intro

[Larry LaFond]

Dear Chungmin and any others who may be interested,

I am interested in opinions on whether English information structure really
varies from some other languages (e.g. Italian, Portuguese, et al.) as much
as some researchers seem to think it does.  Some notice that, unlike
English, in Italian a subject that is coreference with the topic of a
discourse is necessarily dropped, and focused constituents are necessarily
positioned as right-edge constituents.  Although I do not question the
Italian data, I think English also favors right-edge constituency for
topics, and this is reflected by the decreasing discoursal acceptability of
the following:

    A:    Who was that on the telephone?
        B1:    Mary.
        B2:    That was Mary
        B3:    ?It was Mary who called.
        B4:    ??Mary was on the telephone.

Some syntacticians cite B4 as the evidence that English favors syntax of
discourse when it comes to information structure, but it seems to me to be
questionable.  Have any of you worked with these issues?  I'd be interested
in your thoughts.




>I noticed everyone introducing one's research interest(s). I am currently
>interested in working on Contrastive Topic, Topic and Focus, and their
>intonation patterns. Also, I am interested in negative polarity and free
>choice in relation to a game-theoretic concept of CONCESSION. I am
>interested in both functional and formal approaches to discourse.
>---Chungmin Lee clee at humnet.ucla.edu or clee at plaza.snu.ac.kr