In need of mediation: the relation between syntax and information structure

Gisbert Fanselow (University of Potsdam)

fanselow@uni-potsdam.de

This talk gives an outline of how the apparent impact of information structure on sentence structure can be dealt with in an autonomous model of syntax.

Many recent accounts of word order variation and similar phenomena work with concepts of information structure such as “given”, “contrast”, “focus”, “topic”, etc., which cannot figure in an autonomous syntax. Our first step will be to show that such notions very often do not help to describe the syntactic facts properly. The fit between information structure and syntactic constructions is not as tight as is often assumed, and generalizations based on prosodic properties are more successful. This will be exemplified by an investigation of movement to the left periphery and scrambling data taken mainly from German and Slavic languages, Our evidence includes results from production experiments.

In a second step, we will sketch how an autonomous model of syntax can deal with a number of generalizations (no crossing movement for multiple foci in non-contrastive contexts, high placement of topics) that involve prosodic and semantic properties related to information structure to a certain extent. We show how these can be made follow from cyclic linearization theory.

In a third and final step, we try to bring syntactic ‘markedness’ and pragmatic markedness together in an attempt to explain why the choice of a marked word order seems mandatory in certain cases.