Publisher's Synopsis
This volume is a collection of papers on the role informational categories like topic and focus can play in language change phenomena. The novelty of the papers contained in this volume consists in the analyses offered by the authors from a modern theoretical perspective. A further point of interest is the wide range of different languages analyzed like a number of various Germanic and Romance languages, but also Warihio, a non Indo-European language spoken in Mexico. The phenomena of language change considered where information structure is an important factor range from word order change to the rise of clitic pronouns.
