The first issue to be considered here is the possibility to have multiple HTs. As shown in a number of works, this phenomenon is not ruled out in German. Abraham (cited as “p. c.” in Boeckx/Grohmann’s 2005, fn. 6) calls such constructs themata pendentia in extremo. Cf. (7) (Boeckx/Grohmann 2005: 148):

(7)

As is easy to imagine, this structure is marginal in actual usage, but it is still possible. The authors also show that any other word order in the clause-internal domain of the clause would lead to ungrammaticality (see (8)) and construe this fact to illustrate that “[t]he data [above] are puzzling if [the resumptives] are treated as pronouns linked to their antecedent in a non-movement fashion”, i. e. that the utterance-initial HTs result from movement (see footnote 1 above):

(8)

Although these grammaticality judgments are certainly embraceable, an explanation à la Ockham’s razor seems to better account for these facts. What these data can be interpreted to show is that the HTs are first-merged (clause-externally) in an order that mirrors a plausible (clauseinternal) base-generation of the indirect and of the direct object (note that in the German middle field, the unmarked word order is IO > DO), with the insertion of seine Mutter as the rightmost referent since the possessive co-indexed with Alex would be uninterpretable if it did not follow the corresponding constituent in the overt syntax. In the middle field of the clause in which the three resumptives occur, the pronouns are serialized according to the standard order Subject > IO > DO, because the referent for sie has already been introduced in the area above ForceP, and the order results from syntactic operations that take place at some point of the derivation – differently from what is observable in the pre-ForceP area, where (some kind of deficient) Merge, but not (the very same type of) Move (as in the clause-internal domain of the clause) may occur

Note that the presence of a possessive only serves as an “explicitor” for the correct interpretation of the utterance, in which it is Alex’ and not someone else’s mother who performs as the subject of the giving, but if Mutter were simply introduced by a definite article like die (die Mutter ‘the mother’) (as is the case in the same sentence in Grohmann’s (2000: 145) example (21)), the interpretation of this constituent would not be any different, and the grammaticality of the clause-internal order would also remain the same.

Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl (2007) distinguish three classes of topics, which are assigned different information-structural properties directly related to the nature and degree of activation of their referent:

• Aboutness Topics are referents (re-)introduced in the discourse which the sentence predicates something about e. g.: [Johann Wolfgang Goethe]AboutTopic was born in Frankfurt in 1749.

• Contrastive Topics are referents that realize alternatives without having any impact on the focus value of the sentence, e. g.: [Goethe]ContrTopic was born in 1749, [Schiller]ContrTopic was born in 1759

• Familiarity Topics are given referents generally used for topic continuity and typically realized as pronouns, “supposed to be salient in the consciousness of the protagonists” (Féry 2007: 168), e. g. in a lecture about the literary Sturm-und-Drang movement, after ten sentences about the referent Goethe and without any topic shifts: [He]FamTopic also wrote some lesser known poems about the beauty of the German language

More controversially, Fábregas assumes for HTs on the basis of data from Spanish that these can only realize contrastivity or familiarity, but are not fit for aboutness. If we accept the idea that HTalization in Spanish and German works in different ways, then this restriction on Familiarity does not seem to be the case in German. HTs that display aboutness in Frascarelli/ Hinterhölzl’s spirit are, instead, a very productive pattern, both in everyday spoken communication and in written language. The two examples in (9) and (10) exemplify the former, but in two different declinations. Example (9) is from (here: fictionally) literary language. The sentence containing the HT dieser Mann (‘this man’), of course, needs to be embedded into the corresponding context, which is provided in order to determine the information-structural reading of the topic with reasonable certainty. In this sentence, dieser Mann is re-introduced and marks a referential shift in the description. This DP is resumed by a personal pronoun (er ‘he’) after a parenthetical. Also note that even the very beginning in the context contains a HT that can be categorized as an Aboutness Topic (ein französischer Kaffee und Croissants ‘a French coffee and croissants’) placed above the inner-CP domain of the sentence. Crucially, the clause that this DP opens up (habe ich lange nicht gegessen ‘I haven’t had these for a long time’) does not exhibit a V2 arrangement in which the above-mentioned occupies the prefield, but contains a silent resumptive. Here and in the following examples, the topic and the corresponding resumptive are indicated in bold:

