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The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.
List of contents
Part I: General issues
0. Introduction Giuliano Bernini
1. Spoken and written language Jim Miller and M.M.Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest
Part II: From function to form
2. Sentence topics in the languages of Europe Elena S. Maslova and Giuliano Bernini
3. Focus in the languages of Europe Jim Miller
4. Deixis and Anaphora Yaron Matras and Machtelt Bolkestein
5. Theticity Hans-Jürgen Sasse
Part III: From form to function
6. The de-accenting of given information: a cognitive universal? Alan Cruttenden
7. Interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors on basic word order in the languages of Europe(Rosanna Sornicola
8. Articles and article systems in some areas of Europe Christoph Schroeder
Index of names
Index of languages
Index of subjects
About the author
Giuliano Bernini is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bergamo, Italy. Marcia L. Schwartz is affiliated with the Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Germany.
Report
"The rich empirical data collected in this volume will undoubtelly make it attractive to researchers interested in cross-linguistic variation, information structure, and corpus study."H. Wind Cowles in: Folia Linguistica 41/2007
