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Cognitive Strategies in the Formation of Topic Constructions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Elena S. Maslova
Elena S. Maslova
Affiliation:
St. Petersburg Insitute for Linguistic Studies, Tučkov per., 9, 199053, St. Petersburg, Russia. Email lena@lh.pti.spb.su
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Abstract

An attempt is made to incorporate the concept of sentence topic into a general model of sentence formation. The article begins with a morphosyntactic typology of topic constructions attested across languages, followed by an examination of the types of discourse contexts in which these constructions are employed by different languages, which allows a correlation to be established between formal types of topic constructions and their discourse functions. It turns out that both the formal distinctions between major types of topic constructions and their functional distribution obtain a straightforward explanation, if they are taken to be derived by different cognitive strategies. A model based on this idea makes it possible to explain some aspects of interaction between formal properties of languages and their relative “topic-prominence”.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 17 , Special Issue 2: Special issue on LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY , December 1994 , pp. 127 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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