
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.
This volume investigates the relationship between information structure and syntactic operations within the framework of the Minimalist Program. Luis López, a specialist in generative syntax, utilizes comparative data from Romance and Germanic languages to challenge traditional definitions of 'topic' and 'focus'. He proposes a revised feature system centered on 'discourse anaphor' and 'contrast', arguing that the interaction between syntax and information structure occurs specifically at the phase level.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Experts in generative linguistics recognize this work as a rigorous contribution to the study of the syntax-discourse interface. Readers frequently note the high level of technical density and the specialized nature of the syntactic arguments presented.
Page Count:
256
Publication Date:
2009-01-01
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
ISBN-10:
0191565288
ISBN-13:
9780191565281
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