Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

The topic-marked noun in (1), Mary, is resumed by the pronoun, she, later on in the
sentence, whereas the focus construction in (2) makes use of a cleft-sentence in which a
dummy pronoun followed by the copula in combination with a distinct intonation of the
word car indicates that it is emphasized within the sentence, possibly in contrast to some
other referent. Needless to say, topic and focus patterns often reconfigure the
grammatical structures in a language quite dramatically.
Once the articulation of topic and focus have been delineated within a language, it
soon becomes apparent that clauses that include an explicit topicalization tend to occur in
a rather different set of textual environments than clauses involving a focalization.
Clearly, a clause that introduces a new topic will often be followed by a number of
subsequent clauses in which the topic plays an important role, even if it is rather quickly
replaced by another referent as topic. Clauses involving focalization are quite different in
that they often occur at points of culmination or transition within, for example, an
unfolding narrative. 2 The problem with attempting to use topic and focus to understand
the tectonics of clause structure in Sumerian is that there are no hard and fast rules: each
literary tradition adopts a limited number of what we might call rhetorical devices, which
are built up out of both syntactic phenomena such as contrastive focus as well as textual
conventions that have no direct syntactic correlation such as rules of elementary
composition, viz. “the first sentence in a paragraph should be the ‘topic sentence’ and
summarize the content of the entire paragraph.” Clearly, as soon as an entirely
typographic phenomenon such as the paragraph is invoked, we are no longer dealing with
2 The expression “points of culmination and transition” can be thought of as analogous to Vanstiphout’s foregrounding
function (see Vanstiphout 1985, 12-13).
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