provided very helpful comments on drafts of this book as it took shape. We are grateful to our language consultants for their generous assistance: Ghazaleh Kad and Shamsi Saber for Persian, Dolgor Guntsetseg and Tuya Bavuu for Khalkha Mongolian, Galina Koreneva and Anna Lamdo for Tundra Nenets, and Devyani Sharma and Tara Mohanan for Hindi. Finally, we thank our husbands, Ken Kahn and Simon Carne, for their love and support during the writing of this book. 10.3 Towards a typology 10.4 Conclusion Conclusion 1.2.1 Marking as distinguishing arguments Analyses of grammatical marking (and in particular casemarking) have often appealed to two types of functional motivation, referred to as coding/indexing and discriminatory/disambiguating/distinguishing

No abstract

No abstract

Information structure may be understood as the pragmatic structuring of a proposition in terms of the speaker's assumptions concerning the addressee's state of mind at the time of the utterance. The commonly assumed binominal partition of the information structure into topic-focus, theme-rheme, topiccomment, focus-open proposition, or focus-presupposition is sometimes insufficient. The paper addresses the notion of secondary topic, which, although sometimes used in research on information structure, has not been studied closely. The main focus of the paper is Ostyak (Uralic), where the secondary topic is systematically expressed by object agreement. The results of the paper indicate that multiple topic constructions suggested in the literature do not necessarily involve topicalization as (multiple) adjunction but, rather, argue for the possibility of two clause-internal argument topics. The paper suggests some independent criteria for identifying secondary topic and shows how it interacts with other information-structure relations, as well as with syntax and semantics. This further raises the question of cross-linguistic variation in the grammatical realization of the secondary topic function within a clause.

Northern Ostyak (Uralic) has optional object agreement. This paper analyzes the grammatical behavior of objects that trigger agreement and objects that do not, and demonstrates that while the former participate in certain syntactic processes, the latter are syntactically inert. The asymmetry cannot be explained with reference to semantics or argument status, as both objects bear an identical argument relationship to the predicate. Following the functional approach to language, under which the clause has three independent representational levels (syntax, semantics, and informa tion structure), I suggest that the two objects differ in their information structure status. The object that does not trigger agreement bears the focus function, and systematically corresponds to the focus position. It is further argued that virtually all grammatical relations in Ostyak demonstrate reduced syntactic activity when they are in focus. This leads to a search for an information structure-driven motivation for certain behavioral properties.

The pulses at 744 nm with the duration 90 fs, energy 6 mJ and weakly divergent wavefront propagated for more than 100 m and generated a filament followed by unprecedently long high intensity (≥ 1 TW/cm 2 ) light channel. Over a 20 m long sub-section of this channel the pulse energy is transferred continuously to the infrared wing, forming spectral humps that extend up to the wavelength of 850 nm. From 3D+time carrierresolved simulations of 100 m pulse propagation, we show that spectral humps indicate the formation of a train of fs pulses appearing at a predictable position in the propagation path.

No abstract

No abstract