Felicity Condition of Korean and English Contrastive Topic

Language, Information and Computation(PACLIC 11), 1996, 459-468 Felicity Condition of Korean and English Contrastive Topic' Hae-Kyung Wee Indiana University hwee@indiana.edu Abstract This paper attempts to provide a sketch of formalism for Contrastive Topic in Korean and English. Based on the idea that a discourse structure basically consists of question/answer pairs, the proposed formalism shows 1) Korean contrastive topic corresponds to a certain prosody in English and the information structure for contrastive topic in both languages is essentially same, 2) Contrastive topic always presuppose a bigger question, and 3) the presupposition can be either explicitly satisfied by the preceding question, or implicitly accommodated so that the answer can be felicitous. 1. Introduction A widespread attitude to Korean topic marker, nun, is that it has two functions, one is theme presentation and the other is contrastive topic marking. It has been a lot of controversy on the nature of these two functions associated with the topic marker in Korean or Japanese, whether they are essentially one category or not. Based on Hoji's (1985) observation that they show quite different syntactic behavior from functional categories, assuming that the two functions correspond to two separate functional categories, I will concern contrastive topic only in this paper, postponing the analysis of the theme presentation function for a future research. Most Korean or Japanese linguists acknowledge the notion of contrastive topic, but very few precisely captures the essential semantic and discoursal meaning associated with contrastive topic in a formal framework. In this paper, I attempt to provide a sketch of a formalism for the treatmen of Korean contrastive topic. For this, I will first show that Koran contrastive topic corresponds to a certain kind of prosody in English, which is a fall-rise intonation. Given that English has the same function as Korean Contrastive Topic, recent increasing researches on information structure and prosodic focus theory (Rooth 1985, 1992, Partee 1991, Krifka 1992, Vallduvi 1992, Roberts 1996, Steedman 1991, Von Fintel 1994 etc.) deepen our understanding of information structure associated with Korean contrastive topic, too. Especially, by exploiting the idea of Robert and Buering, I will provide a formalism for a proper treatment of the notion contrastive topic not only for Korean but also in general. 2. Formalism for Contrastive Topic 2. 1 Correspondence between Korean and English Contrastive Topic Jackendoff(1972) categorizes two kinds of intonational pattern in terms of the 459 informational function of the expression dubbed with that particular intonation. One is called A-accent, which is a falling accent, and the other is called B-accent, which is a fall- rise accent. The A-accent is said to carry the information of rheme, whereas B-accent is said to carry theme information. The prosody that I believe correspond to Korean contrastive topic is this B-accent. Under Pierrehumbert's (1980) description of intonational patterns, this fall-rise contour is described as L+H* LH%, which is a pitch accent consisting of an ordered pair of two tones, low (L) and high (H), followed by L phrase accent and H% boundary tone. Since "*" …

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