An Information Structure Approach to Individual- and Stage-level Predicates

Based on the observation that the distinction of stage-level and individual-level predicates is determined not solely by lexical properties but also by pragmatic factors, contra Kratzer (1989) and Diesing (1992), I suggest reviving a unified topical structure, in which categorical and thetic statements are both analyzed as having topics, i.e., individual topics and event topics. It turns out that the unified topical structure provides a more flexible tool for us to explain some exceptional behaviors of stage-level and individual-level predicates.

1. Introduction

2. Information Structure and Two Types of Statements

3. What Sorts of Things Can Be Topics?

4. “Topichood” and Relativized Mapping Hypothesis

5. Concluding remarks

(0)

(0)

(0)

(0)