Chapter 10. The influence of the state distinction on word order and information structure in Kabyle and Siwi (Berber)

Author(s):  
Amina Mettouchi ◽  
Valentina Schiattarella
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.


Lingua ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 120 (6) ◽  
pp. 1476-1501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Salem

Diachronica ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard

In the history of English one finds a mixture of V2 and non-V2 word order in declaratives for several hundred years, with frequencies suggesting a relatively gradual development in the direction of non-V2. Within an extended version of a cue-based approach to acquisition and change, this paper argues that there are many possible V2 grammars, differing from each other with respect to clause types, information structure, and the behavior of specific lexical elements. This variation may be formulated in terms of micro-cues. Child language data from present-day mixed systems show that such grammars are acquired early. The apparent optionality of V2 in the history of English may thus be considered to represent several different V2 grammars in succession, and it is not necessary to refer to competition between two major parameter settings. Diachronic language development can thus be argued to occur in small steps, reflecting the loss of micro-cues, and giving the impression that change is gradual.


2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Skopeteas

AbstractClassical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.


Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.48 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Richardsen Westergaard

This article reports on a study of three children acquiring a dialect of Norwegian which allows two different word orders in certain types of WH-questions, verb second (V2) and and verb third (V3). The latter is only allowed after monosyllabic WH-words, while the former, which is the result of verb movement, is the word order found in all other main clauses in the language. It is shown that both V2 and V3 are acquired extremely early by the children in the study (before the age of two), and that subtle distinctions between the two orders with respect to information structure are attested from the beginning. However, it is argued that V3 word order, which should be ìsimplerî than the V2 structure as it does not involve verb movement, is nevertheless acquired slightly later in its full syntactic form. This is taken as an indication that the V3 structure is syntactically more complex, and possibly also more marked.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (04) ◽  
pp. 1650014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fouad El Ouardighi ◽  
Gary Erickson ◽  
Dieter Grass ◽  
Steffen Jørgensen

The objective of the paper is to study how wholesale price and revenue sharing contracts affect operations and marketing decisions in a supply chain under different dynamic informational structures. We suggest a differential game model of a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a single retailer that agree on the contract parameters at the outset of the game. The model includes key operational and marketing activities related to a single product in the supply chain. The manufacturer sets a production rate and the rate of advertising efforts while the retailer chooses a purchase rate and the consumer price. The state of the game is summarized in the firms’ backlogs and the manufacturer’s advertising goodwill. Depending on whether the supply chain members have and share state information, they may either make decisions contingent on the current state of the game (feedback Nash strategy), or precommit to a plan of action during the whole game (open-loop Nash strategy). Given a contract type, the impact of the availability of information regarding the state of the game on the firms’ decisions and payoffs is investigated. It is shown that double marginalization can be better mitigated if the supply chain members adopt a contingent strategy under a wholesale price contract and a commitment strategy under a revenue sharing contract.


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