Topic, focus and discourse

Topic and focus

A topic is roughly what an utterance is organized around; focus supplies information that answers a current question or contrasts an alternative. These are not equivalent to subject and object. To determine the information structure of a cited passage, examine the preceding question or topic, repeated expressions and overt contrast markers. Without that context, a free-standing clause usually does not establish one unique focus reading.

Languages can mark information structure with order, particles, morphology, prosody or combinations of these. In ancient writing, intonation is usually not recoverable directly. An unusual word order can be evidence for a discourse interpretation only when the grammar and comparable passages support it; it is not an automatic focus code.

Coherence across sentences

Discourse interpretation follows reference chains, temporal relations and repeated or contrasted expressions. A paragraph can retain the same topic while introducing a new participant; a repeated epithet can maintain an institutional frame. Note explicit connectives and particles before supplying English “therefore”, “but” or “meanwhile”. Editorial punctuation and paragraphing may be modern decisions.

A source may have several witnesses with different line divisions or broken transitions. Preserve the fragment boundary. If the antecedent of a pronoun is lost, do not replace it with a plausible name without marking the conjecture. A translation may need an English noun for readability, but an annotation should say when it has supplied one.

Practice

Take six lines from one edition. Mark each participant’s first mention and every later reference. For each sentence, write the likely question it answers and identify any focused alternative. Compare this with the edition’s translation, noting where the translator has added a connective or explicit noun.