A Derivational Syntax for Information StructureIn 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. |
Contents
| 1 | |
2 Information structure | 22 |
3 The syntax of dislocations and focus fronting | 85 |
4 The derivation of information structure | 146 |
5 Moving objects | 171 |
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Common terms and phrases
A-movement accusative Alexiadou analysis anaphoric antecedent approach argued argument assigned assume base-generated Boeckx bound reading c-command Cardinaletti Catalan Chapter Chomsky Cl.acc Cl.dat clause clitic doubling CLLD and CLRD CLLDed constituent complement conclude coneix CONTEXT contrastive focus D-linked dative derivation direct object discourse discuss dislocated constituent displacement extracted FFed Finnish FinP following example Gianni grammatical històries t(a HTLD information structure interface interpretation Italian Joan Joana John Juan la Maria languages left dislocated left periphery libro Linguistic llibres López Maria matrix move movement non-finite clauses non-specific p-movement PAST.1st phase position post-verbal pre-verbal probe proposal prosodic quantifier R-expression regular focus resumptive right dislocated Rioplatense Spanish Rizzi Romance Samek-Lodovici scrambling Section semantic sentence sentence grammar shows Spanish spec Spec,Fin Spec,v specific syntactic syntax topic TopP triggered ungrammatical vaig Vallduví verb Villalba wh-phrases Zubizarreta