Complex Topic-Comment Structures in HPSG

(1) can be uttered as part of a ”strategy of inquiry” (Roberts 1998, 4) where it is under discussion what members of a contextually given set of people wanted to see. It reports on Sandy’s wishes as opposed to those of the other members of the set. The felicity of this sentence under these circumstances can be made to follow from the assumption that the content of What Sandy wanted to see is the topic of the overall pseudocleft and that this topic is structured into a contrastive portion, i.e. the meaning of Sandy, and a non-contrastive portion. The meaning of the constituent following the copula is analyzed as the comment, again structured into a contrastive portion (the meaning of red) and a non-contrastive portion. This structured comment signals that there are alternatives to the actually used comment that could have been predicated of the topic and which differ from the present comment merely in replacing the meaning of red with a comparable, contextually salient, meaning. Such an alternative comment could have been expressed by a blue truck, for instance. Steedman 2000 also argues for the division of sentence meanings into topic and comment (he uses the terms ”theme” and ”rheme”) in such a way that each of these can be further articulated into focus and background. He gives the following example (p. 107):