(9) context: Endlich mal wieder ein französischer Kaffee und Croissants, habe ich lange nicht gegessen. Ein Blick auf die Karte genügte, um zu wissen, daß mein Frühstück, drei Croissants und Aufstrich, teuer werden würde. Ich rufe den Ober […] und bestelle. Einen Moment später fällt mein Blick auf einen sehr elegant angezogenen Herrn – aber vielleicht bedeuten sein gepflegter Haarschnitt, sein anliegender Anzug, seine Bewegungen nur für mich Eleganz und nicht unbedingt für einen Franzosen? Vielleicht, jetzt werde ich fast sicher, ist das nur sein Alltagsauftritt? Also, der Mann kommt herein, ohne Mantel. Was, wieso eigentlich? Es ist immerhin Mitte Oktober und es nieselt draußen. Also, auch wenn er unbedingt elegant erscheinen will, sollte er auch an seine Gesundheit denken und sich einen Mantel kaufen. Vielleicht ist es aber nur für mich ein Zeichen von Ärmlichkeit, ohne Mantel herumzulaufen, wenn es draußen kühl ist?

(9)

Example (10), instead, is the first line in a blog article. Also in this case, the utterance in which the DP Ehrlichkeit in der Wissenschaft (‘honesty in science’) appears is clearly not a V2 clause: after introducing the topic, which is realized by means of a HT, the clause-internal domain of the clause is opened up by a wh-element. The HT, which must necessarily be assumed to be an Aboutness Topic here since the referent is mentioned for the first time, is resumed in the middle field by a so-called “pronominal adverb”. In fact, it is somewhat curious that that the idea of a putative incompatibility of HTs and of the information-structural category of aboutness is even discussed in the literature: it seems that all the classical examples illustrating this topic even in research outputs that only marginally have to do with topicality (e. g. examples like (6) above) and also more marginal examples that have been used in thematically dedicated papers (e. g. (7)) involve constituents that are intuitively good candidates for a categorization as Aboutness HTs:

(10)

HTs interpreted contrastively are, in fact, very recognizable and can be disambiguated by means of so-called “topic markers” (also labeled “post-initial particles”) with the appropriate meanings, which have traditionally been treated in combination with CP-internal topics in the literature (cf. e. g. Métrich/Courdier 1995; Pasch et al. 2003; Breindl 2008; Volodina/Weiß 2010; Speyer/Weiß 2018; also cf. Catasso 2021: 768 for an exception). Such (fully optional) elements as aber, hingegen, dennoch (‘however’, ‘on the other hand’) etc. make explicit that the referent of the constituent that they accompany and to whose right they surface is necessarily to be construed as one of two or more items of a set of alternatives, the other alternative(s) being implicit or part of the preceding or following context.⁵ To illustrate this difference between clause-internal Contrastive Topics and HTs interpreted contrastively, cf. the examples in (11a) and (11b), respectively. In (11a), the Contrastive Topic is the first constituent in a V2 clause (in structural terms) that exhibits a linear V3 word order due to the occurrence of the topic marker aber. In (11b), instead, Hans clearly realizes a HT, since it is clause-external – which is explicitly shown by the presence of a phonological pause between the particle and the rest of the sentence, as well as by the fact that this constituent is resumed by a personal pronoun in the prefield of the clause). In the latter case, the constituent is therefore more loosely bound to the sentence. However, the interpretation of (11a) and (11b) is the same

(11)

Example (12) contains a further example of a contrastive HT (taken from a thread of an online forum in which users discuss the consequences of having a pet for one’s furniture), embedded into the corresponding context. In this post, the user contrasts the curtains (die Gardinen, accordingly marked in the context), about which she says that she would not be so sorry if the cat ruined them, to an old precious piece of furniture which she would like to keep the pet from scratching. The latter constituent (meine antike Kommode ‘my antique commode’) is adjacent to the contrastive topic marker hingegen (‘instead’) and resumed clause-internally by a pronominal adverb (darüber ‘about it’):

