Full Description
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 discourse relevance (rather than abstract syntactic relations alone) 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, reexamining classic frameworks such as "Preferred Argument Structure" through contemporary corpus-based and quantitative methods. 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.
