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27 - Discourse and Information Structure in Heritage Languages

from Part III - Grammatical Aspects of Heritage Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2021

By
Oksana Laleko
Edited by
Silvina Montrul  and
Maria Polinsky
Silvina Montrul
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Maria Polinsky
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Summary

This chapter presents an overview of the state of the art in the study of the linguistic realization of information structure and discourse structure in heritage languages (HLs). It surveys the key issues pertaining to the encoding and interpretation of topic and focus, categories related to the distinction between given and new information in discourse, and their role in the development of mechanisms for the construal and maintenance of pronominal anaphoric dependencies in HL systems. Given the broad cross-linguistic variation in the expression of information structure and a vast range of phenomena that fall under its scope, the chapter provides overviews of the particular morphological, syntactic, prosodic, and lexical means employed for the encoding of information-structural relations in typologically different HLs, followed by discussion that identifies some common principles emerging from the surveyed studies and relates them to current issues in heritage language acquisition research. Finally, some directions for future work in this area are offered.

Keywords

information structuretopicfocuscontrastparticlesword orderprosodyanaphorapro-drop
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics , pp. 691 - 727
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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