| This dissertation examines the notions of topic and focus from both synchronic and diachronic points of view. Previous works have almost exclusively treated these concepts synchronically, and the historical studies which do exist have not successfully traced and motivated the individual stages of development.; The sections on topic first propose and give cross-linguistic evidence for the following path of grammaticalization: locative/marker > contrastive marker > topic marker. This overview is followed by two text-based studies, one of the Japanese topic marker wa and the other of the Greek particle dé. Because of their long written traditions, these two languages allow us to contextually view and motivate the intermediate stages of grammaticalization.; The last part of the dissertation is a discussion of focus. It begins by developing a synchronic theory involving different levels of highlighting, and then it presents case studies of data primarily from Japanese and Korean, examining in detail the mechanisms by which demonstratives and copulas become focus markers in these languages. The analysis presented also provides an explanation for hitherto unaccounted-for distributional facts about the Japanese and Korean focus markers.; Topic and focus have been seen by linguists as widespread phenomena cross-linguistically, and yet it has proven difficult to define these intuitively important analytic units. A functional and diachronic approach helps both to elucidate their nature and to explain the complexities which have made them hard for analysts to pin down. |
