Word order and focus particles in Nakh-Daghestanian languages

[Extract] This paper offers an account of how information structure is expressed in the Nakh-Daghestanian languages. The focus of this paper is on word order and focus particles which can be regarded as the most important means of manipulating the information structure because they are to varying degrees employed in all languages of the family. Other means such as a special cleft-like focus construction (cf. Xaidakov 1986, Kazenin 2002), the opposition between certain verb forms (cf. Sumbatova 2004), the use of so-called ‘predicative particles’ (Kalinina & Sumbatova 2007), or intonation are either not very prominent or restricted to a subset of the languages