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The Oxford Handbook of
INFORMATION STRUCTURE Edited by
CAROLINE FÉRY and
SHINICHIRO ISHIHARA
1
3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © editorial matter and organization Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara 2016 © the chapters their several authors 2016 The moral rights of the authorshave been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944849 ISBN 978–0–19–964267–0 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
Abbreviations The Contributors 1. Introduction Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara
ix xvii 1
PA RT I T H E OR I E S OF I N F OR M AT ION ST RU C T U R E 2. Alternative Semantics Mats Rooth
19
3. Givenness Michael Rochemont
41
4. (Contrastive) Topic Daniel Büring
64
5. Question-based Models of Information Structure Leah Velleman and David Beaver
86
6. Information Structure and the Landscape of (Non-)at-issue Meaning Laurence R. Horn
108
7. Information Structure and Presupposition Kjell Johan Sæbø
128
8. Information Structure: A Cartographic Perspective Enoch O. Aboh
147
9. Nuclear Stress and Information Structure Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
165
vi Contents
10. Focus Projection Theories Karlos Arregi
185
11. Constraint Conflict and Information Structure Vieri Samek-Lodovici
203
PA RT I I C U R R E N T I S SU E S ON I N F OR M AT ION ST RU C T U R E 12. Focus Sensitive Operators Sigrid Beck
227
13. Quantification and Information Structure Manfred Krifka
251
14. Contrast: Dissecting an Elusive Information-structural Notion and its Role in Grammar Sophie Repp
270
15. Verum Focus Horst Lohnstein
290
16. Predicate Focus Malte Zimmermann
314
17. Information Structure and Discourse Particles Patrick G. Grosz
336
18. Ellipsis and Information Structure Susanne Winkler
359
19. Word Order and Information Structure Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot
383
20. Dislocations and Information Structure Luis López
402
21. Discourse-configurationality Balázs Surányi
422
22. On the Expression of Focus in the Metrical Grid and in the Prosodic Hierarchy Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad
441
Contents vii
23. Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height Hubert Truckenbrodt
463
24. Second Occurrence Focus Stefan Baumann
483
25. Information Structure and Language Change Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer
503
PA RT I I I E X P E R I M E N TA L A P P ROAC H E S TO I N F OR M AT ION ST RU C T U R E 26. Information Structure and Language Comprehension: Insights from Psycholinguistics Elsi Kaiser
523
27. Information Structure and Production Planning Michael Wagner
541
28. Information Structure in First Language Acquisition Barbara Höhle, Frauke Berger, and Antje Sauermann
562
29. Towards a Neurobiology of Information Structure Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Petra B. Schumacher
581
30. Corpus Linguistics and Information Structure Research Anke Lüdeling, Julia Ritz, Manfred Stede, and Amir Zeldes
599
PA RT I V L A N G UAG E S T U DI E S ON I N F OR M AT ION S T RU C T U R E 31. Syntactic and Prosodic Reflexes of Information Structure in Germanic Gisbert Fanselow
621
32. Syntactic and Prosodic Effects of Information Structure in Romance Cecilia Poletto and Giuliano Bocci
642
33. Discourse Functions: The Case of Hungarian Katalin É.Kiss
663
viii Contents
34. Information Structure in Modern Greek Stavros Skopeteas
686
35. Information Structure in Slavic Katja Jasinskaja
709
36. Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan
733
37. Information Structure in Japanese Satoshi Tomioka
753
38. Information Structure in Asia: Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan) and Vietnamese (Austroasiatic) Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle
774
39. Information Structure in Bantu Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman
790
40. Information Structure in Sign Languages Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau
814
References Subject Index Language Index
835 955 965
Abbreviations
1 first person 2 second person 3 third person ABL ablative ABS absolutive ACC accusative ACCOMP accomplished ADVB adverbalizer AFFIRM affirmative AGT agent Alt alternative APP applicative A-quantification
quantification expressed by adverbs
ASL
American Sign Language
ASS assertion ATB
Across The Board
AUG augment AUT autonomous AUX auxiliary BAE
bare argument ellipsis
BCS
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Bel Belarusian bF bleached focus BG background Bg Bulgarian BOLD
Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent
BPR
Background-Presupposition Rule
C Complementizer
x Abbreviations C
contextual parameter
CAP
counter-assertive polar focus
CAUS causative CC
context connect
CE
contrasting ellipsis
CF contrasting focus CG Common Ground CIR
CT interpretation Rule
CL class CL clitic CL/CLF
classifier
CLD
Contrastive Left Dislocation
CLLD
Clitic Left Dislocation
CnCL
conjunctive subject clitic
COND conditional Cop copula CPS
Closure Positive Shift
CQ
current question
CT contrastive focus Cz Czech D determiner DAN
dorsal attention network
DAT dative DEC/DECL declarative DEF definite DEM demonstrative DET determiner DF
domain of the focus
DGS
German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache)
D-quantification
quantification expressed by determiners
DRT
Discourse Representation Theory
DTA
Deutsche Text Archive
D-tree
discourse-tree
D-type dislocations
Clitic Left/Right Dislocation or Contrastive Left Dislocation
Abbreviations xi DW
Deutsches Wörterbuch
eADM
extended Argument Dependency Model
EEG electroencephalography ENC enclitic ERG ergative ERP
Event-related Brain Potential
EVID evidential EXIST existential EXP experiental EXPL expletive ExplAlt(Set)
explicit alternative (set)
F focus F/FEM
feminine
F1 today future F2 general future FA
Function Application
FAT
Focus Accent Thesis
FC
first conjunct
FF
focus fronting
FI
Focus Intonation
fin finite FinP Finite Phrase FinSL
Finnish Sign Language
FM focus marker fMRI
functional magnetic resonance imaging
FMV
verbal focus marker
FOC focus FOF
First Occurrence Focus
fs
focus sensitive
FULL full form FUT future FV final vowel GEN genitive GME
givenness marking ellipsis
xii Abbreviations GPAD
Generalized Principle of Anaphoric Dependence
H high tone HKSL
Hong Kong Sign Language
HT(LD)
hanging topic (left dislocation)
IAA
inter-annotator agreement
IAV
immediately after verb
IBV
immediately before verb
ID
identity function
IL individual level IMP imperative IMPERF imperfect IMPF imperfective ImplAltSet
implicit alternative set
Ind indicative INDF indefinite INF/infin
infinitive
INFL Inflection INTER/INTERROG
interrogative
ip/IP/i-phrase
intonation phrase
IS
information structure
ISL
Israeli Sign Language
IT-operator
illocution type operator
L low tone LAN
left anterior negativity
LC
Locus Coeruleus
LEA
local excluded alternatives
LF Logical Form LIU
Jordanian Sign language (Lughatil-Ishaara il-Urdunia)
LOC locative LOT
Lexical Operator Thesis
LSB
Brazilian Sign language (Língua de Sinais Brasileira)
LTN
Lexical Term Nodes
M masculine Mac Macedonian
Abbreviations xiii MC main clause MI-S
metrically-interpreted syntactic
ML
machine learning
MMN
Mismatch Negativity
MRC
mental representation of what is being communicated
N neuter NBB
Northern Biscayan Basque
NC
nucleus carrier
NE Norepinephrine NEG
negative, negation
NGT
Dutch Sign language (Nederlandse Gebarentaal)
NIF
neutral information focus
NML/NMLZ
nominalizer, nominalization
NOM nominative NPA
Nuclear Pitch Accent
NPE
NP-ellipsis
NPI
negative polarity item
NS(R)
Nuclear Stress (Rule)
OBJ object ObjPrep
Object Preposing
OHG
Old High German
OP
alternative evaluating operators
OT Optimality Theory P
patient-like argument of canonical transitive verb
P plural P&P
Principles and Parameters
P&T
Pronouns & Traces
P1 today past P2 yesterday past PA pitch accent PA
Predicate Abstraction
PART partitive PASS passive PASTPART
past participle
xiv Abbreviations PB
Proto-Bantu
PC
parallelism condition
PCL
clause final particle
P-COR
corrective focus with the corrigendum being presupposed background
PERF perfect PERF/PFV
perfective
PF Phonological Form PF polar focus PH
past habitual
PhP phonological phrase PL/P
plural
Pl Polish PM
Predicate Modification
POS
part of speech
POSET
partially ordered set
POSS possessive p-phrase
phonological phrase, prosodic phrase
PR.O pronominal object PRES present PROG progressive PROSP prospective aspect PROX
proximal/proximate
PRS present PRST persistive PRT
(discourse) particle
PST past PTCP participle q
contextually salient alternative to a modified proposition
QUD
Question Under Discussion
R relator RC relative clause RD
Right Dislocation
REFL reflexive Rel relative
Abbreviations xv REP
reported/hearsay evidential
RFR
rise–fall–rise
RNR
right node raising
RSL
Russian Sign Language
RST
Rhetorical Structure Theory
Ru Russian RV2
restricted V2 construction
S
single argument of canonical intransitive verb
S singular SADV
sentence adverbial
SC
second conjunct
SCL subject clitic SDM
syntax-discourse model
SDRT
Segmented Discourse Representation Theory
SG singular SJCT subjunctive SL
sign language
SL stage level SLH
Strict Layer Hypothesis
Slk Slovak Sln Slovenian SOF
second occurrence focus
STAT stative SUBJ subject SUP superessive TAM
tense–aspect–mood
TOP topic TPE
TP-ellipsis
TRANS transitive TS
tone spreading
Uk Ukrainian UV2
unrestricted V2 construction
VAN
ventral attention network
VPE
VP-ellipsis
The Contributors
Enoch O. Aboh is Professor of Linguistics and Learnability at the University of Amsterdam. He explores issues of learnability of human languages with a special focus on theoretical syntax as related to the discourse–syntax interface, language creation and language change. Karlos Arregi is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. His research is in syntax and morphology, and their interaction, as well as their interfaces with phonology and semantics, with a special focus on Basque and Romance. He is the author of numerous articles in journals including Linguistic Inquiry and Natural Language Semantics. Stefan Baumann is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Linguistics (Phonetics Department), University of Cologne. His main research interests include prosodic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of information structure, the phonetics and phonology of intonation, the role of prosody in neurocognitive language processing, and multi- layer annotation of spoken language. David Beaver (PhD, University of Edinburgh 1995) spent nine years on the Stanford University Linguistics faculty, and is now a full professor in the departments of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Beaver’s work includes computational and corpus studies, and experimental and theoretical research on topics such as presupposition, anaphora, and focus. He is joint founding editor of Semantics and Pragmatics, a journal of the LSA. Sigrid Beck is Professor of Descriptive and Theoretical Linguistics at the Universität Tübingen. Her specialization is in semantics, with an emphasis on new data sources for semantics, such as cross-linguistic variation, language acquisition, and language change. She is the author of recent articles in Language Acquisition, Journal of Semantics, and Natural Language Semantics. Frauke Berger is a PhD candidate at the University of Potsdam. She previously worked at the ‘Information Structure’ collaborative research centre at the University of Potsdam. Her research includes experimental work on the acquisition of information structure and presupposition triggers. Her work has appeared in Journal of Child Language and Language Acquisition. Giuliano Bocci obtained his PhD from the University of Siena (2009). He worked at the Universities of Siena, Bologna and École Normale Supérieure as a research assistant. He is currently a lecturer in phonetics and phonology at University of Geneva and is a
xviii The Contributors research associate on the ERC-funded project SynCart ‘From maps to principles’. His research focuses on theoretical syntax, prosody, and their interplay with information structure. Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. She is the author of articles in a range of linguistic, psychological, and neuroscientific journals, including Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychological Review, and Lingua and co-author, together with Matthias Schlesewsky, of Processing Syntax and Morphology: A Neurocognitive Perspective (OUP, 2009). Her current research is focused on the development of a neurobiologically and cross- linguistically plausible model of language. Marc Brunelle is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on phonetics, phonology, and language contact, with an emphasis on tone and intonation in Southeast Asian languages, especially Vietnamese and Cham. Daniel Büring is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Vienna, specializing in formal semantics and pragmatics. He is the author of ‘The Meaning of Topic and Focus: The 59th Street Bridge Accent’ (1997), ‘Binding Theory’ (2005) and ‘Intonation and Meaning’ (2016). Yiya Chen is a Associate Professor at Leiden University Center for Linguistics (LUCL) and senior researcher at Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC). Her research mainly focuses on prosody and prosodic variation, with particular attention to tonal languages. Her work has recently appeared in Journal of Phonetics and Phonetica. Laura J. Downing is Professor of African Languages at the Institute for Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research is concerned with the phonology of Bantu languages, and in particular with the role of prosody in conditioning or revealing morphosyntactic structure in domains such as prosodic morphology and the phonology–syntax–information structure interface. Regine Eckardt is Professor of German and General Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. Her research interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics in synchrony and diachrony, specifically focus constructions, particles, perspective taking and polarity phenomena. She is the author of ‘Meaning Change in Grammaticalization’ (2006) and ‘The Semantics of Free Indirect Discourse’ (2015). Katalin É.Kiss is Professor at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, where she is also head of the Doctoral School in Linguistics. Her publications include The Syntax of Hungarian (CUP 2002), Discourse-Configurational Languages (OUP 1995), Event Structure and the Left Periphery (Springer 2006), Adverbs and Adverbial Adjuncts at the Interfaces (2009), The Evoution of Functional Left Peripheries in Hungarian Syntax (OUP 2014).
The Contributors xix Gisbert Fanselow is a Professor of Syntax in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. His research focuses on the theory and methodology of syntax. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and Linguistics. Caroline Féry is Professor of Phonology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research is in phonology and theory of grammar with a special focus on intonation and prosody, as well as the interface with information structure. She was the founding director of the DFG-funded collaborative research centre SFB 632 ‘Information Structure’ from 2003 to 2010. Patrick G. Grosz is Associate Professor in General Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies of the University of Oslo. His research is in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces; it combines theoretical approaches with experimental and corpus-linguistic studies, and has a thematic focus on discourse particles, clause types, pronouns, and agreement and concord. Barbara Höhle is a Professor of Psycholinguistics at the Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam. Her field of research is first language acquisition with a main focus on early acquisition of phonology and syntax. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Journal of Child Language and Lingua. Laurence R. Horn is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of A Natural History of Negation (Chicago, 1989/CSLI, 2001) and the (co-)editor of five handbooks and collections. His 100-plus papers and encyclopedia entries explore implicature, pragmatic theory, negation and polarity, logic, grammatical variation, the lexicon, and the semantics–pragmatics interface. He is an elected fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Larry M. Hyman is Professor of Linguistics and Executive Director of the France- Berkeley Fund at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked extensively on phonological theory, tone, and other aspects of language structure—particularly as concerns the history and description of the Niger-Congo languages of Africa, especially Bantu. Shinichiro Ishihara is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University, having previously held positions at Goethe University Frankfurt, the University of Stuttgart, and the University of Potsdam. His research focuses on the syntax–prosody interface and its relation to information structure in Japanese and other languages. His work has appeared in international journals such as Lingua and Syntax and in edited volumes published by OUP and Mouton de Gruyter. Katja Jasinskaja is a Research Scientist at the Department of German Language and Literature at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on pragmatics, discourse semantics, and various linguistic means, including discourse particles, anaphoric
xx The Contributors pronouns and intonation, that help establish connections between sentences in a coherent text or dialogue. Elsi Kaiser is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. Her primary research focus is in psycholinguistics, especially adult sentence processing and issues related to reference resolution, information structure and the syntax–pragmatics–semantics interface(s). She is especially interested in how different kinds of information interact and are integrated during language processing and what this can tell us about the nature of the mental representations activated during processing. Vadim Kimmelman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC) and he also teaches at the Department of Literary Studies and Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests are in sign linguistics, including the morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of sign languages. Hans van de Koot is a Reader in the Research Department of Linguistics at UCL. His work is broadly concerned with the question of to what degree the properties of linguistic structure are determined by syntax-external systems, both at the level of the word (e.g. argument structure) and at the level of the sentence (e.g. discourse-related word- order variation, the linguistic encoding of scope). Manfred Krifka is Professor of General Linguistics at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Director of ZAS, the Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin. He specializes in semantics and pragmatics on a broader variety of topics, and on descriptive linguistics (Austronesian languages of Vanuatu). Peppina Po-lun Lee is Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie primarily in Chinese and Cantonese syntax and semantics, and she has worked on a variety of research topics, including quantification, focus and information structure, negation, aspect, and eventuality. Her publications include Cantonese Particles and Affixal Quantification (Springer, 2012) and articles in edited books and journals such as Lingua, Journal of Pragmatics and Linguistics. Horst Lohnstein is full Professor and Director of the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Wuppertal. His research focuses on the left sentence periphery and the principles of syntactic and semantic structure building from which the intentional and illocutionary meaning components are derivable in a compositional fashion. Luis López is Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Co-director of the Bilingualism Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His main field of interest is syntactic theory and the interfaces of syntax with information structure, semantics, and prosodic phonology.
The Contributors xxi Anke Lüdeling is Professor of Corpus Linguistics and Morphology at Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin. She is interested in variation and the interplay between qualitative and quantitative knowledge, as well as in methodologies for analysing and annotating corpora of ‘non-standard’ varieties of Germans such as learner language, or spoken language. She has been involved in building several corpora and tools for corpus search and analysis. Alexis Michaud is Research Scientist at CNRS. His main research topic is phonetics/ phonology—especially the study of tone—but his commitment to ‘all-out’ linguistic fieldwork goes some way towards counterbalancing this narrow specialization. Sara Myrberg is a Researcher at the Department of Swedish Language and Multil ingualism at Stockholm University. She defended her thesis The intonational phonology of Stockholm Swedish at Stockholm University in 2010, and primarily works on Swedish prosody and the interfaces between prosody, syntax, and information structure. Ad Neeleman is Professor of Linguistics at UCL. His main research interest is syntax and its interactions with other modules of grammar (especially morphology and information structure). He is the author of Complex Predicates (1993), Flexible Syntax (1999, with Fred Weerman), and Beyond Morphology (2004, with Peter Ackema), and (co-) author of some sixty articles in edited volumes and journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and Morphology. Haihua Pan is Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include syntactic theory, formal semantics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics. Roland Pfau is Associate Professor at the department of General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches in the sign linguistics programme. In his research, he focuses on morphosyntactic and syntactic aspects of sign languages, (sign) language typology, and grammaticalization. Cecilia Poletto is Professor for Romance Linguistics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt since 2011, and Associate Professor at the University of Venice. Her interests are mainly on microvariation of the Romance languages, from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. She worked on various topics within the cartographic framework, from subject clitics, doubling, to interrogative structures and negation and is part of the ASIt project, an online database for Italian dialects. Sophie Repp is Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English and American Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests include the syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and prosody of ellipsis, negation, sentence topics, non-assertive speech acts and question–answer dialogues, as well as processing aspects of some of these phenomena.
xxii The Contributors Tomas Riad is Professor of Scandinavian languages at Stockholm University. His research is concerned with prosody in North Germanic languages, in particular stress and tone accent in a historical and typological perspective. He also works on poetic meter, and the general relationship between meter and phonology. He is the author of The Phonology of Swedish (2014). Julia Ritz is Development Manager at a software manufacturer in the media industry. Her areas of research include information status and the related concepts of coreference, specificity, reference and (non-)referentiality. She has worked on computational models for information structural categories, as well as on Information Extraction tasks, and the extraction of terminology and collocations. Michael Rochemont is Professor of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. His current areas of interest are prosodic phonology, specifically the syntax–phonology connection and relations between information structure categories and prosody; the syntactic expression of categories of information structure, both within and across languages; and givenness, particularly as expressed through deaccenting. Mats Rooth is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Faculty of Computing and Information at Cornell University. He does research in computational linguistics and natural language semantics. He has worked on statistical models of parsing and the lexicon, the semantics of focus, and on related phenomena such as ellipsis and presupposition. In addition to these, he is currently working on finite state optimality theory and web harvesting of intonational data. Kjell Johan Sæbø is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests are mainly in semantics and pragmatics, where he has made contributions across a range of subfields and on a variety of topics, including modality, quantification, definiteness and indefiniteness, presuppositions, appositives and exclamatives, event structures, possessivity, logophoricity, focus structures and theticity, and subjective content. Vieri Samek-Lodovici is a Reader in theoretical linguistics at University College London. He has recently published a monograph with Oxford University Press about the interaction of focalization. He has also worked on a wide range of other topics, including argument structure, agreement, optimality theory, and the relation between optimality theory and minimalism. At the beginning of his career, he worked for several years as a computational linguist. Antje Sauermann is Researcher at the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin. Her research focuses on the acquisition and processing of information structure and word order. Her work has appeared in journals including Second Language Research and Language and Cognitive Processes.
The Contributors xxiii Petra B. Schumacher is Professor of Empirical Linguistics at the Department of German Language and Literature I at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on processes at the interface of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, including anaphora resolution, information structure, and experimental pragmatics. Stavros Skopeteas is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Bielefeld. His interests include syntax, phonology, information structure, experimental fieldwork, and language typology. His research focuses on Greek as well as on several Mesoamerican and Caucasian languages. Augustin Speyer is Full Professor of Linguistics at the German Department of the ‘Universität des Saarlandes’, Germany. The focus of his research is on syntax (mainly German) from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. His main research interests include word order, subordination, infinitival syntax, and the impact of information structure and prosody on syntax. Manfred Stede is Professor of Applied Computational Linguistics at Universität Potsdam. Besides computational applications of text mining, his research revolves around various aspects of discourse structure, ranging from more semantic phenomena, such as coreference, to pragmatic description, for example for the structure of argumentation. As a foundation for this work, he devises frameworks of multi-layer text annotation, and he is also interested in annotation methodology and practice. Balázs Surányi is a Research Professor at the Research Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Theoretical Linguistics of Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. His principal research interests include the interface of syntax and Information Structure, minimalist syntax, and more recently, the interaction between Information Structure and intonation. Satoshi Tomioka is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. His research interest is in semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and their interfaces. He has published articles on various topics, such as interrogatives, ellipsis, anaphora, and information structure. Hubert Truckenbrodt is a Researcher at the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin and Adjunct Professor at Humboldt-University in Berlin. His research interests are the linguistic interfaces. They include questions of how the structures or models of one linguistic module relate to those of another linguistic module with a different nature. Leah Velleman is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is in semantics and pragmatics, with particular interests in the cross-linguistic expression of information structure and in the description of semantics and pragmatics in Mayan languages.
xxiv The Contributors Michael Wagner is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University, and Canada Research Chair for Speech and Language Processing. His research interests encompass everything surrounding sentence prosody, the phonetic and phonological shape it takes as well as the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic factors that it encodes. His contribution was made possible by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation during a stay at Goethe University Frankfurt. Susanne Winkler is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Tübingen. She has a long standing research interest in syntactic theory, information structure, and the syntax–phonology interface. She is the author of Ellipsis and Focus in Generative Grammar. Studies in Generative Grammar 81 (Mouton de Gruyter, 2005) and Focus and Secondary Predication. Studies in Generative Grammar 43 (Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), and of papers in a variety of volumes and journals. Amir Zeldes is Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics at Georgetown University. He works on corpus annotation, search, and visualization, especially for multi-layer corpora. His work focuses on the syntax–semantics interface, where meaning and world knowledge are mapped onto lexical choice. His research explores the idea that constructions have idiosyncratic degrees of innovation that speakers must learn. He has worked on many topics, including German SLA and NLP for under-resourced languages. Malte Zimmermann is Professor of Semantics and Grammar Theory at Potsdam University. From 2010 to 2015, he was the director of the DFG-funded collaborative research centre SFB 632 ‘Information Structure’. His research interests range from laboratory-based experimental semantics to semantically informed field research on non-Indoeuropean languages, with a particular emphasis on West African languages. Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses primarily on the syntactic articulation of the clausal structure, on the interaction between information structure, prosody, and syntax, and on the lexicon-syntax interface. Her other research interests include grammatical transfer in second language acquisition and processing.
Chapter 1
Introdu c t i on Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara
1.1 Goals Information structure (IS) refers to the structuring of sentences (information packaging in Chafe’s 1976 terms) in different kinds of information blocks. IS is not only directly related to some of the central disciplines of linguistics (semantics, pragmatics, syntax, morphology, and prosody), but also to some of the extra-linguistic aspects such as interlocutors’ psychological perception of the world. This Handbook contains forty chapters discussing various theories and issues on IS, and aims to comprehensively cover the state of the art in one volume. It is designed as a guide to the theoretical and practical aspects related to IS, surveying what researchers have achieved so far, as well as raising outstanding questions that still need to be investigated. By bringing together this diversity of questions and this diversity of approaches, we hope to encourage our readers to explore different avenues of research in the future. The volume is intended for a wide audience: graduate students, faculty, and researchers in all disciplines of linguistics who are interested in information structure and its effect on grammar as well as meeting the needs of linguists of all theoretical persuasions at graduate level and above. It will also be useful for cognitive psychologists, computational scientists, philologists, and philosophers. Studies of IS face various kinds of challenges, which are rooted in one striking aspect of IS: its diversity. A first challenge is the diversity, or abundance, of theories and definitions of IS-related notions. There are countless definitions of basic IS notions and related theories that have been proposed in the literature. Many researchers use the same terminology to refer to different notions, or different terms are applied to the same concept. Choosing which definition to adopt in one’s own study can be a first obstacle for starting work on IS-related issues. This volume aims to bring some clarity to the terminological confusion typical of new concepts and ideas. While there is an emerging consensus about many terms and notions related to information structure, some clarifications are still badly needed. In order to avoid unnecessary repetition of terminological confusion,
2 Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara all the chapters in this Handbook adopt a uniform set of definitions, as summarized by Krifka (2008), as a starting point. Therefore, each chapter does not define these basic notions in depth. Only deviations from Krifka’s definitions are discussed by the authors. Krifka’s definitions of IS notions are summarized in this introduction (Section 1.3). A second challenge is the diversity of IS grammatical reflexes. IS is expressed in different ways in different languages, and even within a single language, there is diversity of means. Focus (see Section 1.3.2 for the exact definition adopted in this Handbook), for example, can be expressed by phonetic/phonological means (pitch accents, metrical prominence, prosodic phrasing, pitch range expansion/compression, lengthening/shortening, etc.), by morphological/syntactic means (morphological marking, syntactic movement of focused material, word order manipulation of non-focal material, or specific focus-constructions such as clefts), and by semantic/pragmatic means (focus-sensitive operators and discourse particles, manipulation of pragmatic implicatures, and conversational maxims). There is no doubt that the great number of grammatical means is one of the major causes of the diversity of IS notions and definitions mentioned above. Furthermore, while the notions of IS refer to the formal and communicative aspects of language for the expression of information structural roles, IS is also closely related to psychological perception of the world and of the minds of the participants of the conversation. The notions of IS may therefore denote the extra- linguistic, cognitive, or mental states of referents, actions, locations, and temporality as well (see Kuno 1972; Chafe 1976; Prince 1981; Lambrecht 1994, and many others for this dichotomy). A third aspect that makes IS study challenging is the methodological diversity found in studies of IS. In most (if not all) cases, linguistic and extra-linguistic factors of IS are not simply playing their roles independently. Rather, they are intricately interwoven. In order to disentangle substantial knots of relevant factors and fully understand the nature of IS-related phenomena, linguists need to approach IS-related linguistic phenomena from various interdisciplinary perspectives. A wide range of novel and interdisciplinary approaches, though certainly a desirable direction for the advance of a scientific field, may become an obstacle when one needs to survey the relevant literature in unfamiliar subfields. One of the aims of this handbook is to facilitate interdisciplinary investigation by introducing some of the methodological developments that have emerged in recent years, especially those that take experimental approaches. A fourth challenge is the cross-linguistic diversity. Typological investigation is an essential part of IS studies. This Handbook introduces selected languages and language families to illustrate the breadth of cross-linguistic variation of IS expressions as well as variation within each language(-family). The chapters in this volume are grouped into four parts, each of which addresses one of the challenges mentioned above. The thematic organization within each part of the volume reflects some of the principal fields of research and application in IS. As such, the volume can be read by focusing on specific aspects and parts. Also, each chapter contains cross-references to other chapters, so that the related discussions can be easily found within the volume.
