Details

This volume presents new and cutting-edge research on the question of how we parse, interpret and understand language in more complex discourse settings. The challenge is to find empirical evidence on how information structure and semantic processing are related. Comprehensible answers are provided by showing how syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics interact and how they influence semantic processing and interpretation. The analysis of core information structural concepts that contribute to processing such as focus and contrast, the specific discourse status of referents that add to the common ground, context dependency and markedness as well as prosodic prominence and givenness marking has added new and convincing evidence to the research of information structure and semantic processing.

• Contents
• Markedness in context: An approach to licensing
• The modal particles ja and doch and their interaction with discourse structure: Corpus and experimental evidence
• Focus projection revisited: Pitch accent perception in German
• Focus and prosody in nominal copular clauses
• Focus constraints on relative clause antecedents in sluicing
• Markers of discourse status in descriptions of altered spatial layouts
• On the contextual licensing of English locative inversion and topicalization
• How to get from graded intuitions to binary decisions
• Scrambled Wackernagel! Neural responses to noncanonical pronoun serializations in German
• Logical and pragmatic meaning in the interpretation of disjunction: Contextual relevance and scalar implicatures
• The processing of argument structure: A comparison between patients with early left-hemispheric brain lesions and healthy controls
• Standard items for English judgment studies: Syntax and semantics
• Index