TY  - GEN
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
A1  - Lenertová, Denisa
T1  - Left peripheral focus
T2  - Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - In Czech, German, and many other languages, part of the semantic focus
of the utterance can be moved to the left periphery of the clause. The main generalization is that only the leftmost accented part of the semantic focus can be moved. We propose that movement to the left periphery is generally triggered by an unspecific edge feature of C (Chomsky 2008) and its restrictions can be attributed to requirements of cyclic linearization, modifying the theory of cyclic linearization developed by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). The crucial assumption is that structural accent is a direct consequence of being linearized at merge, thus it is indirectly relevant for (locality restrictions on) movement. The absence of structural accent correlates with given-ness. Given elements may later receive (topic or contrastive) accents, which accounts for fronting in multiple focus/contrastive topic constructions. Without any additional assumptions, the model can account for movement of pragmatically unmarked elements to the left periphery (‘formal fronting’, Frey 2005). Crucially, the analysis makes no reference at all to concepts of information structure in the syntax, in line with the claim of Chomsky (2008) that UG specifies no direct link between syntax and information structure.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 596 
KW  - Czech
KW  - German
KW  - Focus
KW  - Topic
KW  - Information structure
KW  - Intervention effects
KW  - Cyclic linearization
KW  - A-bar-movement
KW  - Prosody-syntax interface
KW  - Accentuation
Y1  - 2020
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/42819
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-428198
SN  - 1866-8364
IS  - 596
ER  -