A comment on the topic of topic–comment

Topic–comment structures are an important ingredient of the grammars of languages that are not normally thought of as topic-prominent or discourse-configurational. This paper presents an integrated topic–comment approach to a subtype of specificational pseudo-clefts and three constructions generally grouped under the rubric of relative clause constructions: ‘subject contact relatives’ in dialects of English, ‘V2 relatives’ in Dutch and German, and extraposed relative clauses. All are argued to have a syntactic structure in which the first clause is the topic, occupying the specifier position of a TopP whose head takes the second clause, the comment, as its complement. The restrictive or specificational relationship between the second clause and the focus of the first clause, common to all the constructions discussed under the rubric of topic–comment structures in this paper, is shown to be the interpretive reflex of the fact that the second clause is introduced as the complement of the abstract head ‘Top0’, and is thereby earmarked as a comment.