The syntax-discourse interface: A comparative study of Catalan and Spanish

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Information Structure (IS) is the pragmatic notion by which information is packaged in propositions. It instructsthe hearer on how to interpret linguistic information by structuring it into 'focus', i.e. the part of the propositionwhich cannot be taken for granted at the time of utterance (Lambrecht 1994: 207); and 'background', that which ispragmatically presupposed or established. There is a lack of consensus between theories of Information Structure(Erteschik-Shir, 2007) and crosslinguistic variation of the syntax-discourse interface is still a poorly understoodarea.In English, prosodic prominence is usually the linguistic mechanism by which pragmatic focus is assigned. InCatalan and Spanish, however, word order can also affect IS by determining or constraining the informationpartition. An example is marked VS word order constructions such as in (1):1. (a) Spa. Se me ha estropeado el coche.RFL me have broken the car(b) Cat. Se m' ha espatllat el cotxe.RFL me have broken the car'My car has broken'The proposed PhD research aims to investigate how word order in Catalan and Spanish express IS. Despite the twobeing closely cognate and typologically very similar languages, Catalan is more restrictive and allows for fewer word order configurations and IS interpretations than Spanish (Leonetti 2017). The proposed study therefore aimsto answer the following research questions:a) How does IS map onto word order in Catalan and Spanish?b) What is the exact role of subject inversion in IS in Catalan and Spanish?c) Do the differences in the syntax-discourse interface of these languages depend on broader properties of thelanguages (e.g., phonological or morphological properties)?d) How can we formally interpret and analyse this crosslinguistic variation?The objective of the study is to address these questions with theoretical and empirical arguments.