Abstract

Drawing on a variety of different phenomena the paper argues for the existence of a designated topic position in the middle field of the German clause. This implies that German is discourse configurational with regard to topics. The result allows some basic questions to be addressed, including the possible number of sentence topics, the possibility of topics in embedded clauses, the question whether there is a dependence between scrambling and topicality, and the question whether the generic interpretation of a bare plural subject is dependent on its topical status. Moreover, a proposai for the structural representation of the media! topic position is put forward.