A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics) - Softcover

López, Luis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199557411 ISBN 13: 9780199557417

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Luis López is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of Locality and the Architecture of Syntactic Dependencies (2007) and co-editor, along with Rafael Núñez-Cedeño and Richard Cameron, of Language Knowledge and Language Use (2004).

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0199557411
• ISBN 13: 9780199557417
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320