Deriving topic effects in Kiowa with semantics and pragmatics Andrew McKenzie 1 Introduction This chapter employs semantic fieldwork to offer new perspective on dislocated topical DPs in the Kiowa language. 1 These topics are often dislocated to the left periphery of the clause. For instance, in (1), the object báò, ‘(the) cat’, is placed the left of the subject chégùn, ‘(the) dog’, even though overt objects typically follow subjects. (1) Báò, b´ ao cat chégùn ts´ eg˜ un dog ´ ¯ al´ ¯ e. ∅-´ a:l´ e: 3sA:3sO-chase. PF ‘The dog chased the cat.’ (lit. ‘The cat, the dog chased (it)’) Previous studies of Kiowa have been unable to discern a motivation for this dislocation, since it lacks the clear signs of syntactic movement found in more commonly studied languages. These studies have also been unable to use the meaning of topichood to motivate the dislocation in Kiowa, because it is very difficult to elicit for topics. This chapter will propose that we instead derive top- ichood from dislocation, rather than the other way around. The hypothesis offered here is that the 1 This work was funded by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (#BCS-0843901), while at the Uni- versity of Massachusetts Amherst, and later during a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Arlington. Many thanks go to the Kiowa-speaker consultants, especially Christina Simmons, and George and Marjorie Tahbone, and all others whose help has been crucial. Examples are glossed as follows: The Kiowa examples are written in the Kiowa orthography developed by Parker McKenzie (Meadows & McKenzie, 2001; Watkins & Harbour, 2010), and in IPA. On IPA glosses, low tone is left unmarked. The following abbreviations will be used: A: agent, D: dual, D: dative, DS: different subject/situation marking, EVID: indirect evidential, HAB: habitual, I: inverse number, IMPF: imperfective aspect, INV: inverse number, MIR: mirative,NEG: negation, O: direct object, PA: plural animate, PF: perfective aspect, PN: plural inanimate, PX: plural exclusive, R: reflexive, S: singular, S: intransitive subject. All Kiowa examples are from my field notes, unless noted.