An OT Approach To The Interface Between Syntax And Information Structure

This dissertation argues that language is a complex system with multi-leveledarchitecture, and one of the major goals of linguistic studies is to unveil the interactiverules of the interfaces.This dissertation is intended to approach the interface between syntax andinformation structure by looking into the hierarchical syntactic and informationstructural constraints under the framework of OT. The investigation is conductedmainly on the basis of the alignment of syntactic constituents, not coveringphonological, morphological and lexical realization. Similar to standard OT syntax,this dissertation follows the assumption that the generation of linguistic output formsis subject to the narrow syntactic X’ theory, excluding the syntactic categories otherthan CP and IP in the functional projection. But different from standard OT syntax,this dissertation adopts the input system proposed by LFG, to incorporate values ofgrammatical functions and information structure.This dissertation perceives information structure as a distinct level of thelinguistic system, competing with syntactic, semantic and functional structures for theoptimal surface forms. Following the primitive system proposed by Choi (1996), thisdissertation argues that information structure consists of topic, tail, contrastive focusand presentational focus on the basis of their different syntactic behaviors. A topic isdefined as a link or reference point to the knowledge store in terms of a cognitiveapproach, usually adjoined to either the left or right edge of the maximal projection ina phrase structure. A focus is considered as the information part in an utterance withprosodic prominence, assumed to be aligned to either edge of a VP according to theparameterization of a particular language. A contrastive focus has a greater tendencyfor scrambling than a presentational focus. On the basis of the alignment analysis ofthese primitives, this dissertation proposes alignment constraints of topic and focusand formulates an IS-configuration as one level of linguistic representation that syntaxhas to correspond to.The interface between information structure and syntax is mainly approached inthe field of subject conditions, NP movement, topicalization, dangling topics, objectshift, super-raised topic structure and wh-movement in Chinese and English. Theindispensable subject in English indicates that the constraint OB-SPEC outranksIDENT-IO. In Chinese their ranking is reversed, thus banning the insertion of anylexical items to fill an empty subject. This dissertation posits that in Chinese OB-SPECis suppressed at the bottom of the constraint hierarchy, explaining subject-drop inChinese. Based on the analysis of the existential and inverted structures in Chineseand English, the dissertation argues that in these two languages ALIGN-PRES-FOCUSdominates SPEC-LEFT, ALIGN-SUBJECT and OB-SPEC to allow the rightwarddislocation of a presentational focus, including a potential subject. The ALIGN-TOPICconstraint is considered to outrank ALIGN-PRES-FOCUS, to ensure the focusedconstituent can also be topicalized and dislocated to the left edge of the maximalprojection. In English the syntactic constraints SUBJACENCY and PROJ-PRIN are ranked higher than ALIGN-TOPIC, thus banning the super-raised topic. In contrast, inChinese, these two syntactic constraints are assumed to be located at the bottom of theconstraint hierarchy, and thus the topic super-raising and intermediate location occurs.However, topicalization in Chinese has to meet the semantic and syntactic constraintsof IDA and LIR, which penalize any illegal topicalization in Chinese to ensuresuccessful interpretation in LF.The dissertation argues that case-checking theory in UG is not sufficient toexplain NP movement, especially in the failure of raising an NP to the subject position,and thus proposes to resort to the information structural constraint,ALIGN-PRES-FOCUS. It is posited that ALIGN-PRES-FOCUS dominates the syntacticconstraint CASE, and thus forbids the NP to be raised to the SpecIP position forcase-checking. Wh-phrase movement in questions is attributed to the syntacticconstraint OP-SPEC, which requires a wh-phrase to appear in the SpecCP position.OP-SPEC is assumed to be located at the same hierarchical ranking as ALIGN-TOPIC,and outrank ALIGN-PRES-FOCUS in English. But in Chinese this dissertation positsthat the syntactic constraint OP-SPEC is ranked at the bottom and the constraintsOB-HEAD and IDENT-IO work in conspiracy to militate against wh-movement toSpecCP in the Chinese phrase structure and thus wh-in situ emerges.