Syntax-Information Structure Interactions in the Sentential, Verbal and Nominal Peripheries PDF Download
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Author: Jimã(c)Nez-Fernàndez à Ngel L Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 9781527548459 Category : Languages : en Pages : 155
Book Description
This book considers the connection between information structure and syntax, exploring formal explanations to account for the distribution of discourse-based phenomena such as topic preposing and focus fronting across languages, with a particular focus on English and Spanish. It discusses issues such as word order and the diverse conditions under which types of topics and foci are licensed in different contexts. It shows the different behaviors of languages with respect to specific discourse-oriented operations to be the consequence of feature inheritance, which takes place in the different peripheries detected in the sentence. The book will be of interest to linguists and MA and PhD students of linguistics.
Author: Jimã(c)Nez-Fernàndez à Ngel L Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 9781527548459 Category : Languages : en Pages : 155
Book Description
This book considers the connection between information structure and syntax, exploring formal explanations to account for the distribution of discourse-based phenomena such as topic preposing and focus fronting across languages, with a particular focus on English and Spanish. It discusses issues such as word order and the diverse conditions under which types of topics and foci are licensed in different contexts. It shows the different behaviors of languages with respect to specific discourse-oriented operations to be the consequence of feature inheritance, which takes place in the different peripheries detected in the sentence. The book will be of interest to linguists and MA and PhD students of linguistics.
Author: Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527549143 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 155
Book Description
This book considers the connection between information structure and syntax, exploring formal explanations to account for the distribution of discourse-based phenomena such as topic preposing and focus fronting across languages, with a particular focus on English and Spanish. It discusses issues such as word order and the diverse conditions under which types of topics and foci are licensed in different contexts. It shows the different behaviors of languages with respect to specific discourse-oriented operations to be the consequence of feature inheritance, which takes place in the different peripheries detected in the sentence. The book will be of interest to linguists and MA and PhD students of linguistics.
Author: Theresa Biberauer Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191511749 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 439
Book Description
This book provides a critical investigation of syntactic change and the factors that influence it. Converging empirical and theoretical considerations have suggested that apparent instances of syntactic change may be attributable to factors outside syntax proper, such as morphology or information structure. Some even go so far as to propose that there is no such thing as syntactic change, and that all such change in fact takes place in the lexicon or in the phonological component. In this volume, international scholars examine these proposals, drawing on detailed case studies from Germanic, Romance, Chinese, Egyptian, Finnic, Hungarian, and Sámi. They aim to answer such questions as: Can syntactic change arise without an external impetus? How can we tell whether a given change is caused by information-structural or morphological factors? What can 'microsyntactic' investigations of changes in individual lexical items tell us about the bigger picture? How universal are the clausal and nominal templates ('cartography'), and to what extent is syntactic structure more generally subject to universal constraints? The book will be of interest to all linguists working on syntactic variation and change, and especially those who believe that historical linguistics and linguistic theory can, and should, inform one another.
Author: Arsalan Kahnemuyipour Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191570206 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
This book explores the nature of sentential stress, how it is assigned and its interaction with information structure. Its central thesis is that the position of sentential or nuclear stress, the element with the highest prominence in the sentence, is determined syntactically and that cross-linguistic differences in this respect follow from syntactic variations. Presented in a Chomskian multiple spell-out framework, the author develops the Sentential Stress Rule and provides a systematic way of accounting for a wide range of cross-linguistic facts, with data taken from Persian, English, German and Eastern Armenian. The author further proposes the Focus Stress Rule to handle the interaction between sentential structure and information structure. Sentential stress is thus determined through an interplay between two components, the default Sentential Stress Rule and the Focus Stress Rule. Syntactic phenomena are not, the author argues, triggered by phonology or prosodic motivations: the relationship between syntax and phonology is always from syntax to phonology. This important contribution to understanding processes at the syntax-phonology interface will interest syntacticians and phonologists at graduate level and above.
Author: David Adger Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9781402019098 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 464
Book Description
The syntactic periphery has become one of the most important areas of research in syntactic theory in recent years, due to the emergence of new research programmes initiated by Rizzi, Kayne and Chomsky. However research has concentrated on the empirical nature of clausal peripheries. The purpose of this volume is to explore the question of whether the notion of periphery has any real theoretical bite. An important consensus emerging from the volume is that the edges of certain syntactic expressions appear to be the locus of the connection between phrase structure, prosody, and information structure. This volume contains 16 papers by researchers in this area. The book: - contains an extensive introduction setting out the research questions addressed and setting the contributions in an overall theoretical context, - has a distinct comparative slant, - brings together work from a range of theoretical perspectives, while maintaining a unity of purpose, - could serve as the basis for a graduate course on peripheral positions, - contains papers addressing: = the question of the fine-grainedness of syntactic representations, = the relevance of syntactic edges to locality and semantic interpretation, = the nature of the dependencies connecting peripheral elements to the syntactic core. Audience: Academics and graduate students interested in syntax and its interfaces with semantics and prosody, acquisition of syntax, cross-linguistic comparison.
