Topic And Focus In Russian Syntax

Download or read book Configuring Topic and Focus in Russian written by Tracy Holloway King and published by Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications. This book was released on 1995-05-26 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines word order. More accurately, it is the ordering of constituents that is discussed since prepositional phrases and most noun phrases form syntactic constituents and the encoding of topic and focus in Russian. As has long been observed, word order in Russian encodes specific discourse information: with neutral intonation, topics precede discourse-neutral constituents which precede foci. King extends this idea to show that word order encodes different types of topic and focus in a principled manner.