Introduction 3 This introductory chapter presents a theoretical background, including a short history of IS studies (Section 1.2), the definitions of IS-related notions adopted throughout the volume (Section 1.3), and brief summaries of each chapter (Section 1.4).
1.2 A short history of information structure The point of departure for research on IS starts with Mathesius (1975), who published at the beginning of the twentieth century and founded the Prague Linguistic Circle. Mathesius is often credited as the father of modern IS, see for instance Lambrecht (1994).1 Mathesius replaced the psycholinguistic terms ‘psychological subjects’ and ‘psychological predicates’ of von der Gabelentz (1869) with the notions of ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’, see also Daneš (1974a, 1974b) and Steedman (2000) for this terminology. According to Mathesius, theme is what the sentence is about, and rheme is what is being said about the theme. These terms easily translate into topic for theme and focus for rheme. Firbas (1964, 1966) developed the ideas of the Prague school further, and integrated them in a theory of dynamic communication: the theme is ‘the sentence element (or elements) carrying the lowest degree(s) of C[ommunicative] D[ynamism] within the sentence’, and the rheme is the important part of the sentence, that ‘pushes the communication forward’ (1964: 272). Halliday (1967–68) first used the term information structure. Focus is what is ‘not being recoverable from the preceding discourse’ (1967–68: 204). ‘The newness may lie in the speech function, or it may be a matter of contrast with what has been said before or what might be expected’ (1967–68: 206). Chafe (1976: 30) defined given (or old) information as ‘that knowledge which the speaker assumes to be in the consciousness of the addressee at the time of the utterance’ and new information as ‘what the speaker assumes he is introducing into the addressee’s consciousness by what he says’. Both Prince (1981) and Lambrecht (1994) were especially interested in the characterization of Chafe’s notion of givenness and proposed elaborate hierarchies of givenness. Another branch of information structure was initiated by Marty (1918). He was inspired by the philosopher Brentano (1874) who discussed the categorical and thetic judgement types. A typical categorical judgement consists of a subject–predicate structure. First an entity is named and second a statement is made about it. Thetic judgements, by contrast, express an event, a state, or a situation, and are thus simpler than categorical ones. Kuroda (1972) revived this distinction by observing that they straightforwardly apply to Japanese expressions containing ga and wa respectively. In the last decades, the interest in information structure has grown immensely, 1 In chapter 33, É. Kiss also cites Sámuel Brassai (1860), a Hungarian linguist, who was interested in some aspects of word orders from the point of view of their givenness and newness (for which he used different terms). However, his work was never well-known outside of Hungary.
4 Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara and this has lead to an extraordinary evolution of linguistic themes and ideas. Many authors have been crucial for the advancement of information structural theories, including von Stechow (1981), Jacobs (1983), Rooth (1985, 1992), Rochemont (1986), Erteschik-Shir (1997), Vallduví (1992), Steedman (2000) to cite only a few names, as can be gathered from the chapters of the volume.
1.3 Definitions As a starting point, all the chapters in this handbook adopt the definitions of IS notions proposed by Krifka (2008). This section briefly summarizes Krifka’s definitions of the basic IS notions.
1.3.1 Information packaging and Common Ground Following Stalnaker (1974) and Reinhart (1981), Krifka (2008: 243) claims that information structure notions should be grounded in theories of how communication works: ‘The basic notions of Information Structure (IS), such as Focus, Topic and Givenness, are not simple observational terms. As scientific notions, they are rooted in theory, in this case, in theories of how communication works.’ To start the discussion of IS notions, Krifka (2008) follows Chafe’s (1976) approach to IS by adopting the idea that IS should be regarded as the matter of information packaging, that is, how ‘the speaker accommodates his speech to temporary states of the addressee’s mind, rather than to the long-term knowledge of the addressee’ (1976: 28). He discusses various ‘statuses’ of nouns (or noun phrases)2 that are related to how the information is transmitted between participants of a discourse, in other words, how the content of the utterance is packaged by the speaker and sent to the addressee: I have been using the term packaging to refer to the kind of phenomena at issue here, with the idea that they have to do primarily with how the message is sent and only secondarily with the message itself, just as the packaging of toothpaste can affect sales in partial independence of the quality of the toothpaste inside. (Chafe 1976: 28)
According to Chafe, the speaker packages the information to be sent to the addressee according to the knowledge that he assumes is shared by the addressee. This shared knowledge is often called Common Ground (CG), a term proposed by Stalnaker (1974, 2002). The CG forms the background of a conversation—the information that is mutually 2 Chafe (1967) limits his discussion to noun phrases. So does Reinhart (1981), in her discussion of aboutness topics (see Section 1.3.4). But see, for example, chapters 15 by Lohnstein (on verum focus) and 16 by Zimmermann (on predicate focus) for cases where non-nominal elements are focused.
Introduction 5 known (or believed) to be shared by speaker and addressee—and to which new information is added. The idea is that a discourse proceeds in such a way that each utterance by the participants of the discourse updates the content of the CG. As a result, the CG is continuously modified in communication. The notion of CG also allows us to make a distinction between ‘presuppositions, as requirements for the input CG’, and ‘assertions or the proffered content, as the proposed change in the output CG’ (see Krifka 2008: 245). Although Krifka agrees with Chafe in that IS deals with the way the message is delivered, Krifka further points out that IS not only deals with how to deliver the message, but also affects the content of the message itself. He therefore makes a distinction between what the content of the current CG is (CG Content), and how these contents should be developed in terms of the relevance to the current discourse (CG Management). This distinction allows us to ‘associate those aspects of IS that have truth-conditional impact with CG content, and those which relate to the pragmatic use of expressions with CG management’ (Krifka 2008: 246).3
1.3.2 Focus The definition of focus is based on the theory of alternative semantics of focus proposed by Rooth (1985, 1992, chapter 2 of this volume). Focus assigned to a linguistic expression α always indicates that there are alternatives to α relevant in the current discourse. Putting it differently, anything that does not indicate any alternatives to α should not be called focus. This analysis allows various ways of focus marking, as there are various ways to signal the presence of alternatives, for example pitch accents, word order, specific syntactic constructions like clefts, etc. Krifka (2008: 247) defines focus as follows: (1) Focus indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions. Focus may be used to influence either the CG content or the CG management. Krifka (2008) distinguishes between the two in terms of semantic vs pragmatic uses of focus. The semantic use of focus affects the truth-conditional aspects of the discourse, while the pragmatic uses of focus regulates how the CG of the discourse is to be updated by imposing pragmatic requirements on the discourse to fulfil the communicative needs of the discourse participants. For example, focus sensitive operators (see Beck, chapter 12 of this volume), such as only, also, and even, are always associated with focus to influence the truth-condition of the sentence in which they appear. The sentence John only introduced Mary to Sue may have different truth-conditions depending on the location of focus, which is indicated by pitch accents. In the context where John introduced Mary
3
See Velleman and Beaver (chapter 5) for a concise overview of this distinction, and Horn (chapter 6) for cases that lie around the border of this distinction.
6 Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara to Sue and Bill (and didn’t introduce anyone to anyone else), the sentence is true if the pitch accent is on Mary, but false if the pitch accent is on Sue. The pragmatic use of focus regulates the direction to which the discourse is developing. A first example is the so-called question–answer congruence. A wh-question sentence requires a congruent answer sentence, thus adding a particular type of information to the current CG. In other words, a question ‘changes the current CG in such a way as to indicate the communicative goal of the questioner’ (Krifka 2008: 250). The answer sentence fulfils this communicative goal by expressing the required information to be added to the CG as the focus of the sentence. Other pragmatic uses are correction and confirmation of information, highlighting of parallel information, and delimitation of the utterance (cf. definition of contrastive topics below). Further discussions of CG management and related notions include ‘question under discussion’ (Velleman and Beaver, chapter 5), ‘(non-)at-issue’-ness (Horn, chapter 6), and ‘presupposition’ (Sæbø, chapter 7).
1.3.3 Givenness The status of referents can be new (inactive at the point of their introduction into the discourse) or given (active in the consciousness of the interlocutors). According to Clark and Haviland (1977), given information is ‘information [the speaker] believes the listener already knows and accepts as true’, and new is ‘information [the speaker] believes the listener does not yet know’. Givenness is divided into text-givenness (previously mentioned in the discourse) and context-givenness (contextually salient). Using the notion of CG, Krifka defines givenness as in (2). (2) A feature X of an expression α is a Givenness feature iff X indicates whether the denotation of α is present in the CG or not, and/or indicates the degree to which it is present in the immediate CG. This definition allows two different interpretations of givenness: givenness may be either a categorical feature (given vs not given, i.e. new), or a scale that expresses the degree of discourse salience, following two lines of theories of givenness (e.g. Schwarzschild 1999 for the former and Prince 1981, Gundel et al. 1993, Chafe 1976, and Lambrecht 1994 for the latter). Givenness may be part of the lexical information (as in pronouns, clitics, and definite articles), or arbitrarily assigned to linguistic expressions by means of various grammatical devices (such as deaccentuation, word order, and deletion). See chapter 3 by Rochemont for further discussion.
1.3.4 Topic The notion of topic is related to the way information is stored in human memory and organized in communication. Krifka describes topic as follows: ‘ … topic is the entity that a speaker identifies about which the information, the comment, is given. This
Introduction 7 presupposes that information in human communication and memory is organized in a certain way so that it can be said to be “about” something’ (Krifka 2008: 265). He adopts the following definition of topic (often referred to as aboutness topic), which makes use of the notion of CG. (3) The topic constituent identifies the entity or set of entities under which the information expressed in the comment constituent should be stored in the CG content. This definition follows the proposal by Reinhart (1981), who uses the organization of a library catalogue as a metaphor for how topics and comments are related to the CG. The CG (for which she uses the term ‘context set’) is organized like a subject-oriented library catalogue, in which book entries (propositions stored in the CG) are organized according to their subjects (topics). A topic is like a subject in the catalogue, according to which book entries are collected in a single file card. Each time a new book entry (a new proposition) is added to the catalogue (the current CG), the topic specifies the file card to which the book entry is to be added.4 (But see also Roberts 2011 and Büring, chapter 4 of this volume, for the difficulties of defining topic.) Based on this definition, Krifka also discusses the interaction between topic and focus to define contrastive topics (see also Büring, chapter 4 of this volume). He claims that a contrastive topic contains a focus, which induces a set of alternatives within a contrastive topic and indicates the presence of other topics relevant for the current CG. The presence of alternatives indicates that there are other topics and their comments that may be added to the CG. In other words, a contrastive focus can imply the presence of further information to be added to the CG.5
1.4 Organization of the Handbook As mentioned in Section 1.1, this Handbook is divided into four parts, each reflecting a type of diversity found in IS studies: Part I Theories of information structure, Part II Current issues on information structure, Part III Experimental approaches to information structure, and Part IV Language studies on information structure. In order to comprehensively review each thread of research that seemed important for a coverage of all aspects of IS, we selected what we thought were major topics and fundamental issues
4 Morphosyntactically, topics may be presented via various strategies: specific syntactic position(s) (see, for example, Aboh, chapter 8, Surányi, chapter 21, É. Kiss, chapter 33, Chen, Lee and Pan, chapter 36, for relevant discussion), dislocations (López, chapter 20, Poletto and Bocci, chapter 32, Skopeteas, chapter 34), morphological marking (Tomioka, c hapter 37, Michaud and Brunelle, c hapter 38), or certain word order configurations (Neeleman and van de Koot, c hapter 19, Fanselow, c hapter 31). 5 But see Repp (chapter 14) for further discussion on the notion of ‘contrast’. Also, see Krifka for two related notions: frame setting and delimitation.
8 Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara and assigned them a chapter each. In planning the specific contents and structure of the volume, our goals were to gather a wide range of perspectives, across subfields, languages, and disciplines, and to highlight the complementarity of approaches and backgrounds. Inevitably, however, theoretical approaches and empirical facts are interwoven, and are often addressed in more than only one chapter. And conversely, some important aspects of IS may not be fully represented in this volume, which is also inevitable to a certain extent given the breadth of the range of IS-related phenomena. When some topic or phenomenon could not be included in a chapter due to space limitation, however, authors were asked to provide references to relevant literature. In the remainder of this section, a general overview of each chapter is provided.
1.4.1 Part I: Theories of information structure Part I comprises an overview of various linguistic theories of information structure in semantics, pragmatics, morphosyntax, and phonology. The first three chapters of this section provide a comprehensive overview of the basic notions of information structure: focus, givenness, and topic. These first chapters take a semantic perspective, and lay the ground for the following chapters. In c hapter 2 (Alternative semantics), Mats Rooth defends the idea that ‘the semantics of the language makes available, in addition to an ordinary semantic value (which is a proposition in the case of a clause), a set of eligible alternatives, which for a clause is a set of propositions. The set of alternatives is a “focus semantic value”, or “alternative semantic value” ’. After reviewing empirical applications of the alternative semantic theory of focus, he explicates how focus is interpreted and how alternatives are composed in this theory. He also discusses an alternative theory by Schwarzschild (1999) as well as Büring’s (1997) extension of the theory to contrastive topics. But he refutes the idea that the notion of ‘focus’ can be assigned a single definition. There may be ‘several different theoretical notions of focus’, depending on the language and the phenomenon under discussion. According to Michael Rochemont’s chapter 3 (Givenness), the notion of givenness, which he discusses in relation to the notion of salience, is related to the notion of CG management rather than that of CG content (see Krifka 2008 and above for this distinction). He examines deaccenting in English and comes to the conclusion that ‘failure to deaccent when to do so would be consistent with speaker’s actual communicative intent misleads interlocutors to think the speaker must have some other intent’. This can be illustrated with Lakoff ’s (1972) famous sentence John called Mary a Republican and then SHE insulted HIM. If insulted is not deaccented, then it may be assumed that the speaker does not consider that calling somebody a Republican is insulting. And he proposes that even under a precise definition of givenness, focus cannot be entirely eliminated. Daniel Büring’s chapter 4 ((Contrastive) Topics) specifies an analysis of contrastive topics as an extension of alternative semantics for focus: ‘CT [contrastive topic] marking results in a set of alternative propositions which are explicitly not used for exhaustification’. A sentence containing a contrastive topic and a focus must not be a complete answer to the question under
Introduction 9 discussion. Büring also makes a plea for eliminating non-contrastive topics, which according to him, do not consist in a coherent type of linguistic phenomena. Chapters 5 to 7 introduce theories of information structure in pragmatics and discourse analysis. In c hapter 5 (Question-based models of information structure), Leah Velleman and David Beaver present a Question Under Discussion model of discourse and information, following a proposal by Roberts (2012). This model uniformly treats focus as a pragmatic notion, and explains its function by developing discourse structures based on questions implicitly or explicitly indicated by focus. They discuss the notion of ‘relevance’ of utterances and of ‘congruence’ of answers to questions in assessing a model in terms of a range of constraints that relate IS to discourse structure. Chapter 6 by Laurence Horn (Information structure and the landscape of (non-)at-issue meaning) explores issues around the border between semantic entailment and pragmatic implicature, or between CG content and CG management, from the perspective of at-issueness. Among other things, Horn shows that exhaustivity in structural focus constructions like clefts (as in It was a pizza that Mary ate) belongs to a non-at-issue component of meaning, and rejects a semantic treatment of exhaustivity. In c hapter 7 (Information structure and presupposition), Kjell Johan Sæbø examines the notion of presupposition in detail. [I]did the dishes presupposes that someone did the dishes. He points out three areas where the notion of presupposition interacts with IS and discusses each in detail: (i) presupposition triggered by focus operators under Rooth’s alternative semantic theory of focus; (ii) presupposition as the background of focus; and (iii) relation to discourse structure, to which both IS and presupposition are sensitive. Presupposition is understood as the conditions that the CG must meet in order to be updated with the sentence. It is shown that a theory which does not directly involve an existential presupposition, but which creates the potential, in the form of the alternative set, for a general process to generate a defeasible presupposition is to be preferred over theories that create presuppositions as the complement of focus. The following chapters discuss specific theories dealing with syntactic theories of information structure and the syntax–phonology interface. Chapter 8 by Enoch Aboh (Information structure: A cartographic perspective) surveys the cartographic line of syntactic approaches to information structure, as proposed by Rizzi (1997). This theory claims that information-structure-sensitive notions (e.g. topic, focus) are encoded by means of discourse markers that trigger various constituent displacement rules. He illustrates his approach with numerous examples, among others taken from Gbe languages of the Kwa family that have topic and focus markers, in bold face in the following example: Náwè lɔ́ yà gbákún étɔ̀n wɛˋ é ɖè ‘As for the woman, she took off her hat’. In chapter 9 (Nuclear stress and information structure), Maria Luisa Zubizarreta compares the predictions of the nuclear stress for Germanic and Romance languages, the latter kind of languages having a rigid rightmost stress pattern, as in Compró el libro Juan ‘Juan bought the book.’ Moreover, she proposes that the unmarked pattern under wide- focus condition, originates in a different way from narrow focus. Chapter 10 by Karlos Arregi (Focus projection theories) is dedicated to a comparison between two theories (‘Default Prosody’ and ‘F-projection’ approaches) of how focus projection arises. In the
10 Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara first model, it is a consequence of general and default rules of grammar, and in the second model, it needs to be implemented by means of rules. Arregi shows that the first model makes better predictions in general and illustrates with Basque data. Chapter 11 by Vieri Samek-Lodovici (Constraint conflict and information structure) provides an overview of conflict-based analyses, specifically Optimality Theory (OT), of information structure. It centres on focalization of Italian post-verbal constituents, as in Parleranno tutti. ‘Everybody will speak.’ No. Non parlerà [nessuno]F. ‘No. Nobody will speak.’ And it shows that OT provides the tools for accounting for typological variations.
1.4.2 Part II: Current issues on information structure Part II introduces case studies of various IS-related topics necessitating interface approaches. The direct reference to IS in grammar, as a result of its inclusion in a theory of grammar, has changed our views about what is possible and what is marked in linguistic structures, and it has shown that modules of grammar have to be more connected with each other than has been assumed until now. The need to bring multidisciplinary approaches to bear on critical questions is the motor for many fruitful collaborations across research specialties for issues addressing IS. However, we only start to understand why languages are so diverse in the way they implement IS. In the first 10 chapters of this part (chapters 12–21), various semantics and morphosyntactic issues are discussed in relation to IS. In c hapter 12 (Focus-sensitive operators), Sigrid Beck studies the role of focus sensitive operators as expressions that operate on alternatives. She agrees with Rooth (1992, chapter 2 of this volume), who proposes that it is the squiggle operator ~ that is the alternative evaluating operator, rather than quantifiers like only, even, and always, as in Derk only saw a raven. Moreover, and this is also reminiscent of Rooth’s chapter, she examines further expressions that operate on alternatives like those involved in question formation and negative polarity item licensing. In chapter 13 (Quantification and information structure), Manfred Krifka surveys data and theoretical models that concern the interaction between IS and quantification. He first discusses a type of quantification expressed by adverbial quantifiers, generic sentences, or modal operators (A-quantification) and suggests that adverbial quantification (always, usually) is focus sensitive. In the second part of the chapter, quantification expressed by nominal quantifiers (Every black die is loaded) and determiners (D-quantification) are investigated and it is shown that these quantifiers, whose restrictors are usually fixed rigidly by syntax, can interact with IS to exhibit exceptional cases. He also discusses cases where some quantifiers are explicitly focused or topicalized, depending on their meaning. In chapter 14 (Contrast: Dissecting an Elusive Information-structural Notion and its Role in Grammar), Sophie Repp shows that the notion of contrast is a difficult one. In the sentence Pete went to Rome, Marc went to London, not only the alternatives that the contrastive constituents evoke, but also the discourse relations that connect the discourse segments containing the contrastive constituents, are subjected to detailed analysis for their effects on grammar (prosody,
Introduction 11 morphosyntax). In chapter 15 (Verum focus), Horst Lohnstein examines Höhle’s (1988, 1992) notion of verum focus ‘emphasizing the expression of truth of a proposition’, as in Carl did feed the dog. After presenting several approaches to verum focus in the literature, Lohnstein examines the role of sentence mood and discourse situation in verum focus constructions. He claims that verum focus is focus on sentence mood, and that it is used to reduce the alternatives of (verbal) behaviour characterized by the functions of the sentence mood (e.g. stopping disputations about the issue that is verum-focused). In chapter 16 (Predicate focus), Malte Zimmermann studies focus on the verbal element and on functional elements in the extended verbal projection (Peter kicked the cat. No, Peter pettedF the cat.) The chapter contains a cross-linguistic overview of the grammatical strategies available for marking predicate focus. It investigates asymmetries in the realization of predicate as opposed to term focus by means of obligatory marking, grammatical strategy, and complexity. In chapter 17 (Information structure and discourse particles), Patrick Grosz studies the relationship between IS and German discourse particles, such as ja in examples like weil man ja arbeitet/weil ja wer arbeitet. ‘because one/someone is working as you know’. These particles contribute to the CG management, and are not necessarily truth conditional, as one can see from the translation. The chapter evaluates the thesis that discourse particles separate clauses into rhematic and thematic information and that they are focus sensitive. Grosz also addresses ‘relational’ discourse particles (e.g. doch and schon) operating on a contextually salient alternative proposition. Chapter 18 (Ellipsis and information structure) by Susanne Winkler investigates the role of information structure in ellipsis. VP-Ellipsis is illustrated in the following sentence where the striked out part is elided: Anna promised to play the piano but she DIDN’T play the piano. According to Winkler, syntactic and information-structural theories interact in accounting for the licensing of the different types of elliptical phenomena. Moreover, information structure (especially givenness and focus) and discourse factors influence the form and the interpretation of ellipsis. In chapter 19 (Word order and information structure), Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot investigate the phenomenon of allegedly free word order in a typological perspective and show that IS is a powerful motor for word order changes. Using data from Dutch, they establish four generalizations (Given-before-new, A-relatedness, No derived topic–focus mismatch, and No focus resumption) that capture the relation between IS and word order. Chapter 20 (Dislocations and information structure) by Luis López examines dislocations, as illustrated by the following Spanish example: Los cubiertos, ya los he puesto sobre la mesa. ‘I already put the silverware on the table.’ He separates the dislocations in H-type (hanging topics, left dislocations, weakly connected to the main clause) and D-type (left and right dislocations, contrastive, strongly connected to the main clause) and shows that they have different information structural properties. In chapter 21 (Discourse-configurationality), Balázs Surányi examines the property shared by many languages that topic and focus are associated with particular phrase structure configurations. He shows that discourse-configurationality and (non-)configurationality are mutually independent properties, and illustrates their effect and variation in numerous languages. For example, the word order of non-configurational languages
12 Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara may be governed by non-IS factors such as person/animacy (Fijian), evidentiality (Quechua), and so on. The next three chapters are dedicated to phonological analyses at their interface with information structure. They investigate the theoretical approaches that have been developed to deal with metrical and prosodic prominence in European languages. In chapter 22 (On the expression of focus in the metrical grid and in the prosodic hierarchy), Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad address the relation between prosodic hierarchy and metrical grid structure that can change as a result of information structure. They compare English, a lexical stress language, and Swedish, a pitch accent language, and investigate nested focus in both languages, as in the so-called Superman sentences of Neeleman and Szendrői (Johnny was reading Superman to some kid) and Second Occurrence Focus (SOF). In c hapter 23 (Focus, intonation and tonal height), Hubert Truckenbrodt is interested in the tonal effect induced by focus (F-marking in his account) and givenness. He concentrates on German and Mandarin Chinese. Besides showing the effect of focus prominence, a principle positing that focus attracts the strongest stress in the sentence, his main point is to show that focus immediately changes the height of accents without changing first the reference lines of prosodic phrases. He uses dual focus in Chinese for illustrations. In chapter 24 (Second occurrence focus), Stefan Baumann reviews the effect of Second Occurrence Focus (SOF) on the intonational correlates of focus and givenness. In the sentence A: Everyone knew that Mary only eats [vegetable]FOF. B: If even Paul knew that Mary only eats [vegetables]SOF, then he should have suggested a different restaurant, the expression vegetables in the second sentence is SOF because it is a focus associated with a focus sensitive operator only, and it appears for the second time in the discourse. Baumann surveys the theoretical questions (semantic and phonological) this phenomenon raises, as well as various analyses in the literature. In the last chapter of Part II (chapter 25 Information structure and language change), Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer examine the effect of IS on language change. They propose that the range of focus sensitive particles, the focus related syntactic patterns, and the alternative-based constructions can change with time, but that the invariant semantics of focus do not change. They illustrate their proposal with the contrast between V2 movement in Germanic languages, and its loss between Middle English and Early Modern English.
