Syntactic aspects of topic and comment
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Syntactic aspects of topic and comment
(Linguistik aktuell, v. 38)
J. Benjamins Pub., c2000
- : eur
- : us : hb
- Other Title
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Topic and comment
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Note
Revision of the author's thesis (Discourse dependent DP (de-)placement), 1995
Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-238) and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The book focuses on the syntactic behavior of argument noun phrases depending on their discourse status. The main language of consideration is German, but it is shown that the observations can be carried over to other languages. The claim is that discourse-new arguments remain inside the VP where they are base generated. The hierarchy of argument projection is claimed to be fix within and across languages. With the major attention to direct objects it is then argued that discourse-old, here called topical noun phrases undergo raising to agreement projections. This movement can be realized differently: scrambling, object agreement, clitic-doubling, differences in morphological case and stress pattern turn out to be analyzable as one underlying phenomenon. It is furthermore shown that many so-called subject:object asymmetries boil down to topic:non-topic differences, for example with respect to extraction. Thus, irrespectively of the argumental status discourse-new constituents do not act as barriers whereas topical arguments create (weak) islands.
Table of Contents
- 1. Acknowledgments
- 2. List of frequent abbrevations
- 3. Introduction: some philosophical reflections
- 4. 1. Discourse dependent tree splitting
- 5. 2. The structure of the German VP
- 6. 3. A trigger for scrambling
- 7. 4. Agr nodes as topic hosts
- 8. 5. The typological chapter
- 9. 6. Notes on extraction
- 10. 7. Conclusions
- 11. References
- 12. Name Index
- 13. Subject index
by "Nielsen BookData"