🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan25.093751.5191@memstvx1.memst.edu>, connolly@memstvx1 writes:
>In article <1993Jan24.115746.29666@enea.se>, sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>> Well, again we can add several languages to the list. Swedish and
>> German are two. In German you only get an ambiguity when none of
>> the words are masculine with articles, so the example above does
>> not translate well to German, since "Hund" is masculine, but take
>> a cat instead:
>> 
>>        "Eine Katze sah Tom"
>> 
>> I leave to Leo Connolly to sort out the fine details for German, but
>> in Swedish:
>> 
>>        "En katt s}g Tom"      ("}" = a-ring)
>> 
>> You don't really know what this is without context. Normally you put the
>> subject first, but then again you are more often talking of what Tom sees
>> than what the cat sees.
>
>I wouldn't be surprised if the fine details for German and Swedish were 
>the same, though I don't know for sure.  German OVS is limited to sentences
>where the object is *topicalized*, i.e. set as the item about which a
>comment is made.  Overwhelmingly this means that the topic is given,
>already mentioned in the discourse.  This is difficult with the indefinite
>_eine_Katze_, though definite _die_Katze_ would be no problem.  Nevertheless,
>if 'a cat' is given, it is probably also known that a cat was seen.  So
>"Eine Katze sah Tom" would the mean 'The one who saw a cat was Tom', or
>less awkwardly: 'It was Tom who saw a cat.'

Wouldn't it rather be "It was *a cat* that Tom saw" under topicalization of the
object?
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_