KŁOPOTY Z TO. NA MARGINESIE ARTYKUŁU MAGDALENY DERWOJEDOWEJ I DOROTY KOPCIŃSKIEJ O TAK ZWANYCH PODMIOTACH NIENOMINALNYCH
Elusive to. A side note to Derwojedowa and Kopcińska’s paper On non-nominal subjects

Summary/Abstract: The paper addresses only one issue raised in the study by Derwojedowa and Kopcińska, i.e. the surface-syntactic representation of sentences bearing the segment in question, e.g. Grać w brydża, to gram, ale tylko z bratem w parze (roughly: I do play bridge but only with my brother as a partner). According to the Authors, in such sentences to is a dependent of the verb and the dependency relation is that of modifi cation. In this paper I argue that the so-called topical (or thematic) to (featured in the example above) shows semantic, syntactic and information structure properties that distinguish it both from the so-called focal (or rhematic) to, e.g. To w brydża gram z bratem w parze. (It is bridge that I play with my brother as a partner) and from topicalising expressions, such as jeśli chodzi o… (as to…). It is argued that topical to should be seen not as a modifying (single place) particle, but as a kind of connecting word, which joins the sentence rheme with the sentence theme, with the latter presented as emphatic one, i.e. one that excludes another potential and semantically similar themes.

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