation may serve to rescue it by entering the information that the man handed her a racket onto the woman's file card. In fact,

Vallduvi proposes inferencing mechanisms which allow this 'propagation' of facts through the file, and in the final section of this paper we will

propose a purely semantic accommodation mechanism which achieves the same result.

Given the fact that we must say that accommodation can render (4b) interpretable, one may wonder if presupposition is the correct way to

explain its unacceptability at all. One could expect its status vis-a-vis

presupposition to be similar to, for example, a case like My sister is in Austin right now said to a hearer who does not know that the speaker has a sister. In such a context, the presupposition would be unproblematically accommodated and the presupposition failure would not lead to noticable

infelicity. Example (4) is rather complex, in particular in building up two

possible ways of referring to the woman (as the woman who ordered a chicken fried steak and as the woman who received a racket), and one

might suggest that the infelicity of (4b) has something to do with this

multiplicity of possible descriptions for the woman. Perhaps there is some

principle - related to the topic structure of (4) or not - which leads to a

preference for the use of the description in (4a) over that in (4b). One

way to test this suspicion is by looking at a case where only one description for a discourse referent is available, and where this description uses infor

mation attributed to the discourse referent while it is not the topic. Ac

cording to our line of analysis, such a description would be predicted to

require accommodation as well. So, for instance, consider the following:

5It is similar in status to the English contrast:

(i) Who bought a book?

(a) JOHN bought a book.

(b) ??John bought a BOOK.




(7) Jon wa kafe de onna-no-hito ni aimashita, soshite

John TOP cafe LOC woman DAT met and

toshokan de betsuno onna-no-hito ni aimashita.

library LOC another woman DAT met

John met a woman in a caf6 and another woman in a library.

Kare ga kafe de atta onna-no-hito wa toemo

he NOM cafe LOC met woman TOP very

omoshiroi hito deshita.

interesting person was

The woman he met in the cafe was a very interesting person.

There is only one unambiguous definite description available to refer to the woman in the cafe, kare ga kafe de atta onna-no-hito ('the woman he

met in a cafe'); furthermore, according to the view we are pursuing, the

descriptive content, 'John met her in a cafe', was originally not entered on the file card for the woman because Jon was topic in sentence (7). Hence, the second sentence in (7) would be expected to be just as much of a presupposition failure as (4b) was. In fact, however, (7) is not as bad as (4b). Thus at first glance (7) seems to provide counterevidence to our

position about the nature of the infelicity of (4b). The difference between (4) and (7) is that no definite NP can be con

structed which refers to the woman using descriptive content which was attributed to the woman while she was topic. It is possible to attribute the relative naturalness of (7) to the 'no alternative' character of the example. In fact, this speculation can be vindicated if we minimally change the above example by attributing additional properties to the woman while she is topic:

(8) Jon wa kafe de onna-no-hito ni aimashita.

John TOP cafe LOC woman DAT met

Kanojo wa pianisuto deshita.

she TOP pianist was

John met a woman at a caf6. She was a pianist.

a. ??Kare ga kafe de atta onna-no-hito wa totemo

he NOM cafe LOC met woman TOP very

omoshiroi hito deshita.

interesting person was

The woman he met in the cafe was a very interesting person.




b. Pianisuto no onna-no-hito wa totemo omoshiroi hito

pianist of woman TOP very interesting person deshita. was

The woman who was a pianist was a very interesting person.

The continuation in (8b), in which the description used is one which was attributed to the woman when she was topic, pianisuto no onna-no-hito wa ('the woman who was a pianist'), is more natural than (8a). This fact is predicted by our analysis because the reference in (8b) does not require the accommodation process, while (8a) does. We would like to argue that the data in (7)-(8) show that we are correct

in analyzing the degraded status of (4b) compared to (4a) as a case of

presupposition failure. The precise pattern of judgments can be accounted for in terms of the theory of topics outlined in (6), along with a careful consideration of the nature of accommodation. According to our view, accommodation occurs in all of the examples, but that in (7) it is virtually unnoticable, while in (8a) and (4b) it is not. Notice that (8a) and the last sentence in (7) are actually identical, but in one context, (7), it is perfectly felicitious, while in the other, (8), it is not. Furthermore, the information used in the description kare ga kafe de atta onna-no-hito wa ('the woman he met in a cafe') was introduced in identical ways in the two cases. The

reason that (8a) is less good is that only in this instance is there an alternative description of the woman, that used in (8b), which does not

require the accommodation process: the definite pianisuto no onna-no-hito wa ('the woman who is a pianist') uses only information entered on the woman's file card. Hence we can say that (7) is good but (8a) is bad because the accommodation triggered by the definite could have been avoided in the latter case but not in the former. Example (4b) is similar to (8a), as an alternative description not requiring accommodation is available there as well.

The foregoing explanation assumes that accommodation is difficult, leading to degraded acceptability, when it could have been avoided by employing an alternative description, but easy otherwise. If we consider accommodation to be a freely employable pragmatic operation with a fixed cost, this assumption does not seem to make too much sense. How

ever, this is not the right way to look at accommodation. In general, one

ought not expect it to have much intrinsic cost at all, since the calculability of presuppositions means that it will typically be as easy to enter accommo dated information into the conversational context as it is asserted informa




tion.6 Rather, it is better to understand the relative case or difficulty of accommodation in terms of a Gricean cooperativeness assumption, in

particular the Maxim of Manner. If it is possible for a speaker to formulate a description which does not require the hearer to undertake accommo dation, the Maxim of Manner dictates that the speaker should utilize such a description. Doing so will minimize the hearer's effort. A hearer is

justified by the Maxim in assuming that a speaker will not force him or her to accommodate unless there is a countervailing reason, such a brevity, which favors accommodation. Since in cases like (4) and (8) it is just as

easy for the speaker to use a description not requiring accommodation as one requiring it, the choice of the wording in (4b) and (8a) gives rise to

pragmatic anomaly.7

2.2. The Question-Based Theory

In this paper we will develop the kind of view discussed above in a more

non-representational framework. Thus we will maintain that a topic is an

entity, the thing which the sentence is about. There is another important notion of topic which has been explored recently, one based on the theory of focus (von Fintel 1994, Roberts 1996, McNally 1997, Biring 1997). According to this view, the topic of a sentence determines an open ques tion in the conversation which it helps resolve.

(9)a. What about John? b. John saw Mary.

In (9b), John could be the topic by virtue of the fact that the sentence

6 Cases of accommodation which are intrinsically difficult seem to involve an attempt to refer which does not include sufficient information to identify the referent:

(i) Two men walked in. ??The man came up to me.

(i) might be described as the failure of a uniqueness presupposition on the part of the man.

