TY  - CHAP
AB  - The effects of focus on syntax differ across languages: some languages encode focus in situ, while in other languages focus induces an array of constructions that deviate from the canonical configuration, such as non-canonical orders or clefts. This article presents semi-spontaneously produced data from American English, Québec French, Hungarian, and Georgian which shows that speakers of these languages select different structures under identical discourse conditions. The observed cross-linguistic differences are accounted for by means of grammatical properties of the object languages that hold independently of information structure. This account leads to the conclusion that a non-compositional mapping between information structural concepts and structural configurations is an unnecessary complication of the grammatical model.
KW  - production experiment
KW  - focus movement
KW  - cleft sentences
KW  - contastive focus
KW  - new information focus
LA  - eng
PY  - 2010
SN  - 9789027287847
TI  - Focus types and argument asymmetries: a cross-linguistic study in language production
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-20950357
Y2  - 2024-11-21T14:44:24
ER  -