Syntax A Medial Topic Position for German*

Drawing on a variety of different phenomena the paper argues for the existence of a designated topic position in the middle field of the German clause. This implies that German is discourse configurational with regard to topics. The result allows some basic questions to be addressed, including the possible number of sentence topics, the possibility of topics in embedded clauses, the question whether there is a dependence between scrambling and topicality, and the question whether the generic interpretation of a bare plural subject is dependent on its topical status. Moreover, a proposal for the structural representation of the medial topic position is put forward. 1 The concept ‘sentence topic’ The famous characterization of the concept ‘topic ’ by Hockett (1958: 201) reads as follows: (1) “The most general characteristic of predicative constructions is suggested by the terms ‘topic ’ and ‘comment ’ for their ICs: the speaker announces a topic and then says something about it.” The following sentences may serve as illustration1: (2) a. /PEter forderte Maria zum \TANzen auf P. asked M. to dance PRE b. /MAria wurde von Peter zum \TANzen aufgefordert M. was by P. to dance PRE asked * I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and Claudia Maienborn, Karin Pittner, Marga Reis and Chris Wilder for very helpful comments. However, it goes without saying that these people cannot be made responsible for the remaining shortcomings of the article