Language and linguistics
Language Teaching Abstracts · 1969
If the underlying structure of a sentence is viewed as consisting of a verb and its participants, then the generalisation suggested by Chomsky's range of permissible focus, as well as by European writings on topic and comment, can be formulated thus: the generative component of the description produces underlying structures; the ordering of the participants is determined by the grammar.However, the actual order of participants in an underlying sentence structure may differ from their primary order due to topicalisation of some of them.If the primary ordering is denoted by lower indices, a 1; a 2 , a 3 , denoting the agentive, dative and patient respectively, topicalisation can be defined as the case where participant ai is included in the topic while aj is not, where This is a more acceptable framework for accounting for regularities of topic and focus in the underlying structure, and for the derivations of corresponding surface structure.Tentative transformation rules are outlined.A brief account of a full semantic treatment is given, including explanation in terms of the properties of natural language required by the basic conditions of communication.The framework suggested accounts for some of the crucial points of disagreement between the Chomskian and Lakovian variants of T G .