José Camacho

Liliana Sánchez

Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo

The study of the interaction between syntax and information structure has attracted a great deal of attention since the publication of foundational works on this subject such as Enric Vallduví's (1992) The Informational Component and Knud Lambrecht's (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. The book inserts itself in this contemporary interest by providing a collection of articles on different aspects of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the indigenous languages of The Americas. The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the some of the basic descriptive issues addressed in them, and of some of the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze them. The reader finds articles that focus mostly on empirical issues, while others are mostly oriented to theoretical issues. Diverse theoretical approaches are addressed, including Minimalism, Optimality-theoretic syntax, and Meaning-Text Theory. The volume includes articles on the following topics: the grammatical means to encode pragmatic notions in Tariana (A. Aikhenvald); the relation between clause structure and information structure in Lushootseed (D. Beck); the split distribution of null subjects in Shipibo (J. Camacho and J. Elías-Ulloa); the syntactic structure of left-peripheral discourse-related functions in Kuikuro (B. Franchetto and M. Santos), an agglutinative and head final language; word order and focus patterns in Yaqui (L. Guerrero and V. Belloro); SVO and topicalization in Yucatec Maya (R. Gutiérrez-Bravo and J. Monforte); the structure of the left-periphery in Karaja (Maia) and the interaction between the wh-words and polarity sensitivity in Southern Quechua (L. Sánchez).

Syntactic Approaches

Information Structure in Indigenous Languages of the Americas

Nydia Flores-Ferrán

Viviane Déprez

María José Cabrera

This volume presents selected papers from the 36th LSRL conference held at Rutgers University in 2006. It contains twenty-two articles of current approaches to the study of Romance linguistics. Well-known researchers present their findings in areas such as of syntax and semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics. The volume contains scholarly research in areas such as parenthetical null topic construction, expletives, number and language change, performative verbs in colonial court Spanish, aspect shift, palatilization in Romanian, melodic contours in Majorcan Catalan, variation in verb type and position, and deviance in early child bilingualism among many others. It is a well-rounded selection of research topics that will enrich and widen our understanding of Romance languages.

Selected papers from the 36th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), New Brunswick, March-April 2006

Romance Linguistics 2006

This book presents an innovative analysis that relates informational structure, syntax and morphology in Quechua. It provides a minimalist account of the relationship between focus, topic, evidentiality and other left-peripheral features and sentence-internal constituents marked with suffixes that have been previously considered of a pragmatic nature. Intervention effects show that these relationships are also of a syntactic nature. The analysis is extended to morphological markers that appear on polarity sensitive items and wh-words. The book also provides a brief overview of the main characteristics of Quechua syntax as well as additional bibliographical information.

Minimalist inquiries in the Quechua periphery

The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus

Minimalist Inquiries in the Quechua Periphery

Jennifer Austin

María Blume

An introduction to bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking world, looking at topics including language contact, bilingual societies, code-switching and language choice.

Bilingualism in the Spanish-Speaking World

Liliana Sánchez

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