Contents -- Notes on contributors -- Abbreviations and symbols -- 1 Introduction -- Part I: Topic and Focus -- 2 Second occurrence focus and Relativized Stress F -- 3 How focus and givenness shape prosody -- 4 Structural focus and exhaustivity -- 5 The interpretation of topical indefinites as direct and indirect aboutness topics -- 6 Contrastive topics operate on speech acts -- 7 Biased questions, intonation, and discourse -- Part II: Cross-Linguistic Variation and Diachronic Change -- 8 Towards a typology of focus realization -- 9 Focus in Aghem -- 10 Subject focus in West African languages -- 11 Information structure and OV order -- 12 Information structure and unmarked word order in (Older) Germanic -- Part III: Experimental and Psycholinguistic Approaches -- 13 Effects of givenness and constraints on free word order -- 14 Investigating effects of structural and information-structural factors on pronoun resolution -- 15 Given and new information in spatial statements -- References -- Author Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z -- Subject Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W.

Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of approaches to information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication. The chapters include typological and diachronic perspectives and demonstrate the value of combining theoretical and experimental approaches.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.