Uniqueness issues do not enter into our examples, and in any case it is not clear that (i) is a presupposition failure at all. Rather, it might simply be a case of ambiguity which can't be recovered from. In this we follow Heim (1982), who argues that uniqueness is not part of the presupposition of definite NPs, and that apparent examples of uniqueness presupposi tions can be seen as following from independent constraints on the types of contexts which allow reference. 7

Theoretically, a hearer might assume that the speaker is flouting the Maxim, and attempt to generate an implicature based this (akin to Levinson's (1983) example of flouting Manner in Miss Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of an aria from 'Rigoletto'); however, this would not be a plausible assumption in this context. Thus the sentence must be taken either as a Manner-violating act of referring to a familiar entity (the intended reading), or as a failed attempt to refer to an individual not previously mentioned in the discourse.




helps to answer (9a). In this sense the sentence can be said to be 'about John'.

In this section we wish to point out some initial problems for this

'question-based' theory of topic phrases, as this provides motivation for

pursuing in greater detail our topics-as-entities alternative. Most signifi cantly, as far as we can see the question-based theory has nothing to say about the type of data discussed in the last subsection, and in Section 4.1 below we will point out some additional problematical facts. However, even concentrating on the phenomena which it was intended to cover, a number of empirical and conceptual difficulties arise. We will discuss them after outlining the approach in a bit more detail. Of the scholars who

pursue the question-based view, Fintel makes the proposals with the most obvious applicability to Japanese -wa marked phrases; thus, we will con centrate on his analysis, though to the extent that they would be modified to deal with the case at hand, it appears that similar points would apply to the others' ideas as well (except where noted).

In a nutshell, the relation between the question-based approach and the

theory of focus is the following: the open question which a sentence helps resolve is whatever the sentence itself would presuppose if the whole non

topic were focused. To see this, let us briefly examine the relationship between questions and focus as formalized in the theory of Rooth (1992). Rooth's analysis of focus establishes a relation between the denotations of (10a) and (10b).

(10)a. Who did John see? b. John saw MARY.

Within this approach, the unifying idea behind the semantics of focus is that it marks 'contrast'. In the case of (10), the proposition that John saw

Mary must contrast with some set of alternatives present in the discourse. Rooth represents this idea by proposing that the sentence contains a covert

anaphoric variable, as in (11):

(11) S

S -C

NP VP

John saw [Mary]F




C will denote some set of propositions present in the discourse, and the contrast operator '-' has a semantics to the effect that this set is a subset

of the set of propositions which vary from the denotation of John saw MARY in the focused position. According to standard analyses of ques tions (Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977), the meaning of (10a) can fulfill this role:

(12) |I Who did John see? II C {'John saw Mary', 'John saw Sue', 'John saw Jack', 'John saw Bill',. ..}

An analysis of topics building upon Rooth's theory has been proposed by Fintel (1994). The fact that John is topic in (9b), according to Fintel, introduces an anaphoric variable and operator '=' similar to '-'.8

(13) S

NP VP

NP =V saw Mary

John

Due to the effects of the second contrast operator '-', some set of

propositions available in the discourse must be a subset of the set of

propositions of the form 'John has property P'. The denotation of (9a) is such a set.

(14) | What about John? |l {'John saw Mary', 'John ate an apple', 'John went to sleep', 'John saw Bill',. ..}

In many cases, the 'What about x?' question which serves to license an NP as topic is not explicitly asked in a discourse, as in (15).

(15) You are wondering about the students. Well, as for Jane, she's

doing well.

Nevertheless, the question-based theory claims that it is the implicit pre sence of such a question, here perhaps 'What about Jane?', which allows for an NP to be a topic.

There is clearly a close connection between the topics-as-entity theory

8 According to von Fintel, the sentence must also contain a focus, here plausibly on Mary

or the whole VP. For the time being, we will ignore this point for simplicity.




and the question-based one. The question naturally arises of whether the former can be reduced to the latter. We do not believe that it can in the

general case. To show this, we will consider cases in which focus interacts with a

topic construction, but in order to set this up let us first examine some

lacking a topic construction. In (16) the focused constituents are marked

explicitly.

(16)a. Q: What happened to each employee yesterday? A: [Mary]F [received $200]F.

b. Q: How much money did each employee receive? A: [Mary]F received [$200]F.

c. Q: Kinou juugyouin sorezore ni nani ga

yesterday employees each DAT what NOM

okorimashita ka?

happened Q

What happened to each employee yesterday?

A: [Mary]F ga [200 doru moraimashita]F.

Mary NOM 200 dollars received

Mary received $200.

Each of these questions stands in the correct relation to the sentence

which answers it, according to Rooth's theory. For instance, (16b) implies9 a set of questions {{'Mary received $100', 'Mary received $200',...}, {'John received $100', 'John received $200', ..},. .}; the first of these, the set of propositions which pertain to Mary, is a subset of the focus

meaning of the answer. The questions in (16a) and (16c) are {{'Mary received $100', 'Mary ate an apple', 'Mary received $200',...}, {'John received $100', 'John ate an apple',..} . . }. The focus meaning of the

answer again contains propositions of the correct form. Next consider (17), in which the focused subjects are explicitly marked

as topical.

(17)a. Q: What happened to each employee yesterday? A: As for [Mary]F, she [received $200]F.

9 We don't wish to take a stand on the semantics of quantified wh questions. At the least,

these examples with each introduce the set of questions pertaining to some employee. This

may or may not be part of their semantics.




b. Q: How much money did each employee receive? A: As for [Mary]F, she received [$200]F.

c. Q: Kinou juugyouin wa sorezore ni nani ga

yesterday employees TOP each DAT what NOM

okorimashita ka?

happened Q

What happened to each employee yesterday?

A: [Mary]F wa [200 doru moraimashita]F.

Mary TOP 200 dollars received

Mary received $200.

These examples are not equivalent to those in (16). This can be seen from

the fact that it is distinctly odd for (17b) to be the end of the exchange;

by saying as for MARY, the second speaker indicates that information

will be given about some other individual next. In contrast, (16b) could

easily be followed by but I don't know about anyone else. Likewise, the

answer in (17c), containing the topic marker -wa, indicates contrast be tween Mary and other students; it is only felicitous following a question

which itself contains -wa. This contrastive reading that focused topics receive can be represented

with von Fintel's approach.

(18) S

S C2

PP S

P NP she received [$200]

as for NP =V

NP C 1

!Mary]




In this case, the focus operator -C1 on the NP marks contrast between

the denotation of Mary and some set of individuals in the discourse; more

precisely, the variable C1 must get as its value some set which is a subset

of the set of alternatives to Mary. In this way, Mary is taken to contrast

with other members of the set. The topic operator then encodes that there must be an open question in the discourse of the type 'What about

Mary?' The question 'How much money did Mary receive?', implied by the explicitly asked question, is of this form. Finally, the variable C2 is constrained to denote a set of propositions of the form 'Mary received x

amount of money.' The implicit question 'How much money did Mary receive?' therefore can serve as its antecedent as well.

