Interface Explorations

Band 29:
Gupton, Timothy: The Syntax-Information Structure Interface. Clausal Word Order and the Left Periphery in Galician. XVIII/290 S. - Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter, 2014.
ISBN: 978-1-61451-271-4
Alternative Medien:
E-Book (PDF). Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter. ISBN: 978-1-61451-205-9
E-Book (EPUB). Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter. ISBN: 978-1-5015-0030-5

It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of generative grammar, there is still uncertainty with respect to the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of languages. According to canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are arguments (A-elements). However, following non-canonical analyses, preverbal subjects are not arguments, but rather A’-elements that behave like topical preverbal direct and indirect objects, which have received a CLLD analysis in the literature (e.g. Cinque 1990). The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are non-arguments, one must question the universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Agnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths.

Galician is an underdocumented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book, I develop an experimental program for establishing clausal word order preferences for a number of information structure contexts. The preference data suggest that preverbal subjects behave like canonical elements, and not CLLD elements. These results inform the model of the preverbal field that I propose for Galician, which also takes into account the enclisis-proclisis divide and reco.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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List of Tables and Figures S. XIII
Preface S. XVII
 
1.   Introduction S. 1
2.   The interaction between syntax and information structure S. 18
3.   Methodology S. 109
4.   Statistical analysis of quantitative and qualitative measures S. 139
5.   Toward a Left-peripheral Syntactic Analysis of Galician S. 183
6.   Appendix A: Linguistic questionnaire for initial tasks S. 248
7.   Appendix B: Task 1: Appropriateness Judgment Task S. 252
8.   Appendix C: Task 2: Word order preference task S. 259
9.   Appendix D: Task 3: Recorded field interview S. 267
10.   Appendix E: Follow-up WPT: for narrow-focus in Task 2 S. 268
 
References S. 274