Types of Topics in German and Italian

This paper investigates the phonological and syntactic realization of topics in German and Italian. Based on a detailed intonational and syntactic analysis of corpus data, it is shown that topics are not fully recursive (contra Rizzi 1997), but fall into three types that are distinguished phonologically and realized in different syntactic positions. We argue that there is a systematic correlation between discourse roles and grammatical properties of topics which is encoded in a strict hierarchy of functional heads in the C-domain.