Download or read book Structures of Focus and Grammatical Relations written by Jorunn Hetland and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-02-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.