Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background, Given/New.

One minor issue: I don't believe the "Trigger" in Tagalog is the Focus.
In fact, the only completely reliable feature that all triggers exhibit,
that they are definite, strongly suggests that the trigger isn't the
focus (the focus is often new information, and unlike the topic is very
frequently indefinite). I read a paper about this once, but I don't have
it anymore and I can't recall all the details.

>
> In Tagalog and the Philippine languages, the Verb's morphology is
> altered so that its "Grammatical Voice" indicates which semantic role
> is played by its Focus.