Wow! eBook
A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure
Author(s): Luis Lopez (Author)
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
- Publication Date: 15 May 2009
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 308 pages
- ISBN-10: 0199557411
- ISBN-13: 9780199557417
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
At the cutting edge of current syntactic theorizing and interface-inspired approaches to discourse/pragmatics
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).