Thus it seems that (18) comes close to representing the meaning and

felicity conditions of (17b). It falls short in one way, as pointed out by an

anonymous reviewer: since it treats as for phrases as simply contrastive, one ought to be able to answer (17b) as in (19):

(19) As for Mary, she got $100; as for Bill, he got $200; and as for

John, he got $300.

Each topic ought to be able to be taken as contrasting with the others. In

fact, however, as for is only really natural on the last conjunct. We will

pass over this issue, however, since we do not wish to worry about the

details of English as for, and evaluate the approach as a general theory of topics. In this regard, there are two main points we would like to make.

First of all, nothing in the framework requires that the focus on Mary

give rise to a reading of contrast with a set of individuals. If CI were

missing from (18), the focus on Mary would associate with the sentence level variable C2. As Fintel notes in discussing similar examples, this should give rise to a reading presupposing a question like 'Which students received how much money', with no implied contrast between Mary and the other students. However, this sentence requires a contrast interpreta tion on Mary. The approach therefore cannot explain the fact that focused

topics must get a contrast reading, but rather must stipulate the presence -C1 in the structure.1?

Another serious difficulty arises for the question-based approach when

10 We should note that the version of the question-based theory presented by Biring (1997) does not suffer from this difficulty in the same way that von Fintel's does. Biiring assigns to elements marked by Jackendoff's B accent (which he considers to be topics) a presupposition equivalent to the narrow focus structure (18). As far as we can see, this seems to simply treat topics as a subvariety of focus and does nothing to eludicate why topic phrases have

whatever other properties they do. In any case, for the reasons noted in footnote 1, it seems clear that the notion of topic analyzed by Btiring is quite different from ours.




topic phrases occur in a question. For example, the question-based theory predicts that the question in (17c) should presuppose a question of the form 'What about each employee?'1 However, this is precisely the form of the question (17c) itself (and no other question of that type need exist in prior discourse). Therefore, it seems that the question expressed with -wa satisfies its own presupposition. Such a situation would appear to be an impossibility. The essential problem here is that, since within this

theory the function of topics is to presuppose a question, a kind of paradox arises when they occur in questions themselves.

To summarize, within the question-based approach a topic is used to

signal the presence of some question currently at issue. We have shown that such a theory faces some significant problems for explaining the function of -wa, and so we will go on to pursue our alternative account.

3. BACKGROUND IN FILE CHANGE SEMANTICS

File Change Semantics (FCS) is a formal discourse semantics which revives the so-called 'familiarity theory of definiteness' originally proposed by traditional grammarians such as Christophersen (1939) and Jespersen (1949). The intuition behind this theory can be summarized as follows:

(20) A definite is used to refer to something already familiar at the current stage of the conversation. An indefinite is used to

introduce a new referent.

With the usual notion of referents and reference, the theory as it is in

(20) assumes that definites and indefinites always denote objects. How ever, there are instances of definites and indefinites which do not refer to

any particular entities, such as in quantified or negative sentences. Heim

(1982, 1983) proposes to use her metaphorical notion of 'file card' in place of referents in the ordinary sense to help understand the familiarity theory. File cards are introduced by indefinites, and are reused by definites in the

course of a discourse. Heim likens the task of a hearer to that of a file

clerk: to understand a discourse is, metaphorically speaking, to keep a file that contains the current information and to update the file with the

information of new utterances. The procedure of updating a file consists of two subprocedures: the introduction of a file card for new discourse

referents, and the encoding of relations among and properties of discourse referents on the corresponding file cards.

1 Or, a collection of questions like {'What about employee a?', 'What about employee

b?'...}.




Let us illustrate how the file change procedure works with the following example:

(21) A man1 saw a woman2 at a convention. Her called her2 the

following day.

Ignoring the tense and the adverbial expressions at a convention and the

following day, when the hearer processes the first sentence, he or she creates a card, numbered 1 for a man and another, numbered 2, for a

woman. He or she then enters 'man' and 'saw 2' on card 1, and 'woman'

and 'was seen by 1' on card 2. The resulting two card file (call it F1) looks like this:

(22) F1:

1 2

man woman

saw 2 was seen by 1

Next, the hearer updates the file F1 by entering 'called 2' on card 1 and 'was called by 1' on card 2. The resulting file (let us call it F2) looks like this:

(23) F2:

1 2

man woman

saw 2 was seen by 1

called 2 was called by 1

Not every noun phrase causes the introduction of a new file card. Only indefinite noun phrases, e.g. a man or a woman do, while definite noun

phrases, such as he or she, prompt the update of an already existing file card.

The essential idea of Heim's theory of (in)definiteness can be summar ized as follows:

(24) Novelty-Familiarity Condition For each indefinite noun phrase, introduce a new card into the file. For each definite noun phrase, update an old (i.e. 'famil

iar') file card.

The above presentation is an informal exposition of the theory of FCS,




one which utilizes the metaphor of file-keeping to explain the process of discourse understanding. We will see below how the ideas can be imple mented more formally. Heim (1982) goes on from this point to abandon the metaphorical file and postulates a theoretical 'formal file', the impor tant properties of which are to be given in purely set-theoretic terms.

With this theory, we will have an account of how linguistic expressions are related to things in the world - that is, we will have a semantic theory, not one in which sentences are simply translated into a nonsyntactic repre sentation. Heim's means of achieving a semantics relates the idea of the file to the COMMON GROUND (Grice 1967, Stalnaker 1979).

Stalnaker characterizes an assertive utterance of a sentence as a change of one utterance context into another by virtue of the content of the sentence. There are many parameters involved in contexts, among which are the location of the utterance, the evaluation world, the speaker, and the addressee. The parameter of context that is relevant in the view of assertion as a context change is Grice's concept of 'common ground', which Stalnaker (1974) calls 'speaker's presupposition'. The common

ground of a context is some informational entity entailing all and only the

propositions which the speaker and the hearer assume to be true (whether explicitly or implicitly). Stalnaker models this information as a set of

possible worlds, i.e., the set of all and only those possible worlds which are compatible with what is presupposed by the speaker and hearer.

Heim proposes that her theoretical formal files be identified with the common ground. Files are thought of as objects containing all the informa tion that has been conveyed in a conversation, whether the information has been explicitly mentioned or not. The central semantic notion of FCS is that of SATISFACTION:

(25) A sequence of individuals a satisfies a file F in world w iff the individuals in a have the properties and stand in the relations

specified by F in w.

File F2 above is satisfied by a sequence a in a world w iff the first member

of a is a man in w, the second member of a is a woman in w, and the first

member of a saw and called the second member of a in w.

Based on the notion of satisfaction, Heim defines an object which can serve as a realization of the common ground.

(26) The common ground of a file F = {(w, a): a satisfies F in w}.

She also elaborates the conception of the formal file in another way. The

file contains a specification of which discourse referents are currently in




use in a conversation. This is represented as a set of indices which have been used, and is indicated by DOM(F), for any file F.

