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The special topic position accessed by Stylistic Fronting is motivated by the main pattern emerging from a series of carefully studied Old French texts: two elements can undergo SF at the same time, but the two elements cannot both be XPs or both be heads. This phrase is labelled TopicP+ to distinguish it from TopicP, the position where topicalized elements in V2 structures raise to in Old French. The aim of this paper is two-fold: on the one hand, its purpose is to show that Stylistic Fronting was very productive in Old French on the other, its rationale is the introduction of a novel hypothesis according to which Stylistically Fronted elements in Old French target a special Topic phrase.

But arguments from word order, intonation, and pragmatics have convinced us that kefira in example (i) must be considered (part of) the Theme, and not the Rheme. Babby takes Theme-Rheme structure to be crucial for determining the scope of negation, and scope of negation to be a necessary condition in licensing the occurrence of the genitive of negation. (I looked-for kefir.) Kefir-GEN-m-sg in store NEG was-n-sg '(I was looking for kefir.) There wasn't any kefir in the store.' It is an important part of the explanatory structure of Babby 1980 that in sentence (i), the Theme is v magazine and the Rheme is kefir- (byl-). The challenge is exemplified most clearly in our 'kefir example': (i) (Ja iskal kefir.) Kefira v magazine ne bylo. In recent work we have come to challenge assumptions that we shared (Borschev and Partee 1998a) with Babby (1980) concerning the role of Theme-Rheme structure in accounting for the nominative-genitive alternation in negated existential sentences (the NES construction, in the terms of Babby (1980), the classic work which we are building on).

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