There is a highway that travels the length of Vietnam's seacoast from Hanoi to Saigon. Many dreadful happenings have blotted this road for over a hundred years. It is truly a street without joy. It is named QL-1. There is a perennial military insult by real soldiers about those behind the lines. For each frontline hero, there lurks ten Rear Echelon Mothers who supply and support them. This story is about some of those Rear Echelon Mothers. Meet a comical group of mechanics and clerks, a wonderfully inept gaggle of men who goofballed and occasionally graced the margins of QL-1.

This collection consists of thirteen contributions focusing on the latest trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the most current developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. Some chapters focus on the syntax of information structure in relation with the position occupied by different constituents in the CP domain and their interpretation such as the distinction between contrastive and corrective focus; the inclusion of given information in focus; the interplay of information structure and binding; the relative position of complementisers; and discourse-based constituents in the left periphery. Information structure is also analysed with regards to prominence phenomena at word level. Other chapters deal with the notion of agreement and its role in the syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives, correlatives, or different types of CP like relatives or embedded interrogatives. This selection of papers was originally presented at the 21st Colloquium on Generative Grammar, held at the University of Seville in April 2011.

Part 1: Portuguese and English