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In:Topicality and the Shaping of Grammar: New perspectives from lesser-studied languages
Edited by Enrique L. Palancar, Claudine Chamoreau and Anaïd Donabédian
[Typological Studies in Language 137] 2026
► pp. 10–58

Chapter 1
Strategies for documenting topic and focus in understudied languages

 | University of California Santa Cruz
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
I concentrate here on the information structure relations topic and focus, and on their contrastive versions (contrastive focus and contrastive topic). All four depend crucially on discourse context. Although topic and focus are sometimes viewed as complementary relations, in fact they belong to distinct dimensions of information structure, with one (focus) having to do with the locus of new information in an utterance, and the other (topic) with the entity that the utterance is about. For each, we will try to understand [1] what is the nature of the relation? [2] how is it marked cross-linguistically? and [3] how can it be elicited and documented? We will discuss the utility of various techniques for documenting these relations, including the study of naturally occurring speech, the use of constructed contexts, and the role of elicitation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The common ground
  • 3.Focus
    • 3.1Characterizing ‘focus’
    • 3.2Marking focus
      • 3.2.1Prosodic prominence
      • 3.2.2Morphology
      • 3.2.3Syntax
      • 3.2.4Conclusion
    • 3.3Documenting focus
      • 3.3.1Naturally occurring speech
      • 3.3.2Constructed contexts
      • 3.3.3Elicitation
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Topic
    • 4.1Characterizing ‘topic’
    • 4.2Marking topic
      • 4.2.1Syntactic position
      • 4.2.2Morphological markers
    • 4.3Documenting topic
      • 4.3.1Naturally occurring discourse
      • 4.3.2Constructed contexts
  • 5.Contrastive topic
    • 5.1Characterizing contrastive topic
    • 5.2Marking contrastive topics
      • 5.2.1Prosodic prominence and morphology
      • 5.2.2Syntactic position
    • 5.3Documenting contrastive topic
      • 5.3.1Naturally occurring discourse
      • 5.3.2Constructed contexts
      • 5.3.3Translation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (124)
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