At this point it is a reasonable question to ask what purpose the file serves in the overall theory. The file is related to two entities, its domain and its common ground. All we know about the file is the nature of these two elements, and so any analysis within FCS will be based on them.

These facts suggest that we should simply use the domain and common

ground as our understanding of the discourse context,12 and abandon the notion of file altogether. In the spirit of Heim (1992), this is what we will do. Satisfaction must now be considered a relation among a sequence, a

sentence, and a world; appropriate definitions are given in Heim (1982, Ch. II).

(27) A CONTEXT C = (DOM, CG), where DOM is a domain of indices and CG is a common ground, as defined in (28).

(28) A DOMAIN is a set of natural numbers. A COMMON GROUND is a set of pairs of a world and an

infinite sequence of individuals.

(29) The null domain is the empty set. The null common ground CGo = the set of all pairs of a world

and a sequence.

The DOM component of C should intuitively be understood as

representing the discourse referents currently in use in C, whereas the CG component encodes the propositional information in C.

In light of these concepts, we can now provide an analysis of defi niteness. FCS maintains (30) as the central principle constraining the use of definite and indefinite NPs:

(30) * A definite NP ai is only felicitous in a context if

(i) i is in the DOM of the context, and

(ii) the CG of the context entails that discourse referent i has the property expressed by a.

* An indefinite NP ai is only felicitous in a context if i is not in

the DOM of the context

For example, in (31) the phrase the cat that he found is felicitous because

12 Of course there will also be other elements to the context: a speaker, a hearer, a time of

utterance, etc. We only consider those parts of the context, DOM and CG, which are of

significance for the purposes of this paper.




the context in which it is used entails that the index 2 is associated with a cat that the man found.

(31) [A man]1 found [a cat]2. He1 took [the cat that he1 found]2 home.

Example (32) illustrates how the interpretation of (31) proceeds in FCS. We use ai to indicate the ith member of sequence a.

(32) (DOMo, CGo) + [a man]l found [a cat]2 is only felicitous if 1, 2 G DOMo. When it is defined, (DOMo, CGo) + [a man]l found [a cat]2 = (DOM1, CG1) = ({1, 2}, {(w, a): the a1 is a man in w and a2 is a cat in w and a1 found a2 in w}).

(DOM1, CG1) + [he]i took [the cat that hel found]2 home is

only defined if 1, 2 E DOM1 and for every (w, a) E CG1, a1 is a male entity in w and a2 is a cat in w that a1 found a2 in w.

Since it is defined, (DOM1, CG1) + [he]1 took [the cat that hel found]2 home = (DOM2, CG2) = ({1, 2}, {(w, a): al is a man in w and a2 is a cat in w and a1 found a2 in w and a1 took a2 home

in w})

We will frequently suppress mention of the domain of the context, since its behavior is easily understood. We will rather focus our attention on the updating of the common ground.

4. AN ENRICHED NOTION OF COMMON GROUND

In this section we show that a proper analysis of Japanese topic phrases requires joining together the insights of Vallduvi with Heim's nonrepresen tational, semantic conception of the common ground. We assume that

Japanese topic phrases are informationally links. In Section 4.1 we argue that Vallduvi's understanding of the file is inadequate. Then, in Section

4.2, we will modify Heim's formalization of the conversational common

ground so that it maintains, in set-theoretic terms, a significant amount of the structure of the intuitive file. This will allow us to adopt a version of

Vallduvi's analysis of the aboutness and definiteness conditions on links.

4.1. Semantic Aspects of Topic Phrases

Vallduvi expresses the pragmatic components of his analysis of linkhood in terms of directions as to how the file should be updated at the moment

a topic phrase is used. In particular, as mentioned in (6), the aboutness




condition is expressed as a requirement that the contents of a sentence with link ai be entered on the file card numbered i. Vallduvi maintains

that, if his view is correct, it shows that the file is not a semantic entity as argued by Heim, but is rather a separate level of knowledge representa tion with no connection to truth-conditional semantics.

It is correct that FCS as developed by Heim is not capable of

representing differences of aboutness. Consider the following:

(33)a. Gakkai3-de otoko-no-hitol-ga onna-no-hito2-ni aimashita.

conference-Loc man-NOM woman-DAT met

Tsugino hi, sono otoko-no-hitol-wa sono onna-no-hito2-ni next day, that man-Topic that woman-DAT

mata kissaten4-de aimashita.

again cafe-Loc met

A man met a woman at a conference. The next day, the man

(topic) met the woman again at a cafe.

(33)b. Gakkai3-de otoko-no-hitol-ga onna-no-hito2-ni aimashita.

conference-Loc man-NOM woman-DAT met

Tsugino hi, sono onna-no-hito2-wa sono otoko-no-hitol-ni next day, that woman-ToPIc that man-DAr

mata kissaten4-de aimashita.

again cafe-Loc met

A man met a woman at a conference. The next day, the woman

(topic) met the man again at a cafe.

There is no way within FCS to connect the information about what

happened at the cafe more closely to the man in (33a) and to the woman in (33b). In both cases, the update of the file will result in the following:

(34) CG + (33a) = CG + (33b) = CG' = {(w, a) E CG: ai is a man

in w and a2 is a woman in w and a3 is a conference in w and

al and a2 met at a3 in w and a4 is a cafe in w and the next

day al and a2 met in a4 in w}

The information that the man and the woman met is encoded in the set

of possible worlds in the file, {w: for some x, (w, x) E CG'}. It is associated more closely with neither the first elements of the sequences in the file

(the man) nor the second elements (the woman). This seems to show that the file should be considered to have a status independent of its




interpretation, since the interpretation loses essential information that the file can represent.

Despite this argument for divorcing the notion of topic from truth conditional semantics and representing its contribution in terms of the file, in the remainder of this section we will introduce several phenomena

which indicate that this is not the correct approach to take. These facts

argue that the notion of topic must be taken to have semantic import, where 'semantic' is construed broadly as having an effect on context

change within a non-representational theory. Later on, once we have outlined our approach in the next section, we will see how it allows the

problematic data to be explained. First of all, Vallduvi's nonsemantic theory of links faces a significant

problem, what we call the ENTAILMENT PROBLEM. Recall that one portion of the analysis of links given in (6) is a definiteness requirement. It is not crucial to the analysis of definiteness that the presupposed material ever have been explicitly stated. For example, in (35), the man who failed is

acceptable even though it is merely implied, and not ever asserted, that the index 3 represents a discourse referent which is a man who failed the test.

(35) [Two men]l took [a logic test]4. [One man]2 passed and [one man]3 didn't. [The man who failed the logic test]3 was upset.

