Syntactic aspects of topic and comment / Andre Meinunger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Meinunger, André.

Series:

Linguistik aktuell ; Bd. 38.

Linguistik aktuell = Linguistics today ; v. 38

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grammar, Comparative and general--Topic and comment.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (259 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Pub., c2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

SYNTACTIC ASPECTS OF TOPIC AND COMMENT

Editorial page

Title page

LCC page

Table of contents

Acknowledgments

List of frequent abbrevations

Introduction: Some philosophical reflections

Chapter 1. Discourse dependent tree splitting

Chapter 2. The structure of the German VP

Chapter 3. A trigger for scrambling

Chapter 4. Agr nodes as topic hosts

Chapter 5. The typological chapter

Chapter 6. Notes on extraction

Chapter 7. Conclusions

References

Name index

Subject index

The Series LINGUISTIK AKTUELL/LINGUISTICS TODAY.

Notes:

Revision of the author's thesis (Discourse dependent DP (de-)placement), 1994/1995.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-238) and indexes.

ISBN:

9786612163388

9781282163386

1282163388

9789027299185

9027299188

OCLC:

70768725