The study of the interaction between syntax and information structure has attracted a great deal of attention since the publication of foundational works on this subject such as Enric Vallduvi's (1992) The Informational Component and Knud Lambrecht's (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. The book inserts itself in this contemporary interest by providing a collection of articles on different aspects of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the indigenous languages of The Americas. The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the some of the basic descriptive issues addressed in them, and of some of the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze them. The reader finds articles that focus mostly on empirical issues, while others are mostly oriented to theoretical issues. Diverse theoretical approaches are addressed, including Minimalism, Optimality-theoretic syntax, and Meaning-Text Theory. The volume includes articles on the following topics: the grammatical means to encode pragmatic notions in Tariana (A. Aikhenvald); the relation between clause structure and information structure in Lushootseed (D. Beck); the split distribution of null subjects in Shipibo (J. Camacho and J. Elias-Ulloa); the syntactic structure of left-peripheral discourse-related functions in Kuikuro (B. Franchetto and M. Santos), an agglutinative and head final language; word order and focus patterns in Yaqui (L. Guerrero and V. Belloro); SVO and topicalization in Yucatec Maya (R. Gutierrez-Bravo and J. Monforte); the structure of the left-periphery in Karaja (Maia) and the interaction between the wh-words and polarity sensitivity in Southern Quechua (L. Sanchez).

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Rodrigo Gutierrez-Bravo investigates a number of word order phenomenon in Spanish, concentrating on the language's unmarked word order and the perturbations of this order that result from topicalization and wh-movement. He demonstrates that word order in Spanish is not regulated by licensing conditions related to the subject (ie Case, agreement, etc), but rather results from the interaction between the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and structural markedness considerations. He proposes that Spanish clauses have different degrees of structural markedness, depending on the semantic role of the constituent in the Pole position.