The Syntax Information Structure Interface
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The Syntax-Information Structure Interface
Author: Timothy Gupton
language: en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date: 2014-10-24
It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of research in generative grammar, there is still uncertainty and debate surrounding the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of null-subject languages. The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are analyzed as non-arguments, it calls into question the proposed universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths. Galician, spoken in the northwest of Spain, is an under-documented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, the author details an experimental program for establishing clausal word order appropriateness and preferences in a variety of information structure contexts, while informing theoretical debate on preverbal subjects. The experimental methodology and information structure assumptions employed create several testable predictions. The statistical data suggest that Galician is a predominantly SVO language and that preverbal subjects behave like canonical subjects, and not CLLD constituents. The empirical data discussed inform the modified model of the preverbal field that the author proposes for Galician, which takes into account a number of recent analyses of Western Iberian Romance clausal phenomena such as the enclisis-proclisis divide, topicalization, focalization, and recomplementation.
The Syntax-Information Structure Interface
Central questions addressed are the analysis of subjects in Spanish and English (DP vs. NP and null vs. preverbal vs. postverbal) and the nature of constructions such as topicalization, left-dislocation, and focus preposing.
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.