Discourse Related Features And Functional Projections

In this volume Silvio Cruschina uses a comparative analysis to determine the syntax of the functional projections associated with discourse-related features, and to account for the marked word orders found in Romance-particularly in the fronting phenomena. Several language-specific analyses of discourse-related phenomena have been proposed in the literature, including studies on the notions of topic and focus in Romance, but the lack of a uniform definition of these notions, together with different assumptions in relation to the triggering features, has led to the perception that the Romance languages show many distinct and heterogeneous properties with respect to dislocation and fronting constructions. This volume is intended to complement the existing literature by integrating recent work on the topic and by emphasizing original and unifying reflections that combine and coordinate diverse elements. Cruschina's investigations clarify fundamental notions such as topic, focus, and contrast, drawing on new data from Sicilian, Sardinian, and other Romance varieties.

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.

This book presents an experimental and theoretical investigation of the interplay between information structure, word order alternations, and prosody in Italian. Left/right dislocations, focus fronting, and other reordering phenomena are analyzed, taking into account their morphosyntactic and prosodic properties. It is argued that a restricted set of discourse-related properties are inserted in the numeration as formal features. These discourse-related features drive the syntactic derivation and the formation of the prosodic representation in compliance with the T-model of grammar. Based on the cartographic approach, this study proposes a model of the syntax–prosody interface in which the phonological computation of prosody is fed by syntactically encoded properties of information structure. However, this computation is also governed by structural requirements intrinsic to the phonological domain, and thus, a bijective relation between information structure and prosodic representation is not guaranteed. The monograph will be of interest to any linguist concerned with syntax, information structure, and prosody.

Particles have for the longest time been ignored by linguistic research. School-type grammars ignored them since they did not fit into pre-conceived notions of categories, and since they did not seem to enter into grammatical relations commonly discussed in the genre. Only in the last century did some publications discuss particles – and even then only from the perspective of their discourse and pragmatic functions, i.e. their dependance on certain previous contexts, and concluded that the function of particles for the grammar of sentences and their interpretation remains obscure. The current volume presents 11 new articles that take a fresh look at particles: As it turns out, particles inform many aspects of syntax and semantics, too – both diachronically and synchronically: Particles are shown to have fascinating syntactic properties with respect to projection, locality, movement and scope. Their interpretative contributions can be studied with the rigorous methods of formal semantics. Cross-linguistic and diachronic investigations shed new light on the genesis and development of these intriguing – and under-estimated – kinds of lexical elements.

This volume contains eight papers, all presented at the 9th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (University of Debrecen, 2009), addressing a great variety of topics in the syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics of Hungarian, and also offering discussion of related phenomena in other languages. The volume includes a syntax-based analysis of Hungarian external causatives in the framework of the Minimalist Program (MP); argumentation for the lack of phonological or acoustic evidence for secondary stress in Hungarian; an MP approach to a Hungarian modal construction with a counterfactual, reproaching reading; empirical arguments for assuming that in the case of embedded sentences factivity is irrelevant for syntax, and clauses are differentiated by referentiality; a comprehensive semantic account of result states in Hungarian; a claim that certain paradigmatic/morphophonological variation in the Hungarian verbal paradigm is caused by conflicting paradigmatic pressures; a purely interface-based MP account of the syntax of identificational focus in Hungarian; and an analysis of arbitrarily interpreted null subjects in Hungarian with third person, plural agreement on the finite and infinitival verb. The volume will be of interest not just to scholars working on Hungarian, but to a general audience of generative linguists.

The contents of this volume are a selection from the papers given at the Sixth International Conference on Functional Grammar (ICFG), which was held in York, at the University College of Ripon and York St John, from 18 to 22 August, 1994. Functional Grammar as understood in the ICFGs and in this volume is the linguistic model as proposed by Simon Dik, and to date most extensively described and discussed in Dik (1989). The indebtedness of the FG-community to Simon Dik, who died six months after the conference was held, is great indeed. The editors hope that this volume is a fitting tribute to his work.

Language is acquired, comprehended, and produced in a rule-based fashion; nonetheless, variation in language is constantly observable--from alternating forms used by second and third language speakers to systematic changes in linguistic rules which eventually come to characterize entirely different language varieties. Therefore, understanding variation helps linguists understand the very forces that shape language itself. This book presents quantitative and qualitative research from interdisciplinary perspectives: second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, discourse studies and syntax. These ten chapters shed empirical light on the variables that result in systematic variation in language. From the influence of previously learned languages on the acquisition of a third language, to how social variables impact the phonetics of French political speaking styles, to how different types of comparatives in Jordanian Arabic can be distinguished by features within a syntactic hierarchy of functional projections, the chapters identify the linguistic factors which are behind the heterogeneity of structures in their individual topics of investigation.