A derivational syntax for information structure

Luis López9780199557400, 0199557403

In this volume, Luis Lopez 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.