This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish Portuguese and French. On the one hand it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic focusmarking meaning and on the other hand it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus Romance topic and focus markers such as sp. en cuanto a pt. a propsito de fr. au niveau de or sentenceinitial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudoclefts are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence in the form of data from various corpora is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.