Focus types and argument asymmetries
A cross-linguistic study in language production
- Author(s): Stavros Skopeteas 1 and Gisbert Fanselow 1
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations:1 Universität Potsdam
- Source: Comparative and Contrastive Studies of Information Structure , pp 169-198
- Publication Date September 2010
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.
- Affiliations: 1: Universität Potsdam
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