1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910970162303321

Autore

Meinunger André

Titolo

Syntactic aspects of topic and comment / / Andre Meinunger

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Amsterdam ; ; Philadelphia, : John Benjamins Pub., c2000

ISBN

9786612163388

9781282163386

1282163388

9789027299185

9027299188

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (259 p.)

Collana

Linguistik aktuell = Linguistics today ; ; v. 38

Disciplina

415

Soggetti

Grammar, Comparative and general - Topic and comment

Grammar, Comparative and general - Syntax

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Revision of the author's thesis (Discourse dependent DP (de-)placement), 1994/1995.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-238) and indexes.

Nota di contenuto

SYNTACTIC ASPECTS OF TOPIC AND COMMENT -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC page -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of frequent abbrevations -- Introduction: Some philosophical reflections -- Chapter 1. Discourse dependent tree splitting -- Chapter 2. The structure of the German VP -- Chapter 3. A trigger for scrambling -- Chapter 4. Agr nodes as topic hosts -- Chapter 5. The typological chapter -- Chapter 6. Notes on extraction -- Chapter 7. Conclusions -- References -- Name index -- Subject index -- The Series LINGUISTIK AKTUELL/LINGUISTICS TODAY.

Sommario/riassunto

The book focuses on the syntactic behavior of argument noun phrases depending on their discourse status. The main language of consideration is German, but it is shown that the observations can be carried over to other languages. The claim is that discourse-new arguments remain inside the VP where they are base generated. The hierarchy of argument projection is claimed to be fix within and across languages. With the major attention to direct objects it is then argued that discourse-old, here called topical noun phrases undergo raising to agreement projections. This movement can be realized differently:



scrambling, object agreement, clitic-doubling, differences in morphological case and stress pattern turn out to be analyzable as one underlying phenomenon. It is furthermore shown that many so-called subject:object asymmetries boil down to topic:non-topic differences, for example with respect to extraction. Thus, irrespectively of the argumental status discourse-new constituents do not act as barriers whereas topical arguments create (weak) islands.