0 . Introduction In recent years, the number of linguists who refer to notions like focus and ground have grown rapidly. Many interesting articles have appeared that show that we cannot give a complete syntactic, morphological or prosodic analysis without taking such notions into acccount. By the focus of an utterance I understand the new information that the speaker wants to convey. In contras...

Russian infinitival existential constructions have puzzled linguists for decades. An excellent critical evaluation of different approaches, as well as related references, can be found in (Apresjan and Iomdin 1989). It is not the goal of the present study, therefore, to review existing analyses. The focus will rather be on working out a plausible analysis of Russian infinitival existential const...

This paper discusses the NP-internal agreement strategies observed in an empirical (corpus based) study of Portuguese, and proposes an analysis which is formalized in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The empirical study suggests that what were previously thought to be rare or non-existent strategies occur with surprising frequency. Capturing these strategies poses p...