A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure

A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure PDF Author: Luis López
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191565288
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In this volume, Luis López sheds new light on information structure and makes a significant contribution to work on grammatical operations in the Minimalist Program. Through a careful analysis of dislocations and focus fronting in Romance, the author shows that notions such as 'topic' and 'focus', as usually defined, yield no predictions and proposes instead a feature system based on the notions 'discourse anaphor' and 'contrast'. He presents a detailed model of syntax—-information-structure interaction and argues that this interaction takes place at the phase level, with a privileged role for the edge of the phase. Further, he investigates phenomena concerning the syntax of objects in Romance and Germanic - accusative A, p-movement, clitic doubling, scrambling, object shift - and shows that there are cross-linguistic correlations between syntactic configuration and specificity, independent of discourse connectedness. The volume ends with an extended analysis of the syntax of dislocations in Romance.

A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure

A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure PDF Author: Luis López
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191565288
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book

Book Description
In this volume, Luis López sheds new light on information structure and makes a significant contribution to work on grammatical operations in the Minimalist Program. Through a careful analysis of dislocations and focus fronting in Romance, the author shows that notions such as 'topic' and 'focus', as usually defined, yield no predictions and proposes instead a feature system based on the notions 'discourse anaphor' and 'contrast'. He presents a detailed model of syntax—-information-structure interaction and argues that this interaction takes place at the phase level, with a privileged role for the edge of the phase. Further, he investigates phenomena concerning the syntax of objects in Romance and Germanic - accusative A, p-movement, clitic doubling, scrambling, object shift - and shows that there are cross-linguistic correlations between syntactic configuration and specificity, independent of discourse connectedness. The volume ends with an extended analysis of the syntax of dislocations in Romance.

A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure

A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure PDF Author: Luis López
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019156527X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
In this volume, Luis Loṕez sheds new light on information structure. He presents a model of syntax-information structure interaction and argues that this interaction takes place at the phase level, with a privileged role for the edge of the phase.

The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure

The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure PDF Author: Caroline Féry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199642672
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 993

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Book Description
"Researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields"--Del editor.

The Syntax of Information-Structural Agreement

The Syntax of Information-Structural Agreement PDF Author: Johannes Mursell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027259739
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

The Syntax-Information Structure Interface

The Syntax-Information Structure Interface PDF Author: Timothy Gupton
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614512051
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of generative grammar, there is still uncertainty with respect to the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of languages. According to canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are arguments (A-elements). However, following non-canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are not arguments, but rather A’-elements that behave like topical preverbal direct and indirect objects, which have received a CLLD analysis in the literature (e.g. Cinque 1990). The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are non-arguments, one must question the universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Agnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths. Galician is an underdocumented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, I develop an experimental program for establishing clausal word order preferences for a number of information structure contexts. The preference data suggest that preverbal subjects behave like canonical elements, and not CLLD elements. These results inform the model of the preverbal field that I propose for Galician, which also takes into account the enclisis-proclisis divide and reco.

Syntax-Information Structure Interactions in the Sentential, Verbal and Nominal Peripheries

Syntax-Information Structure Interactions in the Sentential, Verbal and Nominal Peripheries PDF Author: Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527549143
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This book considers the connection between information structure and syntax, exploring formal explanations to account for the distribution of discourse-based phenomena such as topic preposing and focus fronting across languages, with a particular focus on English and Spanish. It discusses issues such as word order and the diverse conditions under which types of topics and foci are licensed in different contexts. It shows the different behaviors of languages with respect to specific discourse-oriented operations to be the consequence of feature inheritance, which takes place in the different peripheries detected in the sentence. The book will be of interest to linguists and MA and PhD students of linguistics.

Comparative and Contrastive Studies of Information Structure

Comparative and Contrastive Studies of Information Structure PDF Author: Carsten Breul
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287848
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This volume presents original comparative and contrastive research into various aspects of information structure (topic, focus, contrastivity, givenness, anaphoricity) as well as into forms and structures whose realisation depends on information-structural factors (clefts, dislocations, reflexives, null subjects, prosodic features, interrogatives) in a number of different languages (Catalan, English, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian). Each contribution emphasises differences or commonalities between the languages under investigation with respect to the realisation of information structural categories or with respect to the information structural implications of a given form or structure. The specific comparative-contrastive perspective of the volume makes a substantial contribution towards a better understanding of language specific and universal aspects of information structure. It raises significant questions and provides solutions for the formal representation and the functional properties of information structural categories.

Information Structure and Agreement

Information Structure and Agreement PDF Author: María Victoria Camacho Taboada
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255806
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Consists of thirteen contributions that focuses on the trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the present developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. In this book, chapters deal with notion of agreement and its role in syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives and correlatives.

Diachronic Studies on Information Structure

Diachronic Studies on Information Structure PDF Author: Gisella Ferraresi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110227479
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology. Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement. Editorial board Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School) Prof. Dr. Ulrike Demske (Universität des Saarlandes) Prof. Dr. Ewald Lang (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Lühr (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) Prof. Dr. Thomas Pechmann (Universität Leipzig) Prof. em. Dr. Anita Steube (Universität Leipzig)

Syntactic Derivations

Syntactic Derivations PDF Author: Ulf Brosziewski
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110953560
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
This study investigates a model of syntactic derivations that is based on a new concept of dislocation, i.e., of 'movement' phenomena. Derivations are conceived of as a compositional process that constructs larger syntactic units out of smaller ones without any phrase-structure representations, as in categorial grammars. It is demonstrated that a simple extension of this view can account for dislocation without gap features, chains, or structural transformations. Basically, it is assumed that movement 'splits' a syntactic expression into two parts, which form a derivational unit but enter separately into the formation of larger constituents. The study shows that in this approach, if common assumptions about selection and licensing are added, a small and coherent set of axioms suffices to deduce fundamental syntactic generalizations that transformational theories express in terms of X-bar-Theory and various constraints on movement. These generalizations include, for example, equivalents to the C-Command Condition and the Head Movement Constraint, the 'structure-preserving' nature of dislocation, its 'economical' character, and elementary bounding principles.