The author describes and explains the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the nominal and pronominal elements in sentences of the types Ces Romains ils sont fous and Ils sont fous, ces Romains, which, in spite of their frequent occurrence, have so far received little attention among linguists and… read more
Grammars reflect universal constraints on the mappings between the information structure of propositions and the formal structure of sentences. These constraints restrict the possible linkings between pragmatic relations (topic vs. focus), pragmatic properties (given vs. new), semantic roles (agent… read more
Cross-linguistic studies have shown that various adverbial subordinating conjunctions can also function to introduce independent assertions. In the domain of causal conjunctions, there is a striking cross-linguistic trend for subordinating ‘because’ to supersede the corresponding coordinating… read more
This paper is concerned with the cross-linguistic expression of a universal information-structure category called the ‘thetic’ or ‘sentence-focus’ (SF) category. The SF category differs from the unmarked ‘predicate-focus’ (PF) or ‘categorical’ category by the absence of a topic-comment relation… read more
