In CLS 33, 1997. Typological Variation in Sentence-Focus Constructions Knud Lambrecht University of Texas at Austin Maria Polinsky University of Southern California & University of California San Diego This paper will examine a family of constructions in which the subject nominal either appears in a non-canonical linear position (Subject Inversion), or forms a single constituent with the verb, or undergoes what Lambrecht (1992, 1994) calls Prosodic Inversion. The constructions we are going to examine share a common discourse function—that of coding a proposition with sentence-focus articulation. The major goal of the paper is to demonstrate the mappings between the formal and information-structural properties of the constructions in question. From a cross-linguistic standpoint, we will also try to make predictions regarding the choice of a specific realization of a construction in a given language type. 1. The category ‘sentence-focus construction’ In previous work, Lambrecht (1994) has argued that the pragmatic structuring of propositions into presupposed and focal portions is cross-linguistically done in terms of a number of FOCUS CATEGORIES, which correspond to different types of communicative situations and which are consistently coded across languages in distinct formal types. Following that work, we distinguish three major categories: the PREDICATE-FOCUS (PF), the SENTENCE-FOCUS (SF), and the ARGUMENT- FOCUS (AF) category. In the PF category the predicate is in focus and the subject (and possibly some other argument or adjunct) is within the presupposition. The notion of ‘presupposition’ certainly requires a lot of explication but we won’t go into that here and will simply abide by the interpretation proposed in Lambrecht 1994 (see also Erteschik-Shir in press). For the present paper, the most relevant kind of presupposition is the TOPICALITY PRESUPPOSITION. A topicality presupposition involves the assumed status of a referent as a topic of current interest in the discourse. It is the presence or absence of such a presupposition that distinguishes the PF category from the SF category. In the AF category, the subject (or some other argument) is in focus and the predicate is within the presupposition. In the SF category, both the predicate and the subject are in focus, i.e. the focus extends over the entire proposition. The defining features of the three focus categories are summarized in (1): (1) THE THREE FOCUS CATEGORIES: