Position, Function and Interpretation of Topics in Somali

In recent analyses evidence has been provided for a systematic connection between the discourse functions of Topics and their formal properties, which is encoded in a strict hierarchy in the C-domain. In other words, not only are Topics not included in the prosodic domain of the sentence (cf. Frascarelli 2000), they are also made prominent by different intonational events according to their specific discourse role. This crucial connection, originally proposed in Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (henceforth F&H 2007) on Italian and German data, has been supported by subsequent analyses on typologically diverse languages. The aim of this paper is to examine the intonational properties of Topics in Somali, peruse the interpretation of these constituents and consider the complex interplay between different levels of analysis (i.e., the syntaxprosody-discourse interface) in order to check the validity of the aforesaid connection in a polysynthetic language (in the sense of Baker 1996), in which full DPs are obligatorily realized as Topics. Like in the works mentioned above, the relevant investigation is based on natural speech (unstructured conversations among native speakers), which we consider as a basic feature for a real understanding of information structure and its properties.