Overview

In this book leading scholars provide state-of-the-art overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication. They present critical accounts of current understanding of how aspects of grammar, such as prosody, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, interact in the packing and unpacking of information in communication. They also look at the psycholinguistics behind the production and perception of information-structural categories. The book reflects the advances in recent research on all central aspects of the subject, including concepts of focus versus background, topic versus comment, and given versus new, and the kinds of inferences required to make sense of different combinations of words, syntax, intonation, and context. The chapters include typological and diachronic perspectives on information structure. Taken as a whole the book demonstrates the productive value of combiningtheoretical and experimental approaches.

Full Product Details

Author:   Malte Zimmermann (, University of Potsdam) ,  Caroline Féry (, University of Potsdam)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.20cm , Height: 2.90cm , Length: 24.10cm
Weight:   0.787kg
ISBN:  

9780199570959

ISBN 10:   0199570957
Pages:   430
Publication Date:   29 October 2009
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

1: Malte Zimmermann and Caroline Féry: Introduction Part I Topic and Focus 2: Mats Rooth: Second Occurrence Focus and Relativized Stress F 3: Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara: How Focus and Givenness Shape Prosody 4: Katalin É Kiss: Structural Focus and Exhaustivity 5: Cornelia Endriss and Stefan Hinterwimmer: The Interpretation of Topical Indefinites as Direct and Indirect Aboutness Topics 6: Satoshi Tomioka: Contrastive Topics Operate on Speech Acts 7: Brian Reese and Nicholas Asher: Biased Questions, Intonation, and Discourse Part II Cross-linguistic Variation and Diachronic Change 8: Daniel Büring: Towards a Typology of Focus Realization 9: Larry M. Hyman and Maria Polinsky: Focus in Aghem 10: Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz, and Malte Zimmermann: Subject Focus in West African Languaegs 11: Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir: Information Structure and OV Order 12: Roland Hinterhölzl: Information Structure and Unmarked Word Order in (Older) Germanic Part III Experimental and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Information Structure 13: Stavros Skopeteas and Gisbert Fanselow: Effects of Givenness and Constraints on Free Word order 14: Elsi Kaiser: Investigating Effects on Structural and Information-Structural Factors on Pronoun Resolution 15: Robin Hörnig and Thomas Weskott: Given and New Information in Spatial Statements

Reviews

a significant and welcome contribution to the current intense interest in linguistic theorising of information structure and succeeds in highlighting the value of considering different approaches for theoretical linguists, psycholinguists, and typologists alike. Reiko Vermeulen, The Journal of Linguistics

Author Information

Malte Zimmermann and Caroline Féry are Professors of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. Professor Zimmermann's research interests are in quantification and focus. His published work includes articles in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Natural Language Semantics. Professor Féry has published extensively in all aspects of phonology and phonological theory, including the role of prosody and intonation in information structure. She is the co-editor of Gradience in Grammar (OUP 2006).

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