Discourse Configurational Languages

Download or read book Discourse Configurational Languages written by Katalin É Kiss and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising eleven studies on languages with designated structural topic and focus positions, this volume includes an introduction surveying the empirical and theoretical problems involved in the description of this language type. Focusing on languages outside the traditional Indo-European group, the essays look at Chadic, Somali, Basque, Catalan, Old Romance, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, and Quechua. The papers provide interesting new empirical data, as well as a variety of means and alternatives of representing them structurally. At the same time, they address important theoretical questions in the framework of generative theory. This is the first study to apply methods of comparative syntax to the study of topic and focus.