Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1981, Qupperneq 94

92
Karen C. Kossuth
14 Sigurðr konungr segir . . . (Magnússona saga, Hkr. 111:264)
nom nom 3 sg
Sigurd (the) king says .. .
3. Topicality
3.1 The Interaction of Anaphora with Topicality
The anaphoric progression from the initial presentation of a fully
specified NP down to the deletion of known entities depends not only
on the proximity of the last reference to the NP referred to, but also
on the topicality of the NP, that is, on its importance to the discourse.
Not all anaphoric NPs are topical, and not every sentence mentions the
topic, as is apparent from the Magnússona saga example above. The
most important NP in a sentence is its topic; when successive sentences
feature the same NP, it is possible to talk of a discourse topic, a variable
which Halliday and Hasan do not discuss for English. For Old Ice-
landic, topicality is the other variable, with proximity, in the choice of
pronominalization and definiteness. The topic for the above text as a
whole is Sigurðr konungr (SK), but one counter topic intervenes, in
sentences six through eight. As shown in the table below, Sigurd is the
topic for the first five clauses. His marking ranges from full specifica-
tion, with name and title, to unmarked common noun to pronoun. Then
in the sixth sentence the counter topic intrudes, the steward. The
definiteness of this noun is exophoric, as it is to be expected that a
king would have a steward, but the noun is lacking distinguishing modi-
fiers because of its subordinate importance. This counter topic con-
tinues as subject for two more clauses, but is deleted each time, as the
main topic is reintroduced in the direct object position—the most
common one for new information (Givón 1974)—as an unmarked
noun. Thus reestablished in sentence 7, Sigurðr konungr can continue
as a pronoun, which it does, in sentence 9 as subject, then as dative in
sentences 11 and 12. When Sigurd is introduced as speaker again, for
the direct quotations following sentence 14, he is once again mentioned
by name and rank. With this full specification, his topicality is reesta-
blished in force, and the cycle begins anew. In Table I, three indicators
of topichood are presented: the sentence part (subject is most topical
(Keenan 1976:318)) NP type (full, definite, unmarked, pronominal or
deleted) and word order (verb initial is the most cohesive). The syntac-