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The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian, namely right dislocation and marginalization. Based on a vast aggre...
The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure
This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on focus, topic, and givenness. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including quantification, dislocation, and intonation, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including language processing and acquisition. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.
Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar
This book develops a minimalist approach to cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation. Ian Roberts argues that the essential insight of the principles-and-parameters approach to variation can be maintained - albeit in a somewhat different guise - in the context of the minimalist programme for linguistic theory. The central idea is to organize the parameters of Universal Grammar (UG) into hierarchies that define the ways in which properties of individually variant categories and features may act in concert. A further leading idea, which is consistent with the overall goal of the minimalist programme to reduce the content of UG, is that the parameter hierarchies are not directly determined by...
Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order
This book considers the implications of cross-linguistic word-order patterns for linguistic theory. One of the salient results of Joseph Greenberg's pioneering work in language typology was the notion of a 'harmonic' word-order type, whereby if the verb appears at the left or right edge of the verb phrase, other heads (e.g. prepositions, nouns) also tend to do so. Today, however, there is recognition in both the typological and generative literature that very many, and possibly even the majority of languages, fail to be fully harmonic in the sense that all head-complement pairs pattern alike. But does this imply limitless variation? The chapters in this volume, written by international schol...
Features of Person
A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of ...
Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure
This volume brings together exciting research on the relationship between syntax and information structure, developing an interface-based approach.
The Syntax of Topic, Focus, and Contrast
This book addresses how core notions of information structure (topic, focus and contrast) are expressed in syntax. The authors propose that the syntactic effects of information structure come about as a result of mapping rules that are flexible enough to allow topics and foci to be expressed in a variety of positions, but strict enough to capture certain cross-linguistic generalisations about their distribution. In particular, the papers argue that only contrastive topics and contrastive foci undergo movement and that this is because such movement has the function of marking the scope of contrast. Several predications are derived from this proposal: such as that a focus cannot move across a topic – whether the latter is in situ or not. Syntactic and semantic evidence in support of this proposal is presented from a wide range of languages (including Dutch, English, Japanese, Korean and Russian) and theoretical consequences explored. The first chapter not only outlines its theoretical aims, but also provides an introduction to information structure. As a consequence, the book is accessible to advanced students as well as professional linguists.
