[Review of the book The expression of information structure. A documentation of its diversity across Africa, ed. by Ines Fiedler and Anne Schwarz]
This volume contains 13 papers dealing with various aspects of information
structure in a wide variety of African languages. They form the proceedings of a
workshop organized by the Collaborative Research Center on Information Structure
(University of Potsdam and Humboldt University, Berlin). In the introduction,
the editors define the main contribution of this volume in terms of “the spectrum
of information-structural notions and phenomena discussed, the investigation
of information structure in several relatively unfamiliar languages and the genealogical
width of the African languages studied.” (vii–viii emphasis added). In this
sense it complements the previous volume on information structure in African
languages published by the Collaborative Research Center and the University of
Amsterdam (Aboh, Hartmann & Zimmermann, 2007), which was more theoryoriented.
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