The book under review reflects the conviction of the editors, Malte Zimmermann & Caroline Féry, that the study of information structure must be ‘multi-modular’. Information structure is a domain that mediates between components of grammar, such as syntax, phonology and morphology, and other cognitive domains, including pragmatic reasoning and the update of information states. To understand information structure in its entirety, it is thus necessary to consider aspects of grammar together with the interacting cognitive domains. By combining theoretical, typological and experimental approaches, the book aims to highlight this need, as the editors explain in the introduction.

Besides the introduction, the book contains fourteen contributions and is divided into three parts, as reflected in the subtitle of the book. Part I, ‘Topic and focus’, contains six theoretically oriented chapters. In ‘Second occurrence focus and Relativized Stress F’ (Chapter 2), Mats Rooth examines sentences containing two foci with nested scopes, one of which is a second occurrence focus. In such sentences, the focus with wider scope is prosodically more prominent than the focus with narrower scope. To explain the observation, Rooth proposes operators that determine at every relevant syntactic node the relative semantic and phonological prominence of its two daughters. The relative scope is directly linked to the relative prosodic prominence.

In ‘How focus and givenness shape prosody’ (Chapter 3), Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara argue that the effects of syntax and those of information structure on the prosody of a sentence must be kept apart: syntactic structures determine prosodic phrasing, while information structure affects fundamental frequency (F₀) scaling only. Moreover, they argue that prosodic phrasing should be recursive. The proposal captures a variety of complex prosodic patterns, including second occurrence focus and variable pitch accent placement in German, and cases of a pitch reset within a post-focal downtrend and variable amounts of lowering in downstep in Japanese. Dealing with prosodic realisation of focus and second occurrence focus, this chapter complements the preceding, more semantically oriented chapter by Rooth.

‘Structural focus and exhaustivity’ (Chapter 4), by Katalin É. Kiss, re-visits the long-standing question of whether exhaustivity is associated with a particular structural position in Hungarian. Here, É. Kiss provides further evidence for the view that it is. The evidence comes from the fact that a scalar element n, which is usually interpreted as ‘at least n’, must be interpreted as ‘exactly n’ in the pre-verbal focus position. The author attributes the latter interpretation to the exhaustivity requirement of the focus position.

Turning to the notion ‘topic’, in ‘The interpretation of topical indefinites as direct and indirect aboutness topics’ (Chapter 5), Cornelia Ebert & Stefan Hinterwimmer examine indefinites that can be left-dislocated topics in German. Such indefinites typically have widest scope with respect to other quantified expressions in the sentence, and their quantificational force can depend on the quantificational force of a quantified adverbial. The authors derive these properties from the idea that topics function as subjects of logical predication. The predication relation is mediated by a topic operator in the semantics.

‘Contrastive topics operate on speech acts’ (Chapter 6), by Satoshi Tomioka, offers a compositional analysis of contrastive topics in Japanese. The analysis capitalises on two facts about Japanese contrastive topics: (i) the prosodic properties of contrastive topics are identical to those of focus; and (ii) contrastive topics are marked by the putative topic marker wa. The focal stress generates a set of alternatives in the semantics, as in the case of focus (Rooth Reference Rooth1985, Reference Rooth1992), while wa, being a marker of a notion relevant to speech acts, ensures that the alternatives are calculated at the level of speech acts.

‘Biased questions’ (Chapter 7), by Brian Reese & Nicholas Asher, provides a formal account of the questioner's bias expressed in tag questions, negative polarity questions and emphatic focus questions, using the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides Reference Asher and Lascarides2001). The authors argue that these questions perform complex speech acts, namely an assertion and a question simultaneously. Furthermore, they discuss the contributions made by the intonational properties of the questions to their overall interpretation.

Part II, ‘Cross-linguistic variation and diachronic change’, consists of five chapters offering typological and diachronic perspectives in the expression of information-structural notions. In ‘Towards a typology of focus realization’ (Chapter 8), Daniel Büring surveys a number of languages, and proposes that what is common to focus realisation cross-linguistically is that it must be ‘maximally prominent’ (following Truckenbrodt Reference Truckenbrodt1995), and what differs is the strategies languages employ for this purpose. In many languages, the notion ‘prominence’ pertains to prosody and the desired effect is achieved variously. Büring also suggests that extending the idea of ‘maximal prominence’ to other areas of grammar can explain other strategies such as focus particles and syntactic movement without prosodic marking.

In ‘Focus in Aghem’ (Chapter 9), Larry M. Hyman & Maria Polinsky propose an account of focus in the ‘Immediately-After-the-Verb’ position in Aghem, a Western Grassfields Bantu language. The authors propose that instead of moving to the specifier of the Focus or Complementizer Phrase (SpecFocP or SpecCP), a focus remains inside the Verb Phrase (VP) and is bound by a Focus Operator. The operator is base-generated in SpecCP and generates a set of alternatives for the focus. They also argue that the particle nò, previously analysed as a focus marker, is not a focus marker, but simply marks the right edge of VP. Dealing exclusively with Aghem, however, this chapter seems misplaced in the typological part of the book. The structural issues addressed here relate more to those discussed by É. Kiss in Chapter 4.

In ‘Subject focus in West African languages’ (Chapter 10), Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz & Malte Zimmermann survey means of expressing focus in a number of languages of the West African language families Gur, Kwa and (West) Chadic. A predominant characteristic among these languages is that subject focus is marked differently from non-subject focus, for instance, by means of a distinct morphological marker or a special form of the predicate. The authors attribute this asymmetry to the well-known general fact that the default interpretation of an unmarked subject is topic (Li & Thompson Reference Li, Thompson and Li1976), while no such default interpretation is associated with non-subjects. It is interesting to compare this contribution with Büring's. Although the objects of the typological studies are different, some languages feature in both chapters, illustrating the multi-faceted nature of the expression of the notion ‘focus’ even within one language. Interestingly, the notion ‘focus’ is understood in a very general way in both contributions.

