Judith Aissen (UCSC) - Documenting topic and focus
Judith Aissen (UCSC) - Documenting topic and focus
Friday October 2, Professor Judith Aissen from UC Santa Cruz will give a talk on information structure. The talk is officially part of Masha's class, but everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend.
The talk brings together material from two papers, Aissen 1992 and Aissen to appear. The first part of the talk will discuss and illustrate the documentation of topic and focus through naturally-produced speech and through controlled prompts. The second will review the analysis of topic and focus which was proposed in Aissen 1992 for a number of Mayan languages, and will offer some refinements. The last part will show that Tsotsil has two topic positions – one internal and one external – and will use that fact to reconsider whether, in addition to the prosodic and syntactic properties that distinguish them, they fulfill different discourse-related functions.