Syntactic Aspects of Topic and Comment (Linguistik Aktuell Linguistics Today 38)

This title focuses on the syntactic behaviour of argument noun phrases depending on their discourse status. The main language of consideration is German, but it is shown that the observations can be carried over to other languages. The claim is that discourse-new arguments remain inside the VP where they are base generated. The hierarchy of argument projection is claimed to be fixed within and across languages. There is major attention to direct objects. It is then argued that discourse-old undergo raising to agreement projections. Description based on print version record.