Topics in ISL (Israeli sign language) are not topicalized
Ofra Rosenstein
Haifa University, Israel
Topic-comment structures are prevalent in various sign languages (German sign
language: Hirsch 1961, British sign language: Deuchar ,)1983,1984( ASL: Friedman
(1976), Aarons (1996), and Janzen (1995, 1997, 1998). However, it has been
assumed by some linguists that topic–comment structure is not basic, but rather
derived from a more basic structure (e.g., SVO) by means of topicalization, that is
movement of a constituent to S-initial position (Fischer 1975; Liddell 1980; Padden
1988). Such an analysis regards the topic as syntactically dependent on the comment,
and this dependency is captured by the co-indexation between the topic constituent
and the syntactic position from which it originated. Other analyses of topic-comment
construction, which are not based on movement, also analyze the topic assyntactically
related to the comment. In Aarons's (1996) analysis, for example, the comment
clause is dominated by two topic nodes. Lillo-Martin (1991), and Sandler & LilloMartin (to appear) argue that in ASL, empty categories that follow non-agreement
verbs are variables that are bound by the topic in sentence initial position, as is the
case in discourse oriented languages like Chinese (Huang 1984). This topic-variable
binding analysis also entails syntactic dependency of topic and some element in the
comment ,at least in those sentences with non- agreement verbs in ASL.
In this paper I present a different analysis of topic-comment structures in Israeli Sign
Language (ISL). Its main points are that topics are not syntactically related to the
comment, hence topic comment structures in the language cannot be derived by
topicalization. . I argue that topics in ISL are not moved from within the comment,
they do not bind empty categories within the comment (i.e. the clause) and the empty
categories are not variables. Rather, the topic is left adjoined to the comment clause,
but is not dominated by the top node of the clause nor does it dominate it. I adopt
McCawley’s (1982) analysis of parentheticals, and apply it to topics in ISL.
According to McCawly, parentheticals are not syntactically related to the clause they
appear in. They are neither affected by nor affect the structure of the tree, or in other
words ,they are neither dominated by nor dominate any of the original nodes of the
tree. The parenthetical originates from another tree but it moves into a position within
the clause without changing its constituency structure. The difference between topics
in ISL and parentheticals is that while the latter may be inserted in different places
within the tree, the former must be placed in sentence initial position. The main point
is that this is a pragmatic rather than a syntactic requirement. Signers and speakers in
some cultures tend to present the thing they want to talk about and then organize the
message they want to convey (see Shi 2000: 387 for a similar point with respect to
Chinese). In sum, I suggest that the topic-comment construction in ISL consists of
two constituents that have no syntactic relationships.
My argumentation goes along the following lines:
a. Topics in ISL are prosodically set apart from the rest of the sentence like
parentheticals. 78% of the topics in my data are followed by an intonational break.
According to Nespor& Vogel (1986:188) such breaks are used to set off constituents
“…in some way external to the root sentence they are associated with”.
b. In many sentences the topics cannot possibly be construed as belonging to the
comment, as there is no empty position in the comment from which they could have
originated:
(1).
__topic1______________ ___topic 2____________ __comment _____
DARK NIGHT NIGHT, MAN LORD BEARD, LORD WALK…
‘One dark night, the bearded lord of the forest walked ...’
c. Empty categories in ISL are not bound by the topic‘ .Binding’ requires three
conditions: 1 .The binder must c-command the trace or in other words belong to the
same sentence and be dominated by a node that dominates the trace too; 2. The trace
)the empty category) must be coindexed with the binder (Chomsky, 1981).3. There
should not be any other potential binder in between (Aoun & Li 1993). I argue that all
three conditions are not met by empty categories in ISL .Sentence (2) exemplifies
evidence of the violation of condition 1:
(2)
EYES, ei THINK HIMSELF,
ei GO RUN HOME,
ei SEARCH SEARCH ej
’As for eyes, (the boy) thought to himself,
(he) ran home and searched for (eyes for the snow man)’
The empty category following SEARCH refers to the topic EYES, but there are three
clauses between this empty category and the topic. It could be claimed that there is a
topic chain here like in Chinese (Tsao 1977), and that the same empty topic EYES
occupies sentence initial position in each clause. However, the clause GO RUN
HOME cannot be construed as having the covert topic EYES in sentence initial
position because it is not related in any way to the clause. Hence, there is no topic
chain here, and the topic EYES does not c-command the empty category ej.
d. Since I have established that empty categories in ISL cannot be analyzed as
variables, there still remains the issue of determining what kind of categories they are.
According to the binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) the remaining alternative is that
they are pronouns. I argue that this indeed is the case in ISL. Empty categories in ISL
can refer to entities beyond sentence boundaries and can be identified even without
Agr. This is done either by non-manual markers such as eye gaze towards a referent
or shifting the body into a referent’s position, or by pragmatic inference (like in
example (2) above). Empty pronouns, like overt pronouns are base generated. They
are neither derived by movement nor bound by the NP they refer to (Chomsky 1982).
Thus, being pronouns rather than variables, empty categories in ISL may refer to
topics but they are not necessarily syntactically related to them.
e. Analyzing topics as syntactically independent of the comment entails a nonmovement analysis .No-topicalization analysis is required in any case to account for
sentences without empty categories at all. Sentence (1) above is only one example of
a variety of such sentences, which are very prevalent in the language. Hence a nonmovement analysis of topics in ISL is more economic and elegant than a movement
analysis, which cannot account for these very common types of topic-comment
constructions.
Since topic-comment structure is a basic sentence structure in ISL, the language may
be classified as a topic -prominent (TP) language (Li & Thompson, 1976; Gundel
1980, 1985. 1988 ;Fuller & Gundel 1987). Indeed, I found ( Rosenstein 2001) that
properties typical of spoken TP languages characterize ISL as well, with some
modifications that have to do with the different modality of this language. This lends
support to the typology of topic versus subject prominent languages and sheds some
light on the effect of modality on certain properties of topic prominence.
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