The syntactic role of discourse-related features (2009) (original) (raw)

This paper focuses on the syntactic role of the features related to discourse and information structure. I argue that discourse-related features are encoded in syntax, projecting their own phrase structure, and are fundamental in accounting for cross-linguistic variation. Languages differ in the morphological realisation of the discourse-related features (i.e. whether they have topic and focus markers), in the extent to which they exhibit word order alternations and whether they employ syntactic operations which are strictly dependent on the discourse/informational properties of the sentence, as well as in the distinction between different information-structure categories characterised by different grammatical properties. All these differences can be reduced to the syntactic role of discourse-related functional projections, in particular to the overt realisation of their heads and to the kind of movement they trigger, obeying the rigid hierarchical constraints of a uniform functional clause structure, and univocally specifying interpretive instructions to the interfaces. Under this view, this paper offers an analysis of dislocation and fronting phenomena in Romance, which entails that variation in these processes is correlated with the activation and the attraction properties of the functional projections encoding information-structure distinctions.