The formal version of the definiteness condition predicts that (35) should be possible. For every (w, a) in the context when its final sentence is

encountered, a3 failed the logic test in w. However, Vallduvi's analysis, on which the material of each sentence is entered on one or more file

cards, will have difficulties. On the third file card, at most the following will be encoded:

(36) F2:

3

man

took 4

didn't pass 4

This kind of fact holds for Japanese as well. Within a nonsemantic theory, it is not clear why this card should satisfy the presupposition of the man

who failed the logic test. Intuitively, such a card does allow the presupposi tion to be satisfied, but this is simply because it entails (given that the fourth file card represents a logic test) that the third discourse referent




failed a logic text. A representational theory like Vallduvi's requires some

proof procedure which would allow one to derive the fact that 'failed a

logic test' follows from the contents of this file card. No such procedure has been given, and we are not confident that one can be given which amounts to anything less than providing a complete semantics for a lan

guage of file cards. A semantic theory like that of FCS, on the other hand, is designed to be an account of what information is conveyed by the use of language, and it gives this account independently of the way in which the information is encoded. Thus, it straightforwardly accounts for the fact that entailed properties of a discourse referent are just as much able to satisfy presuppositions as asserted properties. The framework which we

will ultimately go on to develop shares this advantage of FCS. Another issue which arises is the fact that the presence of a topic phrase

is able to affect conversational implicature, as demonstrated with (37a) (37b) below.

(37) a. Jon-ga hashitte-imasu.

John NOM running-is

(37)b. Jon-wa hashitte-imasu.

John-ToPIc running-is

John is running.

Following a question like Dare-ga hashitteimasu ka? ('Who is running?'), (37a) implies that only John is running. In contrast, (37b) (which is some

what unnatural in such a context) doesn't. We will account for this contrast in terms of a quantity-based implicature, relating the difference to our semantics of topic phrases. On the other hand, it is hard to see how to account for the implicature in terms of a file divorced from semantics, since generating it crucially depends on the sentence's literal meaning.

Another challenge to the representational view is provided by (38a) (38b):

(38)a. Jon-dake-ga kuru to omotte-ita.

John-only-NoM come COMP thought I thought that only John would come.

b. Jon-dake-wa kuru to omotte-ita.

John-only-TOPIC come COMP thought John is the only one who I thought would come.

The subject of a clause embedded under an attitude verb behaves differ




ently semantically depending on whether it is topic-marked. In the case of (38a), with a nominative subordinate subject, Jon-dake ('only John') gets narrow scope with respect to the attitude verb. In contrast, in (38b), with a topic-marked embedded subject, it gets wide scope. Like those in

(37), the examples in (38) show that the presence of a topic phrase can have semantic effects. Once again, we will be able to relate these facts to our semantics for topic phrases.

4.2. Extended File Change Semantics

In this section, we show how the concept of link as outlined for Japanese topic-marked NPs in (6) can be analyzed within an enriched, nonrepresen tational version of FCS. The crucial fact about the file cards in Section 2

was their ability to connect information established in a conversation with the discourse entities that it is in some sense 'about'. Given that informa tion is modeled in possible worlds semantics as a set of possible worlds,

what we need to do is link with each discourse entity its own such set. Thus instead of utilizing common grounds as in (28), we have:

(39) A Common Ground is a set of infinite sequences of pairs, where each pair consists of an entity and a set of possible worlds.

(40) The null common ground CGo = the set of all sequences of

pairs consisting of an individual and a set of possible worlds

containing that individual. The intersection of all the sets of

possible worlds in each sequence must be non-null.

This idea is reminiscent of that of Reinhart (1982). Where A is an infinite

sequence of the sort described in (39), ei A is the entity in the ith pair in A and I,A is the set of possible worlds in the ith pair in A. Intuitively, for each i, all the pairs (eiA, Ii,A) represent the ith file card. Encoded in

Ii,A are the facts so-far established about the ith discourse referent, and

ei,A is a candidate for being the actual thing that the discourse referent

represents. Note that we require that, if A is a sequence in the common

ground, IA # 0, where IA = nif i IL,A; this makes certain that the se

quence represents a consistent set of pieces of information about the discourse referents.

Next we present the revisions necessary to the update function '+'. In

(41) we provide semantic rules for atomic formulae and conjunction, defining the result (CG + 0) of adding a formula 4 to a common ground CG. For any expression a, Int(a) is the intension of a:




(41)a. For any common ground CG, one-place predicate P, and variable xi, CG + P(x) C {A E CG: for every w E I,A,

ei,A E Int(P)(w)}.13 b. For any common ground CG, n-place predicate R, and

variables xi,. . ., x, CG + R(xi,. . ., x) C {A E CG: for

every w E Ii,A, (e,,A,. . , ej, A) E Int(R)(w)}. c. For any common ground CG and sentences q and f/, CG +

() & ?f) C (CG + X) + p,.

These rules define the effects of a sentence on the context directly, making no reference to the notion of satisfaction; this approach is as in Heim

(1982, Ch. III). According to (41b), all of the information in an atomic formula is added in association with the predicate's first variable. We may think of this first variable as representing the most 'prominent' argument of the predicate. The question then arises of which argument is most

prominent. A type of formula which is relevant to this issue are those where

every argument is quantified. In these cases, there seemingly would be no

permanently introduced discourse referents for the information in the sentence to be 'attached to'. This problem may not arise, however, if we assume that every sentence has an event or eventuality argument along the lines of Davidson (1967). If such an argument is the most prominent, as in the proposal of Kratzer (1989), the above definitions will attach the core sentential information to the eventuality discourse referent. Note that this line of reasoning requires that individual-level sentences also contain an eventuality argument. This position has been more contro versial than the case of episodic sentences; we refer the reader to the relevant literature for details (e.g. Davidson 1967, Kratzer 1989, Parsons

1990). Given all of this, we can recast the analysis of links as follows:

(42) For any sentence of the form [s ai,, x0], where aia, r is link, and

any common ground CG, Definiteness: CG + [s ai ,fO] is only defined if, for every sequence A in CG and for every world w in I,,A, e/,A has the property expressed by a in w.

13 These definitions specify a superset of CG + S because of the fact that the new common

ground may contain more information than that literally asserted by S. This would happen, for instance, if S generated an implicature in the context of CG.




Aboutness: When it is defined, CG + [s aci ,x ] C {A E CG: Ii,A C njETC Ij,A & A E (CG + 0)}.

The aboutness condition makes use of a set of indices XY free in 4. They can be likened to the selection indices which occur on quantifiers in

Chapter II of Heim (1982). Intuitively, all of the information on the cards whose indices are in Y is added to the link's card; this is implemented by intersecting the sets of possible worlds for each index in %Y, and making it the case that the link's set of possible worlds entails the resulting proposition. In this way, it is not necessarily the case that all the informa tion in > is added in association with the link. Only selected information

is, though as a first approximation we assume that all the indices free in

0 occur in j{. Between them, (41) and (42) say that an atomic formula's content is always connected with the discourse referent associated with its

most prominent argument, but that all the information in a sentence, including that coming from other NPs as well as the verb and other non

NPs, is associated with the link.14

14 Some sentences lack overtly represented links. Our first idea would be that the eventuality

argument functions as a link in such sentences. However, there are cases which might be

problematical for the simple Davidsonian view of eventualities assumed in the text. It may be that (i) has a reading like 'for every man, there is a situation in which he left'.