(12)

Note that the (optional) presence of a topic marker to the immediate right of a HT is not only a strategy to disambiguate the contrastive reading of the constituent, i. e. of the corresponding referent; it also strongly suggests that such particles cannot be assumed to be moved constituents, since the element that they accompany is arguably first-merged in the (clause-external domain of the) CP.⁶

Familiar HTs are – predictably – also possible in German, where they cannot generally be followed by a topic marker, as is the case for clause-internal Aboutness and Contrastive Topics (cf. Breindl 2008). This, of course, does not rule out that there may be languages exhibiting specialized particles or similar elements that mark the familiar reading of a topic. In the following example, the referent Fabian is neither newly nor re-introduced in the discourse, and its interpretation is not contrastive. Its very high degree of activation makes a categorization of the corresponding constituent as a familiar HT the most plausible option. Note that the DP dieser Fabian (‘this Fabian’) must be a HT here, since it is non-case-marked and the corresponding middle-field resumptive is a personal pronoun

Context: Sie redet die ganze Zeit über ihn. Fabian hat das gemacht, Fabian hat dies und das gesagt, Fabian hat nen Burger gegessen, Fabian ist mit Susi (seiner Tochter) in den Park gegangen, Fabian hier Fabian da Fabian überall.‘She (= my friend) talks about him (= her boyfriend) all the time. Fabian did this, Fabian said this and that, Fabian ate a hamburger, Fabian went to the park with Susi (his daughter), Fabian here, Fabian there, Fabian everywhere.’ sentence:

(13)

An additional point that needs to be made here is that at least in German, not only are HTs possible which display aboutness, contrastiveness and familiarity in Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl’s spirit; in some cases, a HT can also receive the interpretation of a Frame-setting Topic – or vice versa, depending on the perspective, a Frame-setting Topic can be realized clause-externally and therefore exhibit the behavior of a HT (for an explanation of a slightly different phenomenon in similar vein, cf. Ebert/Ebert/Hinterwimmer 2014). Let us now consider the data in (14), in which a clausal (14a) and a non-clausal (14b) constituent, respectively, appear in some syntactically non-integrated position to the left of the CP, but both introduce what seem to be clause-external frames. The interjection ach functions as a disambiguating element here, since it can be assumed to be positioned in some projection above ForceP (along Wöllstein’s (2014) and Haegeman/Hill’s (2013) lines). Just as typical HTs, the adverbial clause in (14a) and the PP in (14b) would be categorized as regular Frame-setters if they surfaced CP-internally (i. e. in a structural position in which they would be part of the syntactic computation of the clause):

(14)

The two sentences in (14) illustrate a pattern that is productive in spoken usage. In the approach pursued in the present paper, there does not seem to be any reason to believe that the utteranceinitial constituents in (14a) and (14b) are any different from regular Frame-setting Topics except for their syntactic position. Note that HTs in general are one of the possible strategies used to introduce some kind of topic in the discourse. In this respect, uttering a sentence of the type “Hans – ich liebe diesen Mann” (‘Hans – I love this man’), in which the DP in first clause position is arguably an Aboutness HT, is, in fact, not at all different from introducing the frame within which a sentence is to be interpreted by spelling out a CP-external Frame as the first constituent in the utterance, as in (14a)-(14b). To the best of my knowledge, such data have been mainly ignored in the literature (but for a systematic analysis of similar patterns, cf. Breitbarth 2022, to appear). However, they also need to be accounted for, and given the observations made so far, it seems plausible that they can be embedded into a general taxonomy of information-structurally specialized HTs.

