A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure

By Luis López

Book Overview

In this volume, Luis L pez 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199557411
• ISBN13: 9780199557417
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.1"