E-raamat: When Data Challenges Theory: Unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structure

"This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The main aim of the book is to assess the impact of data that seem to run against commonly accepted tenets in this field. Such 'unexpected' or even 'paradoxical' evidence can indeed be precious for testing the validity of current pragmatic and discourse analyses. The contributions to this book, relying on different theoretical frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic andlanguage-internal variation as well as language contact, tackle a wide range of phenomena that go to the core of the discipline and, in some cases, challenge its foundations. Ultimately, this volume shows that in order to appreciate the relation between linguistic structures and the context, it is of uttermost importance to rely on complex discourse models, which are able to account for the fundamental role of inferential mechanisms and rhetorical strategies exploited by speakers"--

This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure.
The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness.
This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.