Download or read book The Syntax of Topic Focus and Contrast written by Ad Neeleman and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Syntax of Topic Focus and Contrast written by Reader in Linguistics Ad Neeleman and published by . This book was released on 2013-03-08 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main description: This book addresses how core notions of information structure (topic, focus and contrast) are expressed in syntax. We propose that the syntactic effects of information structure come about as a result of mapping rules 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. We discuss syntactic and semantic evidence from a range of languages. This book is of interest to professional linguists as well as advanced students.
Download or read book The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus written by Liliana Sánchez and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an innovative analysis that relates informational structure, syntax and morphology in Quechua. It provides a minimalist account of the relationship between focus, topic, evidentiality and other left-peripheral features and sentence-internal constituents marked with suffixes that have been previously considered of a pragmatic nature. Intervention effects show that these relationships are also of a syntactic nature. The analysis is extended to morphological markers that appear on polarity sensitive items and wh-words. The book also provides a brief overview of the main characteristics of Quechua syntax as well as additional bibliographical information.
Download or read book The Interaction of Focus Givenness and Prosody written by Vieri Samek-Lodovici and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression is systematically affected by the syntactic expression of discourse-givenness. The proposed analysis disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by the most productive operations affecting discourse given phrases at the right periphery, namely right dislocation and marginalization. On this basis, it shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that instances of left-peripheral focalization only arise when focus obligatorily evacuates a larger right-dislocating phrase, giving rise to a distribution of leftward-moved foci that generalizes well beyond the cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In its final chapter, the book examines the syntax-prosody interface, showing how focalization in situ and other key properties follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta's (1998) analysis of p-movement and the role of prosody in shaping syntax. Overall, this book offers an evidence-backed radical departure from current views of focalization based on a fixed focus projection at the left periphery of the clause. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure written by Caroline Féry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-21 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Architecture of Topic written by Valéria Molnár and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains innovative papers that target the linguistic status of topic at the interface between grammar and discourse. The purpose of the volume is to discuss the universal properties of topics and, at the same time, to document the range of discourse-semantic and grammatical variation within this phenomenon in European languages. The volume is structured accordingly: (i) theoretical foundations of topicality in grammar and discourse; (ii) discourse-semantic correlates of topicality; (iii) variation in the grammatical (external and internal) encoding of topicality; (iv) topics from the diachronic perspective. The articles take different perspectives, including contrastive studies of modern languages, studies on diachronic development, and typological generalizations. They also take into consideration various types of empirical data – introspective data, semi-spontaneously produced data, experimental data and language corpora. The articles in this volume show that the concept of topic is necessary for the description and explanation of a number of discourse-semantic phenomena. They present a state of the art account of the architecture of topic while making recent research on the phenomenon accessible to a wider readership.
Download or read book Information Structure and Sentence Form written by Knud Lambrecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-13 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Alternatives to Cartography written by Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s generative grammar recognized that functional material is able to project syntactic structure in conformity with the X-bar-format. This insight soon led to a considerable increase in the inventory of functional projections. The basic idea behind this line of theorizing, which goes by the name of cartography, is that sentence structure can be represented as a template of linearly ordered positions, each with their own syntactic and semantic import. In recent years, however, a number of problems have been raised for this approach. For example, certain combinations of syntactic elements cannot be linearly ordered. In light of such problems a number of alternative accounts have been explored. Some of them propose a new (often interface-related) trigger for movement, while others seek alternative means of accounting for various word order patterns. These alternatives to cartography do not form a homogeneous group, nor has there thus far been a forum where these ideas could be compared and confronted with one another. This volume fills that gap. It offers a varied and in-depth view on the position taken by a substantial number of researchers in the field today on what is presumably one of the most hotly debated and controversial issues in present-day generative grammar.
Download or read book Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond written by Marco García García and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages, and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of linguistic disciplines and perspectives such as language acquisition and language contact, this volume provides a state-of-the-art discussion on central issues of focus realization. These include the interaction between prosody, syntax, and pragmatics, the typology of word order and intonation languages, the differentiation between focus and related notions such as contrast and presupposed modality, and the role of synchronic variation and change. The studies presented in this volume cover a broad range of Romance languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, and different varieties of Spanish. Moreover, the book also offers new insights into non-Romance languages such as English, German, and Quechua.
Download or read book The Meaning of Focus Particles written by Ekkehard König and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focus particles (words such as even, only, also) play an important role in English, in various syntactic and semantic domains, but their characteristics pose numerous problems for current syntactic frameworks and semantic theories. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the syntax, meaning and use of focus particles and related function words in English and many other languages. It also provides a historical perspective on their development.
