A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure

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.

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

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).