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"Grammar, Comparative and general -- Topic and comment"
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Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages, and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of linguistic disciplines and perspectives such as language acquisition and language contact, this volume provides a state-of-the-art discussion on central issues of focus realization. These include the interaction between prosody, syntax, and pragmatics, the typology of word order and intonation languages, the differentiation between focus and related notions such as contrast and presupposed modality, and the role of synchronic variation and change.
eBook
When data challenges theory : unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structure
This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The main aim of the book is to assess the impact of data that seem to run against commonly accepted tenets in this field.
eBook
The expression of information structure
Information structure deals with the linguistic forms and techniques that support the integration of what is said into the current informational and attentional state of the addressee. This shows in categories like topic-comment structuring, focus to highlight expressions, marking of givenness and of presupposed information, and ways to indicate that the information provided is restricted. The book relates infor-mation structure to theoretical models of grammar, to computation and modelling and brings together what is known about the expression of information structure in human language with regard to its empirical investigation, its psycholinguistic aspects and the acquisition of information structure. Since the need to integrate what is said into the informational and attentional state of the addressee is central to all human communication, it is not surprising that all natural languages have developed devices to express information structural cate-gories. To illustrate this, the book also provides concrete and theory independent descriptions of the information structural encoding strategies of individual languages of different types . The book can be used as a textbook appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses; it also provides information for linguists that are not specialists in the field.
eBook
Referring expressions in English and Japanese : patterns of use in dialogue processing
It is a major challenge for linguists to explore the relations between referential choice and the discourse structure in dialogues, because, unlike written modes of discourse, dialogue as an interactional mode of discourse needs careful treatment for linguistic analysis. This book investigates how discourse entities are linked with topic chaining and discourse coherence by showing that the choice and the distribution of referring expressions is correlated with center transition patterns in the centering framework. It provides original empirical research into the use of referring expressions in English and Japanese task-based dialogues, and applies and extends theoretical frameworks which attempt to account for local and global discourse coherence. Using a discourse-based integrated approach to anaphora resolution, Yoshida proposes a unified account on the patterns of use of referring expressions. The book will be of interest to discourse analysts, computational linguists, scholars of semantics and pragmatics, and cross-linguistics researchers.
eBook
The Syntax-Information Structure Interface
It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of research in generative grammar, there is still uncertainty and debate surrounding the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of null-subject languages. The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are analyzed as non-arguments, it calls into question the proposed universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths.
Galician, spoken in the northwest of Spain, is an under-documented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, the author details an experimental program for establishing clausal word order appropriateness and preferences in a variety of information structure contexts, while informing theoretical debate on preverbal subjects. The experimental methodology and information structure assumptions employed create several testable predictions. The statistical data suggest that Galician is a predominantly SVO language and that preverbal subjects behave like canonical subjects, and not CLLD constituents. The empirical data discussed inform the modified model of the preverbal field that the author proposes for Galician, which takes into account a number of recent analyses of Western Iberian Romance clausal phenomena such as the enclisis-proclisis divide, topicalization, focalization, and recomplementation.
eBook
The Diachronic Typology of Non-Canonical Subjects
In this paper I have examined several instances in which an oblique constituent acquires canonical subject marking, i.e. nominative case and verbal agreement (in an accusative language). These instances show that an oblique constituent may acquire subject coding properties without being beforehand endowed with subject behavioural properties, if two requirements are met: (i) this oblique constituent must exhibit a considerable functional overlap with the prototypical subject in the given language and, (ii) there must be either no canonically case-marked subject in the construction at all, or the coding subject properties must be assigned to a constituent that has less functional-semantic overlap with the prototypical subject than the oblique constituent. Furthermore, I claim that there is often some minor semantic change concomitant with the acquisition of subject coding properties. I have also introduced the control over the pre-stage property (CoP) which is a weaker entailment than Dowty's (1991) volitional involvement in event or state. It only denotes whether or not the experiencer had the choice to resist the experience to come about. Differently from Dowty's (1991) approach, which presupposes that the proto-role entailments are lexical and provided primarily by the predicate, it is assumed that some of the proto-role entailments may also stem from the case frame. This becomes especially obvious with the labile predicates that allow for more than one case frame, each resulting in different sets of the proto-role entailments.
eBook
Indefinite objects : scrambling, choice functions, and differential marking
A novel view of the syntax-semantics interface that analyzes the behavior of indefinite objects.
eBook
Information Structure and its Interfaces
The volume presents recent results in the field of Information Structure based on research on Italian and Italian dialects, and on further studies on several typologically different languages. The central idea is that Information Structure is not an exclusive matter of syntax but an interface issue which involves the interplay of at least the phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic levels of analysis. In addition, the volume is based on the study of actual language use and it adopts a cross-linguistic point of view.
eBook