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Topic, Focus, and Configurationality

Author : Werner Abraham

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 357 pages

File Size : 43,1 MB

Release : 1986-01-01

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027227241

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Book Description

Some fundamental questions regarding sentence structure in linguistics concern whether all languages, at some level of abstraction, have the same structure, and what are the basic categories with which to describe sentence structure. The contributors of this volume are specialized in two quite different languages: Hungarian and German. Of the German papers three are mainly about focus (Abraham, Jacobs, and Stechow-Uhman), whereas the remaining ones (Haider and Scherpenisse) are mainly about V-second. The Hungarian papers are all about focus, of which those of Kálman, Kiefer, Marácz, and De Mey-Marácz are about focussing in the stricter sense. Hunyadi, Kenesei and É. Kiss focus on the pre-verbal area in general and the interpretation of operators in Hungarian in particular. The remaining papers (Horvath, Komlósy, and Szabolczi) are on the position of the PRE-V, the position immediately after the finite verb.



Topic, Focus and Configurationality

Author : Werner Abraham

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 358 pages

File Size : 26,13 MB

Release : 1986-01-01

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9027282498

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Book Description

Some fundamental questions regarding sentence structure in linguistics concern whether all languages, at some level of abstraction, have the same structure, and what are the basic categories with which to describe sentence structure. The contributors of this volume are specialized in two quite different languages: Hungarian and German. Of the German papers three are mainly about focus (Abraham, Jacobs, and Stechow-Uhman), whereas the remaining ones (Haider and Scherpenisse) are mainly about V-second. The Hungarian papers are all about focus, of which those of Kálman, Kiefer, Marácz, and De Mey-Marácz are about focussing in the stricter sense. Hunyadi, Kenesei and É. Kiss focus on the pre-verbal area in general and the interpretation of operators in Hungarian in particular. The remaining papers (Horvath, Komlósy, and Szabolczi) are on the position of the PRE-V, the position immediately after the finite verb.



Configuring Topic and Focus in Russian

Author : Tracy Holloway King

Publisher : Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications

Page : 287 pages

File Size : 41,29 MB

Release : 1995-05-26

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9781881526629

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Book Description

This work examines word order. More accurately, it is the ordering of constituents that is discussed since prepositional phrases and most noun phrases form syntactic constituents and the encoding of topic and focus in Russian. As has long been observed, word order in Russian encodes specific discourse information: with neutral intonation, topics precede discourse-neutral constituents which precede foci. King extends this idea to show that word order encodes different types of topic and focus in a principled manner.



Events and Grammar

Author : Susan Rothstein

Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media

Page : 382 pages

File Size : 47,89 MB

Release : 2013-12-01

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9401139695

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Book Description

This volume covers a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. It addresses event arguments and thematic argument structure, the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions, events and the distinction between stage and individual level predicates, and the role of events in the analysis of plurality and scope relations. It is of interest to scholars and students of theoretical linguistics, philosophers of language, computational linguists, and computer scientists.



On Information Structure, Meaning and Form

Author : Kerstin Schwabe

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 584 pages

File Size : 38,50 MB

Release : 2007

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9789027233646

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Book Description

This collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.



Discourse Configurational Languages

Author : Katalin É Kiss

Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA

Page : 400 pages

File Size : 11,13 MB

Release : 1995

Category : Generative grammar

ISBN : 0195088344

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Book Description

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 well as 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 to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.



The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure

Author : Caroline Féry

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 993 pages

File Size : 35,10 MB

Release : 2016

Category : Computers

ISBN : 0199642672

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Book Description

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.



Configurationality

Author : László Marácz

Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Page : 380 pages

File Size : 40,23 MB

Release : 2019-11-05

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 3110884887

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Book Description

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.



The Grammar of Focus

Author : Georges Rebuschi

Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing

Page : 382 pages

File Size : 44,23 MB

Release : 1999

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 9789027227454

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Book Description

The grammar of focus has been studied in generative grammar from its inception. It has been the subject of intense, detailed cross-linguistic investigation for over 20 years, particularly within the Principles and Parameters framework. It is appropriate at this point, therefore, to take stock. Appraisal at this particular point is all the more legitimate because it comes at a time of general evaluation of the results of the profound activity that has characterized the Principles and Parameters framework. This general assessment has produced a radical new direction within that framework. The volume starts off with an introductory chapter that aims to provide an outline for the assessment, to be followed by an overview of the evolution of the study of focus in generative grammar, and a recapitulation of the principal issues associated with focus. These issues are taken up in the remaining chapters of the book, where various grammatical means of marking focus (as well as grammaticalization of focus marking) are analyzed in a wide variety of languages.



The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure

Author : Caroline Féry

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 1133 pages

File Size : 22,96 MB

Release : 2016-08-25

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 019100541X

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Book Description

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on focus, topic, and givenness. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including quantification, dislocation, and intonation, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including language processing and acquisition. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.