Syntactic markedness and the definition of sentence topic

University of Illinois Sentence topics are linguistic constituents, with syntactic and semantic properties which single them out for a linking function in the process of relating a sentence to its discourse context. This paper explores the relation between the linguistic properties of sentence topics and their use as discourse links in sentence processing. It proposes a set of criteria for distinguishing relatively weak or strong topic NP's, based on syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties. Syntactically defined topics include subjects and those in 'marked' NP positions, where the surface features define grammatical function in an ambiguous or indirect way. Implications of this proposal are drawn for several languages, and for various models of language processing.*

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