The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus

This book presents an innovative analysis that relates informational structure, syntax and morphology in Quechua. It provides a minimalist account of the relationship between focus, topic, evidentiality and other left-peripheral features and sentence-internal constituents marked with suffixes that have been previously considered of a pragmatic nature. Intervention effects show that these relationships are also of a syntactic nature. The analysis is extended to morphological markers that appear on polarity sensitive items and wh-words. The book also provides a brief overview of the main characteristics of Quechua syntax as well as additional bibliographical information.

Pieter Muysken, Radboud University Nijmegen:
It is an exciting prospect that now pragmatic features of the syntax and morphology of Quechua, a language family so far mostly studied in terms of its historical roots and formal properties, are coming to the fore. Liliana Sánchez, who pairs formal analytic skills with a deep knowledge of the language family, is the ideal person to undertake this. I am sure the book will be a source of inspiration for comparative linguists but also for people working in Andean language studies in a wider sense, including language processing and acquisition, bilingualism and sociolinguistics.