Makonde Leach 2015:58 104 shuni aijá
ku-shuluk-a na=ikal-a po pa-ikele
munu. bird 1a.
DEM
_
DIST NARR
-descend-
FV COM
=sit-
FV LOC
LOC
-sit.
PST
1.person ‘that bird descended and sat where the person was sitting.’
Makonde Leach 2015:52 105 Muliduva limo tayali na=kody-a inembo
i-ndi-injil-a. day
one already
COM
=find-
FV
9.elephant 9-
ANT
-enter-
FV
‘One day finally he came and found that an elephant had fallen in.’
6 Information structure
Information structure concerns the ways in which narrators help hearersreaders to identify new information in a sentence, and then to combine it with information that they already have in order to
arrive at a coherent interpretation of a text. Information structure in eastern Bantu narrative texts is primarily expressed through variations in the relative order of subject, verb, object and oblique
constituents in a sentence, although intonation, pauses and focus markers also play a role. In this section, I shall describe various combinations of topic and focus known as ‘sentence articulations’ found in the
narrative corpora.
6.1 Fundamental concepts and terminology
The terms ‘topic’ and ‘focus’ are used in the sense of Lambrecht 1994, where the topic of a sentence is what a sentence provides information about, and the focus is information “which cannot be taken for
granted at the time of speech” Lambrecht 1994:207. In this paper, I shall distinguish three types of topic continued topic, switch topic, and renewed topic
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and three types of focus sentence focus, predicate focus, and argument focus.
A continued topic is a topic which was also the topic of the previous sentence; that is, the topic of the previous sentence continues to be the topic in the sentence under consideration. A switch topic is a
new topic; that is, the topic of the sentence under consideration is different from the topic of the immediately preceding sentence. Switch topics are also called ‘shifted topics’ and ‘links’ Vallduví
1992:109–10. A renewed topic is a specific kind of switch topic, i.e. one that has functioned as a topic previously in the narrative, but not in the immediately preceding sentence.
Predicate focus arises when non-predictable information is expressed by a verb and optionally its complements, or by a copula construction. When a sentence consists of a lexical topic followed by
predicate focus, the predicate plus any arguments of the verb other than the topic itself are called the ‘comment’ and the whole construction exhibits what is known as ‘topic-comment’ sentence articulation.
With external topics, the comment may exhibit sentence focus.
Sentence focus arises when none of the information in a sentence can be “taken for granted”, and so the whole sentence constitutes the focus. Such topicless sentences are called ‘thetic’ sentences, and are
typically found in the orientations of narratives, where the setting and characters are introduced to present new participants and to report events or situations in which neither the action nor the
participants can be taken for granted.
Argument focus arises when non-predictable information is expressed by a noun phrase. It is typically found when a certain event or situation is presupposed, but the identity of one of the
participants in that event or situation is assumed not to be known by the addressee. When argument
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This is not an exhaustive list. Other possible distinctions, such as between given topics and contrastive topics, will not be discussed.
focus is used to identify an unknown argument in a proposition, the sentence as a whole is said to exhibit ‘identificational’ sentence articulation.
In the following sub-sections, I shall discuss topic-comment sentences, predicate focus with continued topics, thetic sentences sentence focus, and identificational sentences, before summarizing
the major differences in information structure found between eastern Bantu languages.
6.2 Topic-comment sentences
