Introduction and overview

The choice of a marked word order typically goes hand in hand with a marked pragmatic potential. Quite a number of different accounts for this observation have been proposed, which range from the direct encoding of pragmatic functions in the syntactic representation (as in the cartographic model of Rizzi 1997) to the idea that information structure plays no role at all for syntax, and is only loosely linked to surface structure, e.g., as a consequence of the prosodic properties of the sentence, or as a consequence of relatively high processing costs of marked structures.

In their analysis of movement to the left periphery (Spec,CP) in Czech and German, Fanselow and Lenertová (2011) argue for an indirect interaction of syntax and information structure. Movement is triggered by an unspecific edge feature of Comp (in the sense of Chomsky 2008), and the choice of the category to be moved is constrained by the theory of linearization (adapted from Fox and Pesetsky 2005) rather than by considerations of information structure.