144 Francis Cornish
FG, for its part, might usefully pay more heed to establishing criteria for
determining the various attention-focus or accessibility statuses of given
referents in the flow of discourse, thus motivating the successful prediction
of the use of the various subtypes of Topic expression in accessing them
(this point is also made by Gómez-González 2001: 165). Finally, one of the
four subtypes of FG Topics, NewTops, may, I think, be safely abandoned
(since its provision is already catered for, in the unmarked case, by Com-
pletive Focus), thereby simplifying the system as a whole.
Notes
- This chapter is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at the
9th International Conference on Functional Grammar, held at the Universi-
dad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, from 20 to 23 September
2000. My thanks in particular to Wallis Reid, Kees Hengeveld and Knud
Lambrecht as well as the editors of the present volume for their very helpful
comments on earlier versions. - This term should be understood here in the sense which Lambrecht (1994)
adopts, namely where discourse information is that which is derived by an
addressee from the combination of a topic with a focus (within a topic-
comment utterance), or in more general terms, from that of items one with
another in the flow of text. In CS theory, FOCUS (‘IN-’, ‘NOT IN-’,
‘MORE’ or ‘LESS’) is assigned by the speaker-writer to individual argu-
ments (participants) both in relation to the particular predicator chosen
(what it calls ‘EVENT’) within the clause, and to the wider discourse. I am
indebted to Knud Lambrecht for this clarification. - As Knud Lambrecht points out (pers. comm.), this is partly due to the fact
that the term in question is indefinite (thereby marking its referent as uni-
dentifiable by the addressee), and not definite (and hence potentially
identifiable). It is also due, of course, to its position to the right of the verb,
and to the fact that, in its spoken realization, it would receive a nuclear
pitch-accent. - Lambrecht and Polinsky (1997) present a range of distinctive properties
characterizing thetic utterances cross-linguistically. - In this connection, see Reid’s (1991: 181–182) presentation and analysis of
a newspaper report of a marathon race, as well as Huffman’s (1993) appli-
cation of the system to two fictional narratives. - I am indebted to Wallis Reid for this characterization of the CS FOCUS
system. - For good, fairly recent discussions of the thetic vs. categorical distinction,
see Rosengren (1997), and Lambrecht and Polinsky (1997).