I'm going to toss in a gratuitous recap before trying to reassert a
point --

This thread started with a discussion of constructions such as (A) "In
his essay on interpretation, Aristotle commented...." and has since
moved to wider discussion of structures such as (B) "According to
Aristotle, he says..." and "In Aristotle's essay, it/he says...."
Discussion has since focused on the similarities and differences between
preposed adverbial PPs and topic/comment constructions.

At this point, I'd like to argue that (A) and (B) are quite distinct for
reasons in addition -- and unrelated -- to their basic status as
constructions with preposed structures. The difference is stylistic and
rhetorical: (A) adds crucial information in the preposed unit that
cannot be recovered from the rest of the sentence; structures like those
in (B) do not -- they're redundant. While there are (arguably)
functional reasons why a student might wish to set up a redundant
topic-comment-ish structure, the customary bias against redundancy rules
them out in mature writing. There's no pressing reason not to say
"Aristotle said X."

When we find constructions like (B) stylistically "immature," we can do
so based on the redundancy without ever objecting to topic-comment
constructions. And I suspect that the redundancy, not the phrase-level
grammar, is the primary reason writing instructors and mature authors
avoid such constructions. Quite a few other types of topic/comment
constructions are unproblematic.

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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