Eurotyp

The result of over five years of close collaboration among an international group of leading typologists within the EUROTYP program, this volume is about the morphology and syntax of the noun phrase. Particular attention is being paid to nominal inflectional categories and inflectional systems and to the syntax of determination, modification, and conjunction. Its areal focus, like that of other EUROTYP volumes, is on the languages of Europe; but in order to appreciate what is peculiarly European about their noun phrases, a more comprehensive and genuinely typological view is being taken at the full range of cross-linguistic variation within this structural domain. There has been no shortage lately of contributions to the theory of noun phrase structure; the present volume is, however, unique in the extent to which its theorizing is empirically grounded.

The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.