1.4.3 Part III: Experimental approaches to information structure Part III is an overview of the state of the art in the study of information structure from different experimental perspectives. It introduces studies from various sub-disciplines of linguistics that shed a new light on this research. Experimental perspectives have been another motor for theoretical advances. The eye-opening effect of experimental method for the sake of investigating possible structures has highlighted the complexity of linguistic behaviour with respect to IS. In a methodological shift, processing and
Introduction 13 cognition have entered the scene only recently, but these advances are progressively and radically changing the way we deal with theoretical issues. In chapter 26 (Information structure and language comprehension: Insights from psycholinguistics), Elsi Kaiser examines how psycholinguistics has studied comprehension of IS correlates, especially on how prosodic and syntactic cues are processed in real time. She reviews several experimental methods to this effect: time-based measures, attention-based measures, and off-line methods. C hapter 27 (Information structure and production planning) by Michael Wagner is complementary to chapter 26, as it concentrates on the production of IS cues from a psycholinguistic perspective. He distinguishes two views on the effects of IS: production planning models see IS effects as a consequence of contextual salience affecting the speaker’s lexical selection or grammatical functions assignment at the functional level, while linguistic models treat IS functions as part of grammatically encoded information which is processed incrementally in production. Chapter 28 (Information structure in first language acquisition) by Barbara Höhle, Frauke Berger, and Antje Sauermann, reviews the literature on the acquisition of linguistic means related to IS, especially production and the comprehension of accentuation, word order, and the effect of focus particles. In chapter 29 (Towards a neurobiology of information structure), Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Petra Schumacher investigate the neurophysiological and neuroanatomical correlates of IS notions and relate them to higher-order cognitive processing, like prediction and mental modelling, attention orientation, memory, and inferencing. The last chapter in Part III, chapter 30 (Corpus linguistics and information structure research) by Anke Lüdeling, Julia Ritz, Manfred Stede, and Amir Zeldes passes review of existing linguistic corpora for the study of IS. The authors show that there are two sensitive aspects for corpora: the design of a corpus that can serve as a basis for qualitative or quantitative studies and the problem of annotation.
1.4.4 Part IV: Language studies on information structure Part IV groups chapters on different languages or language families. Each of the chapters examines how the different IS roles are reflected in the grammar of the particular languages (or language families). Most chapters compare the role of syntax, prosody, and morphology for the expression of topic, givenness, and focus, but they also address specific cases of IS when they use surprising or non-standard ways of expression. This part can be understood as test cases for the preceding chapters. It reveals the diversity of the means used by different languages. In chapter 31 (Syntactic and prosodic reflexes of information structure in Germanic) Gisbert Fanselow shows that despite evident differences among Germanic languages, common tendencies can be identified, like the preference for prosodic prominence in the final part of the sentence, and the fact that focus can be realized in situ, in which case it is realized with the highest prominence in its domain. However, some Germanic languages change word order as a function of IS more easily than others. In chapter 32 (Syntactic and prosodic effects of information structure in Romance) Giuliano Bocci
14 Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara and Cecilia Poletto review Romance languages in a cartographic approach. Different syntactic positions can have different IS roles. Dislocations are also investigated, as they are typical for Romance languages. Specific tonal analyses are proposed for Italian, which have been shown to realize information structural roles of constituents. Chapter 33 (Discourse functions: The case of Hungarian) by Katalin É.Kiss discusses the IS in the Hungarian sentence from a syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspective. She envisages the topic as the logical subject of the sentence, binding an empty argument in the main clause. Focus also gets a syntactic analysis, as it is necessarily derived by movement to a special syntactic position. Furthermore, it expresses exhaustive identification. In c hapter 34 (Information structure in Modern Greek), Stavros Skopeteas reviews three properties of Greek IS: variable word order, free focal accent placement, and clitic doubling of DP arguments. It is shown that Greek is both similar and different from Germanic languages. Both left-and right-dislocations play a major role in the expression of IS in Greek. In chapter 35 (Information structure in Slavic) Katja Jasinskaja reviews the grammatical reflexes of IS in Slavic languages. She shows the effect of intonation and syntax for different IS roles. She shows the role of different tonal patterns in Russian, and also reflects on the role of full forms, clitics, and zeroes for the expression of givenness. Particles are treated in a separate section. She emphasizes that, even if Russian is better studied than the other Slavic languages, differences among languages abound and need more study. In chapter 36 (Topic and focus marking in Chinese), Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan show that, even though syntax and prosody compete for the expression of IS, they are usually complementary rather than mutually exclusive in Mandarin Chinese. Prosodic effects are pervasive. There are numerous syntactic and morphological means to identify a focus. The notion of topic is traditionally associated with the notion of subject, and Mandarin is a topic-prominent language. Chapter 37 (Information structure in Japanese) by Satoshi Tomioka, is dedicated to the expression of IS in Japanese. It is shown that Japanese is both similar and different from English in several subtle ways: prosody and syntax are used in similar ways in both languages. However, the use of cleft sentences and of markers like wa is typical for Japanese, and express different kinds of IS roles. Tomioka also illustrates recursivity of information structure with Japanese examples. Chapter 38 (Information structure in Asia: Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan) and Vietnamese (Austroasiatic)) by Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle, describes two understudied Asian languages, Na and Vietnamese, and emphasizes the diversity of means used for the expression of IS in these languages, which they describe as typical for the diversity among languages in general. Beside emphatic stress and word order changes, Na has a wealth of discourse particles used for the expression of topic and focus. Moreover, it also uses intonational and phrasing means for expressing givenness. Vietnamese, by contrast, has much fewer IS particles, but it extensively uses intonational means. For givenness, ellipsis is a common strategy. In chapter 39 (Information structure in Bantu) Laura Downing and Larry M. Hyman emphasize the diversity that Bantu languages present in their grammatical means for expressing focus. They are particularly interested in the prosodic, syntactic, and morphological reflexes, and suggest that information structure does not need special
Introduction 15 syntactic positions or special markers in prosody and morphology. This suggestion is illustrated among others with disjoint and conjoint verb allomorphs (Meeussen 1959), but also with word order and dislocations, all operations that are not exclusively used for IS. Other similar examples are nominal cases expressed by tones, as well as metatony, which typically have different functions, one of them being IS. The final chapter of the volume, by Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau, chapter 40 (Information structure in sign languages) describes how IS is expressed in Sign Languages, that is, in languages using the visual-gestural modality of signal transmission, as opposed to the oral-auditory modality of spoken languages. The authors show that there are striking similarities in how these languages transmit IS. For instance, all languages use prosodic and syntactic means, and none of them uses morphological means. Non-manual marking (like raised brows) is commonly used.
Acknowledgements This Handbook is the result of a project which benefited from various kinds of support from many people. Without their help, this book would have never become a reality. We would like to thank everyone who has helped us. First of all, the authors of the chapters kindly agreed to our invitation, and contributed great chapters which deepen our understanding of IS and further stimulate our interests in the topic. Another group of researchers who contributed enormously to this volume and certainly deserve acknowledgement is the large group of anonymous reviewers of the chapters. We sincerely appreciate their cooperation. This project originally started while both of us were still involved in the Collaborative Research Center (SFB632) ‘Information Structure’ at the University of Potsdam and the Humboldt University in Berlin. However, the major part of the endeavour took place at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main after we moved there. We would like to thank our colleagues at both institutes for their support and countless discussions. In May 2012, we organized a small workshop with some of the authors for the typological part of the Handbook (Part IV). We would like to thank the participants for stimulating discussions. We also thank Klaus von Heusinger and Ede Zimmermann for their useful advice in the early planning phase. Many thanks also go to our student assistants Julia Biskupek, Kerstin Czerner, Laura Hirtler, Stefanie Krkeljas, Alexandra Lowles, Melanie Lüttin, Johannes Messerschmidt, Katrin Müller, Katharina Schöning, Dominik Thiele, and Johannes Wolf for their diligent help with style, formatting, reference check, and indexing. Finally, we would also like to thank Oxford University Press (especially John Davey, Molly Davis, Karen Morgan, Julia Steer, Vicki Sunter, and Lauren Konopko) for giving us the opportunity to pursue this project, and their constant and generous support throughout. The people of Newgen also efficiently contributed to the elaboration of the final product.
Pa rt I
T H E OR I E S OF I N F OR M AT ION ST RU C T U R E
Chapter 2
Alternative Se ma nt i c s Mats Rooth
2.1 Introduction Alternative semantics is a semantic framework that finds application in the analysis of questions, focus, disjunction, negative polarity, presupposition triggering, and implicature. The unifying idea is one of semantic, pragmatic, or discourse-structural operations or constraints referring to ‘alternative’ phrasal meanings. This chapter presents the analysis in alternative semantics of prosodic focus. Some of the other applications are sketched in the last section. In English, German, Japanese, Korean, and many other languages, there are constructions, discourse configurations, and pragmatic interpretations that show a phonology and phonetics of prominence, and where a common semantic-pragmatic element related to alternatives and/or redundancy can be identified. We begin with examples of these.1 Scalar some. The existential determiner some is frequently used with a limiting implication. In example (1a), the speaker suggests that only some people can be easily eliminated. Sentence (1b) functions as a correction or hedge, admitting that the group that are supporting Mr Valentine do not necessarily include the public or all the public. In these utterances, which were made on sports talk shows, the word some is noticeably prominent. In sentence (1c) the word some was destressed, and here a limiting implication along the lines of ‘some but not many’ would not fit in, because it would undercut the positive message.2
1
Audio recordings are included in Rooth (2015). These examples are drawn from the study in Chereches (2014) of the pragmatics and acoustics of about two hundred tokens of some from sports talk shows. 2
20 Mats Rooth (1) a. It’s fairly easy to kind of eliminate some people like Terry Francona’s wife. b. The public right now may be sitting there supporting Bobby Valentine or some people are supporting him against Dustin Pedroia. c. You know if you’re looking for him to inspire some people in this in this Yankee-Tiger series listen to this. Questions and answers. When questions are paired with clausal answers, constituents in the answer that correspond to the wh position in the question are prominent. Thus in (2), the vertical pairings are well-formed question–answer pairs, and the diagonal ones are ill-formed. (2) Qa: Who cut Bill down to size?
Aa: Mary cut Bill down to size.
Qb: Who did Mary cut down to size?
Ab: Mary cut Bill down to size.
The correlation, which was discussed as early as Paul (1880), is called question–answer congruence. Descriptively, answer A is congruent to a question Q if and only if substituting wh-phrases for the focused phrase (or phrases) in A and then performing morphosyntactic adjustments such as wh-movement and do-support can result in Q. Comparatives. The four utterances in (3) embed the comparative clause than I did. The first two were spoken with prominence on the subject pronoun I, and the second two were spoken with the subject pronoun destressed. Utterances of this form are covered by a simple descriptive generalization: the subject pronoun is prominent if reference has shifted from the subject position of the main clause to the subject position of the than clause, and is destressed when reference is constant (Howell 2011).3 (3)
a. The aquarium got more attention than I did. b. Tom actually said it a lot better than I did. c. I should have liked that song a lot more than I did. d. I understand that a lot more now than I did a few years ago.
Korean indeterminates. Korean indeterminate morphemes such as nugu (‘who’, ‘someone’) are ambiguous between wh-and existential readings. The wh-reading is reported to have prosodic characteristics of focus, with pitch boosted on the 3
Howell looked at several hundred examples of this form from online sources. Listeners who were asked to naively classify prominence listening just to the three words than I did behaved in a way that is consistent with the reference criterion about 90 per cent of the time. Machine learning classifiers trained to make the reference-shift decision based on acoustic features in than I did, such as duration, formant spread, and pitch are able to make the reference-shift decision with about 90 per cent accuracy from the acoustic features.
Alternative Semantics 21 indeterminate morpheme, and reduced pitch following. Sentence (4), which is quoted from Yun (2013), is ambiguous between the three readings in (5). Boosting of on the indeterminate followed by reduced prosody for the rest of the senprosody tence favours a wh-question reading.4 (4) nay-ka i-nom
nwukwu-hako kyelhonha-myen ton-ul who-with
marry-if
pat-a
money-acc get-int
(Lit. ‘I will get money if I marry [who/someone].’) (5) a. I will get money if I marry someone. (Any guy would be okay. Narrow scope existential.) b. I will get money if I marry someone. (Though not if I marry someone else. Wide scope existential.) c. Who is the person such that I will get money if I marry that person? (wh-question.) Substitution instances for quantifiers. This scenario comes up frequently in sports talk shows. In a discussion of a specific player, a generalization is stated that is understood to imply an application to the player as a substitution instance. When the phrase any player is used as the quantifier in this discourse configuration, the determiner any is markedly prominent. See the utterances transcribed in (6). (6) a. Well uh I think that uh all the conversations between myself and any player uh that are private will remain between myself and the player. I think that’s the way we normally handle it, that’s how we’ll handle it in this case. b. You know being Lebron with constant questions about his legacy and this kind of assumption that he’s gonna you know he needs to start winning titles pronto or he’s a fraud that would be tough for any player. Lists. List-structured phrases show quasi-predictable prominence patterns. Example (7) is a transcript of a listing of some radio station call signs and their home towns, as spoken by Scott Hollis, a DJ. The call signs were spoken as sequences of four-letter names, and are transcribed using capitals to mark prominence. Prominence falls on the letters where the current call sign differs from the previous one.5
4
In a perception experiment, Yun presented listeners with tokens of such sentences with manipulated pitch contours, and asked them to evaluate fit with parapraph contexts that favoured one reading or the other. The wh-reading correlated with the focus-like prosody of boosting and subsequent reduction. 5 This is obvious in [wsqg], where the prominence is non-final. Probably [wskg fm] is a unit with default prominence to the right, so that even in the first call sign, prominence has shifted to the left. In some cases the town names also sound like they have extra prominence.
22 Mats Rooth (7) This is wskg fm hd Binghamton, wsqg fm hd Ithaca, wsqe fm hd Corning, wsqa fm hd Hornell, wsqc fm Oneonta. Contrasting antecedents. In (8), the prominence on the subject in the second sentence can be seen as motivated by contrast with the first sentence.6 (8) Newton discovered calculus. No, Leibniz discovered it. Farmer sentences. Farmer sentences are sentences with sentence-internal contrasting antecedents, where the contrast is at the nominal level rather than a clausal one, and which can show a dual, symmetric expression of focus. In (9) the first word in Canadian farmer is more prominent than the second word, even though the phrase has default prominence on the right. Optionally, prominence can be shifted in American farmer as well. (9) An American farmer told a Canadian farmer a joke. Accommodated contrasts. In many cases, a prominence shift seems to be motivated by a contrast with something that is not overt in the discourse. Example (10) is a statement by DJ Hollis at the end of a weekly programme. The word next was prominent. The statement does not require an overt antecedent along the lines of the statement that the DJ is here this week with three hours of great jazz. But the speaker intends for his listeners to accommodate this contrasting antecedent. (10) That wraps up Jazz in Sillouette, but remember I’ll be back again next week with three more hours of great jazz. Association with only. John introduced Bill and Tom to Sue, and there were no other introductions. In these circumstances, sentence (11a) is false, while (11b) is true. Contexts like this one where focus has an influence on truth value (or other aspects of compositional semantics, such as semantic presupposition) are known as association with focus contexts.7 (11) a. John only introduced Bill to Sue. b. John only introduced Bill to Sue. Reasons. Dretske (1972) pointed out that focus has a truth-conditional effect in counterfactuals, descriptions of reasons, and further contexts that seem to involve underlying counterfactual reasoning. Assuming the situation in (12), in the sentences of (13) we 6
See Repp (this volume) on phenomena and analysis of this kind of use of focus. Beck (this volume) on the analysis of association with focus effects for only and similar operators. 7 See
Alternative Semantics 23 observe variation in truth value that is conditioned by the location of focus, just as in the sentences with only. Dretske emphasized that such examples show that one has to pay attention to focus in compositional semantics, not just at the discourse and pragmatic levels.8 (12) Pat had two daughters, one named Bertha; the other was named Aretha and was indispensable to him in his business. He had made a commitment to marry one of his daughters to one of the sons of a man who once saved his life. There were two such sons, the elder son Clyde and the younger son Derek. According to the custom of the society and period, an elder son had to marry before his younger brothers; this was known as seniority. Given the commitment, seniority, and the desirability of leaving Aretha free to run the business for him, he figured out that the best thing to do was to marry Bertha to Clyde, and that is what he did. (13) a. The reason he married Bertha to Clyde was that Aretha was indispensable in the buisiness. true b. The reason he married Bertha to Clyde was that Aretha was indispensable in the buisiness. false c. The reason he married Bertha to Clyde was that he wanted to obey seniority. false c. The reason he married Bertha to Clyde was that he wanted to obey seniority. true Multiple focus. Most of the types of examples discussed above work also with two or more focused phrases, rather than just one. In (14) we see two focused phrases, with a preceding contrasting antecedent sentence. Example (15) has two focused phrases in an answer to a question with two wh-phrases. Our definition of question–answer congruence already allowed for multiple Fs. (14) a. Leibniz invented calculus. b. Yea, and GouldF invented the laserF. (15) a. Who married whom? b. BerthaF married ClydeF. This concludes the catalogue of examples. All of them, at least under many accounts, are instances of the same phenomenon of ‘focus’. This is essentially a grammatically- mediated correlation between a phonology-phonetics of prominence, and semantic- pragmatic factors that are hypothesized to be common to the constructions and discourse configurations. 8
(12)–(13) are a version of an example of Dretske’s, and are given in this modified form in Rooth (1999).
24 Mats Rooth We turn now to a scheme for annotating three parameters of variation in focus: the phrasal location of a focus, the scope of focus, and antecedents for focus. Jackendoff (1972) introduced the strategy and grammatical hypothesis of localizing focus on surface syntactic phrases, using a focus feature ±F. Usually only the positive value is indicated, using a subscript. When a phrase is F-marked, there is a prominence realizing the focus in the phonological realization of the phrase.9 The dialogues (16)–(17) motivate the notion of scope. Questions are numbered using subscripts, and various phrases that do or do not satisfy question–answer congruence relative to the question are marked with a brace. Congruence is annotated as ~k for the phrase being congruent to question k, and ≁ k for the phrase not being congruent to question k. The pair (16a,b) is the standard case of question–answer congruence. Statement (16c) is another response to the question (16a), also with focus on Justin. Although (16c) is not really an answer to (16a), we can assume that the focus is motivated by congruence to the question. While the entire sentence does not satisfy congruence (pair (16a,d)), the embedded sentential subject does satisfy congruence with respect to the question (pair (16a,c)). In (17), the question is changed, with a resulting switch in the phrases that satisfy congruence. This time the entire sentence does satisfy congruence with respect to the question (pair (17a,c)), and the embedded sentential subject does not (pair (17a,b)). (16) a. [who is going to the party]1 b. [Justin is going] F ∼1 c. [for [JustinF to go]] would surprise me. ∼1 d. [for JustinF to go would surprise me] ∼\ 1
(17) a. [whose going would surprise you]2 b. [for [JustinF to go]] would surprise me. ∼\ 2 c. [for JustinF to go would surprise me] ∼2
In this way congruence provides motivation for the hypothesis that the scope of the focus in the dialogue (16a,c) is the embedded sentential subject, and in the dialogue (17a,c), the entire response. Remarkably, the scopes that result from considering congruence agree with a prosodic notion of scope. In the dialogue (16a,c), the embedded subject Justin is prominent, but it does not outrank the following predicate surprise me 9 Thus the F feature and its scope marker are interpreted phonologically as well as semantically. The phonological interpretation in terms of prominence in a metrical grid that is presented in Myrberg and Riad (this volume) is compatible with the representational scheme introduced here.
Alternative Semantics 25 in prominence—the latter bears the nuclear accent of the sentence. On the other hand, in dialogue (17a,c), Justin does bear the nuclear accent. We can hypothesize that in the first dialogue, the phonological domain of prominence for the embedded subject Justin is the embedded clause, while in the second dialogue, the domain of prominence for Justin is the matrix clause. If so, phonological domains of prominence agree with the scopes that result from the assumption that congruence with respect to the question is to be satisfied. This phonological-semantic isomorphy is the strongest argument for the locus/scope/antecedent grammar of focus. At this point we have arrived at the notation from Rooth (1992). The scope of F is marked with an operator ~k in surface trees, where k is the index of an antecedent with respect to which congruence is satisfied. The indices have the status of semantic indices, that is, indices which correspond to variables in semantics, and/or to discourse referents in a discourse representation. While in many cases antecedents correspond to an overt phrase, they can also be accommodated, as in the nextF week example. The significance of the scope of focus was realized relatively late. In Jackendoff (1972), it seems to be assumed that the semantic scope of focus in our sense is always the matrix sentence. In agreement with this, in the phonology, F-marked phrases take the matrix sentence as their phonological domain, because they bear a special stress feature that is not demoted in the application of cyclic stress rules in the system of Chomsky and Halle (1968). Rooth (1992) discussed non-maximal scope in farmer sentences, using the representation in (18). The isomorphy argument was developed in Truckenbrodt (1995), referring to farmer sentences.10 His point about (18) is that while Canadian is maximally prominent in its host nominal, it is not the location for the nuclear accent, which falls on joke. (18) [an AmericanF farmer]2~3 told [a CanadianF farmer]3~2 a joke. Notice that in (18), the notion of congruence has been generalized. The antecedent [an American farmer] is hypothesized to be congruent to the host phrase [a CanadianF farmer], but it is not assumed (or is not necessarily assumed) that the antecedent contributes a question, either directly or indirectly. A couple of notes are in order about the status of the notation and examples introduced above. The syntactic locus/scope/antecedent notation embodies a grammatical hypothesis, the adequacy of which is not taken for granted. The hypothesis has to be spelled out, notably by articulating the semantic/pragmatic and phonological interpretation for the syntax, and it has to tested against evidence and compared to competitors. 10
The analysis of focus in Chomsky (1971) referred to representations where the scope of focus is represented by what amounts to movement and bound variables, corresponding to LF movement in subsequent theory. This creates the potential for sub-maximal scope, because movement can be to a sub-maximal level, such as an embedded clause. But sub-maximal scope was not discussed. Jacobs (1983), von Stechow (1991), and Rooth (1985) gave semantically oriented accounts that generate sub- maximal focus scopes, while hardly talking about examples with embedded scope.
26 Mats Rooth The examples, in addition to orienting the reader, are intended as an ostensive definition of focus, or of a certain kind of focus. In this it is not assumed prior to analysis that these examples have the same underlying nature. If they do not, then they do not belong in the same theoretical box, and we should countenance several different theoretical notions of focus, or apply different terminology. Sections 2 and 4 of this chapter review analyses which do succeed in identifying a shared deep commonality in the constructions and configurations listed above. By the way, not every construction in every language that shows question–answer congruence is necessarily an instance of the kind of focus under discussion here. The arguments reviewed in É. Kiss (2010 and this volume) indicate that the structural or movement focus found in Hungarian has a distinct semantics from English-type prosodic focus, and a distinct distribution. Yet movement focus is used in default answers in Hungarian, and shows question–answer congruence. In general, we should resist giving any kind of substantive definition of focus prior to analysis, referring either to question– answer congruence, the evocation of alternatives, or a broadly information-theoretic notion of the focus being unpredictable relative to the rest of the material in the scope of the focus. The fundamental problem with starting in this way is that it prejudges the issue of what the optimal theoretical account is. Interesting terms in scientific theories do not have non-ostensive definitions that are independent of theories.
2.2 Semantic interpretation Consider (19), where the clause [ϕ ~ k] embeds a focused phrase and is indexed to a preceding contrasting clause. We assume a system of interpretation where clauses semantically contribute propositions, for example as constructed in possible worlds semantics. Suppose discover is a two-place function from individuals to propositions. Then the antecedent in (19) denotes the proposition discover(n,c), and the host clause for the focus denotes the proposition discover(l,c). Informally, the antecedent proposition is an alternative to the host proposition that can be obtained by making a ‘substitution’ in the position of the focused phrase. This is the core idea of alternative semantics: a legitimate antecedent for focus denotes an alternative to the scope of the focus, or as we will see in a moment, a set of alternatives.
(19) [Newton discovered calculus]2 No, [LeibnizF discovered calculus] ~2 ϕ
The notion of making substitutions in the focus positions of propositions need not be taken literally. For one thing, propositions as constructed in possible words semantics
Alternative Semantics 27 do not have positions—they are unstructured sets of worlds. For another, some way of tracking the focus positions from the syntax to the semantics is needed. For now, we will just assume that the semantics of the language makes available, in addition to an ordinary semantic value (which is a proposition in the case of a clause), a set of eligible alternatives, which for a clause is a set of propositions. The set of alternatives is a ‘focus semantic value’, or ‘alternative semantic value’. The focus semantic value for ϕ in (19) can be expressed formally as in (20), using set abstraction.11 It is the set of propositions that can be obtained by plugging in some individual for y in the open proposition-naming term discover(y,c). Hamblin (1973) introduced a useful informal way of naming such alternative sets. We say that the alternative set is the set of propositions of the form ‘y discovered calculus’. o (20) [Leibniz F discovered calculus] = discover(l, c)
{
}
f [Leibniz F discovered calculus] = p | ∃y. y ∈De ∧ p = discover( y , c ) = discover ( y , c ) | y ∈De
{
}
Now we are ready to formalize this simple idea: a phrase of the form ϕ ~ k is associated with the constraint that the antecedent k is an alternative to the semantic object contributed by ϕ. The set of eligible alternatives is ⟦ϕ⟧f, so we require that the semantic element k be an element of the alternative set. Rule (21) says in addition that k should be different from the ordinary semantic value ⟦ϕ⟧o . (21) Alternative licensing (first version) ϕ ~ k requires that the semantic element k is an element of ⟦ϕ⟧f that is distinct from ⟦ϕ⟧o . The terminology ‘the semantic element k’ is explained in the same way as with other varieties of indexing, such as indices on traces and pronouns. In a standard formulation of a static semantics, values for variables are given by assignment functions, so the semantic object is g(k), where g is the assignment function. It is natural to think of the index k as a discourse referent in a discourse representation, which may be projected from a syntactic index, but may also be constructed. The framework should make available discourse referents of all types, including propositions. So the picture is that (19a) sets up a propositional discourse referent 2, which is used as an antecedent in checking the focus constraint for the second sentence. So while ϕ ~ k is a piece of syntax, the focus constraint is checked semantically. The licensing condition (21) covers cases where the antecedent has the same type as the host phrase for the focus. When the host phrase is a clause and has the propositional type, the contrasting object is a proposition. When the host phrase denotes a generalized quantifier as in the farmer sentence (9), the antecedent is also a generalized quantifier. This does not work when the antecedent is a question and the host phrase is a declarative answer, 11 The ‘destructuring’ set abstraction notation {discover(y,c)|yϵD } is potentially ambiguous, because e one has to know whether y is allowed to vary, or is held constant. In this chapter, all free variables before the bar are allowed to vary over the combinations of values that satisfy the constraint after the bar.
