Some Hypotheses Proposed and Examined

In this chapter it is time to put together some of the results of our joint work into a set of hypotheses concerning the relationship of TFA and tripartite structures. We concentrate on two interrelated sets of issues that have been central to this work, in each of which we first present initial hypotheses inspired by the most central cases we have discussed and then discuss problem cases and develop revised hypotheses. The first issue is the recursivity of topic-focus structure, an issue on which we began with the question of whether TFA is itself directly recursive to the same extent as tripartite structures, and as it became clear that the answer to that question must be negative, developed into a pair of questions: in what cases is there an argument for embedded TFA, and to what extent does the hierarchical (rather than linear) view of CD account for the phenomena for which BHP originally felt a need for greater recursivity of TFA? These issues are addressed in the initial hypothesis (Hi) in Section 6.1, the discussion of problematic cases concerning deeply embedded focus in 6.2.1 and of several kinds of cases concerning focalizers (focussensitive operators) occurring within the topic of the sentence in Section 6.3, and in the revised hypothesis (H3) of Section 6.5.1, where we conclude that embedded TFA never happens unless there is an embedded clause. The second issue concerns the relationship between TFA and tripartite structure directly.