(i) Every man left.

There would be no eventuality discourse referent available to attach the sentence's informa tion to. If this is in fact a distinct reading, it could be dealt with by a more elaborated view

of eventualities. The sentence's information could be attached to a situation encompassing all of the individual leaving events.

Alternatively, if one views (i) as implicitly a proposition about a preestablished group of men, the discourse referent representing that group could serve as the link. Facts from

Japanese support this idea:

(ii) Heya wa subete biichi ni menshite-imasu.

room TOP every beach LOC facing-is

Every room faces a beach.

(iii) ??Subete heya wa biichi ni menshite-imasu.

every room TOP beach LOC facing-is

In (ii), the sentence's topic is indeed the domain of quantification for the quantifier subete

('every'). The -wa marked nominal heya is interpreted as denoting some preestablished set,

perhaps the set of rooms of some resort hotel. The sentence says of that set of rooms that

all of them face the beach. One might think that the topic for (ii) is the full quantifier 'every

room', out of which subete has floated to the right. That this is incorrect is shown by the

fact that the purported source sentence (iii) is unacceptable. Sentence (ii) can thus be seen as an example in which the discourse referent representing the domain of quantification serves as the link.




In (43b) we give a detailed semantics for (43a):

(43)a. [LINK The dog] saw a woman. b. CG + [s [LINK The dog]2,{2,33 [a woman]3 [t2 saw t3]] is only

defined if, for every sequence A in CG and for every world w in I2,A, e2,A is a dog in w.

When it is defined, CG + [s [LINK The dog]2,{2,3} [a woman]3 [t2 saw t3]] C {A E CG: for every w E I2,A, e2,A is a dog in w

and e3,1 is a woman in w and e2,A saw e3,A in w, and for every W' E I3,A, e3,A is a woman in w'}

For simplicity we ignore a possible eventuality argument here, and assume that the subject is the most prominent argument. Notice that in (43b) all of the information in the sentence is added to I2,A To I3,A is added only the information that the third discourse referent is a woman.

The function of the enriched semantics can be illustrated by returning our attention to (4). After the portion of this example which precedes (a) is added to the initial common ground CGo, we have (ignoring information about a couple who came in late):

(44) {A C CGo: (i) for every w' E 2,A, e2,A is a woman with a small child15

who ordered a chicken friend steak in w', and

(ii) for every w" E I3,A, e3,A is a man with a tennis racket who

handed the racket to e2,A in w"}

Continuation (a) is straightforward, because the proposition that the woman ordered chicken fried steak is entailed by each I2,A. The (b)

continuation, in contrast, is not immediately possible, because I2,A does not entail that the woman was handed a racket by the man. Thus we are

ble to explain the facts in (4). Recall, however, that as mentioned above the phrase otoko-no-hito ga raketto o tewatashita onna-no-hito ga ('woman

who the man handed a racket') can indeed be used with some effort and

a certain degree of unnaturalness. We propose that this is possible through mechanisms which make information from other parts of the CG available

to conditions on the I2.A's. Thus we may propose the following inferencing

principles:

(45) To minimally expand the information encoded about the dis course referent associated with a definite NP a,, for each

15 We act as if no discourse referents are introduced for the child, chicken fried steak, and

racket. Though this is false, it harmlessly simplifies the exposition.




A E CG replace Ii.A with njEIiA^, where St is the set of indices free in ai.

(46) To maximally expand the information encoded about the ith discourse referent, for each A E CG, replace Ii,A with IA.

These two processes (45) and (46) may be thought of as coercion or accommodation principles, coming into play when the presupposition ex

pressed in (6) fails. To conclude this section, we would like to discuss two advantages of

this purely semantic approach over one making representational use of file cards. The first has to do with the facts concerning definiteness discussed in Section 4.1. There it was noted that all the information entailed about a

discourse referent, no matter whether it was explicitly stated, could be used to satisfy a presupposition of definiteness. A theory based on file cards would have problems with this case, since it will be quite difficult to make sure that information which is unstated but entailed is entered

onto the appropriate file cards at the right time and in the right format.

With (35), for instance, to satisfy the presupposition of the man who failed the logic test, indexed 3, the third card will have to contain the entry 'failed the logic test' rather than 'didn't pass' or 'got an F'. Because

the theory is non-semantic, the equivalence of these possible entries is irrelevant. However, on the current approach, for every A in the common

ground, each I3.A will only contain worlds in which e2,A failed the logic test. The relevance of entailed properties is automatic within a semantic

theory. The other advantage of our approach has to do with the fact that it lets

us bring together all of the information in the common ground by simply taking the intersection of all the sets of worlds. This will allow us to state

a familiarity condition equivalent to that usually assumed for English definites. The presupposition of English definites has been stated without

any reference to notions of 'topic' or 'aboutness', and thus may be satisfied

due to facts established while some other entity was link. That this result

appears correct can be shown by (47):

(47) [A woman]2 saw [a man in [a green hat]4]3. [The woman who saw [the man in [the green hat]4]3]2 smiled. Then [she]2 saw [a

woman in [a blue hat]6]5. [The man who [the woman]2 had

seen]3 went to talk to [her]5.

Let us assume that a woman is the link in the first sentence. Then the

final sentence shows that the information that the man in the green hat

was seen by her - which should have been 'entered only on the woman's




file card' and thus is expected to be inaccessible to conditions on the man's discourse referent - is sufficient to satisfy the presupposition of the man who the woman had seen in the final sentence. If, on the other hand, a man in a green hat was the link in the first sentence, then the information that she saw a man in a green hat is likewise unexpectedly able to satisfy the presupposition of the woman who saw the man in the green hat in the second sentence. If, finally, something else (such as an event variable), or nothing at all, is the link in the first sentence, neither the man who the

woman had seen nor the woman who saw the man in the green hat should

be expected to be felicitous. Thus, to the extent that (47) is indeed judged pragmatically well-formed, it seems we should conclude that the identity of the links in the preceding context is irrelevant to whether an English definite NP's presupposition can be satisfied.

With the present system, we can assemble all the information entailed in a sequence A - we just intersect all the Ii,A'S. Then we can state the

condition on English definite NPs as follows:

(48) A definite NP ai is only defined if, for every A E CG, ei A has the property expressed by a in every world in IA.

According to this approach, English and Japanese definites differ in whether all the information in the common ground is relevant to the pre supposition or whether just that associated with the discourse referent in

question is available. Perhaps this difference can be seen as arising from the fact that Japanese has an explicit means of marking aboutness, while

English does not (or does only with a marginal construction, if this is the function of as for).

