The Architecture of I-Structure

Maia Andréasson

Abstract

In this paper, the inventory and the architecture of a separate i-structure representation in LFG is discussed in relation to Swedish data. It is argued that a discourse function SCENE needs to be distinguished from RHEME and GROUND. It furthermore proposed that a characteristic that singles out sentence adverbials from other clausal modifiers is their ability to function as focus operators (cf. Rooth 1992) and that FOCUS (as is ACTIVATION) is a discourse feature, separate from the discourse functions. The analysis builds on data from a corpus study of Swedish word order (Andréasson 2007) where the information dynamics of the sentence is found to be the key to explaining much of the possible word order variation.

Proceedings of LFG07; CSLI Publications On-line