28 Mats Rooth because questions and statements have different semantic types. This brings up the connection between alternative semantics for focus and the alternative semantics for questions that was proposed in Hamblin (1973). Hamblin’s semantics can be viewed as being motivated by the principle that any viable semantics for questions must be capable of characterizing what counts as an answer. One way of meeting this constraint is to take the semantics of a question to be a set of propositions, the set of atomic answers to the question, independent of the truth of the answers. So the semantic value of the question (22a) is the set of propositions of the form ‘y invented calculus’, where y is a person. This is nearly the same as the focus semantic value of the answer (22b). This suggests generalizing the congruence condition, so that the antecedent can be a set of alternatives, rather than a single alternative. Rule (23) is a way of stating this. The idea is that since the alternative propositions in the semantics of the question are restricted to people, while the alternatives in the focus semantic value are unrestricted, the antecedent is a proper subset of the focus semantic value. Rooth (1992) also included the condition that the ordinary semantic value of the scope of the focus is an element of the antecedent, and that the antecedent has cardinality of at least two. These conditions, which in a way correspond to the distinctness condition in part (i) of (23), are included in part (ii). (22) a. [who invented calculus2]3 b. [LeibnizF invented it2]~3 (23) Alternative licensing (second version) ϕ ~ k requires that the semantic element k is either
(i) an element of ⟦ϕ⟧f that is distinct from ⟦ϕ⟧º, or (ii) a subset of ⟦ϕ⟧f of cardinality at least two that includes ⟦ϕ⟧º.
A different way of going is to set up the semantics so that the focus semantic value itself gets restricted. Suppose that in generating alternatives for (22b), only people are substituted for Leibniz, so that we get the set of alternatives of the form ‘y invented calculus’, where y is a person. Then the focus semantic value of the answer would match the semantics of the question exactly.
2.3 Composing alternatives The interpretation principle for the focus scope configuration [ϕ ~ k] refers to the alternative set ⟦ϕ⟧f for the phrase ϕ. This section looks at how the alternative set is derived. Hamblin (1973) and Rooth (1985) suggested a recursive strategy: there are alternatives ‘all the way down’, and the alternatives propagate up the tree. Figure 2.1 shows a binary-branching tree for sentence (24). This is a multiple-focus example, where alternatives are generated from the focused subject ArethaF, and the focused object ClydeF. In the tree, each node is annotated with its ordinary semantics, and below that, an alternative set. To control the size of the sets, we assume that there
Alternative Semantics 29
introduce(a,a,c), introduce(b,a,c), introduce(c,a,c),
S introduce(a,b,c) introduce(a,b,c), introduce(b,b,c), introduce(c,b,c),
introduce(a,c,c) introduce(b,c,c) introduce(c,c,c)
VP λx.introduce(x,b,c) λx.introduce(x,a,c) λx.introduce(x,b,c) λx.introduce(x,c,c)
DPF a { a , b , c} Aretha
V’ λzλx.introduce(x,b,z) λzλx.introduce(x,a,z) λzλx.introduce(x,b,z) λzλx.introduce(x,c,z) V λy.λz.λx.introduce(x,y,z) {λy.λz.λx.introduce(x,y,z)} introduced
PP P λx.x {λx.x} to
DP c {c} Clyde
DPF b {a,b,c} Bertha
Figure 2.1 Recursively computed alternatives in a syntactic tree. Each node is annotated with its ordinary semantics, and below that a focus alternative set. The domain of individuals is {a, b, c}.
are just three entities in the model, namely entity a (Aretha), entity b (Bertha), and entity c (Clyde). At the top, we see the ordinary semantics introduce(a,b,c), and an alternative set that contains alternatives such as introduce(c,b,a). There are nine alternatives, resulting from multiplying a choice among three in the subject position by a choice among three in the object position. This is the set of propositions of the form ‘y1 introduced y2 to Clyde’ in this simple model. Looking at the bottom of the tree, the alternative set for the focused subject is {a,b,c}, the set of individuals in the model. The same goes for the focused object. This is how alternatives are ‘launched’: the alternative set for a focused phrase (whether it is a terminal or not) is the set of semantic objects that match the ordinary semantic value of the phrase in type. Non-focused terminals give a trivial alternative set, namely the unit set (singleton set) of the ordinary semantic value of the phrase. Since ⟦Clyde⟧ is c and the phrase is not focused, its focus semantic value is the unit set {c}. (24) a. Who introduced whom to Clyde? b. ArethaF introduced BerthaF to Clyde. If a complex phrase is focused, it goes by the rule already given—its alternative set is the set of semantic objects matching the ordinary semantics of the phrase in type. So for
30 Mats Rooth instance, the alternative set for a focused VP is the set of all properties. Alternative sets for non-focused complex phrases are derived from the alternative sets for their children. Suppose we have a complex phrase with children α and β. Say α is semantically the function, so that the ordinary semantics is formed as ⟦α⟧(⟦β⟧). If we pick any element f of ⟦α⟧f, and any element y of ⟦β⟧f, they can also be combined as function and argument. The alternative set for [αβ] is the set of all semantic objects f(y) that can be formed in this way. Example (25) illustrates this for the phrase [introduce BerthaF], where the verb is the function. There is one choice for f in ⟦introduce⟧f, and there are three choices for y in ⟦BerthaF⟧f. From these three semantic objects can be formed as f(a), as shown in (25). (25) introduced Bertha F
{λ y.λz.λx.introduce(x, y , z )} {a, b, c}
λz λ x.introduce(x , a , z ) introduced Bertha F λz λ x.introduce(x , b, z ), λz λ x.introduce(x , c, z )
Generalizing a bit, let F be the semantic rule that is used to combine ⟦α⟧ with ⟦β⟧ in the phrase [αβ]. Then ⟦αβ⟧f is defined to be the set of all semantic objects that can be formed as F(x,y), where x is an element of ⟦α⟧f and y is an element of ⟦β⟧f.12 In this case ⟦introduce BerthaF⟧f is obtained as the image of the rightward function-application operator fRFA acting on introduced f × Bertha F f . Another way of defining alternatives is to introduce variables in the F positions that have the same type as the ordinary semantic value (Kratzer 1991; Wold 1996). For this purpose a separate family of variables is used. Focus semantic values have the same type as ordinary semantic values, and have variables in the focus positions. The table in (26) illustrates this for the example in Figure 2.1, using the u variables with subscripts for the special focus variables. In this system, there are no alternatives at recursive levels. Instead, alternatives are introduced in defining the ~ operator, by making substitutions for the special focus variables. (26) phrase introduced BerthaF introduced BerthaF Clyde introduced BerthaF to Clyde ArethaF ArethaF introduced BerthaF to Clyde
focus semantic value λy.λz.λx.introduce(x, y, z) ue,1 λz.λx.introduce(x, ue,1, z) c λx.introduce(x, ue,1, c) ue,2 introduce(ue,2, ue,1, c)
12 Mathematically, this is an image construction (Hamblin 1973: fn. 8). In general the image of a function h on a subset Z of its domain is the set of values h(z) that can be obtained by applying h to an element z of Z. In (25), ⟦[αβ]⟧f is the image of the rightward function application operator on the cross product ⟦α⟧f × ⟦β⟧f.
Alternative Semantics 31 Either of these approaches provides a workable solution to the problem of defining focus alternative sets, in the service of making available the semantic objects that are used in the definition of the ~ operator. Hamblin applied alternative semantics to questions. This works in the same way as alternative semantics for focus in the recursive part. There is an issue though about how to treat the restrictive property of the wh-phrase, which interacts in a subtle way with question–answer congruence. Consider the examples in (27), where the wh-pronoun has a lexical restriction to persons, the wh-phrase what dog has a restriction to dogs, and the wh-phrase what Thai restaurants has a restriction to Thai restaurants. One option is to equate the alternative set for the wh-phrase with the extension of the restriction, so that ⟦who⟧f is the set of people. (27) a. Who is awake? b. What dog walks with Mary? [Hamblin] c. What Thai restaurants are in the neighborhood? In this passage, Hamblin describes this ‘restricting’ option, argues against it, and proposes an alternative ‘conjunctive’ option. We would like to think that the phrase what dog could be treated as an interrogative proper name denoting the set of dogs, and that what dog walks with Mary has as answers just the set [of propositions of the form] ‘x walks with Mary’ where x is the name of a dog. But the composition of the set of dogs does not necessarily remain constant from universe to universe: in some universes Rover may be a horse, and Mary herself a dog. I have taken the attitude that when someone answers what dog walks with Mary with Rover he states not merely that Rover walks with Mary but also implicitly that Rover is a dog, and hence that he states the conjunction. [Hamblin 1973: 51, with adjustments in quotation styles.]
The proposal then is that the alternative set for (27a) is the set of propositions of the form ‘x is a person and x is awake’, and that the alternative set for (27b) is the set of propositions of the form ‘x is a dog and x walks with Mary’. This can be formulated by defining the alternative sets for who and what at the generalized quantifier level as in (28). (28) whof
= {λQ.λw.human(w , x ) ∧ Q(x )(w )| x ∈De }
[D what] = {λP .λQ.λw.P (x )(w ) ∧ Q(x )(w )| x ∈De } f
The conjunctive interpretation is not compatible with the theory of question–answer congruence from Section 2. The representation (29) is licensed if the alternative value for the question is a subset of the alternative value for the answer. In any realistic model, it is not, because for instance ‘Justin is human and walks with Mary’ is an element of the alternative value for the question, but not an element of ⟦JustinF walks with Mary⟧f, which is the set of propositions of the form ‘x walks with Mary’.
32 Mats Rooth (29) [who walks with Mary]1 [JustinF walks with Mary]~1 Treatments of question–answer congruence in alternative semantics have assumed the restrictive strategy in the semantics of questions (Rooth 1992). But what about Hamblin’s point that there is no stable set of propositions of the form ‘x walks with Mary’, where x is a human, because the sets of humans are different in different possible worlds? Relatedly, there is a worry that the focus constraint is trivialized in certain cases. In a world where there are no nuclear engineers, the denotation of the question (30a) is the empty set. Therefore the subset constraint coming from the focus interpretation in (30b) is trivial. This is not quite a problem, because the oddity of the pair (30a,b) can be attributed to the logic and pragmatics of the question–answer relation, rather than anything about focus. In any viable account of the question–answer relation, the proposition contributed by (30b) is not an answer to the question (30a). So to rule out this question–answer dialogue, it is not necessary to appeal to the focus presupposition. But if we fix this by adjusting the response as in (30c) (perhaps the cat being on the mat would prevent any dancing), focus in the cat-clause is still not licensed. (30) a. [what nuclear engineers danced with Mary]1 b. [[the cat]F is on the mat]~1 c. [Since [[the cat]F is on the mat]~1 [none did]~1] The right move here is to accept that question alternative sets are world-dependent. This is explicit in the analysis of indeterminate pronouns in Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002). They give the semantics (31) for the Japanese indeterminate pronoun dare, which has a use as a wh-pronoun. Here the alternative set of individuals contributed by dare varies from world to world, since there is reference to the world of evaluation w in the restrictive clause of the set abstraction. (31) dare f ,w , g = { y | human(w , y )} Using the same definition for who results in the denotation given in (32a) for the question in (29a). Here I have switched to a notation for propositions that has explicit reference to worlds. λυ.walkwith(υ,y,m) is the set of worlds υ in which y walks with Mary; this was earlier written walkwith(y,m), without any commitment to modelling propositions as sets of worlds. The set (32a) is world sensitive, because there is reference to the world of evaluation w in the restriction of the set abstraction. (32) a. who walks with mary f ,w , g = {λv.walkwith(v , y , m)| human(w , y )} f ,w , g = {λv.walkwith(v , y , m)| y ∈De } b. Justin F walks with Mary (32b) gives the focus denotation for the answer in the same notation. This set is not world sensitive. Nevertheless for any world w, the question alternative set (32a) is a subset of the
Alternative Semantics 33 focus alternative set (32b). Applying the constraint in each world is exactly what falls out if the congruence constraint is modelled as a presupposition. For comparison, consider the semantics of the second sentence (33) in an extensional semantic model of presuppostion. The sentence intuitively presupposes that Kim is male. This is captured in an extensional model by the assignment of the third (undefined) truth value when Kim is not male in the world of evaluation. While this semantics of presupposition is extensional, in the pragmatics, a common ground model of presupposition can be applied, by checking the presupposition in each world that is an element of the context set of the common ground. This captures the fact that the discourse is perceived as taking for granted that Kim is male. (33) Have you heard? Keisha is dating Kim2. Go figure. The guy2 is expert at tango and she hates to go out. So, if it is formalized semantically as a distributive presupposition that places a constraint on a world, it falls out of the pragmatic interpretation of such presuppositions that the constraint gets imposed in all worlds of the context set. This addresses the worries about the question alternative set not being stable, and about the focus constraint being trivial in some cases. Summing up, to fit alternative semantics for focus in with a generally Hamblin-like alternative semantics for questions, the restricting version of Hamblin semantics for questions has to be used. Hamblin’s official conjoining option does not result in values that satisfy the presupposition of the focus reduncancy operator in configurations of question–answer congruence.
2.4 Entailment semantics According to Section 2, the presupposition of the focus-scope operator is satisfied when the indexed antecedent is an alternative to the semantic value of the argument of the operator, or a set of alternatives. This section looks at a different licensing condition due to Schwarzschild (1999). This says that the semantics of the antecedent should entail a semantic object derived from the focus semantic value of the scope of the operator, in a certain generalized sense.13 Consider the example repeated in (34). The first step is to derive the focus closure from ϕ. This is a proposition with existentially quantified variables in the position of each free F. Formally, it can be obtained as the 13 Schwarzschild’s
proposal was cast in a different way from the framework under discussion here. See Rochemont (this volume) for a presentation of this Givenness framework. A couple of aspects of Schwarzschild’s proposal are independent of the entailment condition. The most important of these is the hypothesis that the redundancy operator need not scope over F. In (34), the pronoun it is destressed, and this is attributed to the pronoun being ‘given’ relative to its antecedent calculus, in the same sense that the scope of an F is given or redundant with respect to its antecedent. Under the scheme presented here, the pronoun is represented as [it4 ~ 4], with the operator ~4 not scoping over F.
34 Mats Rooth union of the focus semantic value, ∪⟦ϕ⟧f. Next, entailment is checked between the antecedent and this closure. In this case, the antecedent proposition ‘Newton invented calculus’ does entail the closure ‘some entity invented calculus’, and the representation is licensed. (34) [Newton invented calculus4]2. [LeibnizF invented it4]~2. So, in cases where both the antecedent and ϕ have propositional type, the presupposition introduced by the configuration [ϕ ~ k] is that the antecedent proposition entails the focus closure for ϕ. Look now at (35), where for the sake of argument we assume that the focus on Canadian takes scope at NP. This constituent has the property type, rather than a propositional one. Here it is proposed that the property type is lowered to the propositional one, by existentially quantifying the argument. The same type adjustment is performed for the antecedent. The result in this case is the proposition ‘there are American farmers’ for the antecedent and for the scope (applying also focus closure) ‘there are farmers’. The former entails the latter, and the constraint is satisfied. (35) Every [American farmer]3 is a [NP CanadianF farmer]~4. Neatly, type shifting works out even in question–answer congruence, where the antecedent is a question, providing that Karttunen’s semantics for questions is used, where the question alternative sets are restricted to true propositions (Karttunen 1977). In (36), the existential closure of the antecedent relative to a base world w is the proposition that there is some proposition of the form ‘y invented calculus’ that is true in w such that y is a person in w. This is equivalent to ‘some person invented calculus’, while the focus closure for the scope is ‘some entity invented calculus’. Since these stand in the relation of entailment, the indexed redundancy operator is licensed. (36) [Who invented calculus4]2. [LeibnizF invented it4]~2. So far we have not seen any cases where entailment licensing and alternative licensing give different results. A simple one is where the antecedent is existentially quantified (Rooth 2005). Since somebody eating the cake entails some entity eating it (the latter is the focus closure), the representation (37) is licensed. But if we try alternative licensing, the proposition ‘somebody ate the cake’ is neither a proposition of the form ‘y ate the cake’, nor a set of propositions of that form.14 (37) [Somebody ate the cake4]2. Yea, [GottfriedF ate it4]~2. 14 This counterexample is undone if existential quantifiers contribute alternative sets. See Section 2.6. Also, it is somewhat plausible to posit an accommodated question ‘who ate the cake’ following the first sentence. This would serve as the antecedent.
Alternative Semantics 35 For an argument the other way, we can exploit the fact that focus and existential closure of the scope result in weak existentially quantified propositions, so it can be too easy for an arbitrary antecedent to entail them. In (38b), there is focus on the noun cat, with sentence scope. In (38c), there is focus within the subject generalized quantifier, and taking scope at it. In both cases, the closure procedure results in trivial propositions. (39a) is the focus closure obtained in (38b). This is necessarily true. Here is the reason. Every entity that tasted the flounder fillets tasted the flounder fillets. Therefore the property of tasting the flounder fillets serves as a witness for the existential quantifier ∃P. Since (39a) is necessarily true, it is entailed by any antecedent, and the licensing condition for the pair (38a,b) is satisfied. This is a bad result. In the pair (38a,c), argument closure as well as focus closure apply, because the scope is a generalized quantifier, rather than a proposition. This results in the closure (39b), which by similar reasoning is trivially satisfiable. So the representation (38a,c) is licensed, again a bad result. (38) a. [I left some flounder fillets4 on the counter]2 b. [[[every cat]F]~ 2 tasted them]~2 c. [[every [catF]]~ 2 tasted them4] (39) a. ∃P.∀x.P(x) → taste(x, g(4)) b. ∃P.∃Q.∀x.P(x) → Q(x) Summing up, generalized entailment is another proposal for the presupposition of ~k. Relative to the alternatives presupposition from Section 2, it has some advantages and some disadvantages. There is a need for deeper investigation of this issue.
2.5 Topic alternatives This section looks at an extension of alternative semantics that posits a higher level of alternatives, consisting essentially of alternatives to alternative-sets. This was proposed in Büring (1997) as a way of theorizing about the discourse pragmatics of contrastive topics. As discussed in Büring (this volume) and Velleman and Beaver (this volume), discourses involving multiple wh-questions and sub-questions can trigger answers that combine focus with an additional prominent element, called the contrastive topic. In sentence (40), focus on Manny correlates with the wh-position in the immediately preceding question. Contrastive topic on the subject is somehow triggered by the complex discourse context. Example (41) illustrates that the pattern can be reversed, with focus followed by contrastive topic (Jackendoff 1972). Contrastive topic and focus strike many speakers as different prosodically, and experimental work has shown that they can be pronounced in ways that differ consistently in pitch contour (Liberman and Pierrehumbert 1984). Current accounts that use the phonological tone model from Pierrehumbert (1980) transcribe the topic constituent L+H* within
36 Mats Rooth a phrase with L–H% boundary tones, and the focus as H* within a phrase with L–L% boundary tones.15 (40) (who came with whom?) What about Anna? Who did she come with? AnnaCT came with MannyF. (41) (who came with whom?) What about Manny? Who came with him? AnnaF came with MannyCT. In (40) and (41), the answers are congruent with the questions they answer, if CT is ignored. Therefore it can be hypothesized that the CT feature does not affect focus semantic values, and that congruence is represented with indexing to the question as before. Suppose the extra contribution of contrastive topic is conceptualized as a contrasting question, which is also represented with an index. The contrasting question stands in a relation of substitution contrast with the focus antecedent, with substitution in the CT position. This leads to representations like (42) and (43), with an additional argument of the focus redundancy operator. In both cases, the question with index 4, namely ‘who did Keisha come with’ can be obtained from the question with index 2, namely ‘who did Anna come with’, by making a substitution in the CT position. (42) (who came with whom?) [who did Anna come with]2 [AnnaCT came with MannyF]3 ~2,4 ([who did Keisha come with]4) (43) [who did Keisha come with]4 ([who did Anna come with]2) [AnnaCT came with MannyF]3 ~2,4 In each of these representations, one antecedent is overt, and the other accommodated. In dialogue (42), we can conceive of the question with index 4 as a question which remains open, under the general discourse topic of who came with whom. In dialogue (43), the respondent switches the discourse topic from the question of who Keisha came with to the question of who Anna came with. The focus antecedent is accommodated, while the contrastive topic antecedent is the overt question. Adding CT adds another dimension to the compositional problem. Büring (1997) followed the recursive strategy by defining an additional alternative semantic value ⟦⋅⟧t. The focus semantic value of [AnnaCT came with MannyF] can be conceptualized as the Hamblin question ‘Anna came with what entity’. The topic semantic value is then 15 Among
studies concerned with the semantics interface for prosodic phonology, see Steedman (2000, 2014), Büring (2003), and Constant (2012).
Alternative Semantics 37 obtained by making substitutions in the CT position, yielding the set of Hamblin questions of the form ‘z came with what entity’, where z is an individual. (44) gives recursive clauses defining topic semantic values.16 The third line defines the topic semantic value for a topic-marked phrase as the set of singleton sets of elements of the semantic domain for the phrase. In our example, this generates questions with individual substitutes for the topic-marked phrase subject, for instance ‘Keisha came with what entity’ and ‘Hannah came with what entity’. The second line defines the topic semantic value of an F-marked phrase as the unit set of the focus semantic value. This has the effect of making elements of the topic semantic value look like the focus semantic value in F positions. For instance, the element ‘Hannah came with what entity’ of the topic semantic value has variation in the position of the object of with, just like the focus semantic value ‘Anna came with what entity’. (44) (i) α t
=
{{α }} , o
if α is a terminal that is not F- marked
{
}
t f (ii) α F = α t (iii) α CT = {{ y } | y ∈Dτ }
(iv) [αβ] = {c | ∃a∃b.a ∈α ∧ b ∈β ∧ c = {F (x , y )| x ∈a ∧ y ∈b}}, where [αβ ] is not F- marked or CT- marked . F is the semantic operation for[αβ]. t
t
t
The two-place redundancy operator can now be defined as in (45). j is the index of the local question. As before, this question is presupposed to be a subset of the focus semantic value. k is the index of the contrasting question. The contrasting question is selected from the topic semantic value, which can be thought of as the set of potential contrasting questions. The subset condition is included to allow for contextual narrowing of the contrasting question, just as for the congruent question. (45) ⟦ϕ ∼ j, k⟧g presupposes that g(j) is a subset of ⟦ϕ⟧f and that g(k) is a subset of an element of ⟦ϕ⟧t that is distinct from ⟦ϕ⟧f. This formulation allows possible contrasting question antecendents to be characterized semantically, just like focus antecedents, and licenses the representations (42) and (43)17. This assumes that the presupposition associated with CT is satisfied by the presence in the discourse representation of a question that satisfies the semantic constraints 16
Section 3.3.1 of Büring (1997) gives a definition along these lines that also deals with free variables and lambda. 17 Another feature of recent work is the hypothesis that both the local and contrasting questions are drawn from the topic semantic value, using the fact that by construction, the focus semantic value is an element of the topic semantic value (Büring 2003). This move is motivated by a desire to characterize possible antecedent questions in a maximally general way.
38 Mats Rooth on the antecedent. Much of the literature, however, works with more specific constraints which say that question antecedents have to be in specific positions in a tree-structured model of discourse state. See Roberts (2012), Büring (2003 and this volume).18 This is a good place to talk about the discourse pragmatics that goes with the locus/ scope/antecedent representation for focus from Section 2.2, and the semantic interpretation for it from Sections 2.2 and 2.4.19 Those interpretations took the form of presuppositional contraints on the antecedent k in the configuration [ϕ ~ k]. A constraint is placed on the semantic object k: it is required to be an alternative to ⟦ϕ⟧ in the sense defined by the focus semantic value, a set of alternatives, or in the formulation from Section 2.4, to entail the focus closure for ϕ in a generalized sense of entailment. Eligible antecedents for k are discourse referents that have the right semantic type, and which satisfy the focus constraint. Pragmatically, a speaker who uses a sentence containing focus and ϕ ~ k signals an intent to assume a discourse representation containing an antecedent that is identified by indexing, which should be salient in the same way that antecedents for pronouns and anaphoric definite descriptions are salient. Discourse referents that provide antecedents for focus can be projected from syntactic phrases. They can also be constructed, as exemplified by the accommodated question antecedents marked with parentheses in (42) and (43).
