ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses characterizing Contrastive Topic by critically examining in what sense it is both topical and focal as claimed by Krifka, and supported by means of alternative semantics, and a discourse model, thus clarifying aspects of information structure – i.e., Topic-Focus structure – and by explaining why scope inversion occurs and how reversed polarity or contrast implicature occurs cross-linguistically. Contrastive Topic (CTs) are underlyingly based on concessive admission of an event/proposition with regard to a cell of a partition of the referent set denoted by a given or accommodated Topic in contrast with the rest of the alternatives in the Contrastive Set. Verbs/adjectives and other event-denoting predicates, contrary to what is commonly believed, can also be topical and thus contrastive. If a universal quantifier, numeral, modal operator or ‘because’ clause, being CT-marked, interacts with negation, it gets a narrow interpretation, because of the nature of the contrastive qualifying denial.
