1 Information structure in the languages of the Caucasus Diana Forker Submitted to Polinsky, Maria (ed.) Handbook of Caucasian languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1. Introduction In this paper, I follow the account of information structure developed in Krifka (2007). He employs the categories of focus, givenness, and topic. 1 Based on existing literature, he defines these key terms as follows:  focus: stresses and points out the existence of alternatives either to the expression (if the focus is on the linguistic expression itself) or, more commonly, to its denotation  givenness: indicates whether the denotation of an item is present in the common ground or not and the degree to which it is present (= saliency)  topic: what the sentence is about An additional notion that will be employed in this paper and that partially overlaps with focus is contrast. Contrast is relational (e.g. Repp, 2010, 2016), in the sense that there must be a relation between the contrasted item and at least another identifiable alternative in the context whereby both the contrasted item and the alternative must be explicitly mentioned. The two items must be comparable to each other with respect to a shared domain. In the following, the three key notions will be briefly discussed. Focus has pragmatic as well as semantic uses. Pragmatic uses of focus don’t have a truth- conditional effect. They can be divided into:  “presentational” or “information” focus that expresses the most important or new information and that fills a gap in the pragmatic information of the addressee as it is the case with answers to general content questions (“What did X do?”, “What happened?”, “What did you buy?”). This type includes thetic sentences that are fully focused.  “constituent” focus that can be used to confirm or correct utterances (including verum focus on the truth value of a sentence), highlight parallels, or it can be, more generally, just contrastive (see also Dik et. al 1981). Note that content questions can also have constituent focus (Drubig & Schaffar 2001).  delimitation: contrastive topics that contain a focused item, and focus in frame-setting expressions such as utterance-initial adverbials (e.g. healthwise, in Greece) Krifka (2007) lists more subtypes that perhaps cannot neatly be integrated into this classification. For instance, focus can be exhaustive, if the item in focus is the only item that leads to a true proposition, or non-exhaustive. The semantic uses of focus can have an effect on the truth-conditions. Examples are focus- sensitive particles such as additives and scalar additives, but also adnominal quantifiers or negation particles. All these items are operators that have scope, which needs to be differentiated from focus. The scope of focus-sensitive particles can but need not be identical with the focus in the utterance in which they occur. Furthermore, in contrast to the pragmatic use of focus, the contribution of focus-sensitive particles such as additives to the information structure does not affect the output common ground. Instead, it restricts the input common 1 He makes use of a fourth category, namely ‘frame setting / delimination’, which resembles aboutness topics or contrastive topics. Due to the difficulty to differentiate these notions I will exclude this category from the discussion.