Consisting of eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this study offers an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Unique in focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quenchua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they also address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. It is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.