Discourse Configurational Languages (Paperback)

Paperback. Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as wellas a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study toapply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus. This volume brings together twelve case studies of languages in which either topic and focus (or both) are configurationally encoded, i.e. languages in which those two notions are controlled by the syntactic structure of the language, if at all. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…