5. SEMANTIC EFFECTS OF TOPIC PHRASES EXPLAINED

In this section we return to three phenomena mentioned above which show an interaction between topichood and other semantic phenomena: (i) the fact that -wa marked phrases take wide scope over attitude verbs, as in (38); (ii) the fact that -wa marked phrases are incompatible with an exhaustive reading, as in (37); and (iii) the obligatoriness of a contrastive

reading for focus within a topic, discussed in Section 2.2. We will show that these phenomena can be explained by combining our analysis of

topics with other components of semantic theory. We begin by again looking at the contrast in (38):

(38)a. Jon-dake-ga kuru to omotte-ita.

John-only-NOM come COMP thought I thought that only John would come.




b. Jon-dake-wa kuru to omotte-ita.

John-only-ToPIC come COMP thought John is the only one who I thought would come.

Recall that in the case of (38a), with a nominative subordinate subject, Jon-dake ('only John') has narrow scope with respect to omotte ('think'). In contrast, in (38b), with a topic-marked embedded subject, it has wide

scope. With the present approach, this follows from the fact that a topic serves to identify the element with which the sentence's information is to be associated. The semantic rule (42) requires that the sentence S which will be added to the common ground be partitioned into two parts, the link a and the informational part 4. The calculation of (CG + S) constitutes the semantic interpretation of S. Since a must be structurally higher than

everything else in S (in order to be the link), if it is a scope-bearing element it will necessarily be given wide scope with respect to everything else, as is shown in the following schematic semantic representation for a sentence with a topicalized phrase a:

(49) [s ati [" *' *

ei * "]]

In (38b) we would assume that Jon is the topic, and that dake must remain with it in the syntax because the two form a syntactic constituent (and constitute an island for the potential movement of Jon alone). Thus, dake will end up with widest scope, and we get the assertion that nobody else is such that the speaker thought he would come.16 This situation contrasts

with the Information Structure theory, on which the pragmatic notion of linkhood is completely independent of semantic interpretation. That

approach is unable to explain the connection between being an informa tional link and receiving a particular semantic scope.

Next we turn our attention to the exhaustive reading generated by (37a). In this paper we will assume an approach to this reading based on scalar implicature, following e.g. Horn (1972), Gazdar (1979), Hirschberg (1985), Rooth (1992), Kuppevelt (1996). For illustration, let us consider the following English question-answer pair:

(50) Who met Bill at the party? (51) Nancy and John met Bill.

16 Note that the uniqueness implication here is not derived from focus. It comes from the lexical meaning of dake, not from an exhaustive-listing implicature of the kind discussed next. Moreover, this is not 'association with focus'; dake is associated with Jon structurally, and putting focus elsewhere would not change its domain (contra McNally's (1997) suggestion of how these cases might be treated).




(51) is normally interpreted as asserting that Nancy and John met Bill, and that nobody else of the people who are relevant met him. This is

more than just its literal propositional content. This type of interpretation has generally been taken to be an implicature resulting from Gricean conversational pinciples; specifically, the implicature in the above case is an instance of Grice's maxim of quantity. The implicational reasoning in

question here goes as follows: If other people than Nancy and John had also met Bill, the speaker would have said so, making a stronger, or more informative statement. The fact that he or she didn't indicates that (51) should be as strong, or as informative, a statement as it can be with

respect to the issue of who met Bill at the party. One way of formalizing the quantity implicature is based on the notion

of a scale of alternative assertions. Consider a set of propositions partially ordered with respect to entailment. Let us denote such a partially ordered set as (C, ). The quantity implicature is implemented in the following

way. Asserting an element b in C implicates the negation of any other

higher element in C. For example, in the case of the question-answer pair under consideration, let us assume the following set C: {Nancy, John, and Susie met Bill; Nancy and John met Bill; Nancy and Susie met Bill; John and Susie met Bill; Nancy met Bill; John met Bill; Susie met Bill}. Then, asserting 'Nancy and John met Bill' implies the negation of 'Nancy, John, and Susie met Bill' and any other proposition which would entail that

Nancy, John, and Susie met Bill. In effect, this implies that Nancy and John met Bill, and neither Susie nor any other people met Bill; that is, only Nancy and John met Bill.

Here it is to be noted that all the propositions in the scale of alternatives C in the above discussion have the form 'X met Bill'; in other words, they all have the part 'met Bill' in common. This is correlated with the focus

structure of the asserted answer sentence (51). When uttered as an answer to (50), (51) must be pronounced with focus on Nancy and John, and not

on, e.g., met Bill. In terms of syntactic representation annotated with

focus, (51) should be rendered as (52a):

(52)a. [Nancy and John]F met Bill. b. Nancy and John [met Bill]F.

The fact that (52a), but not (52b) is an appropriate answer to (50) is reflected in the presuppositions of the sentences. (52a), like (50), pre supposes that someone met Bill, while (52b) presupposes that Nancy and John did something. Different theories formalize this correlation between focus and presupposition in different ways. One simple type of representa tion simply replaces the focused element with a variable, resulting in




an open formula, what has been called the 'presupposition skeleton' or

'background' of the sentence. For example, (52a) has the background 'X met Bill', while (52b) has 'Nancy and John did P'. In each the presupposi tion of the sentence is simply the existential closure of the background;

Rooth's (1992) focus semantic value can also be derived from these

backgrounds in a straightforward way. There is an important connection between the notion of topic and

presupposition. It seems that the entity which a sentence is about must be part of its background. To capture this idea, we propose the following constraint (following Yabushita 1991; the idea is similar to a suggestion of Rooth 1985, p. 205):

(53) Given a sentence with a topic phrase, the semantic representa tion of the topic phrase must be part of the sentence's

background.

The significance of this constraint will become clear shortly, when we consider the incompatibility of topichood with exhaustive readings. How

ever, it does seem natural to connect the entity which a sentence is about

with its background part.17 Now we can see how to explain the effects of a topic phrase on the

availability of an exhaustive reading. Let us repeat the data:

(54) Dare-ga hashitte imasu ka?

who-NOM running is Q

Who is running?

(55) a. Jon-ga hashitte imasu.

John-NOM running is

John is running.

b. Jon-wa hashitte imasu.

John-TOP running is

John is running.

17 As mentioned in Yabushita (1991, 1992), one cannot simply say instead that -ga marked

subjects are always part of the focus, and that this explains the contrast between -wa and

-ga in (37).

(i) Jon-ga Suu-to odotte imasu.

John-NOM Sue-with dancing is

John is dancing with Sue.

(i) has a so-called 'neutral-description' reading, on which there is no focus on Jon.




