Focus and Background in Romance Languages

Editors
| Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich
| Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027205797 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027289520 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
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Focus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.
[Studies in Language Companion Series, 112] 2009.  vii, 362 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“Overall, this is a very useful book for those interested in the field of information structure and the focus-background distinction. It gives the reader a chance to get intersting ideas from the current research in this area and to explore basic concepts and issues dealing with more recent theories of focus.”
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Rodríguez Ramalle, Teresa María
2023. Evidential Adverbs and Polarity: A Study from Spanish. Languages 8:4  pp. 243 ff. DOI logo
Dam, Lotte
2018. The Semantics of the Spanish Adjective Positions: a Matter of Focus. Research in Language 16:2  pp. 223 ff. DOI logo
Kaiser, Elsi
2016. Discourse level processing. In Visually Situated Language Comprehension [Advances in Consciousness Research, 93],  pp. 151 ff. DOI logo

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Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CFK: Grammar, syntax

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2009007669 | Marc record