In this book leading scholars provide state-of-the-art overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication. They present critical accounts of current understanding of how aspects of grammar, such as prosody, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, interact in the packing and unpacking of information in communication. They also look at the psycholinguistics behind the production and perception of information-structural categories. The book reflects the advances in recent research on all central aspects of the subject, including concepts of focus versus background, topic versus comment, and given versus new, and the kinds of inferences required to make sense of different combinations of words, syntax, intonation, and context. The chapters include typological and diachronic perspectives on information structure. Taken as a whole the book demonstrates the productive value of combining theoretical and experimental approaches.

Over the last two decades, focus has become a prominent topic in major fields in linguistic research (syntax, semantics, phonology). Focus Strategies in African Languages contributes to the ongoing discussion of focus by investigating focus-related phenomena in a range of African languages, most of which have been under-represented in the theoretical literature on focus. The articles in the volume look at focus strategies in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic languages from several theoretical and methodological perspectives, ranging from detailed generative analysis to careful typological generalization across languages. Their common aim is to deepen our understanding of whether and how the information-structural category of focus is represented and marked in natural language. Topics investigated are, among others, the relation of focus and prosody, the effects of information structure on word order, ex situ versus in situ strategies of focus marking, the inventory of focus marking devices, focus and related constructions, focus-sensitive particles. The present inquiry into the focus systems of African languages has repercussions on existing theories of focus. It reveals new focus strategies as well as fine-tuned focus distinctions that are not discussed in the theoretical literature, which is almost exclusively based on well-documented intonation languages.