Delahunty and Garvey
(11) S'
COMP S
We will assume that topicalization inserts the moved phrase into COMP.
The surface structure of (7b) would therefore be represented as:
(12) S'
COMP S
NP NP VP
N N V
Mary Bill carried
COMP is a position outside of S that occurs in every S'. It is never as-
signed a semantic role directly. A phrase in COMP acquires its semantic role
by virtue of its association with some deep structure position. This associa-
tion is represented by the transformation that moves the phrase. As every
NP must be assigned a semantic role, it follows that there can be no NP in
COMP in deep structure. We will call positions that cannot be assigned a
semantic role directly in DS non-argument positions. This is often ab-
breviated as A' (read A-bar) in the literature. Argument (A-) positions are
those positions within S to which semantic roles may be assigned in deep
structure. They include, as you no doubt guessed, subjects, objects, and ob-
jects of prepositions. We will discover later that while these positions may be
assigned a semantic role, they occasionally are not. So topicalization moves a
phrase from an A position to which a semantic role has been assigned to an
A' position.
Besides moving an NP, as in the examples above, topicalization can move
any phrase to COMP:
(13) a. Mary, I like. (NP topic)
b. Into the valley of death, I will not go. (PP topic)
c. Intelligent, he is not. (AP topic)
d. I said that Fred would go home, and go home he will. (VP topic)