Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (10)
- Conference Proceeding (5)
- Working Paper (3)
- Article (1)
- Book (1)
Language
- English (18)
- German (1)
- Portuguese (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (20)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (20)
Keywords
- Topikalisierung (20) (remove)
In Jaeger (to appear) I have described clitic doubling in Bulgarian wh-interrogatives which constitutes a type of Superiority violation that cannot be accounted for by any existing analyses. By showing that clitic doubling of object wh-phrases marks topicality, I raised the hypothesis that many (or maybe all) so called Superiority effects in Bulgarian are due to topic-fronting of wh-phrases. Here, I provide further support for this hypothesis and show that there is also evidence for topic-fronting of non-object wh-phrases. Differences between colloquial and formal Bulgarian are restricted to how topical objects have to be realized at the source of the extraction (i.e. the VP), which also makes the account readily extendable to other multiple fronting languages. The complex ordering constraints on the left periphery are captured in a Linear Syntax approach (similar to but different from Kathol 2000).
In this paper I argue that there are three distinct constructions in Modern German in which a 'topic constituent' is detached to the left: (left-)dislocated topic ('left dislocation'), (left-)attached topic ('mixed left dislocation'), and (left-)hanging topic ('hanging topic'). Presupposing the framework of Integrational Linguistics, I provide syntactic and semantic analyses for them. In particular, I propose that these constructions involve the syntactic function (syntactic) topic, which relates the topic constituent to the remaining part of the sentence. Dislocated and attached topic constituents function in addition as a strong or weak (syntactic) antecedent of some resumptive 'd-pronoun' form.
Dislocated topic, attached topic, and hanging topic are in turn contrasted with 'free topics'. Being sentential units of their own, the latter are syntactically unconnected to the following sentence. In particular, they are not topic constituents.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
In my paper, I show that the so-called German right dislocation actually comprises two distinct constructions, which I label 'right dislocation proper' and 'afterthought'. These differ in their prosodic and syntactic properties, as well as in their discourse functions. The paper is primarily concerned with the right dislocation proper (RD). I present a semantic analysis of RD based on the 'separate performative' account of Potts (2004, 2005) and Portner (forthc.). This analysis allows a description of the semantic contribution of RD to its host sentence, as well as explaining certain semantic constraints on the kind of NP in the RD construction.
The claim advanced in this paper is that the presence of a left-dislocated element together with a resumptive clitic in Bulgarian is a special case of argument saturation with implications for the focus structure of the clause, while contrast involves discontinuous focus (contrastive topics/foci) with no clitics present in the derivation. Contrastive topic/focus constructions in Bulgarian can be united on the view that they involve (sets of) ordered pairs where the higher element is valuing a contrastive feature (cf. OCC in Chomsky 2001) while the element in the VP is a non-contrastive topic or focus. The contrastive feature participates in wh-structures but not in clitic-left-dislocated structures where pairing between arguments is 'accidental'.
Band II von II
Band I von II
Ever since Chomsky's "On Wh-Movement" (Chomsky 1977) it has been assumed that topicalization and wh-question formation can be analyzed as instances of the same operation. Leaving certain features aside, this proposal carries over to the analysis of unbounded dependency constructions in HPSG since structurally, topicalization does not differ from wh-question formation in the analysis suggested in Pollard & Sag (1994: 157-163). In the present paper, we challenge this assumption and suggest an alternative analysis of unbounded dependency constructions. Here, topicalization and wh-question formation are considered as structurally different at least in certain languages. They may, however, be structurally identical in other languages. This difference is empirically reflected in patterns of relative clause extraposition. As has been pointed out by Culicover & Rochemont (1990: 28), an extraposed relative clause must not take an antecedent contained in a VP if the VP is topicalized but the relative clause is not.
These proceedings, also online available as No. 46 in the ZAS Papers in Linguistics series under http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/index.html?publications_zaspil have resulted from the International Conference "Focus in African languages" held October 6-8, 2005 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. The conference was cooperatively organized by the latter, together with the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsforschungsbereich) 632, generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It was the first conference bringing together colleagues working on this topic from all over the world in such scale.
Even though this volume contains only ten contributions out of the 35 papers presented at the conference, it displays the wide range of approaches, subjects and languages studied in the field of information structure in African languages. The collection thus reflects the synergetic atmosphere of the conference.
In the name of all organizers (Laura Downing, Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz, Sabine Zerbian, Malte Zimmermann) we would like to take this opportunity to thank the participant reviewers and student assistants for their contributions by which the conference became such a fruitful forum for inspiring and seminal studies in this field. Also special thanks for their effort in copy editing to our research assistants Lars Marstaller and Paul Starzmann.
This paper discusses critically a number of developments at the heart of current syntactic theory. These include the postulation of a rich sequence of projections at the left periphery of the sentence; the idea that movement is tied to the need to eliminate uninterpretable features; and the conception put forward by Chomsky and others that advances in the past decade have made it reasonable to raise the question about whether language might be in some sense ‘perfect’. However, I will argue that there is little motivation for a highly-articulated left-periphery, that there is no connection between movement and uninterpretable features, and that there is no support for the idea that language might be perfect.