A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780199557400)

In this volume, Luis Lez 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: Luis Lez
ISBN-10: 0199557403
ISBN-13: 9780199557400
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 05/15/2009
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 1.00d