Diachronic Studies on Information Structure

In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology.
Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today''s historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement.

Editorial board

Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School)