ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide an overview of how two eminent notions of information structure – focus and topic – are encoded in a number of African languages. It focuses on the notions of focus and topic and how they find linguistic expression in a number of African languages. The chapter explores the prosodic, syntactic, morphological and lexical strategies that speakers of these languages explore in their attempt to highlight significant and or new information in the communicative process. It examines the identification of topic in these languages; against the background that topic is not always linguistically. The chapter also explores the relationship and the phonological identity between focus markers and clausal connectives observed in a number of languages. It also examines the linguistic strategies for encoding focus across a number of African languages, and discusses the linguistic marking of topic. The chapter explains the relationship between identical focus markers and clausal connectives in some Kwa languages.
