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Chapter 28 - Grammatical Reflexes of Information Structure in Germanic Languages

from Part IV - Semantics and Pragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2020

By
Caroline Féry
Edited by
Michael T. Putnam  and
B. Richard Page
Michael T. Putnam
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
B. Richard Page
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Summary

This chapter reviews the syntactic and prosodic correlates of information structure in Germanic languages. The chapter starts with an introduction to the information structural notions: focus, topic, and givenness related to the way information is stored in human memory and organized in communication. The effect of information structure on prosody in these languages can be felt in several ways: pitch accent addition because of focus, pitch accent deletion because of givenness, topicalization because of topic. In syntax, the effects are also numerous: scrambling, a series of leftward movements: topicalization, passivization, dative construction, object-shift, and a series of rightward movements: extraposition, right-dislocation, heavy NP-shift, afterthought. Pronominalization and ellipsis are the results of givenness. At the end of the chapter, focus-sensitive particles (or “association with focus”) like exclusive only, additive also and scalar even, are shortly mentioned. Germanic languages show a wealth of effects, but they also differ among each other in subtle ways.

Keywords

culminativityfocusfocus-sensitive particlegiveninformation structurelexical accentpitch accentprosodic structurescramblingtopic
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics , pp. 661 - 686
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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