Existentials as Existentials:
نویسندگان
چکیده
The common view in the literature is that the post-verbal NP of an existential construction cannot be interpreted as the topic of its sentence, where the term “sentence topic” is construed as an expression forming a relation of aboutness between itself and the clause in which it appears. The aim of this paper is to refute this claim. First, we discuss why the discourse functions associated with sentence topics and with post-verbal NPs are assumed to inherently oppose each other. A list of linguistic properties will then be shown to derive from the discourse function of sentence topics. Then, an extensive analysis of each property, showing why it supposedly proves a misfit when considered as a property of the post-verbal NP in existential constructions, will be provided. Finally a corpus of real-life utterances will prove that the post-verbal NP may function as the topic expression of its clause, and indeed be characterized by the linguistic properties associated with topic expressions. Nadav Sabar [email protected]
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