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Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
The claim advanced in this paper is that the presence of a left-dislocated element together with a resumptive clitic in Bulgarian is a special case of argument saturation with implications for the focus structure of the clause, while contrast involves discontinuous focus (contrastive topics/foci) with no clitics present in the derivation. Contrastive topic/focus constructions in Bulgarian can be united on the view that they involve (sets of) ordered pairs where the higher element is valuing a contrastive feature (cf. OCC in Chomsky 2001) while the element in the VP is a non-contrastive topic or focus. The contrastive feature participates in wh-structures but not in clitic-left-dislocated structures where pairing between arguments is 'accidental'.
An important role in the coherence of texts is played by the distribution of information in the sentence. The present paper especially examines the beginning of sentences (topics). Which syntactic elements are most adequate to initiate a sentence, and which of their characteristics can be considered responsible for this? After a short review of the pertinent literature, we shall present grammatical, semantic and pragmatic factors that organize topicalization. The point of departure are the patterns of basic serialization as defined by the grammar. Deviations of these patterns can particularly be a result of the principle of known information. In addition to this constitutive principle, we can distinguish five regulative principles that lead to non-marked topicalizations (situation, empathy, iconicity, lengthening terms, text connection). In the closing sections, the positioning of phrasal accents and some special types of topics will be discussed. All the examples given are from modem German.