A flexible approach to discourse-related word order variations in the DP

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate whether topic and focus movement operations exist DP-internally. The answer that I will reach is by and large negative. First, I will show that the DP, being argumental and not propositional, is ill-suited for topic/comment or focus/background partitioning. Second, I adopt Neeleman and van de Koot''s (2008) proposal for clause-level focus and topic movement. The fundamental idea in this proposal is that topic and focus movement is driven by the need to create a syntactically continuous comment or background constituent. As I explain below, it follows from this that topic and focus movement cannot take place DP-internally. In the remainder of the paper I provide an analysis for two sets of data where DP-internal FocusP has been proposed in the literature: adjective reordering and Greek polydefinites. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]