2.6 More applications of alternative semantics The discussion so far has looked at the application of alternative semantics to intonational focus, with a short consideration of alternative semantics for questions. The same or a similar framework is applied to other phenomena in semantics and pragmatics. Aloni (2003), Simons (2005), and Alonso-Ovalle (2006) have presented analyses in which natural language disjunctions contribute alternatives. The analysis in Alonso- Ovalle (2009) of conditionals such as (46a) is representative. It is argued that combining a boolean semantics for or with a minimal-change semantics for counterfactuals (Stalnaker 1968; Lewis 1973) gives bad results, because on reasonable assumptions about what worlds count as ‘normal’ or similar to our own, worlds where we have good 18 An alternative to the recursive dual-layer system of alternatives is given by Constant (2012), who works from a representation with a CT head that is realized by the contrastive topic boundary tones. It has two arguments, each of which embeds F constituents that are interpreted in alternative semantics in the normal way. In the structure in (i), both the contrastive topic and the focus are analysed as bearing F features. The distinction between the two is encoded in the semantics of CT, which manipulates focus semantic values.
(i) AnnaF CT e1 came with Manny F. 19
Sæbø (this volume) articulates a discourse-pragmatic model along these lines.
Alternative Semantics 39 weather are much more normal than ones where the sun grows cold. With this background assumption, sentence (46a) comes out as equivalent to (46b). Instead it seems to be equivalent to (46c). (46) a. If we had had good weather this summer or the sun had grown cold, we would have had a bumper crop. b. If we had had good weather this summer, we would have had a bumper crop. c. If we had had good weather this summer, we would have had a bumper crop and if the sun had grown cold, we would have had a bumper crop. Alonso-Ovalle analyses these data using the hypothesis that the material inside the if-clause, instead of contributing a proposition, contributes the set of propositions containing ‘we have good weather this summer’ and ‘the sun grows cold’. Then a quantificational semantic rule for the way that if combines with the clause headed by would is stated, which has the effect of using the elements of the alternative set independently as restrictions for would, in order to obtain a reading equivalent to (46c). Krifka (1995) introduced the hypothesis that ‘weak’ negative polarity items such as any introduce alternatives into the semantic derivation. Negative polarity items (NPIs) occur in restricted environments, characterized by Ladusaw (1979) as downward entailing environments. These include the environments (47a–c), but not the hash-marked environments (47d–e), where the sentence is possible only with a generic interpretation. The alternatives generated by [any NP] are those obtained from sub-properties of the property contributed by the NP. For the case in (47), these are sub-properties of ⟦cookie⟧, for instance the property of being a square cookie, the property of being a poisonous cookie, and the property of being a non-square cookie. These alternatives propagate in the way described in this chapter. On the assumption that any is semantically an existential quantifier, (48a) is the ordinary semantics of the clause (47e). In addition we get the set of alternatives of the form described in (47b). (47) a. Justin didn’t eat any cookies. b. Nobody ate any cookies. c. Everyone who ate any cookies felt good. d. #Somebody ate any cookies. e. #Justin ate any cookies. (48) a. ∃x.cookie(x) ^ eat(j,x) b. ∃x.Q(x) ^ eat(j,x), where Q is a sub-property of cookie. The remaining part of the theory is a principle that restricts the distribution of NPIs by referring to alternative sets. For Krifka, this is a principle of scalar assertion, which says that all alternatives that are not entailed by the ordinary semantics are false. For (47e) this turns out to be a contradictory requirement, which is hypothesized to be responsible for the oddity of the sentence. If Justin ate some cookies, then either he ate some
40 Mats Rooth square cookies, or he ate some non-square cookies. So these two alternatives (neither of which is entailed by the ordinary semantics) could not both be false. On the other hand, looking at (47b), nobody eating cookies is perfectly compatible with nobody eating square cookies and nobody eating non-square cookies.20 These applications of alternative semantics are formally similar to alternative semantics for focus, in that they involve alternatives that are launched from specific positions, propagated compositionally, and then interpreted by certain operators. Currently there is not enough understanding of how these systems of alternatives relate to each other in the grammatical system. One issue is that disjunction and weak NPIs usually show default prosody or are de-stressed, so that it is difficult to analyse them as systematically involving focus of the prosodic kind.
20 Subsequent literature has suggested that the scalar exclusive operator is a phonetically null operator in the compositional structure, similar to only (Chierchia 2013).
Chapter 3
Givenne s s Michael Rochemont
3.1 Introduction Givenness has many forms and functions.1 In all its uses, givenness ties some linguistic property of an expression, its syntactic form or position or its prosody, to the informational or cognitive status of its denotation as already present in the discourse model in some sense. Differing uses reflect the differing ways in which an expression or its denotation may be said to be already present. Consider, for instance, the two self-contained mini-discourses in (1), where (1a) is followed by either of (1b,c) (Chafe 1976: 41). (1) a. John and Mary recently went to the beach. b. They brought some picnic supplies, but they didn’t drink the beer because it was warm. c. They brought some beer, but they didn’t drink the beer because it was warm. Proper nouns, such as those in (1a), usually identify entities that the speaker takes to be already known to the other participants in the conversation. Such assumed familiarity is critical to the speaker’s successful communication of the content of the proposition to her audience. Generally, the felicitous use of names and definite descriptions (the beach, the beer) requires that the entities they designate be familiar or at least uniquely identifiable. For the participants of the two discourses in (1), John and Mary must be ‘given’ in this sense, as must the beach and the beer. The expression the beer in the second conjunct of (1b) uniquely identifies a referent through ‘bridging’ (Clark 1977) to the picnic supplies introduced in the first conjunct: the beer is understood as one of the supplies just mentioned, given the interlocutors’ general knowledge of what sorts of supplies 1 This chapter has benefited from comments and suggestions by the editors and two reviewers, as well as participants in seminars at UBC. I am grateful also to Peter Culicover, Patrick Littell, Valéria Molnár, Hotze Rullmann, and Susanne Winkler for comments on earlier drafts.
42 Michael Rochemont picnic supplies may consist of. This sense of givenness (familiar, identifiable) is a distinguishing property of definite noun phrases generally, and various types of (in)definiteness marking signal the varying degrees to which, or manner in which, the referent of a particular noun phrase may be reliably tied to the background of commonly held knowledge of individuals, events and meanings shared by the participants in a specific discourse (e.g. Prince 1981; Ariel 1990; Gundel et al. 1993). But there is also a different sense of givenness exemplified in (1). As Chafe notes for parallel examples, there is a contrast in pronunciation between the second conjuncts of (1b,c). These sentences, although segmentally identical, form a minimal pair: in (b) beer is intonationally prominent (pitch accented), while in (c) beer is deaccented (it shows a complete lack of pitch prominence). Patently, what makes deaccenting possible in the second conjunct in (c) is the prior mention of beer in the first conjunct.2 This requirement for a situationally salient antecedent for the deaccented expression also reflects a form of givenness. But since both instances of the beer in (1b,c) are definite, deaccenting must reflect a different notion of givenness than that which marks the use of a non- pronominal definite noun phrase. In particular, no deaccenting of the beer is possible in the second conjunct in (b) despite the ready accessibility of a uniquely identified referent. One way in which shared knowledge is represented is through Common Ground (CG), a notion originally proposed by Robert Stalnaker in the early 1970s. CG is the set of propositions and entities that are shared among interlocutors in a conversation and whose content is updated as the conversation proceeds. Krifka (2008) distinguishes CG Content, construed in this way, and CG Management.3 CG Content records and updates the shared knowledge and beliefs of interlocutors, while CG Management is concerned with the immediate and temporary informational needs and communicative goals of interlocutors, governing how CG Content should develop. Adapting Krifka’s distinction between CG Content and Management, a plausible hypothesis is that it is the participants’ shared beliefs about givenness in CG Content that license the use of the beer in (1b,c), but it is CG Management and beliefs about givenness in the conversation itself (that the beer referred to is salient or conspicuous in (1c) in a way that it is not in (1b)) that condition the possibility for deaccenting. From this perspective deaccenting is a device of CG Management that is dependent on the situational (hence temporary) salience of an antecedent, rather than on CG Content. It is this CG Management notion 2
Cruttenden (2006: 314) cites Walker (1781) and Bell and Bell (1879) for early recognition of this fact about English. 3 Krifka is not alone in distinguishing elements of CG. Stalnaker (2002: 708) distinguishes two sorts of beliefs that are encoded in the CG as a conversation proceeds: ‘… beliefs about the subject matter of the conversation’ and ‘ … beliefs about the conversation itself ’. Stalnaker’s distinction mimics the distinction drawn by Dryer (1996) between presupposition and metapresupposition and also parallels Kripke’s (2009) distinction between active and passive context. Further, these distinctions are implicated in the taxonomy of projective content of Tonhauser et al. (2013). None of these proposals are equivalent, however, and I will not decide among them here. For concreteness I cast the discussion in terms of Krifka’s proposal.
Givenness 43 of givenness that will concern me in this chapter. To distinguish salience-based givenness from other possible forms of givenness, I will refer to the former as Givenness (with a capital G).4 The view that deaccenting is conditioned by Givenness as an element of CG Management rather than Content finds support in consideration of the deaccenting of the presupposed clausal complements of factive predicates. Such presuppositions define propositions that for utterances that invoke them to be felicitous must be known to the interlocutors and not simply salient—they must form part of CG Content. The following examples from Wagner (2012a) illustrate.5 (Capitals mark accented words and underscoring marks deaccented strings.) (2) Mary wanted to go swimming in the lake.
a. She didn’t realize that it was too COLD. b. #She didn’t REALIZE that it was too cold.
(3) Although it was way too cold, Mary wanted to go swimming in the lake.
a. She didn’t REALIZE that it was too cold. b. #She didn’t realize that it was too COLD.6
(4) Contrary to the facts, they told Mary that the lake was too cold and it was impossible to swim in it.
a. #She never believed that it was too COLD. b. She never BELIEVED that it was too cold.
The clausal complements to the factive predicate realize in (2)–(3) encode the presupposition that it was too cold to go swimming, but deaccenting is possible only when this proposition is Given. The presupposed truth of the embedded proposition is neither 4 This notion of Givenness corresponds to Prince’s (1981) givenness . Prince’s givenness more closely s k relates to givenness in CG Content. The former is recast in Prince (1992) as Discourse Old and the latter as Hearer Old. Many other terms have been used to name or include this sense of givenness: among others, old, activated (Chafe 1974, 1976; Lambrecht 1994; Dryer 1996; Beaver and Clark 2008), contextually bound (Sgall et al. 1973), salient (Prince 1981; Ward and Birner 2011), c-construable (Culicover and Rochemont 1983; Rochemont 1986), presupposed (Chomsky 1971; Jackendoff 1972; Zubizarreta 1998), ground/tail (Vallduví 1992; Vallduví and Engdahl 1996), predictable (Bolinger 1972; Kuno 1972), topic (Gundel 1988, 2003; Erteschik-Shir 1997, 2007). 5 See Schmerling (1976), Allerton (1978), and Rochemont (1986) for parallel argument. The non- reduction of Givenness to presupposition is discussed by many other authors, including Prince (1981), Tancredi (1992), Dryer (1996), Büring (2004), Jacobs (2004), Gundel and Fretheim (2004), Kratzer (2004), Abusch (2008). In contrast, numerous authors propose to reduce Givenness to presupposition; see Zubizarreta (1998), Guerts and van der Sandt (2004), and Sauerland (2005) for different recent proposals to this effect. See Sæbø (this volume), Velleman and Beaver (this volume), and the collection of papers in Theoretical Linguistics 30.1 (2004) for extended discussion. 6 This example may be improved in this context by the use on cold of the HLH accent that is normally used to mark a Contrastive Topic (Büring, this volume).
44 Michael Rochemont necessary (4) nor sufficient (2)–(3) for deaccenting. If deaccenting is conditioned by salience, a notion of CG Management, then the relative salience of a proposition is unrelated to its accepted truth, this latter an issue of CG Content. A similar demonstration is provided by the examples below from Kratzer (2004) (citing Christopher Potts). (5) a. *Sue doubts that Ed attended the meeting, but/and we all agree that Jill attended the meeting too. b. Sue doubts that Ed attended the meeting, but we all agree that Jill attended the meeting. Use of the operator too in the second conjunct of (5a) imposes a presupposition (∃x [x attended the meeting]) that cannot be satisfied by the first conjunct, which does not assert that Ed attended the meeting. But as the felicity of deaccenting in (5b) shows, the failure of assertion of this embedded proposition (and its corresponding update in CG Content) is irrelevant to its salience for purposes of deaccenting. Examples (2)–(5) show a distinction between presupposition as commonly construed and salience. Dryer (1996) rightly objects that such examples do not yet show that salience (his activation) is not a form of presupposition that may be distinct from the more widely recognized presupposition that derives from a lexical factive or additive element, for instance. It remains possible that deaccenting presupposes not that the relevant proposition is accepted/true, but instead that it has a local legitimate antecedent in the ongoing conversation/context. (Dryer refers to this form of presupposition as metapresupposition.) And indeed, the prevailing assumption among analysts seems to be that Givenness is presuppositional in nature, although it is not quite clear how. After all, Givenness projects across environments that block presupposition projection in other cases: (5) shows us that the metapresupposition of a Givenness antecedent projects even when the closely similar (if not identical) presupposition that the additive particle too introduces does not. Presuppositions like the existential presupposition introduced by too in (5a) are generally modelled in CG as conditions on the input CG that must be satisfied for the utterances that invoke them to be able to update the CG. In terms of Krifka’s distinction of types of CG function, such presuppositions are based in CG Content. In contrast, Dryer’s metapresupposition would be cast in terms of CG Management, governing the temporary nature of salience-based presupposition in ongoing discourse. Givenness conditioned deaccenting can then be seen as presuppositional in the latter sense only—it expresses a presupposition of a situationally salient antecedent of a particular sort, an effect of CG Management rather than a condition on CG Content. In what follows, I will use deaccenting as a probe into the precise nature of Givenness. Before proceeding, three caveats about deaccenting are in order. First, it is important to observe that while Givenness is necessary for deaccenting, it is not sufficient. In each response in (6), the italicized phrase is Given in virtue of its mention in the question, but deaccenting it would be distinctly odd in this context. In general, deaccenting is overruled by considerations of focus (Rooth 1992, this volume), regardless of the Givenness
Givenness 45 status of a candidate expression. (We return to the relation between focus and Givenness in Section 3.3.3.) (6) a. {Do you like coffee or tea?} I like tea. b. John’s mother slapped Mary, and then she slapped John. c. Susan’s sister likes everyone. She even likes Susan. Second, as (7) shows, deaccenting of a salient expression, when possible, is mandatory only when the expression follows a nuclear accent, or might itself bear the nuclear accent were it not given. In pre-nuclear position, expressions whose denotations are Given (and not focused) may be deaccented, but need not be (see Horne 1990, 1991; Gussenhoven 1999). (7) {Mary met a student from her class at a social event.} a. The student from her class asked her to DANCE. b. She DANCED with the student from her class. The student from her class, if it is understood as coreferential with the student introduced in the context sentence, may be either accented or deaccented in (7a), whereas it seems it must be deaccented in (7b). Given this difference, I adopt the practice of (re-)fashioning examples that test deaccenting so that relevant candidates consistently appear in post- nuclear position. Third, I will deal here only with the Givenness of denotations and/or (the mental representations of) their referents. Nevertheless, it has been known since at least Williams (1981) that sometimes it is the form of an expression and not its meaning that acts as Given for the purposes of deaccenting. Examples (8) and (9) below from Williams (1981) and Wagner (2012b), respectively, illustrate. (8) ?John does not usually give advice to his SON, but he did recently tell him not to look at the SUN. (9) a. Clara loves the public and Clara is loved by them. b. Clara loves the public and Clara is loved by the public. Although the informational content is the same in both examples in (9), (9a) tolerates an accent on them whereas this same pronunciation with an accent on public is distinctly odd in (9b). It is evident from Williams’ example (8) that it is the repetition of form rather than content that triggers the effect. Wagner labels this ‘a givenness illusion’ and reports on experimental results confirming this effect. The illusion (Wagner 2012b: 1443) is due to the possibility that ‘… accenting phonologically given material is avoided, even at the cost of not marking a contrast’. I will not be concerned in this chapter with such givenness illusions. The reader is referred to Williams (1997) and Wagner (2012b) for proposals regarding such cases.
46 Michael Rochemont The question we turn to next is, what are the precise conditions that define salience based Givenness? In (1c), for instance, the expression some beer that serves as antecedent for the deaccented beer is segmentally identical to it. But, as shown below, not all cases of deaccenting are conditioned by such identity. We are left again with the question why beer counts as salient in (1c) but not in (1b). In Section 3.3.2 we examine the semantic relations that qualify an expression as salient for the purposes of Givenness, using deaccenting as a diagnostic.
3.2 Semantic relations 3.2.1 Entailment and coreference Schwarzschild (1999) posits the relevance to Givenness of two core semantic relations: coreference (10) and entailment (11)–(13) (see also Rochemont 1986). (10) John’s sister doesn’t LIKE John / him / the bastard. (11) a. Where are those groceries I paid for? Actually, JOHN bought them. b. First John carried the vase upstairs, then MARY moved it. (12) a. John traps gorillas and he also TRAINS animals. b. John had a sister before MARY had a sibling. (13) a. #John traps animals and he also TRAINS gorillas. b. #John had a sibling before MARY had a sister. The deaccented proper noun, pronominal and epithet objects in (10) are all understood as coreferential to the proper noun possessor of the subject noun phrase. In (11), each deaccented constituent is entailed (in terms of set inclusion) by its italicized antecedent. In (12), entailment predicts the potential for deaccenting the hypernym on the basis of its hyponym. Where entailment fails to hold in (13) (that is, from hypernym to hyponym), deaccenting is illicit. In Schwarzschild’s proposal, entailment is strictly a relation between propositions that is facilitated by a mechanism of type-lifting existential closure (∃-type shifting) to raise non-propositional denotations apart from e to the type of propositions, for calculating Givenness. An utterance U is then Given if (i) U is entailed (modulo ∃-type shifting) by a valid antecedent A in the discourse, or (ii) U is of type e and U and A corefer.7 For example, in (12a) animal is deaccented because ∃x [animal (x)] 7
Is it possible to reduce coreference based salience to entailment? This could be done by type shifting e type denotations to the type of predicates (Partee 1987) and subjecting them to ∃-type shifting. Hotze Rullmann (p.c.) suggests two further possibilities: treating individuals as generalized quantifiers or reformulating entailment as a relation between denotations of any type (van Benthem 1986). The failure of definite pronouns to bear an accent except when contrastive may be due not to coreference with a
Givenness 47 is entailed under ∃-Closure by the mention of gorilla in the first clause. Importantly, the relevant entailments are not necessarily logical entailments of the discourse, but rather entailments under ∃-type shifting from what is salient in prior discourse. (See also (19).) Many accounts of Givenness (e.g. Dryer 1996) propose a three-way distinction between active, non-active, and semi-active (or accessible) denotations (like the beer in (1b)). A denotation is said to be accessible if it bears a pragmatic (e.g. functional or meronymous) relation to a locally prior denotation. For instance in (14), comparable to (1b), the driver is said to be accessible due to the prior mention of the bus. (14) When I boarded the bus, I thought I recognized the driver. But notice that the possibility for deaccenting shows that the accessible referent denoted by the driver is not Given in the preferred sense needed for deaccenting: driver in (14) is not possibly deaccented despite being accessible.8 This is predicted if deaccenting is licensed specifically by entailment. More generally, the relation between meronym and holonym, unlike the relation of hyponym to hypernym, is not a relation of entailment. It is thus predicted that deaccenting is not generally licensed by meronymy or holonomy, as the following examples confirm. (15)
#If you knock on the door, you can ENTER the room. #When the engine died, I JUNKED my car. #John takes pictures of steeples, and he PAINTS churches, too. #If I give you the oars, you have to FIND the rowboat.
(16)
#If you want to enter the room, you have to KNOCK on the door. #My car broke down. I forgot to OIL the engine. #John takes pictures of churches, and he PAINTS steeples, too. #When I got out of the rowboat, I FORGOT the oars.
Notably, (15)–(16) improve when the main stress is shifted to the deaccented phrase, whose denotation is evidently not salient despite being accessible. Deaccenting under entailment or coreference can give rise to inferences about speaker’s meaning, as in this famous example from Lakoff (1972). (17) John called Mary a Republican and then SHE insulted HIM. If insulted can only be deaccented under entailment, then calling someone a Republican must entail insulting her. Here the entailment is not logical, but speaker defined (van salient antecedent but to the failure of functional categories (analysing pronouns as Ds) to be parsed in the mapping of syntax to phonology unless specifically stressed. 8 This does not rule out the possibility that accessible denotations might yet find distinct prosodic expression, as claimed by Baumann (2006), Baumann and Grice (2005).
48 Michael Rochemont Deemter 1994) and inferentially available to interlocutors who may not otherwise share it: if insulted is deaccented then its meaning must be Given, hence entailed by a prior (effectively type-compatible) antecedent, for which there is but one candidate in (17).9 Inferencing from coreference conditioned Givenness is also possible, as in (18).10 (18) a. On my way home, a dog barked at me. I was really FRIGHTENED by the fierce German shepherd. b. Did you see Dr. Cramer to get your root canal? Don’t remind me. I’d like to STRANGLE the butcher. c. My neighbour is a funny character. Still, I really LIKE John. d. The crowd approached the gate. The guards were AFRAID of the women. e. The children were up late. I’m reluctant to WAKE the boys. f. John had an old farm. He SOLD the shed. In each case, if the underlined phrase is deaccented, then it is understood to co-refer with the italicized antecedent; if the phrase is instead accented, it may not co-refer (though in (18d,e), it may specify a subset). Van Deemter (1994) argues for expanding the notion of anaphor to allow the deaccented expression in such cases to be anaphorically dependent on the antecedent (see also Williams 1997, 2012 for a different such proposal). It would seem odd, however, to characterize (18c) for instance as a case where the deaccented proper noun is anaphorically dependent on the prior descriptive noun phrase. The inference instead seems to be that both expressions refer to the same entity.
3.2.2 Other putative relations for Givenness The conclusion that Givenness is a function of entailment/coreference is consistent with the conclusion that Givenness is to be distinguished from topic-hood (Halliday 1967; Krifka 2008; Kučerovà and Neeleman 2012).11 I want now to argue that several other notions that have been appealed to for Givenness are similarly inappropriate. For instance, appeal is sometimes made to Ariel’s (1990) notion of accessibility as the conditioning factor in deaccenting (e.g. Reinhart 2006). But accessibility in Ariel’s use functions like the givenness of the Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel et al. 1993): degree of accessibility is 9 It
is thought that deductive inference under entailment from what is asserted can also motivate deaccenting. In (i) such inference seems to be sufficient for deaccenting, but does not so readily license pronominalization. (i) I know I bought 11 marbles, but when I got home I found I only had 10. And then I found the missing marble /#it in my POCKET. 10 These examples are modelled on or borrowed from Ladd (1980), van Deemter (1994), Umbach (2001), Büring (2007), Baumann and Riester (2012). 11 For analyses in terms of topic-hood see Gundel (1988, 2003), (Lambrecht 1994), Erteschik- Shir (1997, 2007), for example.
Givenness 49 correlated with the likelihood or possibility of appearance of a particular form of referring expression, like the contrast between pronouns and full referential descriptions. Deaccenting is overall insensitive to distinctions among referring expressions in these terms. This perspective belies a widespread claim in the literature that definite noun phrases are consistently Given and indefinite noun phrases consistently lack Givenness. In contrast, like other constituents, definite noun phrases are typically accented when discourse new and deaccented when Given (modulo the usual exemptions from deaccenting), as is evident already from Prince’s (1981) discussion of her category of Unused noun phrases (see also Brown 1983; Bosch 1988; Terken and Hirschberg 1994; Umbach 2001). Moreover, it is readily possible for an indefinite noun phrase to be deaccented, as in (19). (19) If John paints a hot dog, Sam will EAT a hot dog. There is no hot dog introduced by the conditional clause of (19) that serves as a referential antecedent for the deaccented second instance. Compare (20a), where the underscored indefinite noun phrase in the second clause is deaccented in virtue of the entailment licensing antecedent a dog in the first clause. (20) a. Peter had a DOG long before I had a pet. b. My parents let me KEEP Sam, though they never really WANTED a cat. In (20a) two new discourse referents are introduced—Peter’s dog and my pet. Evidently even a deaccented indefinite noun phrase (a pet) can introduce a new discourse referent. In addition, in arguably enthymematic fashion, subsequent references to my pet (the underscored phrases in (20b)) can yet be deaccented, even though each introduces new information about this discourse referent. I conclude that neither definiteness nor indefiniteness are uniquely or predictably associated with accenting or deaccenting independent of salience. Analysts also sometimes use the term D-linked to refer to Given in the intended sense. But D-linking (Pesetsky 1987), to the extent that is it well defined, is independent of Givenness. In Pesetsky’s analysis, which-headed phrases in wh-questions are D-linked, as indicated by their exemption in (21c) from Superiority effects (21b). As Rochemont (2013b) observes in relation to (22), D-linking cannot be co-extensive with Givenness, since which phrases are uniformly D-linked while still expressing possible distinctions in Givenness via deaccenting. (21) a. Who bought what? b. *What did who buy? c. ?Which teacher did which student talk to? (22) We know you bought a car, …
a. but we don’t know WHICH car you bought. b. but we don’t know which MODEL you bought.
50 Michael Rochemont (23) a. The teachers have been assigning specific books to specific students. ?Mary asked WHICH teachers WHICH students REPORT to. b. The teachers have been assigning specific books to their charges. ?Mary asked WHICH teachers which STUDENTS REPORT to. b. Specific books are being assigned to specific students. ?Mary asked which TEACHERS WHICH students REPORT to. Although judgements are subtle, the (b) examples in (23) are equally as grammatical as (21c) and in contrast to (21b), showing conclusively that which-phrases are D-linked for Superiority regardless of the Givenness distinctions among them. D-linking must therefore be independent of Givenness. Some analysts use the terms predictable, repeated, or unimportant to describe the type of Givenness that is relevant to deaccenting.12 But these terms are ill-chosen for that function and, as a result, entirely misleading. Examples (17), (18), and (20) show that deaccenting is not restricted to repeated expressions nor to expressions that are presented as unimportant. Predictability is a more widespread term that is nevertheless as readily ill-chosen. First, predictability too encounters the problems faced by repetition and unimportance as predictors of felicitous deaccenting. For instance, in (17), (18), and (20) the deaccented expressions are not only arguably important but also unpredictable in that they add potentially new information about their antecedents. Moreover, predictability, when not confused with probability, is more often than not determined only post hoc when applied to deaccenting, even with expressions that are repeated. (24) Mary, John, and Bill were sitting in the living room. All of a sudden, Mary KISSED John. It is certainly not predictable in advance of the utterance of the second sentence in (24) that Mary did something to John or if Mary kissed anyone, she kissed John: she might have kissed Bill, the cat, or even the couch. And finally, when predictability does seem to have some predictive force, it is not generally associated with deaccenting, as in (25). The word beak in (25a) is fully predictable, but it is not possibly deaccented (without adding further context), as shown by the contrast in (25b). (25) a. The chicken pecked at the ground with its _____. b. The CHICKEN pecked at the GROUND with its BEAK/#at the GROUND with its beak. I conclude that neither predictability, nor repetition, nor unimportance sufficiently characterize Givenness. 12
Deaccenting is sometimes lumped together with ‘prosodic reduction’, but it may be that prosodic reduction is common with repeated or predictable expressions regardless of their status as accented or deaccented (e.g. Jurafsky et al. 2000).
