This collection consists of thirteen contributions focusing on the latest trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the most current developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. Some chapters focus on the syntax of information structure in relation with the position occupied by different constituents in the CP domain and their interpretation such as the distinction between contrastive and corrective focus; the inclusion of given information in focus; the interplay of information structure and binding; the relative position of complementisers; and discourse-based constituents in the left periphery. Information structure is also analysed with regards to prominence phenomena at word level. Other chapters deal with the notion of agreement and its role in the syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives, correlatives, or different types of CP like relatives or embedded interrogatives. This selection of papers was originally presented at the 21st Colloquium on Generative Grammar, held at the University of Seville in April 2011.

In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

Consists of thirteen contributions that focuses on the trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the present developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. In this book, chapters deal with notion of agreement and its role in syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives and correlatives.

Agreement is a pervasive phenomenon across natural languages. Depending on one’s definition of what constitutes agreement, it is either found in virtually every natural language that we know of, or it is at least found in a great many. Either way, it seems to be a core part of the system that underpins our syntactic knowledge. Since the introduction of the operation of Agree in Chomsky (2000), agreement phenomena and the mechanism that underlies agreement have garnered a lot of attention in the Minimalist literature and have received different theoretical treatments at different stages. Since then, many different phenomena involving dependencies between elements in syntax, including movement or not, have been accounted for using Agree. The mechanism of Agree thus provides a powerful tool to model dependencies between syntactic elements far beyond φ-feature agreement. The articles collected in this volume further explore these topics and contribute to the ongoing debates surrounding agreement. The authors gathered in this book are internationally reknown experts in the field of Agreement.

This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

A cross-linguistic study of how objects are affected by information structure.

This book considers the connection between information structure and syntax, exploring formal explanations to account for the distribution of discourse-based phenomena such as topic preposing and focus fronting across languages, with a particular focus on English and Spanish. It discusses issues such as word order and the diverse conditions under which types of topics and foci are licensed in different contexts. It shows the different behaviors of languages with respect to specific discourse-oriented operations to be the consequence of feature inheritance, which takes place in the different peripheries detected in the sentence. The book will be of interest to linguists and MA and PhD students of linguistics.

The notion of focus structure in this work refers to the distinction between categorical, thetic and identificational sentences. The central claim is that the syntactic representation of every sentence has to encode which of these types of focus structure is realized. This claim is discussed in great detail with respect to syntax, intonation and semantics within the framework of the Minimalist Program. It is shown that the incorporation of focus structure into syntax offers new perspectives for a solution of vexing problems in syntax and semantics. For example, fronting (preposing, 'topicalisation') is treated as a syntactic operation which clearly belongs to core grammar, i.e. is not optional or 'stylistic'; the semantic notion of quantifier raising is dispensed with in favour of a focus structural treatment of phenomena which gave rise to it. The book appeals to generative linguists and to functional linguists who do not believe in an unbridgeable gap between the formal and functional analysis of language.

Differential argument marking has been a hot topic in linguistics for several decades, both because it is cross-linguistically widespread and because it raises essential questions at multiple levels of grammar, including the relationship between abstract processes and overt morphological marking, between case and agreement, and between syntax and information structure. This volume provides an introduction into the current state of the art of research on differential case marking and chapters by leading linguists addressing theoretical questions in a wide range of typologically and geographically diverse languages from the Indo-European, Sinitic, Turkic, and Uralic families. The chapters engage with current theoretical issues in the morphology, syntax, semantics, and processing of differential argument marking. A central issue addressed by all the authors is the adequacy of various theoretical approaches in modelling (different varieties of) differential case marking, such as those determined by topicality, those driven by cumulative factors, and those that involve double marking. The volume will be of interest to students and researchers working on cross-linguistic variation in differential marking and its theoretical modelling.