Topic agreement in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands)

In this article we investigate topics in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands). NGT is a topic-prominent language in which sentences start with the topic(s) and the remainder of the sentence is interpreted as a comment about that topic. Topics are identifiable in NGT first and foremost by their prosody: they always form a separate prosodic unit. We show that NGT has different types of topics that can precede the rest of the sentence: argument topics and spatio-temporal topics. Both types of topic occur sentence-initially, but when both are present in one sentence, argument topics precede spatio-temporal topics. The main aim of our article is to argue that all types of topics can be referred to by sentencefinal indexes, contra Bos (1995) who claimed that copied sentence-final indexes always refer to subjects. We will analyze these clause-final anaphoric pronouns as an instantiation of topic agreement. Thus, we argue that NGT has topic agreement.