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Share Paper 3184

Focus-Movement within the Bangla DP
Saurov Syed
332-341 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Ever since Chomsky (1970)'s idea that different phrases like NP, VP, AP, PP have the same internal structure, symmetry has always been sought, and discovered, in generative grammar. A lot of research has been done in the field on the parallelism between the nominal and the clausal domain, arguing that DP is the nominal counterpart of CP (cf. Abney 1987, Szabolcsi 1987, Stowell 1991). There is an ongoing debate, however, about how information structure is coded in the nominal domain, if at all. Focus movement has been argued in the nominal domain for a number of languages to account for interpretational differences that arise from reordering of materials within the DP (See Aboh 2004 for Gungbe, Cardinaletti 1998 for Italian, Siewierska and Uhliróva 1998 for Polish, Ntelitheos 2004 for Greek, Rijkhoff 1998 for Turkish, among many others). Another way of accounting for such reordered material has been arguing for base-generation of the same element in different positions for different interpretations (cf. Szendroi 2010, among others). This paper provides arguments in support of the focus-related movement theory, by showing empirical evidence from reordered material within the Bangla nominal domain, and also shows limitations of an account in terms of base-generation in explaining the Bangla patterns.

Published in

Proceedings of the 32nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Ulrike Steindl, Thomas Borer, Huilin Fang, Alfredo García Pardo, Peter Guekguezian, Brian Hsu, Charlie O'Hara, and Iris Chuoying Ouyang
Table of contents
Printed edition: $375.00