A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure

✍ Scribed by Luis Lopez

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 308
• Series: Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover Page......Page 1
Title Page......Page 4
Contents......Page 6
Preface......Page 10
Abbreviations......Page 12
1. Introduction......Page 14
2. Information structure......Page 35
3. The syntax of dislocations and focus fronting......Page 98
4. The derivation of information structure......Page 159
5. Moving objects......Page 184
6. Dislocation debates......Page 225
References......Page 290
Index......Page 302