new book

[Johan van der Auwera]

The following is a book which readers of this list might find of
interest. For more information please visit
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/ZUBPPS98

Prosody, Focus, and Word Order
Maria Luisa Zubizarreta

This monograph exemplifies a new trend in grammatical theory in which
researchers combine findings from more than
one area of linguistics. Specifically, the author looks at the
relationship between phrasal prominence and focus in
Romance and Germanic languages to provide new insights into how these
properties are grammatically articulated.
Building upon previous results in the field, she argues that phrasal
prominence (nuclear stress) reflects syntactic ordering.
There are two varieties of syntactic ordering. The first is the standard
asymmetric c-command ordering. The second is the
ordering derived from the primitive relation of selection holding
between a head and its associated argument. Part of the
difference between Germanic and Romance languages stems from a
difference in the way the two syntactic orderings
interact in the mapping onto phrasal prominence. The author shows that
the symmetry between syntactic ordering and
phrasal prominence so defined may be broken because of the independent
requirement that a focused constituent must
contain the most prominent element in the sentence. Two kinds of
processes come into play to repair the broken symmetry.
One is a process of deaccenting. The other is a process of movement,
called "p-movement." The author shows that a
proper understanding of the properties of p-movement can be attained
within the framework of the Minimalist Program.

Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is Associate Professor at the University of
Southern California.

Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 33

August 1998
6 x 9, 232 pp., 4 illus.
paper
ISBN 0-262-74021-4
cloth
ISBN 0-262-24041-6

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