Recent studies have shown that shì ‘be’… (de) focus sentences in Mandarin Chinese are not structurally uniform. One of the criteria to make distinctions among them is Adjacency Condition, is, only right adjacent element can be focused. The debate has been centered on question why this restriction holds certain types involving but all them. We argue so-called Condition a primary condition regula...

Persian and Turkish exhibit a number of striking similarities, including the following: (a) many verbal concepts are expressed by complex predicates (CPr) consisting of a non-verbal element (NVE) and a light verb (LV) (Folli et al. 2005, Megerdoomian 2002, Kornfilt 2003), (b) both languages exhibit scrambling, (c) they both mark direct objects for specificity (Enç1991, Karimi 2005), and (d) foc...

the present investigation was designed to study the production and comprehension of specific means for information highlighted by advanced iranian learners of english as a foreign language. the study focused on the discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, pre-posing, it- and wh-clefts. after taking the nelson test, a homogeneous group was settled. ...

Abstract This paper tackles issues that involve distinguishing clefts from other monoclausal focus constructions when describing the syntax of lesser-known languages. I concentrate on Tilapa Otomi, which is, morphologically speaking, most conservative language Otomi family Mexico (Oto-Pamean; Oto-Manguean). propose has (at least) two specialized constructions: one is a biclausal, and analyze as...

This paper explores the information structure of VP-anaphora constructions in English, Spanish, and German. The goal is to provide an initial account of the syntactic and prosodic licensing mechanisms of VP-anaphora and to suggest some theoretical consequences for the syntactic representation of the different types of focus and topic. Recent studies (e.g. Rooth 1992b; Tomioka 1995; Fox 1998) ha...