ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide an overview of how two eminent notions of information structure – focus and topic – are encoded in a number of African languages. The notion of information structure has for several decades been of interest to a number of linguists (see, for example, Halliday 1967, Chafe 1976, Jackendoff 1972, Vallduvi 1990, Lambrecht 1994, Bearth 1999, Gundel and Fretheim 2002, Breul 2004, Molnar and Winkler 2006, Amfo 2010, Fiedler and Schwarz 2010, Van der Wal 2015, Güldemann et al. 2015, Féry and Ishihara 2016). Generally speaking, information structure is preoccupied with the manner in which the propositional content of an utterance is organized such that it allows the speaker to highlight new and/or significant information, bearing in mind assumptions about the addressee’s mental representations of the issues and entities at stake (Amfo 2010).
