Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Cross-linguistically, both subjects and topical information tend to be placed at the beginning of a sentence. Subjects are generally highly topical, causing both tendencies to converge on the same word order. However, subjects that lack prototypical topic properties may give rise to an incongruence between the preference to start a sentence with the subject and the preference to start a sentence with the most accessible information. We present a corpus study in which we investigate in what syntactic position (preverbal or postverbal) such low-accessible subjects are typically found in Dutch natural language. We examine the effects of both discourse accessibility (definiteness) and inherent accessibility (animacy). Our results show that definiteness and animacy interact in determining subject position in Dutch. Non-referential (bare) subjects are less likely to occur in preverbal position than definite subjects, and this tendency is reinforced when the subject is inanimate. This suggests that these two properties that make the subject less accessible together can ‘gang up’ against the subject first preference. The results support a probabilistic multifactorial account of syntactic variation.

SUDDEN CARDIAC DEATH: MECHANISMS AND REASONS, RISK FACTORS, TREATMENT AND PREVENTION

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) can be called one of the most important issues of modern cardiology for it is the first and the last sign of heart trouble in 25 % people and occurs in 60 % patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases. Interest to the problem is caused also by the fact that the SCD prevalence tends to increase. Obviously there are ways to take effective measures of prevention aimed at the improvement of the situation. The literature review presents analysis of publications containing topical information about mechanisms and reasons, risk factors and predictors for SCD and covers ways to treat and prevent the disease.

Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese

This chapter reviews how the two important notions of information structure—topic and focus—are encoded in Chinese. It first describes the properties of syntactic constructions (e.g.shi/shi . . . de, lian–dou/ye) and semantic particles (e.g.cai, jiu, dou, and zhi) for focus marking. It then discusses how Chinese, a topic-prominent language, conveys topical information via different structures such as base-generated topics, dangling topics, and moved topics. Finally, it provides an overview of how prosodic structure and prominence cues (e.g. pitch register raising, pitch range expansion, and lengthening) complement and enhance focus and topic marking in a variety of Chinese dialects, and how such prosodic reflexes of information structure are constrained by their characteristic sound structures. Lacunae for the studies of focus and topic in Chinese are also identified as important questions for future research.