Topicalization

Abstract

Chomsky (1977) argued for a dedicated topic position above the CP. I will develop this idea in several directions. First, I will show that this topic position hosts Aboutness topics uniformly across three languages: English, Japanese, and Spanish. Second, while this topic position occurs freely in matrix clauses, in complement clauses it can only occur with certain predicates identified by Hooper and Thompson (1973). Using Villalta’s (2008) analysis of the subjunctive mood in Spanish, I will argue that the limitations on the occurrence of the topic position in complement clauses are due to the semantic properties of these clauses and the predicates that select them. Finally, we will see that the other two kinds of topics, Contrastive and Familiar topics, vary in their distribution across languages. I will show that this variation is predicted by the typology under Strong Uniformity (Miyagawa 2010, 2017).*