Focus and background in romance languages
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Focus and background in romance languages
（Studies in language companion series / series editors, Werner Abraham, Michael Noonan, v. 112）
John Benjamins, c2009
- : hbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Summary: Papers presented at a workshop, Focus and background in Romance languages, that convened during the 30th Romanistentag, in Vienna, Austria, 23-27 September 2007
Contents of Works
- Introduction / Andreas Duffer and Daniel Jacob
- Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses / Jeanne Aptekman
- Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish / Lisa Brunetti
- Clefting and discourse organization : Comparing Germanic and Romance / Andreas Dufter
- Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese / Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro
- Fronting and verum focus in Spanish / Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal
- Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition / Estelle Leray
- Major constituent order, information packaging, and narrative structure in two Middle French texts / Claude Muller
- Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives / Edgar Onea and Klaus von Heusinger
- Verb placement in Old Portuguese / Esther Rinke
- Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses / Vieri Samek-Lodovici
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Focus-background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus-background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.
Table of Contents
- 1. Preface (by Dufter, Andreas)
- 2. Introduction (by Dufter, Andreas)
- 3. Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses (by Aptekman, Jeanne)
- 4. Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish (by Brunetti, Lisa)
- 5. Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance (by Dufter, Andreas)
- 6. Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese (by Kato, Mary Aizawa)
- 7. Fronting and verum focus in Spanish (by Leonetti, Manuel)
- 8. Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition (by Leray, Estelle)
- 9. Major constituent order, information packaging, and narrative structure in two Middle French texts (by Muller, Claude)
- 10. Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives (by Onea, Edgar)
- 11. Verb placement in Old Portuguese (by Rinke, Esther)
- 12. Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses (by Samek-Lodovici, Vieri)
- 13. Index
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