The Even Yearbook 10 (2012)

#88

volume: 10 (2012)
pages: 26–48
author: Gizella Baloghné Nagy
title: Degrees of topicality on Alignment Syntax
keywords: syntax, Alignment Syntax, Optimality Theory, topicalisation, contrast
abstract: The aim of the paper is to provide a finer categorization of the syntactic notion ‘topic’, on the basis of pragmatic findings. It is shown that topics do not have an identical featural makeup cross-linguistically, and topics are distinguished according to their strength. Differences in the frequency and markedness of topicalisation are accounted for by the complexity of features responsible for topicality (e.g. aboutness, contrast). The analysis is carried out in the framework of Alignment Syntax as proposed by Newson (2008, 2010), in which the input is made up of feature bundles that are then manipulated by the syntactic component. Vocabulary insertion follows only after the ordering of features. This is done by alignment constraints of two types: precedence and adjacency requirements.
PDF:   full text
raw text: 12na-raw
refs: ⟨BibTeX⟩ ⟨RIS⟩ ⟨txt⟩