Topics in French and Norwegian

In this paper, we compare the structural and syntactic properties of different kinds of topics in French and Norwegian. We argue that both languages permit Hanging Topics and Left Dislocated Topics, but that the differences between the two types of topic are subtle. Properties that have been described for Italian and German cannot be extended to French and Norwegian, indicating that topicalization has language-specific characteristics. A fundamental difference between French and Norwegian is that while topics in French are base-generated, topics in Norwegian are moved.