Functional topics

Abstract

It has long been observed that DPs containing a bound pronoun can occur left-dislocated in the German pre-field (see e.g. Vat 1981, Frey 2004b) while at the same time (Frey 2004b) argues that a left-dislocated DP has to be understood as the aboutness topic of the respective sentence. As the pronoun in the left-dislocated DP is bound from within the clause, this seems to be add odds with the claim that topicality of a DP results in a wide scope reading of this DP (as proposed e.g. by Cresti 1995, Ebert and Endriss 2004). We show that those examples in fact have functional wide scope readings as opposed to narrow scope readings and propose an extension of the approach of (Ebert and Endriss 2004) that can derive those readings and account for the occurrence restrictions of certain DPs w.r.t. left-dislocation and other topic positions.