Topic and Focus Markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French

Download or read book Topic and Focus Markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French written by Anja Hennemann and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers - such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts - are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.