Information Structure and Topic-Comment Constructions in Igbo: A Discourse-Functional Analysis

This study conducts a discourse-functional analysis of information structure and topic-comment constructions in Igbo, examining how speakers of the language manage the packaging of given and new information within sentence and discourse boundaries. Information structure research in Igbo has been largely confined to theoretical syntactic debate, leaving the discourse-functional dimensions of topicalisation and focus phenomena without adequate empirical grounding. The research compiles a two hundred thousand word spoken corpus from natural conversational and narrative data collected from eighty Igbo native speakers across three dialect zones in Anambra, Imo, and Enugu states. Topic-comment constructions, left-dislocation, focus fronting, and in-situ focus marking are identified, annotated, and analysed within a cross-linguistically informed discourse-functional framework. Findings confirm that Igbo employs a rich repertoire of information structure devices, with topic fronting being the most frequent strategy for foregrounding previously established discourse entities. Focus constructions are found to correlate systematically with prosodic marking, with focused constituents exhibiting measurably higher pitch and duration values in acoustic analysis. The study identifies significant dialect-conditioned variation in information structure strategy frequency and proposes a unified discourse-functional account that accommodates this variation. The corpus is archived as a resource for further Igbo linguistic research. Keywords: Igbo information structure, topic-comment, discourse-functional analysis, focus, corpus linguistics.