About this Arts and Humanities article
Pragmatic Properties of Certain German and English Left Peripheral Constructions by Werner Frey is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.
The article discusses various left peripheral constructions in German and English, which are often considered to be topic constructions. The article demonstrates, however, that only one of the constructions under review obligatorily marks a topic in the ''aboutness'' sense. It also discusses how the constructions behave with respect to some discourse properties which are often related to topicality: referential linking to the preceding discourse, promotion of a nontopic to a topic, thematic continuity. The article describes which constructions exhibit which discourse properties and shows that quite similar constructions behave rather di¤erently with respect to these properties. The article's findings also cast serious doubt on certain common assumptions about how left peripheral constructions in the two languages correspond to each other.
It is typically read by researchers, students, and practitioners in Arts and Humanities.
- Author
- Werner Frey
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Published
- 2005
- Language
- EN
- Field
- Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)