50 H1.6–H1.7
Pre-NO
Pre-NI S
V OC
Post-NI Post-NO
6a Kimwi abheebhusi bhaaye
m-ba-tum-a omuunu okugenda okumubhwira
waamuwaabho [6b]
[6c–7] So
2.parent 2.
POSS
.3
S NARR
-3
P
-send-
FV
1.person
INF
-go
INF
-3
S
-tell relative.
POSS
.3
S
6b [uyo ---
a-ri mu-bhyaro]
1.
DEM
2 3
S
-
COP LOC
-14.country 6c
[omusubhaati waaye k-aa-j-a okumukeesha
1.sister 1.
POSS
.3
S PRES
-3
S
-come-
FV INF
.3
S
.greet 7
Na omusubhaati waaye
uyo k-aa-j-a a-fwa-ye omwenda omurebhe]
CONJ
1.sister 1.
POSS
.3
S
1.
DEM
2
PRES
-3
S
-come-
FV
3
S
-wear-
PSTANT
3.clothes 3.certain So, her parents then sent a man to go tell her relative, who was living in that country, that his sister is coming to
greet him. And that sister will come wearing certain clothes.
5.5 Summary
The narrative is the primary tense used for foreground information, though the present tense is used occasionally as well.
P
3, often in combination with the copula ri, is the most common verbal form for background information.
P
1 can also be used in background. Movement expressions are lexicalized in the verbs okuja ‘to come’, which has a movement towards
the deictic center, and okugenda ‘to go’, which has movement away from the deictic center.
6 Information structure
Information structure concerns the ways in which narrators help hearers and readers to identify new information in a sentence and to combine it with information that they already have in order to arrive at
a coherent interpretation. Information structure in Kwaya is primarily expressed through the relative order of subject, verb, object and oblique constituents in a sentence. The default word order in Kwaya is
SVO.
6.1 Fundamental concepts in information structure
Information structure deals with the relationship between linguistic form and the nature of the information it presents. Sentence structure reflects a speaker or writer’s assumptions about what the
hearer or reader already knows. For example, the writer of a narrative may use a certain constituent order when the information expressed by the object is what the sentence is about the topic, compared
to when the object does not fulfill this particular role. What is said about the topic is termed the comment. A sentence in which there is a topic and a comment about that topic is said to have topic-
comment articulation. If the topic of a sentence is the same as that of the previous sentence, it is called a continued topic; if it is different, it is called a switch topic.
Another important information structure category is that of focus. When a constituent fills an information gap in a reader’s mental representation of a text, it is called the focus of the sentence. If a
whole sentence is given without any link to the established context, that sentence has sentence focus. If the subject of a sentence is already established in the discourse context and the predicate fills an
information gap about that subject in the reader’s mental representation, that sentence is said to have predicate focus. If, rather than the sentence as a whole or the predicate, an argument of the verb is the
focus, that sentence has argument focus. A sentence with a focused argument is said to have
identificational articulation, as it identifies which argument should fill the gap in the reader’s mental representation of the text.
In Kwaya the information structure categories outlined above are chiefly expressed through constituent order.
6.2 Presentational articulation sentence focus
