Focus and Background in Romance Languages
Editors
| Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich
| Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg
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
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
vii
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1–18
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19–42
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43–81
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83–121
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123–154
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155–204
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205–238
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239–279
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281–308
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309–332
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333–357
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Index
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359–362
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“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.”
Elena Martínez Caro, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in Functions of Language Vol. 18:2, 2011
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Kaiser, Elsi
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Subjects
BIC Subject: CFK – Grammar, syntax
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General