Diachronic Studies on Information Structure : : Language Acquisition and Change / / ed. by Gisella Ferraresi, Rosemarie Lühr.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• MitwirkendeR: Armendáriz, Rolando Féliz,; Eide, Kristine Gunn,; Ferraresi, Gisella,; Gabriel, Christoph,; Hinterhölzl, Roland,; Lühr, Rosemarie,; Matić, Dejan,; Petrova, Svetlana,; Rinke, Esther,; Viti, Carlotta,; Westergaard, Marit,; Wratil, Melanie,
• HerausgeberIn: Ferraresi, Gisella,; Lühr, Rosemarie,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2010]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Series: Language, Context and Cognition , 10
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (217 p.) :; Zahlr. Abb. und Tab.

In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology.Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement. Editorial board Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School) Prof. Dr. Ulrike Demske (Universität des Saarlandes) Prof. Dr. Ewald Lang (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Lühr (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) Prof. Dr. Thomas Pechmann (Universität Leipzig) Prof. em. Dr. Anita Steube (Universität Leipzig)

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- The Role of Information Structure in Language Change: Introductory Remarks -- Information Structure, Constituent Order, and Casein Warihío -- The Information Structure of OVS in Vedic -- Information Packaging and the Rise of Clitic Doubling in the History of Spanish -- Cue-based Acquisition and Information Structure Drift in Diachronic Language Development -- Discourse and Syntax in Linguistic Change: Decline of Postverbal Topical Subjects in Serbo-Croat -- Prosody, Information Structure and Word Order Changes in Portuguese -- The Development of V-to-C-Movement in the West Germanic and Romance Languages -- Evidence for Two Types of Focus Positions in Old High German -- Backmatter