This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers,
written by one of the founders of this new field. Using examples from a wide range of …

This dissertation develops a theory of contrastive topics (CTs)—what they mean, and how
they are realized. I give a compositional semantics for CT constructions, built on the idea that …

Speakers have competent intuitions in assessing word order alternations as well as in
judging different prosodic patterns. Speakers can find a certain superficial word order tout …

Building on the basis of the papers in this special issue on 'Contrast as an information-
structural notion in grammar'as well as earlier research, this editorial paper decomposes the …

The analysis of contrastive topics introduced in Büring 1997b and further developed in
Büring 2003 relies on distinguishing two types of constituents that introduce alternatives: the …

While research shows that adults attend to both segmental and suprasegmental regularities
in speech, including syllabic transitional probabilities as well as stress and intonational …

Abstract Kipsigis (Nilo-Saharan, Kenya) is a verb-initial language that exhibits a VSO/VOS
alternation, in which the felicity of postverbal word orders is dependent on information …

The paper proposes a syntactic and semantic analysis of Double Negation (DN). It is shown
that there are two types of DN. Strong DN is the result of a Focus construction that involves a …

Language serves as the principal instrument of communication between human beings.
How interlocutors successfully exchange information has always been a critical issue in …

Near-native speakers (heritage speakers and adult second language learners alike)
experience difficulty in interpreting and producing linguistic constructions that contain …