Prosody Focus and Word Order

This monograph exemplifies a trend in grammatical theory in which researchers combine findings from more than one area of linguistics. Specifically the author looks at the relationship between phrasal prominence and focus in Romance and Germanic languages to provide insights into how these properties are grammatically articulated. Building upon prominence (nuclear stress) reflects syntactic ordering. There are two varieties of syntatic ordering. The first is the standard asymmetric c-command ordering. The second is the ordering derived from the primitive relation of selection holding between a head and its associated argument.