THE THETIC CATEGORICAL DISTINCTION REVISITED ONCE MORE/

This paper discusses the distinction thetic/categorical from the viewp oint of a modular framework where the main components are, on the one hand, grammar (a formal component) and information structure (a functi onal component), both belonging to the language system, and, on the ot her, an extralinguistic component, conceptual structure. The interacti on between grammar and information structure results in specific claus e structures giving rise to a thetic or categorical interpretation, re spectively. It is maintained that the syntactic structure of thetic an d categorical clauses is the same, the informational difference betwee n them being triggered by the interaction between focus-background str ucture and topic-comment structure. Thetic clauses, thus, are all-focu sed and all-comment. In addition, their predicate must have a specific meaning that qualifies the clause for a thetic reading. It is further maintained that the distinction thetic/categorical is an extra-lingui stic, conceptual distinction between two ways of perspectivizing an ev ent. Thetic stands for a perspective where an event is looked upon as a stage, that is, an event in the flow of other (potential) events; ca tegorical stands for a perspective where an event is divined into two parts, one of which is viewed as an entity to which something happens or which does something. Consequently, there is no such thing as a the tic clause. There are only clauses that - because of their specific in formational structure (being all-focused and all-comment) and the ''ri ght'' meaning of the predicates, sometimes taking help from cotext - u nambiguously give rise To a thetic reading. The thetic reading is trig gered by the clause with this specific constellation (primarily its la cking a topic) looking for its topic in CS, picking out the concept of a stage as its topic, and commenting on it.