Givenness 51 In this section I have ruled out definiteness, D-linking, repetition, importance, and predictability as factors that categorically condition deaccenting. I conclude that Givenness is solely a function of coreference or entailment.
3.2.3 Givenness accommodation We have seen in example (17), repeated below, that deaccenting by a speaker can support an inference on the part of the addressee. Let us now consider exactly how. (17) John called Mary a Republican and then SHE insulted HIM. In deaccenting insulted, speaker B presents its denotation as Given, a presentation that is not obviously true in (17). Rather, the addressee is led to infer that the speaker believes that to call someone a Republican is to insult him/her. What precisely is the source of this inference? The inference follows from the anaphoric Givenness presupposition introduced by deaccenting, which indicates the need for a salient antecedent that entails ∀x, y [x calls y a Republican→x insults y]. In this case B is invoking accommodation, classically construed as a means of introducing an informative presupposition into a conversation (see Stalnaker 2002; von Fintel 2008 for recent discussion). B appeals to A to recognize that there is a situationally salient antecedent for the deaccented expression and to accommodate a proposition that allows that antecedent to entail the deaccented phrase under Existential Closure. An appeal to accommodation is subject to the restriction that it must be accepted ‘quietly and without fuss’ (von Fintel 2008). This restriction characterizes the difference between (17) and (26). (26) John insulted Mary and then SHE called HIM a Republican. Most speakers would not easily agree to accommodation of the proposition that is needed to render deaccenting felicitous in (26): ∀x, y [x insults y →x calls y a Republican]. Accommodation gives a natural account of such cases as (17)/(26) and also of parallel cases of accommodation of coreference as in (18), and (20). The naturalness restriction on accommodation, that it be accepted ‘quietly and without fuss’, emphasizes the inherently pragmatic nature of the process, thus readily characterizing its culturally and contextually sensitive variability. Accommodation displays other characteristic restrictions as well, related to this naturalness requirement. First, it is optional, in the sense that speakers are not required to use accommodation wherever possible. Rather, speakers may use locutions that directly alter the context, introducing the relevant meanings that would satisfy presupposition without the need for accommodation. Thus, except in cases where there is limited risk, speakers are typically conservative in their appeal to accommodation, for the reason that its use poses the risk that the speaker’s contribution may be rejected by interlocutors who refuse to accept the appeal quietly and without fuss. A related restriction is that accommodation is sensitive to the specific intimacy of the interlocutors: in many cases greater
52 Michael Rochemont intimacy implies less risk on the part of the speaker, modulo the specific content to be accommodated. The view that deaccenting may give rise to the need to accommodate in order to satisfy a presupposition of salience leads to a re-evaluation of cases which have otherwise often been characterized in strictly grammatical terms or in terms of notions like predictability or unimportance, such as so-called thetic sentences (27), Bolinger-style deaccenting (28), or discourse new though unaccented indexical locative and temporal expressions (29).13 In our terms, the problem presented by such cases is this: if α must be Given to be deaccented, then α that is not Given (i.e. new) must be accented; but the literature claims that all of (27)–(29) can be used in contexts where the underscored constituents are both new and accentless. (27) a. JOHN’s here. b. My HAIR’s a mess. c. Your MOTHER phoned. d. Your COAT’s on fire. e. A COP pulled me over on my way to work today. f. There’s a CAR coming /SKIDDING. g. I knew I would like it here—the STUDENTS are smart. h. A TRAIN whistled. /A PASSENGER WHISTLED. i. I think I hear the BABY crying / your HUSBAND CRYING. (28) a. He’s in jail because he KILLED a man /killed a POLICEMAN. b. I have a POINT to make /a point to EMPHASIZE. (29) a. I ran into JOHN on the subway today. b. JOHN is leaving for LONDON this week. Most accounts of such cases seek non-Givenness based sources for the lack of an expected accent. Among the grammatically based alternatives, one widely favoured proposal links theticity, for example, to the unaccusative/unergative contrast (but see (27 e,f,i)). Another links theticity to the stative/eventive distinction (Your EYES are red/ BLUE, but see (27g)). But if the only possible source of the lack of an expected accent is deaccenting and deaccenting is solely dependent on Givenness as analysed here, then these cases must have a Givenness-based source. Accommodation related to Givenness may provide an analysis consistent with this conclusion. One leading indicator is that accommodation is a pragmatic mechanism, with the potential flexibility to characterize the range of examples in terms other than predictability or unimportance. Accommodation is also not susceptible to the inherent flaw in the grammatically
13 For
complete references and fuller discussion of the claims in the remainder of this section, see Rochemont (2013b).
Givenness 53 driven accounts, that they are simultaneously too weak and too strong, as Rochemont (2013b) shows. If the problem posed by (27)–(29) is fundamentally pragmatic, consider how the characteristic conditions on accommodation noted above give insight into an account of such cases. For one thing, judgements of acceptability vary as a function of levels of intimacy between interlocutors: (29a) would be judged less acceptable if it could not be taken as Given without comment that events regularly occur on the local subway system, or where there is no local subway for example. With thetic sentences it has been observed that in many cases deaccenting the predicate is optional. Since making appeal to accommodation can be a risky business, it only appears mandatory in cases where the risk is completely minimal. Compare (27a,c) with (27b,d,e,g) and the alternatives in (27f,h,i). Alternative pragmatic accounts that claim that the underscored phrases in (27)–(29) are either predictable or unimportant, while plausible for some examples ((27h,i) for instance), face severe difficulties with others: the unaccented predicate in (27e) is not necessarily predictable or unimportant, and that in (27d) is most certainly neither. Importantly, as both Stalnaker (1998) and von Fintel (2008) emphasize with accommodation generally, the adjustment to CG that accommodation demands is made only after the utterance that invokes the presupposition and before the update to CG content. Thus, the context that Givenness appeals to is not the virtually null context that precedes these discourse initiating utterances but the discourse initial context that includes these utterances (hence the contrasts between examples in (27h,i)). Predictability/unimportance are often considered appealing for such cases, but as already argued, these pragmatic notions fail to provide a general account. This view of Givenness as a presuppositional device of CG Management contrasts with the way Givenness is often seen. A more traditional view is that when a speaker deaccents a string this leads to a recoverability problem for the addressee: recover a meaning that is sufficiently activated. Whether activation is sufficient is usually tied to limits of memory and attention: what is the span of time and/or distance between utterances that may suffice to allow a string to be seen as activated? The CG Management view of deaccenting presents the addressee’s problem differently: which CGs are consistent with the presuppositional requirement of an antecedent for a constituent presented as Given? Here there is no issue of a timespan beyond which Givenness deaccenting is illicit under an intended interpretation. Rather, the addressee must select a CG that is compatible with the speaker’s presentation. The only consideration is whether the speaker is successful in appealing to the addressee to construct an appropriate CG. Dryer’s (1996: 501) discussion of an example due originally to Chafe (1976) illustrates. Adapting this example slightly, imagine that Sherlock Holmes, sitting quietly at the desk in his study, suddenly says to Watson, who is reading a newspaper, ‘The BUTLER killed the Kingsdale widow!’ As Dryer observes, one way to view this exchange is that Holmes is appealing to Watson to recover a context in which the relevant constituent (the VP) is Given, when the present context obviously does not qualify. Dryer refers to this process as ‘activation accommodation’ on the model of presupposition accommodation. As noted for presupposition accommodation generally,
54 Michael Rochemont Holmes’ appeal succeeds only to the extent that the accommodation is made ‘quietly and without fuss’ (von Fintel 2008). If Watson is unwilling or unable to accommodate a CG with an appropriate antecedent, Holmes’ appeal to accommodation will fail. But there is no issue of how long it has been since the expression has been uttered, as some absolute bound on persistence of activation. While it may be possible to determine some statistical measure of persistence of activation for certain purposes, such a measure is but a poor reflection of the actual state of affairs. This is that whether a particular use of deaccenting succeeds or fails will be strictly a function of the addressees’ willingness or ability to construe under accommodation an antecedent for the deaccented expression in the current CG or to accommodate a different local CG which supplies an appropriate antecedent.
3.3 Given, new, and focused So far in the discussion we have considered only cases where entire constituents are Given under entailment or coreference, under Schwarzschild’s preliminary definition of Givenness. But Schwarzschild’s ultimate proposal provides for cases where a phrasal constituent is only partly Given. He delivers an informal procedure in which constituents are checked for Givenness recursively, Given constituents are unmarked, and non- Given constituents are F-marked under an operation of Existential F-closure which replaces each F-marked constituent from within a potentially Given constituent with a variable, existentially closing the result to check for antecedence, modulo the need for ∃-type shifting. In order to avoid over-liberal use of F-marking in context, F-marking is limited by an economy measure (Avoid F) to just what is necessary to satisfy Givenness for any particular constituent.14 The final elements of Schwarzschild’s informal analysis are given in (30).15 (30) Definition of GIVEN (Schwarzschild 1999: 151): An utterance U counts as GIVEN iff it has a salient antecedent A and
a. if U is of type e, then A and U corefer; b. otherwise, modulo ∃-type shifting, A entails the Existential F-Closure of U.
GIVENness: If a constituent is not F-marked, it must be GIVEN AVOID F: F-mark as little as possible, without violating GIVENness
14 An alternative to minimizing F-marking is maximizing Givenness, as proposed in Truckenbrodt (1995). This option is pursued in different ways by Williams (1997) (DOAP—Don’t overlook anaphoric possibilities), Büring (2012) (MaxAna—Maximize Anaphoricity), and Sauerland (2005), Wagner (2006), and Kučerovà (2007) (Maximize Presupposition—Heim 1991). 15 Schwarzschild’s formal analysis uses designated assignment functions rather than Existential F-closure.
Givenness 55 Consider the following illustrations of how this procedure allows for partly Given constituents. (31) A: Last week, John bought a blue convertible. B: Well yesterday, John bought a RED convertible. (32) A: Who did John’s mother kiss? B: She kissed JOHN. While John bought a red convertible is not GIVEN in (31B), the nominal, predicate, and sentential constituents are GIVEN if red is F-marked and the resulting constituents undergo Existential F-Closure (and ∃-type shifting as needed): the ensuing denotations for the noun phrase (∃x ∃Y [x is a Y convertible]), verb phrase (∃x ∃Y [x bought a Y convertible]), and sentence (∃Y [John bought a Y convertible]) are all entailed by the discourse prior John bought a blue convertible. It is also possible in (31) to consider the VP to be F-marked, since it is Given from A’s statement that ∃P[P (John)]. But VP cannot be F-marked here: Avoid F rules out a representation in which both VP and red are F-marked, since F-marking just the latter suffices to satisfy GIVENness (30). (The VP alone cannot be F-marked since red convertible is not Given.) In (32B), though John is GIVEN, kissed John is not. John is thus F-marked despite being GIVEN, in service of satisfaction of GIVENness for the containing verb phrase and sentence which are otherwise not GIVEN. In this section, I will discuss three problematic aspects of this analysis. First, the analysis fails to capture focus sensitivity effects when all constituents in a specific domain are GIVEN (Beaver and Clark 2008). In fact, AVOID F rules out any possible F-marking in such cases. Second, Avoid F also proves overly restrictive in some cases where rhetorical relations play a role (Kehler 2005). Third, deaccenting of one constituent under Givenness often results in accenting some other constituent. Wagner (2006: 298) presents data that argue for a modification to Givenness such that ‘[m]arking a constituent x as given introduces the presupposition that there is an alternative y′ to its sister y, such that the constituent [y′ x] is given’. Here Givenness of the deaccenting candidate does not suffice to license deaccenting; rather, deaccenting is dependent on the ability of the candidate’s structural sister to express a focus of contrast.
3.3.1 Focus sensitivity In Schwarzschild’s system lack of F-marking is interpreted (by GIVENness), but F-marking has no particular interpretation. A constituent that is F-marked may be GIVEN or not. Nevertheless, if an F-marked constituent is GIVEN, it is F-marked in service of a higher prerogative only: the GIVENness of a containing constituent. While this consequence correctly characterizes many cases of contrastive focus, it fails in cases
56 Michael Rochemont where the GIVENness of a containing constituent is not at stake. Consider the following example from Beaver and Clark’s (2008) discussion of this specific problem. (33) {Brady taught semantics and . .}
a. the students were glad that BRADY taught semantics. b. the students were glad that Brady taught SEMANTICS. c. the students were GLAD that Brady taught semantics.
Because the emotive predicate glad in (33) is a focus sensitive expression, the interpretations of these examples differ: (33a) expresses the students’ preference for Brady, rather than someone else, to teach semantics, whereas (33b) expresses their preference for Brady to teach semantics rather than some other subject. But in Schwarzschild’s system not only are each of the elements of the clausal complement to the predicate in both examples GIVEN, the clausal complement itself is GIVEN and hence grammatically unmarked and predicted to be deaccented, as in (33c). AVOID F rules out any further internal F-marking within these clausal complements, and so does not license F-marking of Brady in (33a) or semantics in (33b). But Brady and semantics are not deaccented though Given, and so must be F-marked in their respective sentences. Evidently, F-marking must distinguish between focus-as-alternatives (as in cases of focus sensitivity) and focus-as-new (in cases assessed by GIVENness directly). There are several revisions to Schwarzschild’s analysis on offer: see especially Féry and Samek-Lodovici (2006), Krifka (2006), Kratzer and Selkirk (2007), Beaver and Clark (2008), Selkirk (2008), Beaver and Velleman (2011), Katz and Selkirk (2011). Most of these proposals elect to reserve F-marking for focus-as-alternatives, marking either Given or new constituents distinctly while adapting elements of Schwarzschild’s analysis in (30). Other facts point to this same need to distinguish focus-as-alternatives and discourse new. Selkirk (2008) and Katz and Selkirk (2011) argue that when focused and new constituents co-occur in the domain of a focus sensitive operator (see Beck, this volume), an undifferentiated notion of focus does not suffice to distinguish the range of interpretations available. Consider the following example from Rochemont (2013b). (34) {Did John do anything odd at the reception?} Yes—He only introduced BILL to SUE.
a. … He didn’t introduce anyone else to Sue. b. … He didn’t introduce Bill to anyone else. c. … He didn’t make any other introductions. d. … He didn’t do anything else.
In the context indicated, the utterance He only introduced Bill to Sue is multiply ambiguous, as the possible continuations in (34) indicate: only may associate with just Bill (34a), with just Sue (34b), with both Bill and Sue (34c), or with the VP (34d).
Givenness 57 But in Schwarzschild’s analysis all of these constituents are F-marked (35), since none are GIVEN. (35) He only [introducedF BillF to SueF]F
(36) a. He only [introduced BILLF to SUE]. b. He only [introduced BILL to SUEF]. c. He only [introduced BILLF to SUEF]. d. He only [introduced BILL to SUE]F.
Representation (35) does not distinguish among the various ambiguities evident in (34). On the other hand, if focused and new are distinguished by F-marking and new is unmarked, then the various interpretations in (34) can be represented distinctly as in (36), one representation corresponding to each of the interpretations invoked in (34a–d) respectively. A similar argument presents itself from it cleft sentences, which are widely acknowledged to be syncategorematic focus sensitive contexts.16 A cleft partitions a sentence into focus (the pivot) and background (suitably adjusted to replace the understood position of the focus within the cleft clause with a variable), as in (37). (37) It was [her sweater]FOCUS [that Mary lost __on the cruise]BACKGROUND If focus bears the same relation to background as it does to Givenness, then the background in an it cleft must be Given. But while the background in an it cleft may be Given, and very often is, it need not be (for recent discussion, see Hedberg 2012). (38) A: I’ve been looking for Mary’s sweater and can’t find it anywhere. B: It was her sweater that Mary lost on the cruise. For B’s reply to be felicitous, the context set that precedes the utterance should include at least a shared proposition to the effect that Mary lost something on the cruise. Notwithstanding that this condition is satisfied (for instance, both speakers know that the fact that Mary lost something on the cruise is part of the context set), the cleft clause in sentence (38B) will be deaccented only in case the proposition that Mary lost something on the cruise is already Given in the conversational context, and not otherwise. Since this latter condition is not satisfied in the mini-discourse in (38), deaccenting of the cleft clause in (38B) is disfavoured, pending further amendment to the context.
16 A reviewer
objects that the pivot of a cleft is not a focus except by assumption. The assumption seems warranted by the transparent alternative semantics of the pivot/background relation, and is rendered yet more plausible by the lack of existentiality and exhaustiveness implicatures in the clefts of some languages, where clefts serve solely a focus function (e.g. Zerbian 2006; Koch 2008).
58 Michael Rochemont Plainly, the cleft clause that marks the background in an it-cleft need not be Given for the cleft to be felicitous.17 Accordingly, some distinction between background and Given is mandated—focus cannot be the complement to both background and Givenness.18 The need to distinguish focused and new extends also to prosody. Neeleman and Szendrői (2004) and Féry and Samek-Lodovici (2006) together give several arguments against F-marking as a focus-marking device in grammar, but what they implicitly argue is that for prosodic purposes discourse new and focus must be distinguished and F-marking, if used, must be restricted to focus (Selkirk 2008; Rochemont 2013b). In each case, the argument is based on showing that whenever new constituents compete with focused constituents for prosodic prominence, focus inevitably wins. These arguments are strongly supported by the experimental results reported in Katz and Selkirk (2011), who show that in sentences containing focus sensitive only and in which both new and focused constituents appear, focus prominence shows greater amplitude, duration, and intensity than new prominence, even in cases where a new constituent linearly follows a focused constituent. A further prosodic argument (see Reich 2012) for the need to distinguish between focused and new stems from consideration of cases of Second Occurrence Focus (SOF—Baumann, this volume), illustrated in the following example adapted by Beaver et al. (2007) from Partee (1999). (39) A: Everyone already knew that Mary only eats VEGETABLES. B: If even PAUL knew that Mary only eats vegetables, then he should have suggested a different RESTAURANT. The pitch accented Focus vegetables in (39A) is Given with its containing clause in (39B), and it then comes as no surprise that this clause, including vegetables, is deaccented. What is surprising is that vegetables continues to function interpretively as a Focus in association with only even though it does not bear the expected pitch accent (as measured through f0 excursion in particular) that usually marks a Focus prosodically in English. Beaver et al. (2007) show that though it fails to show significant f0 excursion, the SOF vegetables in (39B) nevertheless continues to bear phrasal prominence as indicated by measures of intensity and duration. These results are interpreted to mean that focus in English is associated with some degree of prosodic prominence even when it is deaccented. It cannot then be the case that focus is simply the complement of Given if Givenness conditions deaccenting, since in SOF we see a variety of focus that is evidently deaccented.19 17
This argument is particularly compelling in the case of Informative-Presuppositional clefts (Prince 1978), which may be used to initiate a discourse (e.g. as the lead sentence of a newspaper article) with virtually no part of the utterance Given. (i) It was just about fifty years ago that Henry Ford gave us the weekend. 18 Williams
(1997) proposes nested topic/focus configurations to account for such cases, while still introducing a distinction between prosodically and structurally identified focus in clefts. 19 This argument presupposes that a Givenness-based account of SOF is possible, a position argued against in Büring (2015). See Beaver and Velleman (2011) for discussion.
Givenness 59
3.3.2 Rhetorical effects Schwarzschild (1999: 165) observes that Givenness marking through deaccenting is sensitive to rhetorical relations. In (40a) it is the Givenness of the matrix clause (John borrowed the book) that is central to the interpretation; in (40b) it is the givenness of the embedded clause (Max purchased the book). (40) {John borrowed the book that Max had purchased.}
a. No, MAXF borrowed it. b. No, Max BORROWEDF it.
In either case, the relevant proposition (x borrowed it, Max x’d it) is GIVEN, and there is no problem with either GIVENness or AVOID F. But this is not always the case. Rhetorical effects are possible when GIVENness is satisfied but AVOID F is not. Kehler (2005) compares Schwarzschild’s (1999: 170) examples in (41) with the patently equivalent examples in (42) (although I have slightly modified the contexts): the accent pattern in (a) is preferred in (41) but infelicitous in (42), and that in (b) is preferred in (42) and is infelicitous in (41).20 (41) {John cited Mary, and you won’t believe what he did next … }
a. he DISSEDF SUEF. b. #he [dissedF SUEF]F.
(42) {Fred read the menu, and you won’t believe what he did next … }
a. #he ORDEREDF a [HAMBURGER]F. b. he [orderedF a HAMBURGERF]F.
Nevertheless in Schwarzschild’s proposal,21 only the F-markings and pronunciations in the (a) examples are predicted: AVOID F uniformly prohibits the F-marking and corresponding pronunciations of the (b) examples. Kehler explains that the contrast between 20 Rochemont (2013b) observes that (41b) is indeed felicitous if the accent pattern is understood to mark Contiguity rather than Resemblance. The option for both patterns is made clearer in the modified example in (i)
. (i) {John cited Mary. What did Bill do?}
a. He dissed SUE. b. He DISSED SUE.
Many speakers agree that both responses are possible in (i), but the responses differ in that (b) marks a dual contrast between cited/dissed and Mary/Sue, whereas (a) marks only a contiguous event (see 43a). 21 To guarantee a systematic relation between F- marking and accenting, Schwarzschild restricts required accents to privileged F-marked constituents, those that are FOC-marked under (i). (i) F OC-marking: A FOC-marked node is a node that is not immediately dominated by another F-marked node.
60 Michael Rochemont (41) and (42) is due to a difference in rhetorical relations: the felicitous accent pattern in (41) reflects Contrast or Parallel (which are in the Resemblance category of coherence relations—see Culicover and Jackendoff 2012) while that in (42) reflects Contiguity. Despite the evident relevance of rhetorical relations to the choice of accent pattern in (41)/(42), the approach that Schwarzschild advocates for (40) will not extend to these cases without modification or elimination of AVOID F, as Kehler suggests. A possible solution to this difficulty utilizes the revision proposed already in Section 3.1. If F-marking is restricted to focus-as-alternatives and discourse new constituents remain unmarked (one of several possible alternative revisions), then representations (41a)/(42a) remain unchanged, but (41b)/(42b) are revised to (43a,b).
(43) a. he [dissed SUE]F b. he [ordered a HAMBURGER]F
Examples (41a)/(42a) mark the dual contrasting alternatives reading consistent with Contrast/Resemblance that is far more natural in the context of (41) than (42). The accent pattern and representations in (43), on the other hand, are consonant with the simple rhetorical Contiguity that is most natural to (42) in particular. The implicit question in the contexts of both (41) and (42) asks only what happened next—the differing felicity of patterns in the target utterances reflects the relative suitability of invoking rhetorical Contrast in (41) vs (42). Importantly, ‘relative suitability’ is at least partly a function of the speaker’s rhetorical intent, the intentional use of accents to indicate either Contrast or Contiguity as the intended rhetorical relation.
3.3.3 Local alternatives It has been commonly observed that deaccenting of one constituent under GIVENness often results in the accenting of some other constituent, the latter usually proposed to be a metrical or syntactic sister of the former (Ladd 1980, 2008; Culicover and Rochemont 1983; Selkirk 1984; Williams 1997, 2012; Wagner 2006, 2012a). In some cases, the shifted accent must mark a focus of contrast or deaccenting is barred, as in the following example from Wagner (2006). (44) {Mary’s uncle, who produces high-end convertibles, is coming to her wedding. I wonder what he brought as a present.}
a. He brought [a CHEAP convertible]. b. # He brought [a RED convertible]. c. He brought [a red CONVERTIBLE].
Although convertible is GIVEN in (44a–c), it is only acceptably deaccented in (a). Wagner argues that what makes deaccenting possible in (a) but not (b) is that cheap in
Givenness 61 (a) is an acceptable alternative to high-end as a focus of contrast, but red in (b) is not. GIVENness as formulated in (30) is not sufficient to capture this contrast between (44a,b) since in both cases convertible is equally GIVEN. Wagner argues for a reformulation of Givenness as Relative Givenness such that ‘[m]arking a constituent x as given introduces the presupposition that there is an alternative y′ to its sister y, such that the constituent [y′ x] is given’. An observation that I think relevant here is that there is a further alternative in the context provided in (44). This is the continuation in (45). (45)
He brought [a cheap CONVERTIBLE].
Since the object is the locus of contrast in alternatives that are called for by the explicit question in (44) (I wonder what he brought), the object cannot be fully deaccented even if Given (cf. #He BROUGHT a convertible). Here we see again the relevance of rhetorical relations in speakers’ use of deaccenting: if the speaker wishes to draw a contrast with high-end convertibles she may (44a), but need not (45). It nevertheless remains true, as Wagner claims, that deaccenting seems dependent in such cases on whether the deaccenting candidate’s sister can plausibly mark a focus of contrast (Repp, this volume).22 Moreover, as Wagner observes, while in some cases the shifted accent must mark a focus of contrast (44); in others it seems it need not (46).23 (46) Mary, Sam, and John were sitting on the couch. Then Mary KISSED John. Here the structural sister of the deaccented John does not mark a contextually licensed focus of contrast—although discourse new, kissed in (46) is not contrasted with other contextually given relations that hold between Mary and John. Wagner’s (2006) solution is to posit LF raising of arguments, which allows the sister requirement on contrasting alternatives to be satisfied. Relative Givenness is satisfied after raising if the raised argument is Given and its sister, the residual sentence from which it is extracted, marks a weak contextually licensed contrast, ‘weak’ in the sense that any discourse prior proposition that contains the Given argument can count as a valid alternative.
