This book describes Optimality Theory from the top down, explaining and exploring the
central premises of OT and the results that follow from them. Examples are drawn from …

Word order is one of the major properties on which languages are compared and its study is
fundamental to linguistics. This comprehensive survey provides an up-to-date, critical …

Constraints on prosodic and syntactic well-formedness conflict with each other. This is
particularly evident in the expression of new information focus, where the best prosodic …

During the last decade, several proposals have been made for modeling focus-induced
word order variation in Spanish, both in derivational and in optimality-theoretical …

In this study we investigate how word order interacts with prosody in the expression of
sentence modality and different focus constructions in different varieties of Catalan and …

We present data from an empirical investigation on the dialectal variation in the syntax of
German 3-verb clusters, consisting of a temporal auxiliary, a modal verb, and a predicative …

It is most often claimed that in Spanish constituents in narrow presentational or information
focus appear rightmost, where they also receive main sentence stress, while shifting the …

This dissertation uses the generative framework to study the syntax and pragmatics of word
order variation in the Andean Spanish of Bolivia and Ecuador. While Standard Spanish has …

The grammars of bilinguals have been found to differ from those of monolinguals especially
with regard to phenomena that involve the interface of syntax and discourse/pragmatics …

The strategies used to signal information focus—the non-presupposed part of a sentence—
in Spanish are under debate. The literature suggests that focus must appear rightmost; …