Publications

Publication details [#23228]

Davison, Alice. 1984. Syntactic markedness and the definition of sentence topic. Language 60 (4) : 797–846.

Publication type

Article in journal

Publication language

English

Keywords

markedness | sentence structure | topic

Annotation

The paper argues that the perception of topic functions to allow the matching of a sentence to its context. Topic perception is a consequence of the semantic and syntactic contents of the sentence, in particular of the fact that topics appear in marked syntactic positions.