The next two chapters are similarly interesting to read alongside one another. They examine two languages which both used to have mixed V(erb)O(bject)/O(bject)V(erb) word orders but developed into a predominantly VO language (Icelandic) and a predominantly OV language (German). In ‘Information structure and OV order’ (Chapter 11), Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir investigates the variation between OV and VO orders in Old Icelandic. She illustrates the role of information structure (new vs. old information) in the grammar change, but argues that the prosodic ‘weight’ of the objects also played a significant role. ‘Light’ Determiner Phrases (DPs), i.e. pronominals and DPs containing few words, typically appeared pre-verbally, while ‘heavy’ DPs (i.e. DPs with more than two words) tended to follow the verb. Hróarsdóttir proposes that the loss of the OV order was caused by the relative complexity, and a subsequent increase in markedness, of structures associated with the OV order, as well as some sociological factors.

In ‘Information structure and unmarked word order in (Older) Germanic’ (Chapter 12), Roland Hinterhölzl proposes that the variation between OV and VO orders in Old High German too was regulated by information structure: backgrounded and contrastive material preceded the verb, while information foci followed the verb. Unlike modern German, arguments and predicates could appear post-verbally if they were (part of) an information focus. However, such word orders often yielded marked prosodic structures in the language. The increase in the frequency of marked prosodic structures is argued to have triggered the diachronic change from the mixed OV/VO feature of Old High German to the OV characteristic of New High German.

The three contributions in Part III, ‘Experimental and psycholinguistic approaches’, deal with the notion ‘givenness’. In ‘Effects of givenness and constraints on free word order’ (Chapter 13), Stavros Skopeteas & Gisbert Fanselow investigate by what means languages express the well-known tendency to place discourse-given items before new items. The results of experiments conducted for numerous typologically unrelated languages show that in all but one (Greek) this tendency is realised as optional A-movement, that is either scrambling or passivisation. Most languages adopt one strategy, even if the grammar of the language has both at its disposal, as is the case in German. If a language does not independently have A-movement available for this purpose, the tendency is not manifested in the syntax, as is the case in Greek. Skopeteas & Fanselow argue that the optional nature of the marking of discourse-old material suggests that expression of givenness by A-movement is a matter that lies outside the theory of syntax.

Elsi Kaiser argues in ‘Investigating effects of structural and information-structural factors on pronoun resolution’ (Chapter 14) that pronoun resolution is influenced by the syntactic and information-structural nature of the antecedent, as well as by the presence or absence of another referential form in the same sentence. Her findings from a production experiment indicate that subjecthood and pronominalisation of a potential antecedent contribute more to its salience (and hence its likelihood to be an antecedent) than focusing. She also discusses the effects of the presence of another referential expression in the pronoun-containing sentence in the framework of Centering Theory (Grosz, Joshi & Weinstein Reference Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein1995).

In the final chapter, ‘Given and new information in spatial statements’ (Chapter 15), Robin Hörnig & Thomas Weskott examine word order variation in spatial relational statements, such as Under the table is the box, which typically provide new information regarding the place of the locatum (the box) relative to a given relatum (the table). The authors discuss many experiments investigating what factors affect the comprehension of such statements in German. Factors reported to aid comprehension are (i) that the relatum is given, but the locative expression containing the relatum (under the table) is new; and (ii) that the relatum precedes the locatum.

In my view, the present book is reasonably successful in achieving the editors' laudable goal of demonstrating the importance of combining different approaches to the study of information structure. The theoretical contributions of Part I provide formal tools with which to carry out typological and experimental research of the kind in Part II and Part III. In turn, the rich empirical data in Parts II and III provide means to test the various theoretical claims made in Part I. However, while the overarching theme is made evident in the introduction, it does not always clearly emerge from the individual contributions. Although each chapter can be read individually as providing an interesting analysis of a set of phenomena, greater efforts might have been made by some of the authors to relate their findings more explicitly to the overarching theme (this is particularly obvious in Chapters 7 and 9).

To this end, it would also have been helpful to have explicit definitions of information-structural notions that are adopted by all contributors, or at least have some discussion in the introduction why and how the definitions used differ across the book. In the introduction, the editors provide only a very brief discussion of several information-structural concepts, noting that each chapter understands them differently. However, the relevant notions are not clearly laid out in every chapter (this is especially the case in Chapters 6, 9, 11), and some contributors, even if they give clear definitions, use very different definitions from the one espoused by the editors (as in Chapters 8, 10 and 12 for ‘focus’). Consequently, it is sometimes difficult to grasp the implications of some claim about ‘focus’ or ‘topic’ in one chapter for an analysis of ‘focus’ or ‘topic’ in a different chapter (as with Chapters 9, 11 and 12 for ‘focus’, and Chapters 5 and 6 for ‘topic’).

Finally, the book places seemingly undue emphasis on Germanic languages. Even excluding the three chapters on English, five out of the remaining eleven chapters deal with Germanic languages. It is a little surprising that no chapter on, say, Romance or Slavic languages was included, on which much interesting work is also being carried out.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings, this collection is a significant and welcome contribution to the current intense interest in linguistic theorising of information structure and succeeds in highlighting the value of considering different approaches for theoretical linguists, psycholinguists, and typologists alike.