Cyclic phonology–syntax-interaction : movement to first position in German

This paper investigates the nature of the attraction of XPs to clauseinitial position in German (and other languages). It argues that there are two different types of preposing. First, an XP can move when it is attracted by an EPP-like feature of Comp. Comp can, however, also attract elements that bear the formal marker of some semantic or pragmatic (information theoretic) function. This second type of movement is driven by the attraction of a formal property of the moved element. It has often been misanalysed as “operator” movement in the past

The restricted access of information structure to syntax : a minority report

This paper sketches the view that syntax does not directly interact with information structure. Therefore, syntactic data are of little help when one wants to narrow down the interpretation of terms such as “focus”, “topic”, etc

Prosody of discontinuous nominal phrases in Indian languages

The purpose of this survey is to compare the tonal and prosodic structure of discontinuous nominal phrases in several Indian languages with those of the better studied intonation languages, such as English and German. From a syntactic perspective, the SOV base order and the free constituent order property in nearly all Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and Tibeto-Burman languages lead to a fairly rich system of discontinuous NPs of the type involving two independently generated NPs. From a prosodic perspective, the Indian languages discussed in the article are prototypical examples of phrase languages, i.e., the intonation is not dependent on variable pitch accent placement, but is rather based on the existence of prosodic domains, each with a characteristic ‘phrasal’ intonation. We will see that the division between cohesive and non-cohesive patterns that has been made for intonation languages is blurred in these languages. In line with this observation on prosody, the hierarchy-preserving and hierarchy-inverting discontinuous nominal phrases are not always easy to tell apart syntactically

Morphology

The guidelines for morphological annotation contain the layers that are necessary for understanding the structure of the words in the object language: morphological segmentation, glossing, and annotation of part-of-speech

In need of mediation: The relation between syntax and information structure

This paper defends the view that syntax does not directly interact with information structure. Rather, information structure affects prosody, and only the latter has an interface with syntax. We illustrate this point by discussing scrambling, focus preposing, and topicalization. The position entertained here implies that syntax is not very informative when one wants to narrow down the interpretation of terms such as “focus”, “topic”, etc