none 10.1075/la.273.05lah John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 134424431 3976661 1420043 202507022317000049 10.1075 2025-07-02T21:17:36Z 2022-02-03T10:33:09Z 2 0166-0829 10.1075/la https://benjamins.com/ catalog/la Davide Garassino University of Zurich https://ror.org/02crff812 ZHAW, Winterthur https://ror.org/05pmsvm27 Daniel Jacob University of Freiburg https://ror.org/0245cg223 Non-prototypical, unexpected and paradoxical evidence in the field of information structure This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use. 273 2 22 2022 2 3 2022 9789027210807 9789027258151 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/la.273 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027258151 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027258151.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/la.273/html Karen Lahousse KU Leuven https://ror.org/05f950310 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4023-1439 Abstract This article argues that some types of syntactically marked focus are root (main clause) phenomena in French. We show that c’est (‘it is’) clefts, which explicitly mark narrow new information focus, are root phenomena, in contrast with il y a (‘there is’) clefts marking broad new information focus and contrastive focus c’est -clefts. Nominal inversion in French behaves in the opposite way and is argued to be an ‘inverse root phenomenon’. These observations are explained by Krifka’s (2017) notion of a ‘judge’, its relation to epistemic modality and the distinction between assertive embedded clauses (in which root phenomena occur) and non-assertive embedded clauses (in which root phenomena do not occur). 2 22 2022 2 3 2022 147 182 10.1075/la.273.05lah https://benjamins.com/catalog/la.273.05lah https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/la.273.05lah/html 10.1075/la.190.01ael Iberia: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics Authier 4 1 61 2012 An intervention account of the distribution of main clause phenomena: Evidence from ellipsis 10.1075/sl.19021.bel 10.1075/la.262.02bel Alternating Constructions on the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: Theticity and Sentence-focus in Dutch and Italian Belligh 2021 10.5334/gjgl.677 10.1075/la.197.07bia 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190210588.003.0004 10.1075/la.197.07bia Iberia Bianchi 2 43 2010 Is topic a root phenomenon? 10.1075/rllt.8.01bia Semantics and Pragmatics Bianchi 9 1 2016 Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and the evaluative dimension C’est comme ça que, C’est pour ça que, C’est là que tout a commencé. Moderna Språk Blanche-Benveniste 100 2 273 2006 Les clivées françaises de type: Marges Linguistiques Bres 2005 Dis-moi avec qui tu “dialogues”, je te dirai qui tu es… De la pertinence de la notion de dialogisme pour l’analyse du discours 10.1016/j.lingua.2008.10.005 The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language Büring 103 2012 Focus and intonation Sens et références. Mélanges Georges Kleiber Choi-Jonin 39 2005 Il y a des gens ils ont mauvais caractère. A propos du rôle de il y a 10.1075/la.24.04cle Cleft and Pseudo-cleft Constructions in English Collins 1991 10.1075/fol.16.1.04cor 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759613.001.0001 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198745266.003.0002 10.1075/etc.9.1.07dav 10.1075/la.190.06cat 10.1515/9783110361872.9 Zwischen den Texten: die Übersetzung an der Schnittstelle von Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft De Cesare 121 2016 Les phrases clivées de l’italien en contact avec le français. 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