(58) a.JOHNSON died!
b. Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a large, dark, forest.(58a) could be used to answer the question Who died?, treating JOHNSON as focus and “someone died” as
presupposition. But it can also be used to announce the event of Johnson's death“out of the blue,”with no previous
commonground intheconversationthatbears uponeitherJohnsonor thisevent.(58b)isobviouslythebeginning ofa
story. As a scene-setter, it cannot presume any previous information; the little girl and the forest are both new
characters. Lambrecht (1994) adopts the termthetic judgmentsfor presuppositionless sentences like (58), following the
usage of Marty (1918), a pupil of Brentano.
Another important component of information structure istopic. Like the focus, the topic in English receives a stress
peak, usually with a rising intonation. The clearest expression of topic in English is theas forphrase that introduces a
sentence:
(59) As for BILL, I think you'll LIKE him.The topic is often said to be“what thesentence is about.”More precisely, it serves to draw thehearer's attention to an
entity about which some new information is to be provided.
Lambrecht (1994), under the standard definition, wishes to treat unstressed anaphoric pronouns, especially subject
pronouns, as parts of the topic; for instance,She's COMINGis“about”her. This creates a curious disjunctionbetween
thesorts of topics thatare speciallymarked, as in (59), and those that are pronominalor eventacit. My inclinationis to
divide the notion of topic into “continuing topic” and “new topic.” When an anaphoric pronoun is topic in
Lambrecht's sense, it is a“continuing topic,”and no special attentionneeds to be drawn to it. By contrast,as for Billin
(59)introducesa“newtopic”towhichthehearer's attentionmustbedrawn.For purposes ofthepresentsection,I will
use“topic”to mean“new topic”only.
Not all (new) topics are introduced withspecialexpressions likeas for. The stereotypical expressionof topic(inEnglish
at any rate) is as a subject NP carrying its own intonation contour. The stereotypical information structure in English
divides the sentence into the topic, consisting of the subject, and thecomment, consisting of the verb phrase (or
predicate). The topic introduces what the speaker is talking about and the comment says what there is to say about it.