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This book offers substantial reading for those interested in the juncture of structure and context, notably a critical take on the important legacy of the preeminent linguist Knud Lambrecht, a pioneer of Information Structure.
Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.
The author describes and explains the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the nominal and pronominal elements in sentences of the types Ces Romains ils sont fous and Ils sont fous, ces Romains, which, in spite of their frequent occurrence, have so far received little attention among linguists and grammarians. He argues that far from having the marginal status of a linguistic anomaly, the cooccurrence in the same clause of coreferential nouns and pronouns is one formal manifestation of an important functional principle in modern French: the encoding of a topic-comment relationship in the surface structure of the sentence. The pronouns in sentences such as the ones mentioned are interpreted as agreement markers. The syntactic and semantic differences between topics and anti-topics are analyzed.
This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the 2000 'Going Romance' conference, held in Utrecht. The papers discuss current topics in formal syntax in Romance languages.
This volume, which represents a major advance on Simon Dik's final statement of the theory (1997), lays the foundation for the future evolution of FG towards a Functional Discourse Grammar. It rises to the double challenge of specifying the interface between discourse and grammar and of detailing the expression rules that link semantic representation and morphosyntactic form. The opening chapter, by Kees Hengeveld, sets out in programmatic form a new architecture for FG which both preserves the best of the traditional model and offers a place for numerous recent insights. The remaining chapters are devoted to refining and developing the programme laid down by Hengeveld, bringing in data from...
Left detachment constructions (LDs) (e.g. "un buffet de campagne, c est un meuble") are examined in a corpus of informal spontaneous conversation between educated native speakers of French. The overwhelming majority of these constructions are shown to have a clearly pragmatic motivation. The author s observations support a view of LD in French as a particular type of paratactic structure which should be seen primarily as a feature of unplanned discourse. The analysis partly builds on views expressed by Knud Lambrecht in an earlier contribution tot this series.
Based mostly on papers presented at the First International Conference on Construction Grammar, 2001.
An introduction to syntactic theory and analysis.
"The present book contains a selection of articles based on papers presented at the conference on 'Contrastive Information Structure Analysis' organised by Carsten Breul at the University of Wuppertal in March 2008"--Pref.
Traditionally the study of syntax is restricted to the study of what goes on within the boundaries of the prosodic sentence. Although the nature of clause combining within a prosodic sentence has always been a central concern of traditional syntax (in GG, e.g. it underlies important research on deletion and anaphora), work within a discourse analysis framework has hardly been done. Analyses like this are given in the present volume.