A New Approach to Contrastive Topic: Partition Semantics and Pragmatics

The purpose of the current work is to propose a more comprehensive approach to Contrastive Topic (henceforth, CT) than the existing ones. In the literature, there have been two approaches to CT proposed: one is to take CT as an information-structural discourse-regulating notion on a par with focus and the other is to analyze CT as an focus-sensitive operator with its inherent semantic and pragmatic content. Although both of the approaches have their own merits capturing some facets of CT, neither of them is adequate, for one cannot capture the facets the other can and furthermore, as we will see, there are examples of CT neither of the approaches can be extended to deal with. Alternatively, we will propose an alternative approach couched in the so-called partition semantics of questions proposed by (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984, Groenendijk 1999). 1 CT as an information-structural discourse-regulating notion on a par with focus Consider the question-answer discourse in (1). It is intuitively clear that CT as well as focus has something to do with the congruence of the discourse.