It is commonly assumed that word order in free word order languages is determined by a simple topic – focus dichotomy. Analysis of data from Ancient Greek, a language with an extreme word order flexibility, reveals that matters are more complex: the parameters of discourse structure and semantics interact with information packaging and are thus indirectly also responsible for word order variation. Furthermore, Ancient Greek displays a number of synonymous word order patterns, which points to the co-existence of pragmatic determinedness and free variation in this language. The strict one-to-one correspondence between word order and information structure, assumed for the languages labelled discourse configurational, thus turns out to be only one of the possible relationships between form and pragmatic content.

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Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022226712000345How to cite this article: DEJAN MATIĆ and DANIEL WEDGWOOD (2013). The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretationbased category in crosslinguistic analysis.

The use of generic verbs of speech in functions not related to their primary meaning, such as to introduce complements or adjuncts, is cross-linguistically widespread; it is also characteristic of some languages of Siberia. However, the distribution of non-canonical functions of generic verbs of speech among the languages of Siberia is very uneven, with striking differences even between dialects of one language. In this paper we attempt to elucidate whether shared inheritance, parallel independent developments, or areal convergence are the factors determining this distribution, using fine-scaled investigations of narrative data from a large number of Siberian languages and dialects. This enables us to uncover a wide range of non-canonical functions that the generic verb of speech has acquired in some of the languages investigated, as well as to highlight the very complex historical processes at play