What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages, and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of… read more
What happens when a canonically transitive form meets a canonically transitive meaning, and what happens when this doesn’t happen? How do dyadic forms relate to monadic ones, and what are the entailments of the operations that the grammar uses to relate one to the other? Collecting original expert… read more
Many languages exhibit some form of differential argument marking (DAM), where the same generalized argument role can be marked differently. Approaches explaining these phenomena have in common that they assume some form of ranking among linguistic elements of the same kind. While previous… read more
This paper makes a contribution to the study of Spanish noun phrase (NP) exclamatives, such as ¡Las tonterías que dicen! ‘The silly things they say!’. The main purpose is to explore the relation between NP exclamatives and the notion of focus. I compare NP exclamatives with canonical focus-marking… read more
Despite numerous theoretical approaches and empirical analyses, it is not entirely clear how different focus types and constructions are realized and interpreted in individual Romance languages. Due to the complexity of this linguistic area, an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic approach seems… read more