Download or read book Syntax and Its Limits written by Raffaella Folli and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, leading linguists explore the empirical scope of syntactic theory, by concentrating on a set of phenomena for which both syntactic and nonsyntactic analyses appear plausible. The volume is organized into four thematic sections: architectures; syntax and information structure; syntax and the lexicon; and lexical items at the interfaces
Download or read book East and West of The Pentacrest written by Timothy Gupton and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of contemporary essays and squibs exploring the mental representation of Spanish and other languages in the Romance family. Although largely formal in orientation, they incorporate experimental and corpus data to inform questions of synchronic and diachronic importance. As a whole, these contributions explore two areas of particular interest to linguistic theorizing. The first is linguistic interfaces with chapters on syntax-information structure, syntax-prosody, syntax-semantics, and lexicon-phonology. The second consists of explorations of noun phrases of all sizes—from clitics to nominalized clauses. The results and conclusions of these studies encourage researchers to continue to explore individual languages in particular in order to gain insight on human language in general. This edited volume in honor of Dr. Paula Kempchinsky is reflective of the diversity of approaches that inspired her teaching, research, and mentoring for over thirty years at the University of Iowa and beyond.
Download or read book Discourse Particles in Asian Languages Volume II written by Hiroki Nomoto and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the second in a two-part collection of research on discourse particles focusing exclusively on the languages of Asia from the perspective of formal as well as non-formal semantics and pragmatics. Despite increasing interest in discourse particles, most research in the area (particularly within formal semantics and pragmatics) focuses on a restricted set of languages, and there has been little consensus on the proper formal treatment of particles. The term "discourse particles" has been used to cover a broad range of phenomena, including such things as "sentence-final particles," "discourse adverbs," and other related phenomena. In recent years, there has been extensive development of the formal approach to discourse particles, which often treats these words as devices for marking information updates. It is vital however, to extend this data to non-Western languages, like Malay, Thai, or Vietnamese. These two volumes are the first to give an exclusive focus on particles in non-European languages (in this case, Asian languages), from the perspective of formal and non-formal semantics and pragmatics. This second volume includes chapters on Tagalog, Kimaragang Dusun (Malaysia), Malay, Singlish (Colloquial Singapore English), Thai, and Vietnamese. The chapters are informed by recent theoretical work in formal and non-formal semantics and pragmatics relating to the meaning of particles. The collection contributes to our theoretical understanding of the meaning of discourse particles and to empirical knowledge of discourse particles in the languages of Asia. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and scholars of semantics and pragmatics.
Download or read book Information Structure Within Interfaces written by Asli Gürer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The realization of information structural units has been intriguing as information packaging has reflections in the semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and prosodic domains. This book extends the investigation by bringing data from all these domains and presenting an analysis for the model of grammar.Based on three-way classification for information packaging, semantic investigation presents insights on compositionality and positional restrictions for topic, focus and discourse anaphoric phrases. The prosodic experimental studies reveal how focus shapes prosody and how diverse languages encode such information packaging. Drawing on the findings of experimental studies reflecting the interaction of information structure with quantifier scope, negation and aspectual markers,clause internal functional projections and scope domains are proposed in the syntactic analysis. The analysis offers new perspectives for movement operations, functional categories, phases which are central themes for the Minimalist Program.Building on the investigation of information structure within semantic, prosodic, syntactic perspectives, the book will appeal to researchers working on either of these domains or their interfaces.
Download or read book The Syntax of Russian written by John F. Bailyn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential guide to Russian syntax, which examines major syntactic structures and grammatical puzzles of the language.
Download or read book Focus and Background in Romance Languages written by Andreas Dufter and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers presented at a workshop, Focus and background in Romance languages, that convened during the 30th Romanistentag, in Vienna, Austria, 23-27 September 2007.
Download or read book Exploring Nanosyntax written by Lena Baunaz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring Nanosyntax provides the first in-depth introduction to the framework of nanosyntax, which originated in the early 2000s as a formal theory of language within Principles and Parameters framework. Deploying a radical implementation of the cartographic "one feature - one head" maxim, the framework provides a fine-grained decomposition of morphosyntactic structure, laying bare the building blocks of the universal functional sequence. This volume makes three contributions: First, it presents the framework's constitutive tools and principles, and explains how nanosyntax relates to cartography and to Distributed Morphology. Second, it illustrates how nanosyntactic tools and principles can be applied to a range of empirical domains of natural language. In doing so, the volume provides a range of detailed crosslinguistic investigations which uncover novel empirical data and which contribute to a better understanding of the functional sequence. Third, specific problems are raised and discussed and new theoretical strands internal to the nanosyntactic framework are explored. Bringing together original contributions by senior and junior researchers in the field, Exploring Nanosyntax offers the first all-encompassing view of this promising framework, making its methodology and exciting results accessible to a wide audience.
