Configurations

Abstract In the previous chapters, we have seen that topic and focus play a central role in all languages, but that these notions can be signaled in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we examine the relationship between word order and topic-focus articulation. First, we examine languages in which the basic word order functions to signal topic and focus and contrast them with languages in which basic word order functions to signal syntactic argument type. We continue to investigate the role of the left periphery of the sentence in determining topic and focus roles (section 2). Fronting to the left periphery can also be altruistic. In such cases the fronted element itself does not play a particular IS role, yet its movement enables another element to take on an IS role it could otherwise not have. Altruistic fronting is examined in section 3. In section 4, we show that word order also marks information structure in cases of scrambling. Scrambling is then compared to Scandinavian object shift (section 5).