DISCONTINUOUS NOUN PHRASES

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to examine the noun phrase with non-canonical order of constituents, called ‘discontinuous Np’ by Keizer (2007). The analysis and description of discontinuity aims to search, based on Functional Discourse Grammar theoretical framework (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008), for pragmatic, semantic and formal factors which motivate the speaker’s choice of specific encodings to these Nps in the Morphosyntactic Level. The sample is constituted from spoken language records from the Iboruna database, which represents the spoken variety in the northwest of São Paulo State, collected by the ALIP project, within the Functional Grammar Research Group, at UNESP, in São José do Rio Preto. For the purposes of this work, the following criteria are explored: (i) motivation for discontinuity; (ii) type of intervening material in the Np; (iii) morphosyntactic configuration of the discontinuous Np; and (iv) structural weight of the element displaced from the Np. The analysis shows that discontinuity is predominantly motivated by pragmatic aspects, in particular, by the focal status of information provided by part of the Np. Furthermore, the prototypical discontinuous Np is characterized by the interference of morphosyntactic material between the head noun and its postnuclear constituents. Although there is this linear distancing, the comprehension of discontinuous statements is not impaired due to a semantic link preserved at the Representational Level, a possible interpretation in a theoretical model such as FDG.

noun phrase; discontinuity; focus