A further parallel between clause-internal Frames and Frame-setting HTs is that both categories can be(come) Contrastive Topics/Contrastive HTs given the appropriate context. This comes as little surprise – at least with respect to CP-internal topics – given Krifka’s (2008b) and Krifka/Musan’s (2012) observations on the notion of delimitation. What is relevant to the present discussion is that this parallel also applies for topics only loosely bound to the clauseinternal area of the clause. Cf., for instance, the examples in (15) and (16). In the former, the temporal PP am zweiten Tag (‘on the second day’) is a clause-internal topic that is contrasted to a PP occurring in the pre-context. The adjunct in the relevant sentence provides the very frame within which the content of the sentence is to be interpreted, but at the same time, it is interpreted contrastively. This reading is also disambiguated by means of an adversative marker to the immediate right of the constituent (aber ‘however’). In (16), we have a similar pattern, but in this case, the constituent in first position qualifies as a HT. The contrastive interpretation of the PP, which simultaneously functions as a Frame-setting HT, is disambiguated by hingegen (‘instead’):

context: [Am ersten Regattatag] hatten wir nur eine Wettfahrt, in dieser waren wir auf Platz vier und unsere Gegner in der Qualifikation zweite. Damit wäre es sich nicht ausgegangen, da der Vorsprung der vorangegangenen Regatten nicht so groß war. ‘On the first day of the regatta day, we had only one race, in which we were fourth, while our rivals in the qualification were second. It wouldn’t have been enough, since the advantage gained in the previous regattas was not so great.’ sentence:

(15)

context: Obwohl Deutschland diesbezüglich rein theoretisch besser dastehen sollte als die NL, was das angeht, sind die beiden Länder eigentlich kaum miteinander zu vergleichen. [In den Niederlanden] sind die Job-Perspektiven sowohl im BWL- als auch im PS-Bereich sehr gut (...). ‘Although Germany should in principle be in a better situation than the Netherlands with respect to this, the two countries are in fact incomparable. In the Netherlands, the job opportunities are excellent both for Business Administration and for Psychology graduates.

(16)

If the assumption that HTs can realize Frames is on the right track, this also implies that the phrase category associated with this type of topic is not necessarily a DP, differently from what is generally stipulated for HTs. This is also clear from the examples above, in which the HTs are, respectively, a whole subordinate clause (14a) or a PP (14b)-(16)-(i) in footnote ⁷. For space reasons, I am not able to go into greater detail and illustrate all possible combinations of labels and information-structural functions here. For the time being, it suffices to say that the phrase categories compatible with clause-internal topics (typically DP, PronP, PP, CP and AdvP)⁸ can also realize the corresponding HTs.

In Table 1, the average rating for each stimulus are summarized. For space reasons, the submitted pre-contexts cannot all be discussed (the reader is referred to the exemplary items above). However, each sentence was accompanied by a (pre-)context to disambiguate the informationstructural category of the HT, which is given in the corresponding column in the table. As for the abbreviations used in this column: F = Familiar HT, A = Aboutness HT, C = Contrastive HT, FS = Frame-setting HT. In the case of domain adverbials, two options were indicated, since these elements (at least those occurring clause-internally) are often treated as “Contrastive Frame-setting Topics” in the literature (see the discussion above).

Table 1
Complete list of stimuli and summary of results

Of course, Table 1 only includes the items relevant to the present discussion and not the 18 distractors also used in the same study.¹⁰

These results are at least indicative of a tendency in the preferences of the participants. In a nutshell, sentences (1), (4), (6), (9), (10) and (12) in Table 1, accordingly marked in bold and all performing an average score of >7.0 points, are the stimuli that were rated as exhibiting the most acceptable patterns. The outer-left-peripheral HT serializations observable in these six utterances are summarized in (23) for the reader’s convenience:

(23)

