The information structure of Meadow Mari

This paper provides a first descriptive overview of morphosyntactic strategies of marking information structure in contemporary Meadow Mari, based on both elicited and corpus data. I describe syntactic strategies of marking focus, topics, and contrastive topics in the language. Focus is variably realized in situ, in immediately preverbal or postverbal position, or via pseudocleft. The strategies differ in terms of their “markedness”, in the sense that more marked strategies encode subsets of the types of foci which the less marked strategies encode. Nevertheless, no type of focus requires a certain strategy. Topics are placed in the left periphery of the clause. In addition to these syntactic strategies of information structure marking, the suffix -ŽE is described as a morpheme denoting the selection of an individual from a superset and contrasting it with other individuals — essentially as a marker of contrastive topics. With its broad scope, the paper lays the groundwork for comparative research on information structure in Meadow Mari and other Uralic languages and for more detailed studies on information structure in Meadow Mari itself.