This dissertation is intended to investigate intensively and extensively "topic" and "focus" constructions in a Bunun dialect, an Austronesian language spoken in the tribal areas of Nant'ou, Taiwan, Republic of China. These constructions are studied in relation to the syntactic and semantic phenomena such as the distinction between topic and subject, the overlapping relationships between underlying case relations and surface case-marking affixes and particles, anaphora, relativization, question-word sentences, complementation, verbal classification, cooccurrence of cases, and. word order so as to shed light on the interactions between syntax and semantics in Bunun in particular and, possibly, in human languages in general.

The Bunun dialect under study is called "Takbanuad", one of the five·dialects spoken in Hsinyi Hsiang Nant'ou prefecture. The data on which this dissertation is based were collected by me during my field trips to Hsinyi Hsiang between 1968 and 1971, and again between 1974 and 1975. Of all the data, the texts of stories and interviews consist of approximately 30,000 words, and the individual sentences elicited from the informants for the purpose of grammatical analysis amount to about 35,000 words.