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.
| ISBN: | 9780199557400 |
| Publication date: | 26th February 2009 |
| Author: | Luis , University of Illinois, Chicago López |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 320 pages |
| Series: | Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics |
| Genres: |
Semantics, discourse analysis, stylistics Grammar, syntax and morphology |