TY  - THES
A1  - Skopeteas, Stavros
T1  - Word oder and information structure: empirical methods for linguistic fieldwork
Y1  - 2009
CY  - Potsdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Skopeteas, Stavros
A1  - Féry, Caroline
A1  - Asatiani, Rusudan
T1  - Word order and intonation in Georgian
N2  - Georgian is famous for its word order flexibility: all permutations of constituent order are possible and the choice among them is primarily determined by information structure. In this paper, we show that word order is not the only means to encode information structure in this language, but it is used in combination with sentence prosody. After a preliminary description of the use of prosodic phrasing and intonation for this purpose, we address the question of the interrelation between these two strategies. Based on experimental evidence, we investigate the interaction of focus with word order and prosody, and we conclude that some aspects of word order variation are pragmatically vacuous and can be accommodated in any context if they are realized with an appropriate prosodic structure, while other word order phenomena are quite restrictive and cannot be overridden through prosodic manipulations.
Y1  - 2009
UR  - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2008.09.001
SN  - 0024-3841
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Skopeteas, Stavros
A1  - Verhoeven, Elisabeth
T1  - The interaction between topicalization and structural constraints : evidence from Yucatec Maya
N2  - This article deals with the syntactic and pragmatic properties of left dislocated constituents in Yucatec Maya. It has been argued that these constituents are topics, which implies that a particular structural configuration, namely left dislocation displays a 1:1 correspondence to a particular discourse function. We present evidence that the discourse properties of left dislocation are not uniform: only a subset of the left dislocated constituents qualify as topics in the strict sense, while other instances of left dislocation are better explained if we assume a structural constraint that bans the postverbal occurrence of subject constituents in a particular syntactic configuration. Our empirical findings show that though the occurrence of word order possibilities in discourse is not random, it is not necessarily determined by a unique licensing condition.
Y1  - 2009
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/tlir
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/tlir.2009.009
SN  - 0167-6318
ER  -