These ratings are interesting for a number of reasons. In the first place, they seem to build a fairly coherent case. In particular, they suggest that the projection hosting Frame-setting HTs is the lowest of the four (in (a), three categories are displayed that point to this relative word order; in (b)-(e), only two categories appear in the HT area, but in all cases, Frame-setting HTs occur to the right of the other HT). The stimuli reported in Table 1 that contain patterns violating this ordering, for instance (2) (A > F > FS) or (11) (FS > C), all performed poorly, with average ratings even below the average of the quasi-ungrammatical structures on the list (namely the ones in the <2.0 spectrum). Given that – as was shown above (= example (19)) – the context provided to the study participants for this sentence forces a Contrastive-HT reading, but the order itself is in principle also compatible with other interpretive options in which the lower constituent realizes a (non-contrastive) Frame-setting HT, the test persons were additionally asked to evaluate the acceptability of the single conjunct Maria, in der Kirche – sie wird dort die Girlanden aufhängen (lit. ‘Maria in the church she will there the garland hang-up’) in a context in which Maria is an Aboutness HT and in der Kirche a non-contrastive HT. Accordingly, this sentence obtained the second-highest average rating (7.88 points) of all items in the study after sentence (10) (exhibiting the order Contrastive HT >Frame-setting HT), which scored 8.11 points. Along these lines, the sentences that performed the worst are the ones that violate this ordering: in particular, all serializations in which a Contrastive HT linearly precedes an Aboutness HT (e. g. sentence (16) in Table 1) and any sentence in which the Frame-setting HT is not the rightmost element have received relatively or very low ratings. A further (expected) result is that Aboutness HTs can be iterated, but that there seems to be a preference concerning the order of the middle-field resumptives associated with a given sequence of HTs in the outer left periphery (sentences (12)-(13) in Table 1; see the discussion on Grohmann’s data in 2.2.1).

Secondly, these results show an unexpected preference for a serialization that seems to be (at least with respect to the items used in this experiment) more rigid than the one generally discussed in the literature for clause-internal topics. If we consider the general outcomes of the existing information-structurally-oriented studies of the left periphery of both Historical and Present-Day German in combination (e. g., among others, Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007; Speyer 2008; Petrova 2012; Speyer/Weiß 2018; and Catasso 2015, 2021), the picture that these studies paint is that CP-internal topics realize a hierarchy of the following type, with the categories of Aboutness and Frame potentially occupying two positions. With respect to the former: in Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007, it appears to the left; in Speyer 2008; and Petrova 2012 to the right of the position dedicated to contrastive elements. As has been shown in a number of recent works in the realm of cartographic syntax (cf., e. g., Rizzi/Bocci 2017), the (inner) left periphery and the lower areas of the clause include multiple positions for topics with different informationstructural labels. Thus, the formalization in (24) possibly corresponds to a structure in which more than one position for Aboutness is available or in which the lower projection functions as an intermediate step for a topic moving out of the middle field and on its way to its landing site in the structure to acquire some of the relevant information-structural features with which it surfaces. With respect to Frame-setting Topics, instead, Catasso (2021) proposes that a further FrameP (or a projection with very similar features) must be postulated in a lower position of the CP area to make sense of data of the type Hans, als das passierte, war zu Hause (which is possible in German and in a number of other languages, cf. the English translation ‘Hans, when that happened, was at home’):

(24)

The hierarchy in (24), which summarizes the results of the existing studies in one coherent representation, shows among other things that in general, the projection encoding Contrastivity never occupies an edge position, but is located more or less in the middle of an array of projections specialized for HT marking.

If the results of the present pilot study are at least approximately representative of the general makeup of the area above ForceP hosting HTs, they show that the preferred order is the one in which Frame-setting HTs are the lowest of the four categories, linearly preceded by Contrastive HTs, which are in turn preceded by Aboutness and Familiar HTs:

(25)

To be sure, the investigation presented in this paper does not address the structural and topological distinction between Aboutness and Familiar HTs in a very detailed manner, but is only able to show a slight tendency (see items (2) and (15) in Table 1). In the formalization in (25), I represent the position of Familiar HTs to the left of the position for Aboutness HTs in light of the results in Table 1, which seem to indicate a preference for the serialization Familiar HT > Aboutness HT. Moreover, the two types of HT are placed in different projections because – as contended above – Aboutness HTs can be iterated, but Familiar HTs cannot – at least not in the outer left periphery). However, a more in-depth investigation of this sequence and of the technical details associated with it must be left to future research. In any case, even in (24) one can see that Aboutness and Familiarity may (at least optionally) appear next to each other. Given the limited scope of a pilot study like this, for the time being, I do not have much to say about the reasons behind this ordering and what this can tell us about the structure of the outer left periphery or about UG in general. These findings will have to be integrated with further evidence also including other types of elements typically occurring in the pre-ForceP area.