The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody

The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody PDF Author: Vieri Samek-Lodovici
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198737920
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian, namely right dislocation and marginalization. Based on a vast aggregate of evidence, he shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that left-peripheral focalization patterns arise from the interaction with right dislocation and generalize well beyond the familiar cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In the final chapter, the author examines how the key properties unveiled in the previous sections, such as focalization in situ, follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta's (1998) insight about the role of prosody in shaping syntax. Overall, the book offers an evidence-backed radical departure from current views of focalization proposing a high, fixed, focus projection at the left periphery of the clause. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date.

The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody

The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody PDF Author: Vieri Samek-Lodovici
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198737920
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian, namely right dislocation and marginalization. Based on a vast aggregate of evidence, he shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that left-peripheral focalization patterns arise from the interaction with right dislocation and generalize well beyond the familiar cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In the final chapter, the author examines how the key properties unveiled in the previous sections, such as focalization in situ, follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta's (1998) insight about the role of prosody in shaping syntax. Overall, the book offers an evidence-backed radical departure from current views of focalization proposing a high, fixed, focus projection at the left periphery of the clause. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date.

The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax

The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax PDF Author: Marcel den Dikken
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107354587
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1412

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Book Description
Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody PDF Author: Carlos Gussenhoven
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198832230
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 957

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Book Description
This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

Prosody and Language in Contact

Prosody and Language in Contact PDF Author: Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3662451689
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This volume provides new insights into various issues on prosody in contact situations, contact referring here to the L2 acquisition process as well as to situations where two language systems may co-exist. A wide array of phenomena are dealt with (prosodic description of linguistic systems in contact situations, analysis of prosodic changes, language development processes, etc.), and the results obtained may give an indication of what is more or less stable in phonological and prosodic systems. In addition, the selected papers clearly show how languages may have influenced or may have been influenced by other language varieties (in multilingual situations where different languages are in constant contact with one another, but also in the process of L2 acquisition). Unlike previous volumes on related topics, which focus in general either on L2 acquisition or on the description and analyses of different varieties of a given language, this volume considers both topics in parallel, allowing comparison and discussion of the results, which may shed new light on more far-reaching theoretical questions such as the role of markedness in prosody and the causes of prosodic changes.

Intonation and Prosodic Structure

Intonation and Prosodic Structure PDF Author: Caroline Féry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107008069
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
This book provides a state-of-the-art survey of intonation and prosody from a phonological perspective, for advanced students and researchers in phonology.

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15 PDF Author: Ingo Feldhausen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262373
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In 2016, the Going Romance conference series celebrated its 30th edition and the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany) had the honor of organizing this.The edited volume at hand presents a selection of 17 peer-reviewed articles, based on papers that were presented at this occasion. The volume covers a wide variety of phenomena, ranging from morphosyntax to prosody. Some are discussed from a synchronic perspective, others from a diachronic perspective, or in the context of language acquisition. In addition to frequently-studied languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, this volume features lesser-studied varieties including Aromanian, Gallo, and Sardinian.

On the Role of Contrast in Information Structure

On the Role of Contrast in Information Structure PDF Author: Jorina Brysbaert
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110986612
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
In research on Information Structure, there is an ongoing discussion about the role of contrast. While most linguists consider contrast to be compatible with both focus and topic, some argue that it is an autonomous IS category. Contrast has been shown to be encoded by different linguistic means, such as specific morphemes, adverbials, clefts, prosodic cues. Hence, this concept is also related to other domains, in particular morphosyntax and prosody. The precise way in which they interact is however not yet entirely clear. Moreover, from a methodological point of view, the identification and annotation of contrast in corpora is not straightforward. This volume provides a selection of articles discussing the definition of contrast, the importance of distinguishing different types of contrast, the use of several encoding strategies, and the annotation of contrast in corpora using the Question Under Discussion Model. The contributions offer data on English, French, French Belgian Sign Language, German, Hindi, Italian and Spanish.

The Verbal Domain

The Verbal Domain PDF Author: Roberta D'Alessandro
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198767889
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
This volume features cutting-edge research from leading authorities on the nature and structure of the verbal domain and the complexity of the Verb Phrase (VP). The book is divided into three parts, representing the areas in which contemporary debate on the verbal domain is most active. The first part focuses on the V head, and includes four chapters discussing the setup of verbal roots, their syntax, and their interaction with other functional heads such as Voice and v. Chapters in the second part discuss the need to postulate a Voice head in the structure of a clause, and whether Voice is different from v. Voice was originally intended as the head hosting the external argument in its specifier, as well as transitivity. This section explores its relationship with "syntactic" voice, i.e. the alternation between actives and passives. Part three is dedicated to event structure, inner aspect, and Aktionsart. It tackles issues such as the one-to-one relation between argument structure and event structure, and whether there can be minimal structural units at the basis of the derivation of any sort of XP, including the VP.

Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation

Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation PDF Author: Itamar Francez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198744587
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby systematic variation in form arises from systematic variation in the meaning of basic lexical items. In this volume, Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden contrast these views as applied to the empirical domain of property concept sentences - sentences expressing adjectival predication and their translational equivalents across languages. They demonstrate that property concept sentences vary systematically between possessive and predicative form, and propose a transparentist analysis of this variation that links it to the lexical denotations of basic property concept lexemes. At the heart of the analysis are qualities: mass-like model theoretic objects that closely resemble scales. The authors contrast their transparentist analysis with uniformitarian alternatives, demonstrating its theoretical and empirical advantages. They then show that the proposed theory of qualities can account for interesting and novel observations in two central domains of grammatical theory: the theory of syntactic categories, and the theory of mass nouns. The overall results highlight the importance of the lexicon as a locus of generalizations about the limits of crosslinguistic variation.

The Grammar of the Utterance

The Grammar of the Utterance PDF Author: Alice Corr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192598503
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with i) vocatives, interjections, and particles; and ii) illocutionary complementizers, items that look like subordinators but behave differently. Alice Corr argues that the behaviour of these conversation-oriented items provides insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. The approach identifies the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer - i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside - and the empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the configurational architecture of grammar also configures the architecture of the mind. The book thus builds on existing work on the syntax of discourse not only by contributing new empirical and theoretical insights, but also by pursuing explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalizes the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. Drawing on a wealth of naturalistic data from social media and online corpora, augmented by elicited introspective judgements, The Grammar of the Utterance offers new insights into the colloquial grammar and morphosyntactic variation of (Ibero-)Romance, and showcases the utility of comparative work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organization of grammar.