A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure
ISBN13: 9780199557417ISBN10: 0199557411
Paperback,
256 pages
Also available:
Hardback
Mar 2009,
In Stock
Price:
$49.95 (06)See more from the series
Description
In this volume, Luis Lopez 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.Features
- A novel contribution to an ongoing area of debate
- At the cutting edge of current syntactic theorizing and interface-inspired approaches to discourse/pragmatics
- Provides clear empirical arguments based on intriguing and new data
About the Author(s)
Luis Lopez is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of Locality and the Architecture of Syntactic Dependencies (2007) and co-editor, along with Rafael Nunez-Cedeno and Richard Cameron, of Language Knowledge and Language Use (2004).