22
Büring (2012) treats contrast in terms of the notion of issue: an issue is plausible if it partitions the worlds in the context set into complementary sets, each compatible with only one of the alternatives in the issue. 23 Ladd (1980) proposes default accent to characterize the cases in which no contrastive interpretation ensues from deaccenting, although Godjevac (2006) and Rochemont (2013a) argue that the most widely cited putative example (John doesn’t READ books) is not such a case. Still, other cases do not so readily succumb to such re-analysis, as with the following examples from Ladd’s (1980) and Selkirk’s (1984) discussions.
(i) I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a dentist, but I’m awfully glad there are guys who want to BE dentists. (ii) The buttermilk’s the best part OF it. (iii) I didn’t even know it was BY Beethoven.
62 Michael Rochemont Wagner (2012a) modifies the Relative Givenness account of local alternatives to require local excluded alternatives (LEA), whereby the negation of the existential closure of the antecedent must be entailed by universal closure of the constituent under evaluation (akin to Schwarzschild’s existential F-closure), effectively enforcing a partition of the set that unifies the two subsets so defined, such that one subset excludes the other. LF raising a Noun Phrase argument a, yields a proposition level constituent [a b] and givenness in such cases is determined by applying a two place exhaustive operator that requires there to be ‘… a salient constituent [a′ b] in the context such that the exhaustive operator applied to a and b excludes [a′ b]’ (Wagner 2012a: 125). These proposals successfully cover (46) and related examples (such as those in footnote 23). They also provide a means to address the focus sensitivity data in (33) from Beaver and Clark (2008), through accommodation of a form consistent with our earlier proposals. Roughly, the deaccenting of Brady in (33a) gives rise to a requirement for a salient antecedent of the form ∃x[x teaches semantics] that is excluded by Brady teaches semantics. A similar account in terms of accommodation is possible for (33b). As Wagner observes, ‘… a context in which an alternative statement is excluded may well be the default type of context that is accommodated if one hears a sentence with marked prominence out of the blue’ (Wagner 2012a: 126). Although these cases are not out of the blue, they do represent a choice among alternative presentations of the sentence in the context indicated. (Compare the third alternative (33c)). Notably, a speaker’s choice of what to deaccent as Given relative to some accented alternative is not driven by context but must be compatible with context (as licensed by Givenness), as the contrast between (33a–c) makes clear. In contrast to Schwarzschild’s analysis, Wagner’s LEA proposal introduces alternatives into the calculation of Givenness, so that both Focus-as-new and Focus-as- alternatives might be seen to complement Givenness. It remains unclear whether such a programme can succeed and so eliminate reference to Focus completely. Problems remain that have no clear solution, including how to provide for evidence of a prosodic contrast between New and Focused and how to capture SOF.24 In the absence of a proposal on these issues, Focus and Givenness do not yet appear wholly susceptible to unified analysis.
3.4 Conclusion This chapter has explored Givenness as expressed through Givenness marking in English in the form of deaccenting. It has been argued that the data support a coreference/entailment based approach to Givenness, in contrast to other conceivable
24 See
Stevens (2014) who argues specifically against both the LEA analysis and the LF raising of arguments.
Givenness 63 formulations. Moreover, Givenness is expressible as a form of presupposition so long as a distinction is drawn between two distinct types of beliefs in Common Ground (beliefs about the subject matter of a conversation and beliefs about the conversation itself (Stalnaker 2002)) or between two distinct components of CG, CG Content, and CG Management (Krifka 2008). This view gives rise to a novel account of some longstanding problems stemming from the lack of accenting in English all-new utterances. In evaluating the influential proposal of Schwarzschild (1999), we have also seen that Givenness presents necessary though not always sufficient contextual conditions on deaccenting—speakers deaccent in accord with their communicative intents in regard at least to evoking focus alternatives and expressing rhetorical relations, not because the context strictly speaking requires them to. Apparent mandatory deaccenting, when it arises, is best seen from this perspective in the following way: failure to deaccent when to do so would be consistent with a speaker’s actual communicative intent misleads interlocutors to think the speaker must have some other intent: deaccenting is mandatory when it is unavoidably consistent with a specific rhetorical intent. With regard to the question of how focus and givenness are related, it was argued that while Givenness (specifically under Wagner’s 2012a formulation) comes close to eliminating Focus, it does not do so completely. Some evidence still supports a three-way contrast between Given, focused, and new.25
25 Due to reasons of space, I have not explored in this chapter either range of variation in prosodic marking of Givenness (for relevant discussion see Zubizarreta 1998, this volume; Cruttenden 2006; Zerbian 2012) or the syntactic expression of Givenness (see Grosz, this volume; Fanselow, this volume; López, this volume; Neeleman and van de Koot, this volume; Winkler, this volume).
Chapter 4
(C ontrasti v e ) Topi c Daniel Büring
4.1 Contrastive topics: the un-focus To approach contrastive topics, we take focus as our point of departure (non-contrastive or thematic topics will not be discussed until Section 4.5 below).1 A focus-marked (F- marked) constituent, roughly, is interpreted as ‘the new information in response to a question’:2 (1) (Who did they kick out? —) They kicked ME out. Either because of the meaning of focus, or because of the pragmatics of question–answer pairs, focus is interpreted exhaustively (‘↝’ marks a pragmatic inference): (1) ↝ it was me they kicked out; no-one else was kicked out This sometimes carries over to sentences with two intonational prominences: (2) (Did you kick her out? —) SHE kicked ME out! ↝ it was her who did the kicking out, and it was me who got kicked out; no one else kicked anyone out It seems therefore plausible to analyse (2) as a double focus: (3) (Did you kick her out? —) SHEF kicked mef out! 1 Thanks to Manuel Križ, the editors, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and corrections. 2 Small caps indicate intonational prominence; sentences in parentheses are given as context and not annotated for intonation.
(Contrastive) Topic 65 In some instance (or some contexts), however, the two prosodically highlighted elements are interpreted asymmetrically: (4) (Who do they want to kick out? —) SHE wants to kick me out.
a. NOT: it is her who wants to do some kicking out, and it’s me who (she hopes) is going to get kicked out; no one else wants to kick anyone out b. BUT: as far as she is concerned, it’s me that should get kicked out; she does not want to kick out anybody else
The answer in (4) suggests a continuation along the lines of ‘… whereas someone else wants to kick so-and-so out’. In that case, she is—by assumption—marked as a contrastive topic (henceforth CT), rather than a focus: (5) (Who do they want to kick out? —) SHEct wants to kick mef out. Like focus, a CT relates to alternatives (‘someone else’), but whereas with the double focus in (2) all combinations of alternatives are, pragmatically, excluded (‘no one else kicked anyone out’), with the CT+F in (5), the exclusion only concerns who she wants to kick out (see Rooth, this volume, for more on alternatives). It is in fact implied that others want to do some kicking out as well. The notion that CT marking results in a set of alternative propositions which are explicitly not used for exhaustification lies at the heart of the recent proposals in Hara and van Rooij (2007), van Rooij (2010), and Tomioka (2009, 2010). In fact, at least Tomioka (2009, 2010) does not explicitly state anything more about what is done with these alternatives. The idea is that from the mere existence of such non-excluded alternatives, a hearer can deduce that the speaker must find these alternatives potentially relevant, and at least possible (otherwise she would have explicitly excluded them, i.e. have used a focus instead). This may ultimately be the most elegant account of CT, but for the time being we will outline an account here which specifies the reasoning that leads from the presence of non-excluded alternatives to their actual pragmatic effects in more detail, as part of the linguistic rule system. In Büring (2003) I argued for the following view: Whereas F relates a declarative sentence to alternative propositions, CT+F relates it to alternative questions. In (4), the alternative propositions say things like ‘she wants to kick George out’, ‘she wants to kick Marcy out’, etc., whereas the alternative questions are ‘Who does Bob want to kick out?’, ‘Who does Kim want to kick out?’, etc. (I use single quotes to characterize meanings). The alternative propositions are alternative answers to the question, so by the pragmatics of questions, and following the line of analysis just quoted, they are excluded: she doesn’t want to kick George/Marcy…. out, only the speaker. The alternative questions, on the other hand, are not excluded in any way; rather at least one must be pertinent to the conversation. This is the case in (4): The original question was who they want to
66 Daniel Büring kick out. Given that the answer is limited to her intentions, there must be other relevant people—the other members of the group referred to by they—for whom it is pertinent to ask: Who does (s)he want to kick out? This basic idea can be implemented via an extension of alternative semantics for focus (von Stechow 1981; Rooth 1985, this volume), which derives from a sentence like (4), repeated with information structural marking in (6), the set of F-alternatives, (6a), as well as the set of CT-alternatives, (6b):3 (6) SHECt wants to kick mef out. a. F-Alternatives: the set of propositions like ‘she wants to kick x out’, for some individual x b. CT-Alternatives: the set of question meanings like ‘Who does y want to kick out?’, for some individual y We will write SCT+F for a sentence containing CT+F (analogously for F+F, F etc.), and ⟦SCT+F⟧O , ⟦SCT+F⟧f , and S CT+F CT for its ordinary meaning, F-, and CT-alternatives, respectively. What to do with the CT-alternatives? That is, how are they interpreted? For the purpose of this paper, (7) will serve as our sole rule: (7) Ct-Interpretation Rule (cir)
For a sentence SCT+F to be felicitous, there must be at least one question meaning in SCT+F’s CT-value which is
a. currently pertinent, and Pertinence b. logically independent of ⟦SCT+F⟧o, and Independence c. identifiable. Identifiability The requirements on SCT+F introduced by the CIR should be understood as conventional implicature triggered by the presence of CT marking. Applied to (6), (7) requires that speaker and hearer can identify at least one question instantiating ‘Who does y want to kick out?’ which is pertinent and independent of (6) itself. We will elaborate on what exactly is meant by Pertinence, Independence, and Identifiability in the course of this chapter, but it should be clear already that in a context in which it was asked who X want to kick out, X some group, there are at least as many such pertinent questions as there are members of X. If one knows who the members of X are, one can identify the questions about them. And only one of those questions is resolved by—i.e. not independent of—the answer She wants to kick me out (namely ‘Who does she want to kick out?’); the other questions (‘Who does Jeanne want to kick out?’…) are independent of that answer, meeting (7). Note that (7) is not met in (2) (Did you kick her out?—she kicked me out!). If she were a CT (and me a focus), (7) would require that there is at least one question like 3
See Büring (2003: sec. 12.1) for how to do that, Büring (1997b: sec. 3.3) for details.
(Contrastive) Topic 67 ‘Who did y kick out?’ which is pertinent to the conversation and logically independent of (i.e. not resolved by) the answer. But this is not the case: What we are interested in is whether he kicked her out, or she him. Answering that she kicked him out resolves this issue completely, in violation of the CIR in (7), in particular Independence, (7b). Crucially, failure to meet (7) does not mean that (2) is infelicitous, only that it cannot be a CT+F structure. As stated above, it does have a well-formed structure on which both she and me are F, to which (7) simply does not apply. A question not addressed so far is whether the F+F structure in (2) is prosodically different from the CT+F structure in (4). Or, put differently, whether prosody can disambiguate the declarative sentence in (8) between a double focus (answering (8a)) and a CT+F structure (answering (8b)): (8)
(a) Do you want to kick her out?
(b) Who do they want to kick out?
F+F
CT+F
she wants to kick me out.
This question has not been systematically investigated, but it is usually assumed that the two intonational contours resulting from the different questions in (8) are, or at least can be, different. Impressionistically speaking, the F+F contour has a high pitch accent on the first F she, followed by a low stretch (presumably H* L–in Mainstream American English ToBI notation, cf. Beckman et al. 2005) and another high pitch accent on me, followed by a low boundary (H* L–L%).4 The CT+F contour, in contrast, has a rising pitch accent on she, after which the pitch remains rising/high (L*+H), followed again by a high pitch accent on me, and a low boundary (H* L–L%). In a very stylized form, the CT on she would be realized as a ‘rise– fall–rise’ (L*+H L–L%)—what Jackendoff (1972) calls a B-accent—whereas the F-accent would just be a high pitch accent, followed by a low tone (H* L–). In what follows I will assume that CT+F sentences are indeed prosodically different from F+F sentences. There are other ways to tease the two patterns apart. In a CT+F sentence, CT may be fronted across F, as in (9b):5
4 See
Eady et al. (1986), experiment 2, for comparison of this accent pattern with wide and narrow foci—though not with what we call CT+F here. Mehlhorn (2001) and Braun (2005) compare CT+F in German to ‘neutral’ sentences, but not systematically to what we call F+F here. 5 Sub-examples with letters are to be read as alternative continuations, so (9b) is not a reply or sequel to (9a), but—like (9a)—to (9).
68 Daniel Büring (9) (Churchmoth recorded this song in eighty-three.)
a. And muckensturm recorded it in seventy-two. b. And in seventy-two, muckensturm recorded it.
An F+F sentence does not allow for non-canonical ordering of the two F, cf. (10): (10) (Churchmoth wrote this song in eighty-three.)
a. No, muckensturm wrote it in seventy-two. b. #No, in seventy-two, muckensturm wrote it.
For pragmatic reasons, the answer in (10)—unlike that in (9)—must be an F+F sentence: If Muckensturm wrote the song in 1972, there cannot be other pertinent questions like ‘When did Batiston write it?’ (or ‘Who wrote it in 1982?’), given that songs are only written once. Accordingly, (10b), which involves preposing of one focus across the other, is out. We can thus take the possibility of non-canonical order of two prosodically prominent constituents to be indicative of a CT+F pattern. I will now review some of the uses that have been taken to be typical for CT+F patterns in the literature.
4.2 CT phenomenology 4.2.1 Partial topics Answers to multiple wh-questions, or a single wh-question containing plurals, typically allow CT+F answers: (11) a. (Which guest brought what? —) fredCT brought the beansf. b. (Where do your siblings live? —) My SISTERCT lives in stockholmF. The CT values of the answers in (11) are ‘What did x bring?’ and ‘Where does your x-sibling live?’, respectively. Given the more general questions about the guests/siblings, we can see how the CIR in (7) is met: The questions in (11a / b )CT are obviously pertinent, and independent of the answers in (11). Languages with topic-marking morphemes like Korean -nun or Japanese wa likewise use these markers, together with intonational prominence, in such discourses:6
6
Lee (1999); for Japanese see Uechi (1998), Tomioka, this volume.
(Contrastive) Topic 69 (12) (Who did what? —)
[joe-nun]CT Joe ct
ca -ko sleep and
sue- nun Sue ct
nol- assta. play past
(Korean)
The question need not be overt in order for CTs to occur. Simple pair-lists that answer an obvious implicit question like ‘Who ate how many mbeju?’ suffice, as the following example from Guaraní shows:7 (13) (Sambo’s father ate 35 mbeju (mandioka starch patties), his mother ate 20…) … ha Sámbo=katur ho’u 54 mbeju and Sambo- CONTRAST eat 54 mbeju
(Guaraní)
It is not necessary that the speaker knows what the answer to the other question is. The following example from Hungarian is representative for contexts showing that:8 (14) (Ki aludt a padlón? —) who slept the floor
(Hungarian)
‘Who slept on the floor?
[A PADLÓN]CT PÉTERF aludt, és (lehet, hogy) sehol the floor-SUP Peter slept and perhaps that nowhere máshol nem is aludt senki más. other place not too slept nobody different
‘It was Peter who slept on the floor, but (it is possible that) nobody slept anywhere else.
Example (14) is instructive in two respects: First, the speaker need not believe that someone else slept in a different place (see also Section 4.3 below); and second, (s)he does not even have to think that the other question does in fact have a well-defined answer, as long as the question itself (‘where did the others sleep’) is pertinent. This shows that it is accurate for the CIR to refer to alternative questions, rather than their answers.
4.2.2 Shifting topics (15) a. (Will Bo come to school today? —) yesterdayct he was SICKF . b. (Where did Fritz buy this book? —) bertiect bought it at hartliebf’s. 7 Krivoshein De Canese et al. (2005: 81), via Tonhauser (2012: 273); the marker katur is glossed ‘contrast’. It can occur in non-initial answers within a CT+F answer sequence. 8 Gyuris (2002: 38f), see also É. Kiss, this volume.
70 Daniel Büring The CT-questions here are ‘How is/was Bo on day x?’ and ‘Where did x buy this book?’. Which of them are pertinent? For (15b), the very questions overtly asked is pertinent and not resolved by the answers. Similarly, for (15a) the question how Bo is today is pertinent, since its answer will indicate whether he will come to school today. (Note that we do not aim to answer the question why the answers in (15) are relevant to the question in particular, but only why they can bear the CT+F pattern they do.)
4.2.3 Purely implicational topics (16) (Where was the gardener at the time of the murder? —) The gardenerCT was in the housef. In this case, the answer directly resolves the question that was asked. But the CT indicates additional questions: Where was the chauffeur? The cook?9 Are they pertinent? Quite plausibly ‘yes’ in a case like (16), where the questioner is easily construed as trying to find the murderer. This is not always the case, of course: (17) (Where did Thomas Mann write The Beloved Returns? —) # MANNCt wrote it in [LOS ANGELES]F. The odd implication of the CT-marking on Mann is that someone else might have written the novel elsewhere, which defies word knowledge (similarly to (10b) above). Somewhat in-between are cases like (18): (18) (Do you remember where you were when you first heard about Chernobyl? —) ICT was at HOMEF . Using the CT-marking on the first person subject here adds the implication that someone else’s whereabouts (at the time of their learning about Chernobyl) are a pertinent question. Unlike in the murder case (17), this is not so easily accommodated here, but unlike in the Thomas Mann case, one can probably come up with something that the speaker considers pertinent, maybe that her dog was vacationing in the Ukraine. Even in (16), though, there is a feeling that the speaker stretches the use of CT, flouting the CIR, which govern its use. Why? Recall from (7) that the CIR requires that the pertinent questions referenced by CT should be identifiable—(7c). This amounts to knowing at least some value for x in ‘Where was x at the time of the murder?’ which makes for a pertinent question (see Section 4.4 below for more). While, for example, 9
Though of course, the gardener did it!
(Contrastive) Topic 71 with partial topics (Section 4.2.1 above) the question itself names a group containing such x (so Identifiablity is met), additional common knowledge between the speaker and addressee about who the suspects are is needed in (16); and the more unclear the group of potential xs is, the more enigmatic the answer appears, as in (18) (where additionally, Pertinence is a problem). Examples (16) and (18) show that CT-marking does not necessarily just ‘echo’ something that is in the context already, but may itself contribute, possibly by way of accommodation, the notion that more questions are pertinent at this point. Conversely, the CT marking on for example, the gardener in (16) can be omitted without loss of coherence. But without it, there is no implication of other suspects (via other questions). So here the speaker is making a choice as to whether to indicate the presence of other questions prosodically or not.
4.2.4 Ineffability In some cases, CT marking appears impossible, regardless of context. One such case from German is (19) (Büring 2003: 534): (19) #ALLECT all
Politiker SINDF politicians are
korrupt. corrupt
(German)
Without CT-marking (but retaining F on the finite verb), (19) would be perfectly well- formed. But CT-marking on the determiner alle leads to unacceptability (even though alle can be CT-marked under other circumstances, as we will see momentarily). Why is that? Assuming that F on a finite verb signals polarity focus, the F-alternatives of (19) are that all politicians are corrupt, or that they are not. This means that the CT-alternatives are questions like ‘Are Q politicians corrupt?’, where Q is some determiner. Now note that none of these questions are independent of (19)’s assertion: If all politicians are corrupt, that logically entails the answers to ‘Are most/some/the… politicians corrupt?’, namely: ‘Yes’. In other words, independently of actual context, (19) cannot possibly meet the CT-Interpretation Rule (7), specifically Independence, (7b), and hence is ungrammatical (or ‘unpragmatical’, if you like). If we change the example slightly, CT+F is possible again: (20) a. einigeCT Politiker SINDF korrupt. some politicians are corrupt b. ALLECT Politiker sind ETWASF korrupt. all politicians are a little corrupt
(German)
72 Daniel Büring The CT-alternatives of (20a) are the same as in (19), but since the sentence itself neither entails nor precludes that all, or most, politicians are corrupt, these will be unresolved (and potentially pertinent) questions. In (20b), with the added degree expression, CT- alternatives are ‘How corrupt are Q Politicians?’, that is, questions that could be answered by Only a handful are totally corrupt or Some are not at all corrupt. And while the latter is again resolved by (20b)’s assertion, the former, for example, is not. There are thus unresolved (and potentially pertinent) questions among the CT-alternatives, as required by CIR.
4.2.5 Scope inversion If a SCT+F is structurally ambiguous between a construal on which it violates the CIR— along the lines just discussed in Section 4.2.4—and one on which it does not, CT marking will effectively disambiguate the sentence towards the latter. A case in point is sentence (21), with CT+F marking as indicated, which can only mean that not all politicians are corrupt. Without CT marking, it can either mean that, or that all politicians are non-corrupt:10 (21) ALLECT Politiker sind NICHTF korrupt. all politicians are not corrupt
(German)
‘Not all politicians are corrupt.’
The same can be observed for example in Hungarian (from Gyuris 2002: 80): (22) only has the ‘not… everybody’ reading, although quantificational elements in Hungarian usually have a preference for surface scope: (22) mindenkiCT nemF ment el. everybody not went PREFIX
(Hungarian)
‘It is not the case that everybody left.’
Let us focus on the available construal first: The sentence asserts that not all politicians are corrupt, and its CT-alternatives will be ‘Is it false that Q politicians are corrupt?’, for example ‘Is it false that many politicians are corrupt?’. This question is not resolved by the assertion, and it is plausibly pertinent, meeting the CIR. On the other construal, the sentence says that all politicians are un-corrupt, with CT-alternatives like ‘Are Q politicians corrupt?’. But since the sentence asserts that none of them are, any such question is resolved by the assertion alone. As was the case with (19), this construal of (21) cannot possibly meet the CT Interpretation Rule (7). But in (21), unlike in (19), there is a second construal which is (or can be) felicitous, so that the sentence is acceptable, though not ambiguous, with CT+F marking. A similar effect can be observed in (23): 10
From Jacobs (1984), analysis following Büring (1997a).
(Contrastive) Topic 73 (23) Ich habe NICHTCT I have not
getrunken, weil ich TRAURIGF bin. drunk because I sad am
(German)
‘I didn’t drink because I’m sad.’
With the CT+F marking as indicated, the sentence invites the question ‘Then why DID you drink?’. For that to make sense, the sentence itself must be interpreted as ‘it is not the case that my being sad is the reason for my drinking’. If it meant ‘my sadness is the reason I don’t drink’ it would be incoherent to ask what, instead, is the reason the speaker drinks. Without this CT+F marking, on the other hand, that latter reading is easily possible. So here, just as in (22), the CIR disambiguates by way of rendering one logical construal of the sentence contradictory.
4.3 Single CT and F+CT English has a rise–fall–rise (RFR) pattern—L*+H L–H% in MaeToBI notation—which can occur sentence finally, that is, without a following F:11 (24) a. (Will Uncle Michael and Aunt Carolyn be coming to the rehearsal dinner? —) They’re INVITEDRFR. b. (What about the beans? Who ate them? —) fredf ate [the beans]RFR. For both the ‘sole RFR’ and the ‘F+RFR’ we should ask whether the RFR is the same as CT in CT+F. The parallels are striking, not just prosodically, but pragmatically. For example RFR on all in (25) disambiguates the otherwise scope ambiguous string towards the ‘not all’ reading, much like CT+F on alle… nicht (‘all…. not’) did in (21) above:12 (25) allRF the men didn’t goR. Likewise, Japanese stressed wa, and Korean stressed nun, the pragmatics of which appear very similar to English and German CT marking, can appear without an accompanying focus, yielding scope disambiguation:13 (26) motu -nun o -ci anh -ass -ta all ct come conn not past dec
(Korean)
‘Not all of them came.’
11 See, among others, Ward and Hirschberg (1985); Pierrehumbert and Steele (1987); Hirschberg and Ward (1991); examples from Bolinger (1982: 507) and Jackendoff (1972: 261). 12 From Ladd (1980: 146). I notate the final R at the end of sentence here, indicating that it is not part of the pitch accent on the prominent word—all in (50)—but a rise at the right edge of the intonational phrase. 13 Lee (1999); see Hara (2008), Oshima (2008) and Tomioka (2009, this volume) for Japanese.
