The seven articles of this volume take up crucial aspects of information structure and grammatical form. Special attention is paid to the definition of topic, focus and contrast, to the language specific devices for expressing different types of these information structural notions, and to the typological characterisation of languages as to discourse configurationality. The investigation of grammatical relations includes the interplay between syntactic functions, morphological case and thematic structure, and the study of the functional and formal complexity of passive in Germanic languages.

Inhalt

Contents: Jorunn Hetland/Valéria Molnár, Preface. - Jorunn Hetland, Contrast, the fall-rise accent, and Information Focus. - Lars Heltoft, Iconic and categorical focus systems in Scandinavian. - Marja Järventausta, Are Finnish null subjects topics? - Valéria Molnár/Marja Järventausta, Discourse configurationality in Finnish and Hungarian. - Jóhanna Bardal, The relation between morphological case, syntactic functions and thematic roles in Icelandic: A frequency analysis. - Barbro Landén/Valéria Molnár, Passive as activity aspect. On the relation between aspectuality and passive: A comparative study of German and Swedish. - Jóhanna Bardal/Valéria Molnár, The passive in Icelandic, compared to Mainland Scandinavian.