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Description:
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Focus-background structure has taken center stage in much current
theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the
inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the
interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be
insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on
the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In
doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish,
Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include
constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus
particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex
sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus-background
structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a
comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance
and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad
audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and
historical linguists.
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