Recall that the exhaustive reading in question is associated with the focus structure '[Jon-particle]F hashitte imasu'. In other words, its background shoud be RUNNING(X). An answer to (54) normally has this focus

structure, since it triggers a presupposition which matches that of the

question. This result is fine for (55a). On the other hand, the same focus structure is impossible for (55b) because it is in conflict with the constraint

(53). Because the focus must be elsewhere than on the subject, (55b)'s presupposition cannot match that of (54), and we predict the infelicity of

(55b) in this context. Thus, (55b) is infelicitous in precisely the kind of context which gives rise to the exhaustive reading. Moreover, to the extent that (55b) is used (awkwardly) in such a context, it will have the wrong background for generating the exhaustive interpretation.

Finally, we return to the fact that topics which contain a focus only allow the focus to be interpreted contrastively.18 Recall from Section 2.2 that the contrast reading of focused NP can be represented as follows:

(56) S

NP VP

NP .-C saw Mary

[John]F

In (56), the -C1 indicates that John contrasts with some presupposed set. An alternative representation would be (57):

(57) S

S -42 -C 1

NP VP

[John]F saw Mary

18 This point is not in conflict with (53), since that constraint implies that a topic cannot be contained in a focus, not the other way around.




Here, the whole proposition that John saw Mary contrasts with others of the form 'X saw Mary'; hence, it could be used to answer the question

Who saw Mary ? Our question is what happens when this focused element is part of the

topic. We consider two possible representations, parallel to (56) and (57).

(58) S2

NPLINK S

NP -C NP VP

[John]F e saw Mary

(59) S3

S2 -C

NPNK S

[John]F NP VP

e saw Mary

There is no problem with (58), where the focus is connected with the

operator - C inside the topic. This represents the contrast reading. On

the other hand, our analysis of topics allows us to predict that the structure in (59), on which the focus associates with the operator

~ C outside the

topic constituent, is impossible. In intuitive terms, the function of the topic NP is only to identify the file card on which the sentence's information is to be encoded. It does not contribute to the propositional information asserted by S2, and so focus in it does not affect the presupposition of S2. In terms of Rooth's theory, the operator

~ C designates contrast with

the set of propositions differing from that denoted by S2 in the position of the focused element. But since [John]F does not contribute to that

proposition, it will not help generate alternatives. Hence the focus on John in (59) will be semantically vacuous. If we assume that every focus




feature must have some semantic consequence, we can rule out the struc ture in (59), and indeed any structure in which a focus contained in a

topic is not interpreted contrastively.

6. CONCLUSION

Japanese topics seem to be explicable in terms of the same notion of link as Vallduvi uses in discussing Catalan and English. While we have not

reanalyzed his impressive set of facts, we have argued that there are

significant advantages to using a purely semantic, set-theoretic system to formalize the analysis of Japanese topic phrases. We have shown that it is possible to present a semantic analysis which maintains much of the structure of representational theories which make crucial use of the con

cept of the file, and in this way we have attempted to incorporate the

insights of Vallduvi's approach to links. In particular, we have analyzed the notion of 'aboutness', and hope to have demonstrated that it not only can, but must, be viewed as a relation between discourse referents and

propositions. The propositions represent subparts of the common ground, Stalnaker's speaker's presupposition, and as such can be modeled as sets of possible worlds. This kind of theory fits into a broader view of prag matics in which it, in many cases, establishes relations among semantic

objects on the basis of informational or conversational principles.

APPENDIX

This appendix contains two additional examples showing that the informa tion in a sentence with a topic phrase is selectively added in a way linked to the topic's discourse referent.

(60)a. Futari no onna-no-hito ga nihon e ikimashita.

two of women NOM Japan to went

Two women went to Japan.

Hitori no onna-no-hito2 wa Tookyoo de Wookuman

one of women2 TOPIC Tokyo LOC walkman

o kaimashita. ACC bought One woman bought a Walkman in Tokyo.




Moo hitori no onna-no-hito3 wa Kyooto de nihon

other one of women3 TOPIC Kyoto LOC Japanese

ningyoo o kaimashita.

doll ACC bought The other woman bought a Japanese doll in Kyoto.

Wookuman o katta onna-no-hito3 wa rainen mata

walkman ACC bought woman3 TOPIC next-year again nihon e iku soo desu

Japan LOC go 'hearsay' The woman who bought a Japanese doll will go to Japan again next year.

(60)b. Futari no onna-no-hito ga nihon e ikimashita.

two of women NOM Japan to went

Two women went to Japan.

Tookyoo de wa hitori no onna-no-hito2 ga

Tokyo LOC TOPIC one of women2 NOM

Wookuman o kaimashita.

walkman ACC bought In Tokyo, one woman bought a Walkman.

Kyooto de wa moo hitori no onna-no-hito3 ga

Kyoto LOC TOPIC other one of women3 NOM

nihon ningyoo o kaimashita.

Japanese doll ACC bought

In Kyoto, the other woman bought a Japanese doll.

??Nihon ningyoo o katta onna-no-hito3 wa

Japanese doll ACC bought woman3 TOPIC

rainen mata nihon e iku soo desu

next-year again Japan LOC go 'hearsay' The woman who bought a Japanese doll will go to Japan again next year.




(61) Nihonjin no gakusei2 ga Tekisasu no daigaku de

Japanese of student2 NOM Texas of university LOC

gengogaku o benkyoo shite-imasu.

linguistics ACC study doing-is A Japanese student is studying linguistics at a university in Texas.

Sono gakusei2 wa imiron o senkoo shite-imasu.

the student2 TOPIC semantics ACC major doing-is The student is majoring in semantics.

Imiron de yuumeina X kyooju wa ima sono

semantics for famous X Professor TOPIC now the

gakusei2 o oshiete-imasu.

student2 ACC teaching-is Professor X, who is famous in semantics, is teaching the stu

dent.

Tekisasu no daigaku de gengogaku o benkyoo Texas of university LOc linguistics ACC study shite-iru gakusei3 ga moo hitori imasu.

doing-is student3 NOM another one is

There is another student studying linguistics at the university in Texas.

Sono gakusei3 wa Y kyouju no moto de toogoron the student3 TOPIC Y Professor of vicinity LOC syntax o benkyoo shite-imasu.

ACC study doing-is The student is studying syntax under Professor Y.

(61)a. Sono gakusei3 wa imiron o senkoo shite-iru

the student3 TOPIC semantics ACC majoring doing-is

gakusei2 to isshoni ima ronbun o kaite-imasu.

student2 with together now paper ACC writing-is The student is now writing a paper with the student who is

majoring in semantics.




(61)b. ??Sono gakusei3 wa X kyouju ga oshiete-iru gakusei2 the student3 TOPIC X Professor NOM teaching is student3

to isshoni ima ronbun o kaite-imasu.

with together now paper ACC writing-is The student is now writing a paper with the student whom Professor X is teaching.

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PAUL PORTNER

Department of Linguistics Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057, USA

portnerp @guvax.acc.georgetown .edu

KATSUHIKO YABUSHITA

Department of English Naruto University of Education

Takashima, Naruto-cho Naruto-shi 772, Japan yabuchan @naruto-u.ac.jp



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The Semantics and Pragmatics of Topic Phrases