Partitioning Discourse Information: A Case of Chichewa Split Constituents

Chichewa is said to display mixed properties of configurationality such as the existence of VP on the one hand and discontinuous constituents (DCs) on the other. In the present work we examine the discourse and syntactic properties of DCs, and show that DCs in Chichewa arise naturally from the discourse configurational nature of the language. We argue that the fronted DCs in Chichewa are contrastive topics that appear in a left-dislocated external topic position, and the remaining part of the split NP in the right-dislocated topic position. We develop an analysis that integrates the discourse information of split constituents into the parallel architecture of LFG by assuming a direct mapping between c-structure and i(nformation)-structure.