Syntactic reflexes of information structure in heritage Spanish: Evidence from psych-predicate constructions

Author(s):  
Inmaculada Gómez Soler ◽  
Diego Pascual y Cabo

AbstractThis study examines the status of discourse-dependent syntactic properties in Spanish heritage grammars. In particular, we focus on pragmatically-driven word order patterns with Spanish psychological predicates (e. g.,

Author(s):  
Jochen Zeller

This chapter presents an overview of the most important syntactic properties of African languages and language families. It investigates the status of syntactic word categories (noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, etc.) and examines the different word orders and word order alternations that are observed phrase-internally and at the level of the clause. Also discussed are syntactic constructions such as the passive, wh-questions, and relative clauses, as well as morphological phenomena that bear a close relation to syntax, such as case and agreement. Special attention is drawn to syntactic traits which are attested in African languages but which occur rarely, or not at all, outside Africa, such as the SVO–S-Aux-OV word order alternation (found in Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages as well as in Northern Khoisan), the construct state nominal (a characteristic of Afro-Asiatic languages), or logophoricity (a feature of subgroups of Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic).


Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.


Lingua ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 120 (6) ◽  
pp. 1476-1501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Salem

Diachronica ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard

In the history of English one finds a mixture of V2 and non-V2 word order in declaratives for several hundred years, with frequencies suggesting a relatively gradual development in the direction of non-V2. Within an extended version of a cue-based approach to acquisition and change, this paper argues that there are many possible V2 grammars, differing from each other with respect to clause types, information structure, and the behavior of specific lexical elements. This variation may be formulated in terms of micro-cues. Child language data from present-day mixed systems show that such grammars are acquired early. The apparent optionality of V2 in the history of English may thus be considered to represent several different V2 grammars in succession, and it is not necessary to refer to competition between two major parameter settings. Diachronic language development can thus be argued to occur in small steps, reflecting the loss of micro-cues, and giving the impression that change is gradual.


2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Skopeteas

AbstractClassical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.


Author(s):  
Iuliia Zelena

The article is devoted to the study of marked and unmarked attributive constructions, considering the influence of semantic transfer mechanisms, taking into account their productive potential. Structuraland semantic characterization of types of attributive constructions is performed in light of two initial theories –in view ofreferentstatusand actual sentence fragmentation. An independent research of relationsbetween predication manifestations and the semanticand syntactic structure of a sentence has been performed by determining the valence properties of attributive verbs. The distinctionbetween different types of constructionswith the attribute complement isdescribed and it is specifiedthat there is a direct correlation between the type of attributive sentences and the emergence of predicative relation.The article is dedicated to the analysis of modification of the information structure and the status of the referent in sentences containing attributive object. Given the types of interpretation of attributive sentences and, based on the results of contextual analysis, it became possible to prove that change of argumentative structure in verbal group gives a reason to treat attributive verb with elements SN2 and X as a predicative focus of the sentence and permit to consider it as the complex secondary predicate.


Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.48 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Richardsen Westergaard

This article reports on a study of three children acquiring a dialect of Norwegian which allows two different word orders in certain types of WH-questions, verb second (V2) and and verb third (V3). The latter is only allowed after monosyllabic WH-words, while the former, which is the result of verb movement, is the word order found in all other main clauses in the language. It is shown that both V2 and V3 are acquired extremely early by the children in the study (before the age of two), and that subtle distinctions between the two orders with respect to information structure are attested from the beginning. However, it is argued that V3 word order, which should be ìsimplerî than the V2 structure as it does not involve verb movement, is nevertheless acquired slightly later in its full syntactic form. This is taken as an indication that the V3 structure is syntactically more complex, and possibly also more marked.


Author(s):  
Daniel Valois

AbstractThis paper discusses and expands upon various ideas concerning the structure of nominals in general (DPs) and of French nominals in particular, with the underlying idea that CP and DP have parallel argumental and functional structure. The main topics discussed are: (i) the projection of arguments in French and English; (ii) the parameterization of N-movement, which accounts for some word order differences between French and English; (iii) the distribution of adjectives in event nominals, which reflects that of adverbs in clauses in both French and English; (iv) a peculiar case of rightward movement out of DP that provides further evidence for N-movement as well as for the claim concerning the prohibition on right adjunction of genitive nominals within DP; and (v) extraction facts that are a consequence of the status of [Spec, DP] as an A′-position in French.


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