ABSTRACT
Languages use different ways to encode what is new versus what is given information in a discourse context. Languages like English, for instance, often use phonological means to encode this information, while languages such as Spanish can use syntactic operations (e.g., via noncanonical word orders). Languages like Korean or Japanese make use of morphological markers. In this chapter, I define two fundamental notions in Information Structure: Topic and Focus, which broadly denote given versus new information, respectively. I also survey important typological differences among different Topic (thematic, contrastive) and Focus types (e.g., information, contrastive), along with some of their characteristic attributes. The central point is to review research outcomes from L2 investigations of the acquisition of focalization and topicalization structures across different language pairings. In so doing, I also review several hypotheses that have been proposed to explain difficulty with structures that involve both the interface between syntax and information structure, such as the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011) or the Structural Overlap Hypothesis (Müller & Hulk, 2001). I conclude by examining the impact of methodological decisions on the research of constructions encoding Topic and Focus and offer avenues for future research.
