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This collection investigates the architecture of focus in linguistic theory from different theoretical perspectives. Research on focus and information structure in the last four decades has shown that the phenomenon of focus is highly complex, the theoretical approaches manifold, and the data highly sensitive. The main emphasis has been placed on the integration of the notion of focus in generative grammar. In recent years, however, the approaches to focus and information structure underwent a radical change in perspective. The theoretical concept of focus, its related terms and phenomena became the object of research. Along with it, the research questions shifted: instead of locating focus ...
Information structure deals with the linguistic forms and techniques that support the integration of what is said into the current informational and attentional state of the addressee. This shows in categories like topic-comment structuring, focus to highlight expressions, marking of givenness and of presupposed information, and ways to indicate that the information provided is restricted. The book relates infor-mation structure to theoretical models of grammar, to computation and modelling and brings together what is known about the expression of information structure in human language with regard to its empirical investigation, its psycholinguistic aspects and the acquisition of informatio...
This study explores the grammar of focus particles in German. It gives a thorough description and analysis of focus particle constructions and links their syntactic, semantic, and information structural properties to their prosodic characteristics. The study also shows that focus particles present a particularly well-suited subject for the investigation of the modularity of grammar in general. The first part of the book deals with the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of focus particle constructions and results in a modular account of the relation between their word order, information structure, and meaning. The second part presents a corpus study and several speech production and perception experiments investigating the prosodic realization of the constructions. The integration of these two lines of research results in a comprehensive theory of focus particles and of the interaction of grammar and information structure in German.
This monograph addresses two issues, phases and adverbials. It proposes that there is a correlation between the phase structure, the tripartite quantificational structure and the information structure of the sentence. This correlation plays an important role not only in referential and information-structural properties of arguments and the verb but also in adverbial properties. For instance, the study shows that certain sentence adverbials can occur in the sentence-final position in the vP phase when they represent the extreme value with respect to the set of focus alternatives. The proposed correlation also becomes important in anaphoric relations with respect to adjuncts. Only an R-expression spelled out and interpreted in the CP phase of an adjunct clause can corefer with the coindexed pronoun. The study also discusses adverbial ordering and shows that the relative order of certain adverbials can be reversed if they occur in different phases. The monograph will appeal to syntacticians and linguists interested in the relationship between syntax and its interfaces.
The volume contains articles that focus on the interface between linguistic and conceptual knowledge. The issues addressed in the volume include the preconditions of every level of the language system that are required for the transformation of linguistic information into conceptual representations. In accordance with Chomsky’s Minimalist language model, the language system is embedded into the performative systems where language is a part of the cognitive competence of human beings, i.e. system of articulation and perception (A/P) and the conceptual-intentional system (C/I). During the formation of linguistic structures, every performative system obtains well-formed representations as its...
This volume is the third one of the revived series of "Travaux," which was the well-known international book series of the classical Prague Linguistic Circle, published in the years 1929-39. The tradition of the Circle still attracts attention in broad circles of European and American linguistics.
Contrastive lexical semantics was the main topic of an International Workshop at the University of Münster in May, 1997. It was addressed from different perspectives, from the pragmatic perspective of a corpus-oriented approach as well as from the model-oriented perspective of sign theoretic linguistics. Whereas the rule-governed model-oriented approach is necessarily restricted to subsets of vocabulary, the pragmatic approach aims to analyse and describe the whole vocabulary-in-use. After the pragmatic turn, lexical semantics can no longer be seen as a discipline on its own but has to be developed as an integral part of a theory of language use. Essential features of individual languages can be discovered only by looking beyond the limits of our mother languages and including a contrastive perspective. Within a pragmatic, corpus-oriented approach essential new ideas are discussed, mainly the insight that single words can no longer be considered to be the lexical unit. It is the complex multi-word lexical unit a pragmatic approach has to deal with.
The present volume was brought together on the occasion of Petr Sgall's 60th birthday. It bears testimony to the multifarious and variegated character of his background and activities. It is to be hoped that this kind of variety will contribute as Petr Sgall strives to do to a broader and deeper understanding and cooperation between linguists of various backgrounds. The volume contains sections on I. Semiotics and semantics; II. The Sentence and Its Structure; III. Below the Sentence Structure; IV. Topic and Focus; V. Text and Context; VI. Formal and Computational Methods.
Review text: "This volume contains exciting and potentially valuable new contributions that attempts to expand our understanding of the role of phonology and phonetics in speech perception. This volume has much to contribute for not just linguistics, but psycholinguistics more generally, and so concepts contained in this volume should form the basis of many discussions in future speech perception studies."Andrew Blyth in: Linguist List 21.3465.