New Benjamins title - Dufter & Jacob: Focus and Background in Romance Languages

[Paul Peranteau]

Focus and Background in Romance Languages

Edited by Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob
Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich / Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg

Studies in Language Companion Series 112

2009. vii, 362 pp.

Hardbound:  978 90 272 0579 7 / EUR 99.00 / USD 149.00

e-Book  Not yet available
978 90 272 8952 0 / EUR 99.00 / USD 149.00

Focusbackground 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 focusbackground 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.


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Table of contents

Preface
Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob
Introduction
Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob
Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses
Jeanne Aptekman
Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish
Lisa Brunetti
Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance
Andreas Dufter
Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese
Mary Aizawa Kato and Ilza Ribeiro
Fronting and verum focus in Spanish
Manuel Leonetti and M. Victoria Escandell-Vidal
Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition
Estelle Leray
Major constituent order, information packaging, and narrative 
structure in two Middle French texts
Claude Muller
Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives
Edgar Onea and Klaus von Heusinger
Verb placement in Old Portuguese
Esther Rinke
Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses
Vieri Samek-Lodovici
Index

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