Focus , and the Grammar - Pragmatics Interface

In the introduction to her classic paper on topic, Reinhart (1982) writes: “Although the subject matter of pragmatic theory is ostensibly linguistic communication, much of it deals, in fact, with the more general problem of human interaction, which is independent of linguistic considerations and of which linguistic communication is just a particular manifestation. Thus, as Grice points out, his principle of cooperation holds equally for rational conversation and for baking a cake. Sentence topics, by contrast, are a pragmatic phenomenon which is specifically linguistic.” I agree with Reinhart that sentence topic is a specifically linguistic phenomenon. But I will propose in this paper that it is not primarily a pragmatic or discourse phenomenon as Reinhart and others have assumed. It is an integral part of the semantic/conceptual representation of natural language sentences, which is encoded (though not always unambiguously) by their morpho-syntactic and/or phonological form. The fact that topiccomment structure contributes to the way sentences are processed and interpreted in context, and thus constrains the appropriate contexts for a given sentence, doesn’t necessarily distinguish this notion from other aspects of the meaning of sentences. The important question then isn’t whether some particular linguistic phenomenon has pragmatic effects or not, but which of its properties are determined by the grammar and which can be derived from more general cognitive and communicative principles. Much of what I will have to say in this paper isn’t new, but I hope that reformulating the question in this way will shed new light on some old controversies, if not resolve them.