IntroductionAs is well-known, topics and foci have dedicated positions in a variety of languages. This paper is concerned with the question of what this fact can tell us about the typology of information-structural notions and their mapping to the syntax. We argue that the data support two conclusions, both of which can be shown to clash with a cartographic outlook on sentence structure (for a general overview of the cartographic framework, see Cinque 2002, Rizzi 2003, and Belletti 2004. The first is that there are no fixed landing sites for topic and focus movement. The second is that there are cross-cutting generalizations over topics, over foci, and over contrastive elements. These jointly motivate the following four-way typology:

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This paper investigates a phenomenon that has been referred to in the linguistic literature as contrastive topic. Traditionally, contrastive topic is analyzed as an independent information-structural notion that is linked to a particular interpretation and intonation. The paper, however, argues that the information-structural notion of contrastive topic is redundant and can be reduced to that of contrastive focus. The apparent dissimilarity between contrastive topics and contrastive foci is attributed to a difference in the structures that contain them rather than any particular difference between the associated information-structural notions themselves. The structures that host contrastive topics and contrastive foci are claimed to be distinct due to the nature of an additional focused element obligatorily present in the sentence. Contrastive topics and contrastive foci themselves, in contrast, are shown to be associated with identical interpretations, which results in their identical syntactic distribution, strongly suggesting that they in fact represent one and the same information-structural phenomenon in two different types of construction.

According to the principles of economy, scrambled orders require an interpretive license. Removal of such a license should result in canonical orders, that is, orders I hypothesize to be determined by a thematic hierarchy. It is traditionally assumed that the interpretive license for scrambling is provided by information-structural interpretations such as focus and background. However, either direct object–indirect object or indirect object–direct object order is possible in Russian all-focus constructions, complicating the choice of order analyzed as canonical. I argue that Russian scrambling can be licensed by a variety of interpretations, focus/background encoding being but one of them. When the construal of objects is neutralized on the basis of all of the relevant interpretations, the direct object–indirect object order surfaces, strongly suggesting that this is the canonical order of Russian objects.

This paper investigates the interpretive and formal properties of the so-called focus construction in Akan. It argues that Akan has only one true morphological focus marker, namely na, whereas the marker de(e) that has been analysed in the linguistic literature on Akan as a focus marker (