Information structural perspectives on discourse particles 2.2 Common Ground Management and speech act specification as loci for information structural strategies 2.3 A cross linguistic view: Equivalence and interactions between particles and information structural strategies 2.4 Particle placement polyfunctionality and the role of information structure in the emergence and specialization of discourse particles 3. Epistemic authority engagement and enimitives : Information structural approaches in the face of the newest typological research on particle semantics 3.1 Engagement epistemic authority egophoricity 3.2 Enimitives. The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic antitopic contrastive topic focus verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles sentence final particles and other medial sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk including Basque French German Italian Kazakh Spanish and Turkish with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information structural strategies such as left dislocations clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally the contribution of particles to the determination of the information structural profile of the clause is examined as well as their role in the information structural specification of illocutionary types. Language specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles Intro Information Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles Editorial page Title page Copyright page Table of contents Introduction: What can information structural categories tell us about discourse particles 1. Discourse particles and information structure: Preliminary definitions 2. Information structural aspects of the syntax semantics and pragmatics of discourse particles 2.1 Givenness and newness in the syntax and semantics of German discourse particles 3. Predecessors of is that constructions 4. Information structural partitions 4.1 Inverse copula construction 4.2 Clefts and pseudo clefts 4.3 Information structural parallelism 4.4 Analysis 5. Presuppositional meaning and relevance 5.1 Negation: No es que 5.2 Interrogative: ¿es que ... 5.3 Further observations on the morpho syntactic properties of es que 6. Conclusion References Chapter 3. Kazakh particle ğoj as an existential operator 1. Introduction 2. The Kazakh language 2.1 Socio economic background of the Kazakh language 4. The contributions in this volume 5. Conclusion References Part I. The contribution of information structural strategies to the rise of discourse particles Chapter 1. Discourse particle position and information structure 1. The position of discourse markers 2. Mohawk 3. Topic shift constructions 4. Focus constructions 5. Antitopic constructions 6. Grammaticalization 7. Conclusion References Chapter 2. Information structural properties of is that clauses 1. Introduction 2. The semantic and pragmatic properties of is that constructions 2.2 General features of Kazakh 2.3 Kazakh data 3. Previous research on ğoj 4. Ğoj in imperative clauses 5. Syntactic distribution of ğoj 5.1 Post predicative ğoj 5.2 Post nominal ğoj 6. Pragmatic contribution of ğoj 6.1 Pragmatic contribution of post predicative ğoj 6.2 Pragmatic contribution of the post nominal ğoj 7. Semantics of ğoj 7.1 Russian že 7.2 Tundra Yukaghir particle mə(r)= 7.3 Ğoj as an existential operator 8. Conclusions Abbreviations References