Swiss Information – Tourism & Products

Swiss Language Spoken

This volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the fundamental interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in this book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; dissimilar patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. This book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside conventional areas of investigation at the interface amongst syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.

Review"The rich empirical info gathered in this volume will undoubtelly make it beautiful to researchers fascinated in cross-linguistic variation, selective information structure, and corpus study."H. Wind Cowles in: Folia Linguistica 41/2007

About the AuthorGiuliano Bernini is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bergamo, Italy. Marcia L. Schwartz is affiliated with the Christian-Albrechts-Universitat Kiel, Germany.

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