Topicality and the Shaping of Grammar

This volume places topicality at the very heart of grammatical explanation, drawing on richly annotated discourse corpora from lesser-studied languages across the Americas and beyond. Through nine original studies, it demonstrates how aspects of discourse relevance (rather than just abstract syntactic relations) shapes word order, argument encoding, case marking, and voice systems in natural speech. Several chapters revisit and critically reassess Givón's seminal work on topic continuity and discourse motivation, and re-examine classic frameworks such as “Preferred Argument Structure” through contemporary corpus-based work. The volume spans a remarkable typological range, from polysynthetic and head-marking languages to Austronesian and Indo-European systems, combining methodological innovation with fine-grained empirical analysis. Essential reading for linguists working on information structure, typology, and language documentation, this book demonstrates why topicality remains a powerful engine of grammatical design, diversity, and change.