Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

presupposition, and presupposition in the logical sense differs in certain fundamental
ways from focal presupposition. Herburger (2000, §§2.3-2.5) has argued, quite
persuasively in my view, that focal presupposition is not, in fact, presupposition at all, but
rather what she terms a “backgrounded focal entailment.” Nonetheless, if only so as to
preserve the title of this chapter, I use presupposition in its older somewhat less precise
meaning in the balance of the chapter.
Of perhaps more importance for the investigation of Sumerian morphosyntax than
subtleties of presupposition and entailment in focal sentences is the basic opposition
between topic and focus. Although presupposition and assertion, as a pair of related
concepts, bear a great deal of similarity to topic and focus, respectively, it is probably
best to keep them separate as analytical terms, even if the correlation between them does
provide a good deal of the scaffolding, linking together different parts of my
investigation. Definitions of and theories concerning topic and focus are, as a rule, quite
involved and not immediately applicable to Sumerian at the present state of our
knowledge, but I would like to characterize these phenomena in a preliminary way. To
oversimplify in the direction—I hope—of truth, three features can be used to differentiate
topic and focus: (a) definiteness, (b) pronominalization and (c) sentence-initial/sentence-
final position. Topics are regularly definite, are capable of being resumed by pronouns in
the core of the sentence and can typically be found in sentence-initial position, whereas
focused constituents can be either definite or indefinite, are not resumed by pronouns in
the core of the sentence and are typically found as close as possible to the end of a
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