1 Word order and focus particles in Nakh-Daghestanian languages Diana Forker & Oleg Belyaev 1 1. Introduction This paper offers an account of how information structure is expressed in the Nakh-Daghestanian languages. The focus of this paper is on word order and focus particles which can be regarded as the most important means of manipulating the information structure because they are to varying degrees employed in all languages of the family. Other means such as a special cleft-like focus construction (cf. Xaidakov 1986, Kazenin 2002), the opposition between certain verb forms (cf. Sumbatova 2004), the use of so-called ‘predicative particles’ (Kalinina & Sumbatova 2007), or intonation are either not very prominent or restricted to a subset of the languages. Nakh-Daghestanian languages are located in the eastern part of the Caucasian mountains. Most of the languages are found in Russia, but some speech communities live in Azerbaijan and Georgia. Only the larger languages (e.g. Chechen, Ingush, Avar, Lezgian) are regularly written. The majority of the Nakh-Daghestanian languages are oral languages used as primary means of everyday communication. Much of the data on which this paper is based comes from originally oral texts that have been collected and/or analyzed by the authors and thus lack references. All remaining examples originate from texts that have been published by other researchers. The aim of this paper is to present a typologically oriented study of the expression of topic and focus via word order and the use of particles. We employ the standard information structure- related terms— topic, focus 2 , contrast, pragmatic presupposition and assertion — that are widely accepted in typological and theoretical literature on information structure (cf. Vallduví 1992, Erteschik-Shir 1997, Krifka & Musan 2012 and many other works). Our specific understanding of these terms is following Lambrecht (1994). We show that topics are placed at the edges of clauses, often depending on the activation status of the topical referent. Focus is usually verb- adjacent and can precede or occasionally follow the verb. Focus particles express narrow focus, which precedes the verb. They represent additional means of emphasizing single words within focused phrases. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present a description of topic and focus positions and the impact of different words orders on the information structure of clauses. In Section 3 we give an account of the major focus particles. Section 4 analyzes the interaction of focus particles and focus marking by means of word order and Section 5 contains the conclusion. 2. Word order Nakh-Daghestanian languages are usually assumed to possess an unmarked SOV word order. While this order of constituents is indeed most frequently used, the ordering of constituents is not determined by grammatical relations, but by information structure. The reason why SOV word order is most common is that objects are typically focused and subjects are typically topics. 1 Oleg Belyaev’s work has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project No. 14-18-03270. 2 An important issue that has been debated in recent literature is whether “focus” can be defined as a cross-linguistically valid notion at all (Matić & Wedgwood 2013). However, whatever conclusion on this question is reached, it does not directly affect our use of the term in this paper, as we are dealing with a group of closely related languages, within which all of the IS terms we use are easily identifiable with particular pragmatic and structural configurations.