Knud Lambrecht

Information structure and sentence form : topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents

Information structure and sentence form , Information structure and sentence form , کتابخانه دیجیتال جندی شاپور اهواز

Toward a Construction-Based Theory of Language Function: The Case of Nominal Extraposition.

Through a detailed examination of a particular sentence type, we outline a formal model in which grammatical description includes the description of use conditions on form-meaning pairs. The sentence type at issue is an exclamative construction we refer to as Nominal Extraposition (NE). This construction, exemplified by the sentence Its AMAZING the DIFFERENCE, bears a superficial resemblance to Right Dislocation (RD). However, NE must be distinguished from RD on syntactic, semantic and discoursepragmatic grounds. The postpredicate NP represents a TOPIC in the case of RD, a FOCUS in the case of NE; this NP receives a metonymic scalar interpretation in the case of NE, but not in RD. We employ the framework of Construction Grammar and seek to demonstrate that it is uniquely suited to grammatical description of the type required here: NE represents a gestaltlike interaction of formal, semantic and pragmatic constraints. We argue for a compatible formalism akin to that found in recent versions of Lexical-Functional Grammar in which argument structure and syntactic constituency parallel a level of representation incorporating categories of INFORMATION STRUCTURE. In addition, we seek to validate the notion-central to Construction Grammar that sentence types are a crucial basis for syntactic description. In particular, we argue that NE is an instance of the exclamative sentence type and that basic formal and semantic properties of NE follow from this categorization. We suggest that the relationship between NE and like exclamatives can be represented in an INHERITANCE NETWORK.

Topic, antitopic, and verb agreement in non-standard French

The author describes and explains the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the nominal and pronominal elements in sentences of the types Ces Romains ils sont fous and Ils sont fous, ces Romains , which, in spite of their frequent occurrence, have so far received little attention among linguists and grammarians. He argues that far from having the marginal status of a linguistic anomaly, the cooccurrence in the same clause of coreferential nouns and pronouns is one formal manifestation of an important functional principle in modern French: the encoding of a topic-comment relationship in the surface structure of the sentence. The pronouns in sentences such as the ones mentioned are interpreted as agreement markers. The syntactic and semantic differences between topics and anti-topics are analyzed.