A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure

In this volume Luis L?pez sheds new light on information structure and makes a significant contribution to work on grammatical operations in the Minimalist Program. Through a careful analysis of dislocations and focus fronting in Romance the author shows that notions such as ''topic'' and ''focus'' as usually defined yield no predictions and proposes instead a feature system based on the notions ''discourse anaphor'' and ''contrast''. He presents a detailed model of syntax---information-structure interaction and argues that this interaction takes place at the phase level with a privileged role for the edge of the phase. Further he investigates phenomena concerning the syntax of objects in Romance and Germanic - accusative A p-movement clitic doubling scrambling object shift - and shows that there are cross-linguistic correlations between syntactic configuration and specificity independent of discourse connectedness. The volume ends with an extended analysis of the syntax of dislocations in Romance.