Author: Knud Lambrecht Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521587044 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.
Author: Ivona Kučerová Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139536230 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are united in rejecting accounts that assume designated syntactic positions associated with specific information-structural interpretations, and aim instead to derive information-structural conditions on word order and other phenomena from the way syntax and syntax-external systems interact. Beyond this shared aim, the authors of the various chapters advocate a number of approaches, based on different types of data (syntactic, semantic, phonological/phonetic) from a range of languages. The book is aimed at specialists in syntax and/or information structure, as well as students and linguists in related fields keen to familiarise themselves with current issues in this fascinating area of research.
Author: Luis López Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191565288 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
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.
Author: José Camacho Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 311022853X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
The study of the interaction between syntax and information structure has attracted a great deal of attention since the publication of foundational works on this subject such as Enric Vallduví's (1992) The Informational Component and Knud Lambrecht's (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. The book inserts itself in this contemporary interest by providing a collection of articles on different aspects of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the indigenous languages of The Americas. The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the some of the basic descriptive issues addressed in them, and of some of the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze them. The reader finds articles that focus mostly on empirical issues, while others are mostly oriented to theoretical issues. Diverse theoretical approaches are addressed, including Minimalism, Optimality-theoretic syntax, and Meaning-Text Theory. The volume includes articles on the following topics: the grammatical means to encode pragmatic notions in Tariana (A. Aikhenvald); the relation between clause structure and information structure in Lushootseed (D. Beck); the split distribution of null subjects in Shipibo (J. Camacho and J. Elías-Ulloa); the syntactic structure of left-peripheral discourse-related functions in Kuikuro (B. Franchetto and M. Santos), an agglutinative and head final language; word order and focus patterns in Yaqui (L. Guerrero and V. Belloro); SVO and topicalization in Yucatec Maya (R. Gutiérrez-Bravo and J. Monforte); the structure of the left-periphery in Karaja (Maia) and the interaction between the wh-words and polarity sensitivity in Southern Quechua (L. Sánchez).
Author: Kun-Long Liu Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The present thesis investigates the syntactic interactions with information structure in Squliq Atayal, an Austronesian language in Taiwan. Information structure (i.e. i-structure) is a representation of discourse-pragmatic information at the sentence level in accordance with addressers' mental states in given discourse-pragmatic contexts. By observing the interactions between syntax and information structure through both quantitative and qualitative evidence, the present thesis discovers that the syntactic structures of both unmarked and marked clauses in Squliq Atayal are formed not only for pure morphosyntactic motivations but also for discourse-pragmatic ones. The present thesis is composed of ten chapters. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to the ethnic background of Squliq Atayal and the research questions of the present thesis. Chapter 2 reviews the research on information structure, topic, focus and topicality, as well as the studies on Squliq Atayal. In addition, this chapter elaborates the methodology of the present thesis, including data sources, the orthography and our theoretical framework, Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Chapter 3 presents the basics of grammar of Squliq Atayal, which include the rigid word order Verb-Object/Oblique-Subject, case markers and multiple voices, with related theoretical discussion on the internal structure of c-structure and the lexically determined mapping between a-structure and f-structure. In Chapter 4, the theoretical model of feature-based discourse functions is proposed. There are four discourse features: givenness, aboutness, prominence and contrast, the values of which constitute twelve discourse functions in i-structure. In addition, the proposal of one-to-many mapping benefits the incorporation of gradience into LFG. Chapter 5 focuses on discourse evidence from topicality and information chaining. The former studies the topicality of subject, object, and oblique with the measurement proposed in Givón's works. The latter looks into how a piece of information connects two adjacent sentences. It shows that new information is highly restricted by syntax. Chapter 6 identifies what discourse functions in i-structure the grammatical functions of subject, object and oblique correspond to. The conflict between quantitative discourse evidence from topicality and qualitative syntactic evidence from question-answer tests verifies the one-to-one general mapping between subject and continuing topic with the application of the conversion function, which further proves that Squliq Atayal is a quasi-f-structural language and that the multiple voice system in Squliq Atayal belongs to both the role-remapping voice system and the information-salience one in linguistic typology. Chapter 7 and 8 offer a general description of the properties of grammaticalized topics and grammaticalized foci respectively. Despite the complexity of the one-to-many mapping from grammatical functions to discourse functions, it is explained by the Informational Mapping Theory proposed in the present thesis, which directly establishes the mapping between f-structure and i-structure. Chapter 9 takes a diachronic perspective on the emergence of split-subjecthood in the Austronesian languages. By comparing Squliq Atayal and Tsou, it is hypothesized that split-subjecthood emerged from the shift of primary continuing topic from nominative subjects to oblique actors in NAV clauses. Chapter 10 summarizes the contributions of the present thesis and points out some issues for further research.