bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Apr 27, 2020 10:44 pm
And now, a question on a completely different topic (pun not intended): I always assumed that ‘topic’ and ‘focus’ were two words for the same thing, but earlier today I was reading Wikipedia, which mentions that they are different. What are topic and focus really, and how do they differ?
Topic and focus are two of the most abused terms in linguistics! Firstly, we need to deal with language specific usages, such as calling the trigger the focus in Austronesian languages with complex voice systems basically because it's not obvious if it's a subject or not. Despite the name, it's not obvious that the "focus"
is a focus in the most commonly understood sense.
In the pragmatic sense, a topic is normally defined by
aboutness. But this can mean different things depending on the context. For example, sometimes when people say topic they mean discourse topics. Discourse topics are the highly persistent referents that appear in clause after clause. They're the speech act participants (I, you), the protagonists of stories, the references that can most easily be represented by minimally marked references like verbal agreement alone or unstressed pronouns.
But below the level of discourse, individual clauses often have a topic. If I say "John'll be back from school at 6pm", the chances are I'm trying to give you information about John (because you want to see him but he's not here), not about the school or about things happening at 6pm. The reason the concept of topic is tricky for English speakers is that English has no one device that marks topics, but a number that can, including:
- Location of emphatic stress (placing it on the subject marks that the subject is unexpectedly not the sentence topic
- Grammatical voice, and in particular use of the passive to promote topics to subject
- Choice of referential devices
- Various constructions such as "as for", "speaking of", ...
I said before that clauses or sentences often have a topic because there are also thetic statements where everything is asserted and non-topical. If you ask "what happened?" and I say "A man arrived" (note the emphatic stress on the subject when you say this), the unidentified man is highly unlikely to be a topic. Instead the entire clause is new information. If there is a topic at all, it's some kind of default, unspoken stage topic. The clause is about what happened at an non-overt time and place.
You need to distinguish as well here between new topics and old topics. An old topic, one predictable from previous clauses, will generally be realised as minimally as possible. Zero if the language allows it, an unstressed or clitic pronoun, or verbal agreement. A new topic, when the topic changes and the speaker feels the need to mark this fact, will be highly prominent, and its marking may be similar in some ways to focus marking. Both contrastive foci and new topics need to be prominent, and many languages use similar devices for both.
The normal use of focus is to mean the most strongly asserted part of the sentence. The strongest form of focus, and the most commonly marked cross-linguistically, is normally contrastive argument focus, where a single constituent is asserted either from a closed list of possibilities or in contradiction to the expectations of the listener. An example would be: "No,
John broke the vase", where the vase breaking is known, and only the identity of the breaker is asserted. Not all clauses have a single constituent in focus in this way. More commonly, the entire clause apart from the topic (also known as the "comment") is in some sense focal or at least non-topical, but this is a bit of a default and not overtly marked in many languages.
Many works distinguish the following common pragmatic patterns at the sentence/clause level:
Predicate focus - There is a topic, and the rest of clause/sentence constitutes an assertion about that topic
Argument focus - There is a (contrastive) focus, and the rest of the clause is background information
Sentence focus - The entire clause/sentence is focal/new information
Specific books may also distinguish between background and topic, and between assertion and focus. But I don't think there is complete agreement right now on exactly what all of these terms mean, how they differ, and how the (presumably universal) psychology of attention and interest map onto linguistic structures.
