A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure [Paperback]

In this volume, Luis L??pez 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.

1. Introduction
2. Information Structure
3. The Syntax of Dislocations and Focus Fronting
4. The Derivation of Information Structure
5. Moving Objects
6. Dislocation Debates
References

Luis L??pez is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author ofLocality and the Architecture of Syntactic Dependencies(2007) and co-editor, along with Rafael N????ez-Cede??o and Richard Cameron, ofLanguage Knowledge and Language Use(2004).