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26 - Information Structure

from Part Five - Semantics and Pragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2022

By
Silvio Cruschina ,
Ion Giurgea  and
Eva-Maria Remberger
Edited by
Adam Ledgeway  and
Martin Maiden
Adam Ledgeway
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Martin Maiden
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter deals with the analyses of the grammatical phenomena that have been related to information structure in the Romance languages, and that have played a central role in the general research on the encoding of information-structure notions in the grammar and at the interfaces. An overview is presented of this work, which has offered a great contribution to our current understanding of both empirical and theoretical issues. Highly debated questions are addressed, such as the relationship between focus and newness and between topic and givenness, the grammatical and interpretive correlates of different types of focus and topics, and the ‘aboutness’ nature of topics in contrast with subjects.

Keywords

information structuretopicfocussubjectfrontingdislocationtopicalizationinversionnew informationold information
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics , pp. 784 - 814
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Selected References

Belletti, A. (2004). ‘Aspects of the low IP area’. In Rizzi, L. (ed.), The Structure of IP and CP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, II. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 16–51.Google Scholar
Benincà, P. (2001). ‘The position of topic and focus in the left periphery’. In Cinque, G. and Salvi, G. (eds), Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essays Offered to Lorenzo Renzi. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 39–64.Google Scholar
Cruschina, S. (2012). Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruschina, S. (2016). ‘Information and discourse structure’. In Ledgeway, A. and Maiden, M. (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 596–608.Google Scholar
Cruschina, S., and Remberger, E.-M. (2017). ‘Focus fronting.’ In Dufter, G. and Stark, E. (eds), Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 502–35.Google Scholar
Giurgea, I. (2016). ‘On the interpretation of focus fronting in Romanian’, Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics 18: 37–61.Google Scholar
Giurgea, I. (2017). ‘Preverbal subjects and topic marking in Romanian’, Revue Roumaine de Linguistique 62: 279–322.Google Scholar
Leonetti, M. (2017). ‘Basic constituent orders’. In Dufter, A. and Stark, E. (eds), Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 887–932.Google Scholar
Remberger, E.-M. (2010). ‘Left peripheral interactions in Sardinian’, Lingua 120: 555–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Remberger, E.-M. (2014). ‘A comparative look on focus fronting in Romance’. In Dufter, A. and Toledo y Huerta, À. O. (eds), Left Sentence Peripheries of Spanish. Diachronic, Variationist and Comparative Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 383–418.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1997). ‘The fine structure of the left periphery’. In Haegeman, L. (ed.), Elements of Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 281–337.Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, M. L. (1998). Prosody, Focus and Word Order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar

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