74 Daniel Büring Furthermore, RFR may occur in partial answers and shifting topics, similar to the cases discussed in Sections 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 above:14 (27) a. (Can Jack and Bill come to tea? —) billRF canR. b. (Did you feed the animals? —) I fed the catRFR. c. (Do you want a glass of water? —) I’ll have a beerRFR. Constant (2006, 2012) assumes that the accent in RFR is a focus, and that RFR operates on the focus alternatives, conventionally implicating (28): (28) a. There are contextually salient focus alternatives to SRFR, which are informative (i.e. neither contradictory nor redundant after the utterance of SRFR),15 and b. for all such alternatives a, the speaker cannot ‘safely claim’ a. (cf. Constant 2012: 408, 414, 424) Example (28a) states that there are alternatives in the focus value which are independent of the assertion of SRFR (as well as the Common Ground). It should be transparent that that derives the scope disambiguation effects, as well as cases of wholesale infelicity in case the assertion of SRFR entails or contradicts all its alternatives: (29) a. ALLrf my friends didn’t comeR.
no alternatives ‘n of my friends did not come’ open, but open alternatives ‘not n of my friends did come’; compare (21)
b. # ALLrf of my friends liked itR.16
no open alternatives ‘n of my friends liked it’ at all; compare (19) It should be noted that (29b) (as well as (19)—all politicians ARE corrupt) has F- alternatives which are entailed (‘some/most of my friends liked it’), as well as ones that are contradictory (‘none/fewer than half of my friends liked it’). This is captured by the word ‘informative’ in (28a), as well as the word ‘independent’ in the CIR, (7b). Weaker conditions which merely require alternatives that are compatible (but possibly redundant, such as Wagner 2012: 24, ex (46)), or non-redundant (but possibly known to be false, such as Oshima 2008: 7, ex (17)), or simply not equivalent to SRFR (e.g. Ludwig 2008: 391, ex (19)) will systematically fail to derive the desired result. 14
O’ Connor and Arnold (1973: 173), Ladd (1980: 153), examples (16) and (19). This half of the rule is also assumed in Wagner (2012: 24), where it is assumed that any additional meaning of RFR follows by Gricean reasoning, instead of being grammatically encoded. 16 Constant (2012, ex (33b)). 15
(Contrastive) Topic 75 Turning to the examples in (27), here, too, (28a) is crucial, in particular the ‘salient’ bit: In (27b), repeated below, as well as (30b), we are looking for alternatives like ‘I fed x’ which are informative; this holds for any alternative x ≠ ‘the cat’. Assuming that the speaker fed the cat only, none of these is ‘safely claimable’, either, so (28) appears to be met in both (30a) and (30b): (30) a. (Did you feed the animals? —) I fed the CATRFR. b. (Did you feed the cat? —) # I fed the CATRFR. Crucially, then, such alternatives must be salient in (30a), precisely because the question asks about them (namely whatever other animals are in ⟦the animals⟧Ο; the anomaly of (30b), on the other hand, must arise because the question only makes one proposition salient: ‘I fed the cat’. Since that proposition is entailed by the answer, (28a) is violated, not because there are no informative unclaimable F-alternatives, but because none of them qualifies as ‘salient’ in the context of (30b). Similarly in (27a) and (27c). The alert reader will notice that ‘salient’ in (28) plays much the same role as ‘pertinent’ in (7a) in the CIR. Unsurprisingly, then, cases like (25)–(27c) can be analysed using the CIR as well, if we replace the informative and non-claimable proposition required in (28) by the yes/no-question based on it, that is, ‘Did not n of my friends come?’, ‘Can x come to tea?’, ‘Did you feed x?’, and ‘Will you have an x?’. This was suggested in Büring (2003: 532), where it was assumed that the CT-value of a declarative with CT but without F is a set of yes/no-question meanings (see Constant 2012, sec. 5.3 for more discussion).17
4.4 Details, open questions, and alternatives 4.4.1 Last answer Crucial to the treatment of scope disambiguation in Section 2.5 was the fact that an SCT+F must not be a complete answer to the questions in its CT-value, that is, that the latter contain at least one independent question. It bears pointing out that, according to the CIR in (7), there need not be an actual open question (in S CT+F CT ) after uttering
17 Strikingly,
parallel German cases appear to have a focus on the finite verb or negation, as in (21) above, which—by standard F semantics—yields the meaning of a yes/no-question as the focus value. Generally, German does not allow for CT (or RFR) without a following F, so one can hypothesize that German here chooses an F-marking—on the finite verb—which yields the same result that a CT-only/ RFR sentence would (see Büring 2003: 532).
76 Daniel Büring SCT+F; there only needs to be a question that is not resolved by SCT+F alone. Example (31) helps to illuminate the difference: (31) (Where are these two from?) a. #both of themct are from hungaryf . (i)HE is from AUSTRIA . (ii)SHE is from SCOTLAND . b. CT F CT F Sentence (31a) is infelicitous as an answer, which is predicted: The CT-value of (31a) contains questions like ‘Where is x from?’, and for the pertinent ones, x must be her or him. Since (31a) resolves both of these questions, there is no question in (31a ) that is indeCT pendent of (31a) itself, in violation of Independence, (7b). Now, the two answers in (31b), taken together, also completely resolve the question, so why is CT+F possible here, in particular in (31b-ii), which completes the answer to (31)? To see why, it is important to realize that the Independence part of the CIR, (7b), prohibits CT+F in sentences which themselves completely answer the questions in S CT+F CT , but not in sentences which together with the common ground (in particular together with previous partial answers) completely answer the question. That is to say, the crucial difference is that (31a) itself is a complete answer, whereas (31b-ii) is merely a ‘completing’ or last answer. The former, but not the latter, are excluded from containing CT+F.18 Interestingly, as noted, for example, in Constant (2012: 430), the single peak RFR pattern discussed in Section 4.3 above cannot occur in a last answer (Constant 2012: ex 76): (32) (Can Elizabeth and Persephone come over tomorrow? —) elizabethrf canR.
a. #persephoneRF canR. b. persephoneCT can tooF .
While the CT+F pattern in (32b) is fine here, a sole RFR on Persephone as in (32a) is not, pointing to an essential difference between the two contours.
4.4.2 Pertinence In a double correction like (33), it seems that any two teams could be replaced for England or Spain, preserving felicity: (33) (What games are on tonight? Is Brazil playing England? —)
a. No englandf is playing SPAINF . b. No, spainf is playing germanyF .
18 The interpretation rules for topic in Büring (1997b) has rightly been faulted for creating the ‘Last Answer Problem’, since it ruled out CT+F not just in complete answers, but also, wrongly, in last answers (Krifka 1999: sec. 3.4; Hara and van Rooij 2007: slides 19f; Aloni and van Rooij 2002: 32f). This was corrected via the ‘highest attachment’ condition in Büring (2003), as well as, explicitly, in the Independence condition in (7b) here.
(Contrastive) Topic 77 This is different when we use a CT+F pattern instead:19 (34) (What games are on tonight? Is Brazil playing England? —)
a. No, brazilct is playing spainF . b. No, englandct is playing germanyF. c. #No, spainct is playing germanyF .
Sentence (34c) is certainly fine with F+F intonation, but with a proper rise on Spain, the likely reaction to (34c) is: ‘Spain?! Who is talking about Spain?’ One might be tempted to conclude that CTs in general have to be ‘anaphoric’ (in some sense). But note the contrast with (35): (35) (What games are on tonight? Is Brazil playing England? —) Yes, and spainct is playing germanyF .20 The oddness of (34c) must therefore have to do with corrections in particular. I would like to suggest that it has to do with Pertinence, (7a), that is, with which question is currently under discussion. Presumably the basic question in (34)/(35) was which games are on tonight. We then tackle the subquestion which team Brazil is playing tonight, suggesting (34)/(35). If the answer to that is ‘yes’, as in (35), we can continue with the general question of which games are on, saying who Spain is playing, as in (35). If the answer to ‘Is Brazil playing England tonight?’ is ‘no’, on the other hand, we cannot go on to the next question—who Spain is playing—as (34c) is trying to. We first have to resolve the question of who Brazil is playing.21 If this is the right conclusion to draw from these examples, it shows that the notion of Question under Discussion—and hence the mentioning of Pertinence in the CIR in (7a)—is highly relevant for the modelling of CT. After all, the fact that Spain is playing Germany is equally informative and even relevant in (34c) and (35). The crucial difference is that, since it addresses a new subquestion (about Spain), it can only do so after the current subquestion (about Brazil and/or England) has been resolved. To complete the picture, consider (36): 19 To get in the right mood for the intonation patterns, you may try the left-dislocated versions first, i.e. No, Brazil, they’re playing Spain, etc. The contrast with No, Spain, they’re playing Germany is rather stark. However, what I claim here is that the same contrast can be observed with intonation alone, and is not a function of syntactic dislocation. 20 I am inclined to think that in (35) we accommodate that, for example, Spain belongs to the same group as England and Brazil, and the relevant task was to find out who (out of the four) was playing who tonight. That is to say, Spain, too, seems to have to be identifiable or anaphoric in some sense. If this were not the case, Spain would just have to be F, as in (33b). The point is that no such accommodation can come to the rescue of (34c), it seems. 21 In fact it seems likely that both the question who Brazil plays and who England plays have to be resolved (or aborted by means of saying ‘Brazil isn’t playing’ or ‘We can’t find out right now who England is playing’) before we turn to other countries as topics: Is Brazil playing England tonight?—
(i) No, BRAZILCT is playing SPAINF . (ii) # … and SWEDENCT is playing ITALYF .
78 Daniel Büring (36) Is Brazil playing tonight? If so, against whom?—Well, SPAINCT is playing GERMANYF . The difference between (34c) and (36) is that we can understand the answer in (36) as part of the strategy to figure out if and against whom Brazil is playing. We are thus not introducing Spain as a topic in its own right, but as part of figuring out if and who Brazil is playing.
4.4.3 Distinctness of foci The CIR in (7) requires that there be an independent and relevant question among the CT alternatives. It does not require that the answer to that question have a different focus than SCT+F. Thus, on the face of it, the condition allows for texts like (37): (37) (Where are you guys from? —) (i)JACQUES is from PARIS , (ii)# and COLETTE is from PARIS . CT F CT F But (37) is clearly odd, and that oddness vanishes if we replace either occurrence of Paris (but not both) with Marseille. So it appears to be infelicitous to pair two CTs with the same focus. How to rule this out? One possibility is to blame the oddness of (37) on the Gricean Maxims of Manner: Basically the speaker should have said Jacques and Colette are from Paris, whereas otherwise one wrongly infers, via scalar implicature, from (37i) that only Jacques is from Paris (this was the line taken in Büring 1997b). Oshima (2008: sec. 3.3), van Rooij (2010: 14f) and Constant (2012), among others, point out that the effect appears too strong to be a conversational implicature. Van Rooij (2010) instead assumes that CT is grammatically exhausted independently, so that, for example, (37i) implies ‘only Jacques lives in Paris’; consequently (37ii) creates a contradiction. This, however, would also, wrongly, rule out (38ii), since it contradicts the CT- exhausting of (38i) (‘only Jacques is from Southern California’):22 (38) (Where are these guys from?—) (i)JACQUESCT is from somewhere in Southern CALIFORNIAF , (ii)BILLCT is from LAF , and (iii)SUSANCT is from oregonF . Oshima (2008), too, assumes that CT-alternatives are not questions, but propositions, just like F-alternatives, namely propositions in which both CT and F are replaced by alternatives. That means that (37i) would require that there be some proposition ‘x is from y’, where x ≠ Jacques and y ≠ Colette, which is not assumed yet (hence a fortiori independent of ‘Jacques is from Paris’); ‘Colette is from Paris’ in (37) would not qualify here, since it sets y = Paris (whereas ‘Colette is from Marseille’ would). Unlike van Rooij (2010), this does not wrongly rule out (38). 22
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this example and its significance.
(Contrastive) Topic 79 What Oshima (2008) (as well as van Rooij 2010) has difficulty explaining is that (39) is notably better than (37):23 (39) (Where are these guys from? —) (i)JACQUESCT is from PARISF , and (ii)COLETTECT is from Paris, TOOF . This suggests that CT+F should not rule out the proposition that Colette is from Paris as satisfying the CIR for (37i) and (39i) (as van Rooij and Oshima do), but the particular realization of that proposition in (37ii). Plausibly one can blame the infelicity of (37ii) on the repeated focusing of Paris: There simply is no alternative ‘live in x’ to license F on the given element Paris in (37ii) (cf. Rochemont, this volume). This is avoided by focusing the particle too in (39ii) (see Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006:146 for basically this idea).
4.4.4 CT—F Asymmetries In introducing CT-values, we have added an additional layer of semantic computation to the compositional semantics. We should ask whether this is strictly necessary. For example, we saw in Section 4.3 that scope inversion effects can be achieved by requiring that a proposition (rather than a question) which replaces CT and F be independent and informative. Of course, if we ignore the difference between CT+F and F+F altogether, it is impossible to differentiate whether (40) answers (40a) or (40b) (repeated from (8) above): (40) a. Do you want to kick her out? b. Who do they want to kick out?
SHE wants to kick ME out.
In Section 4.1 above I suggested that the answer in (40) would be pronounced differently, depending on the question, reflecting the difference between F+F (answering (40a)) and CT+F (answering (40b)). If this is correct, we cannot treat CT+F just like F+F. Assuming then that the rule for interpreting CT+F is different from that for F+F, couldn’t the former nevertheless operate on the same formal object, a set of propositions, as proposed e.g. in Ludwig (2008) or van Rooij (2010)? I submit that the answer is ‘no’. It would predict that CT and F would generally be symmetrical, since they both introduce alternatives at the same ‘level’, the F-alternatives. But CT and F, while often exchangeable, sometimes are not: 23 Van
Rooij (2010: 15) actually notices the felicity of (39) and proposes that the presence of too in (37ii) ‘cancels’ the otherwise obligatory exhaustification of JacquesCT lives in ParisF to ‘only Jacques lives in Paris’. Note, though, that this does not offer an explanation for the acceptability of (38).
80 Daniel Büring (41) (When are you guys’ birthdays? —)
a. MARCYCT’s birthday is on the 12th of SEPTEMBERF , and... b. #On the 12th of SEPTEMBERCT it’s MARCYF’s birthday, and...
Were we to ignore the CT/F difference, both (41a) and (41b) would have the alternative set ‘x’s birthday is on y’, so any distributional difference between them would be unexpected. This alone shows that whatever interpretation rule applies to CT+F structures, it must be able to distinguish F-from CT-alternatives. But what is responsible for the difference between (41a) and (41b)? Presumably it has to do with the fact that speaker and hearer in (41) can list all the people who should appear in an answer (‘you guys’), but not all the birthdays that will appear in an answer (of course they know all potential birthdays, but not which ones are one of you guys’). This is what the word ‘identifiable’ was included for in (7c) of the CIR: If you guys is known to refer to Marcy, Elisabeth, Anton and Kim, speaker and addressee can identify the pertinent questions ‘When is Marcy’s birthday?’, ‘When is Elisabeth’s birthday’ and so on. But they cannot identify the four corresponding ‘inverse’ questions ‘Whose birthday is it on 9/12?’, ‘Whose birthday is it on 3/26?’ etc. Note that both sets of questions yield the same answers (that Marcy’s birthday is on 9/ 12, Elisabeth’s on 3/26 etc.), so a condition that only refers to the set ‘x’s birthday is on y’ could not possibly encode this effect. One might note that the same preference is observed with overt subquestions: When are you guys’ birthdays?’ is naturally followed up by (42a), not (42b)
(42) a. When is x’s birthday? b. Whose birthday is it on y? So should this really be a part of the CT-condition, rather than a theory of querying? Note that even if we assume that there are covert sub-questions, and querying principles that choose (42a) over (42b), there still needs to be a part of the CT-condition that tells us that (41a) answers (42a), and (41b) (42b), and not the other way around. And that requires keeping CT-and F-alternatives different. So the main point—that the CT- condition must treat CT and F asymmetrically—remains valid.
4.5 Thematic Topics In this last section, I will briefly turn to non-contrastive topics, also called thematic topics. Examples of these include e.g. clitic left dislocation in Romance, preposing in English, or wa-marking in Japanese:24 24
Catalan from López (this volume, ex (1b)), Japanese from Vermeulen (2011: ex (10a)).
(Contrastive) Topic 81 (43) a. Les pomes, jo no les he vist. the apples I NEG them have .1SG seen
(Catalan)
‘The apples, I haven’t seen them.’
b. Bagels, John likes.
c. (Tell me about the dog!)
ano inu-wa kinoo kooen-de John-o kande-simatta. that dog-WA yesterday park-at John-ACC bite-ended.up
(Japanese)
‘That dog bit John in the park yesterday.’
Presumably, some or all of these constructions can host contrastive topics as well, especially if the topic constituent receives some extra prosodic prominence, say, by pitch accenting. What we are interested in now are examples where this is not the case, that is, where the dislocated/wa-marked phrase is neither a CT, nor an F, but still not just an ordinary part of the background. But why assume that there are designated topics in the background? Usually this characterization comes about as follows: Some (syntactic, morphological, or intonational) marking does not have a regular truth conditional effect, but seems to shape the pragmatic meaning of the sentence it occurs in, that is, the kinds of contexts where it is felicitous (sometimes, certain restrictions on the kind of constituents that can be so marked—for example ‘referring expressions only’—go hand in hand with that). If these effects are clearly not the ones found with F (answer to a question, new information, locus of correction…. ), or CT (see Sections 4.1–4.4 above), the marking is likely to be called (thematic) topic-marking.25 It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that attempts to characterize the properties of topic marking pragmatically have yielded widely diverging results. That said, the described pragmatic effects of topic-marking cluster around notions such as ‘psychological subject’, ‘what the sentence is about’, etc. As seen in (43c), a common way of eliciting a constituent x as a topic in this sense is to prefix the sentence in question with ‘Tell me about x’ or ‘What about x?’ Similarly, an utterance of a sentence with a topic x should be reportable by saying ‘(s)he said about x that….’; this latter fact is probably the reason such topics are often referred to as aboutness topics. But, as most recently discussed in detail in Roberts (2011), none of these tests seem sufficient or necessary to identify thematic topics, nor is it clear that they actually test for the same thing; or as van Bergen and de Hoop (2009: 173) put it in their foreword to a special issue on topics: ‘there is very little consensus among linguists on any…. specific definition. Multiple properties contributing to topichood have been described, but none of these properties seems either necessary or sufficient to classify something as a topic.’ Jacobs (2001) for one concludes that this diversity of characterizations is fundamental to the notion of topic itself: ‘there is no common functional 25
See e.g. Aissen (1992: sec. 3.1) for a nice illustration.
82 Daniel Büring feature (nor a common set of functional features) that justifies this classification [as ‘topic’; DB]’. A common way of modelling aboutness topics is to break the meaning of sentences with topics into two parts: the referent of the topic-marked expression (assuming for the moment that it is referential), and the property expressed by the non-topic part of the sentence. This is what Reinhart (1982: 6.2) calls the Pragmatic Assertion of a sentence. The discourse context, too, is structured into individuals, and properties that are agreed to hold of them. The standard metaphor for this is a stack of indexed file cards (one for each discourse referent), on which properties of the individuals are written (Reinhart 1982; Vallduví 1990; Erteschik-Shir 1997). For concreteness, associate a context C with a partial function fC from individuals to sets of properties, that is, a set of pairs 〈x, Φ〉, where x is an individual (or a discourse referent) and ɸ is a set of properties. So for any individual i that is part of the context, fC (i) gives us the set of all properties that are agreed to hold of i. Adding a sentence about i, that is, a sentence with a Pragmatic Assertion of the form (i, ϕ) to the context, results in a new context C′ such that fC′ is like fC except that φ ∈ fC ’ (i ) . Finally, assume that a context C is also associated with a set aC of aboutees, where aC is a subset of the domain of fC. The purpose of this set is to distinguish between individuals that have generally been introduced to the context C (the domain of fC) and those that are currently ‘under discussion’, aC. For illustration, consider the following short text from Tzozil:26 (44) Something had landed at the foot of the tree … There was a straw mat … They untied it…. a. Tzeb san-antrex la te staik un. girl San Andres CL there they. found ENC
(Tzozil)
‘It was a girl from San Andres that they found there.’
b. A ti tzeb san-antrex un-e, iyik’ik la ech’el un. TOP DET girl San Andres enc-enc they.took Cl away ENC
‘They took the San Andres girl with them.’
According to Aissen (1992: 51), Tzeb san-antrex, ‘a girl from S. A.’, is focused in (44a). In our model, it will expand the domain of the contextual function fC so as to include a discourse referent for the girl in its domain, and map that referent to the property of ‘being found in the straw mat (that fell from the tree)’. In (44b), ti tzeb san-antrex, ‘the girl from S.A.’ is topic-marked (by the prefix a and suffix e). Such topic-marking occurs when a topic is ‘new or shifted’ (Aissen 1992: 51). In our model, the discourse marker for the girl is now added to aC , the set of aboutees, possibly removing other elements from that set. In the subsequent six sentences of the story, there is neither a full DP nor a pronoun referring to the girl, although they are about her. In other words, the topic marking in Tzozil is only used to establish an aboutee, not to refer back to it. 26 Laughlin (1977: 67), via Aissen (1992: 50f). cl stands for ‘second position clitic’, enc for ‘intonational phrase enclitic’.
(Contrastive) Topic 83 On the other hand, some markings are supposed to pick out an already established aboutee, but cannot newly establish one. For example, Reinhart (1982: 63) blames the degraded status of (45b) vis-á-vis (45a) on the fact that the first sentence in (45) established Felix as an aboutee (in our terms), and that the as for…. construction refers back to an established topic, rather than establish a new one, as it would have to in (45b):27 (45) Felix is an obnoxious guy.
a. Even Matilda can’t stand him. b. ?As for Matilda, even she can’t stand him.
A thorough look at descriptions of topic-markings in various languages reveals that differences like these abound, making it impossible to talk about properties of ‘topics’ in general. An investigation of a suspected topic-marking in a given language should therefore start, not by assuming that, since it is a topic, it has a particular cluster of properties, but by establishing their exact specific properties independently, among them… 1. what items can be so marked (DPs only, definites only…. ); 2. whether the marking can… (a) establish a new discourse referent as the aboutee for the following, or (b) establish an existing discourse referent as the new aboutee (as in Tzozil), or (c) refer to an established aboutee throughout its tenure as ‘what the passage is about’? (d) … or do something altogether different; 3. whether elements that meet that description have to be so marked, or merely may be; 4. whether the same marking can serve other pragmatic functions; 5. whether there are other tests (than occurrence with that marking) to establish the status marked by it. Once careful descriptions along these lines are available, we can start a systematic investigation of topic cross-linguistically. Above, a way of modelling aboutness topics formally was sketched. It is not claimed that this particular version in fact models the effects of any particular marking in any particular language, rather it served to illustrate a common way of thinking about topics. Moreover, as Krifka (2008: sec. 5.1) notes, such a model ‘presupposes that information in human communication and memory is organized in a certain way so that it can be said to be “about” something. This does not follow from a general definition of information. For example, relational databases or sets of possible worlds, both models for information, do not presuppose any relation of 27 As
Reinhart herself later notes, as for is bad, too, unless ‘used to change the current topic of the conversation’ (Reinhart 1982: 64). Accordingly, (i) does not improve on (45b), suggesting that the problem must lie elsewhere: (i) Felix is an obnoxious guy. # As for him/Felix, even Matilda can’t stand him.
84 Daniel Büring aboutness’. Given that there is no reason to assume a priori that information should be structured into aboutees and their properties, models of topic that reduce their meaning to such a structuring of information essentially leave us with the question: What is the observable effect? That is: How is an information state in which, say, the information that Mary visited Sue is stored under the Mary-entry different from one in which it is stored under the Sue-entry? Few proposals seem to address this crucial question. As an example of what we are after, take Portner and Yabushita’s (1998) claim that the descriptive content of an anaphoric definite in Japanese preferably describes properties that are filed under the entry of the intended referent (Portner and Yabushita 1998 pp. 125f): (46) John-wa John-TOP
kafe-de café-LOC
onnanohito-ni aimashita. Kanozyo-wa woman-DAT met she-TOP
pianisuto deshita. pianist was
‘John met a woman at a café. She was a pianist.’
a. Pianisuto-no pianist-of
onnanohito-wa totemo woman-TOP very
omoshiroi interesting
(Japanese)
hito deshita. person was
‘The woman who was a pianist was a very interesting person.’
b. ??Kare-ga kafe-de atta onnanohito-wa He-NOM café-LOC met woman-TOP
totemo omoshiroi very interesting
hito deshita. person was
‘The woman he met in the café was a very interesting person.’
In the first clause, John carries the topic marker wa, so by hypothesis the resulting context stores about John that he met a woman in a café. In the second clause, the woman carries wa which establishes about her that she is a pianist. In the continuation (46a), this information is used to form a definite description referring to the woman, which is fine. In (46b) on the other hand, the information in the definite description is taken from the information stored about John—that he met the woman in a café—rather than about the woman. This is less felicitous. So we have an independent way of establishing how otherwise equivalent information is stored differently in the context. This effect, however, proves to be rather weak and subject to various exceptions, some of them pointed out in Portner and Yabushita (1998), others elsewhere (e.g. Fry and Nakamura 2000, who provide further counter-examples) casting doubt on the validity of this diagnostic. But it is such discernible effects that we need to find, for without them, the claim that topics determine the way information is added to the context is lacking empirical
(Contrastive) Topic 85 content, as are any conclusions about the structure of the context required to model this (see Dekker and Hendriks (1996) for similar criticism regarding Vallduví’s version of this model). The above discussion centred around ‘aboutness-topics’. A less widely used concept is what we may call frame topics. Chafe (1976: 50f) (endorsed by Li and Thompson 1976: 464), for example, explicitly dismisses the ‘what the sentence is about’ characterization for topic-marking in, for example, Chinese, and describes its effect like this instead: What the topics appear to do is to limit the applicability of the main predication to a certain restricted domain.… Typically, it would seem, the topic sets a spatial, temporal, or individual framework within which the predication holds. In English we do something similar with certain temporal adverbs. (Chafe 1976: 50)
Example (47) illustrates with two Lahu examples from Li and Thompson (1976: 462): (47) a. hɛ chi tê pêʔ ɔ̄ dàʔ jâ field this one CLASSIFIER rice very good
(Lahu)
‘This field, the rice is very good. b. hɔ ɔ̄ na-qhɔ̂ y ì ̠ ve
elephant TOP nose
yó long PRT DECL
‘Elephants, noses are long.’
Extrapolating from Chafe, these sentences are about rice and noses, not fields and elephants. In any case they lack any contrast associated with the ‘as for…. ’ paraphrase and therefore constitute—according to Chafe—a category of their own. Krifka (2008: sec. 6) gives the following English examples: (48) (How is John? —) [healthwise/As for his health]Frame, he is [fine]f. (49) (How is business going for Daimler-Chrysler? —) [In Germany]Frame the prospects are [good]f, but [in America]Frame they are [losing money]f. Examples like these also lend themselves to an analysis as CT, given that we did not restrict CTs to DPs or indiviual-denoting expressions. Indeed Krifka (2008) subsumes both frame setters and contrastive topics under his notion of delimitation. Summing up, the notion of ‘topic’ (without ‘contrastive’) should be used with great caution. There is no agreed-upon way to identify topics across languages, and therefore inconsistent claims about their properties abound. There is a semi-formal rendering of the notion of aboutness topic, which, however, relies on a notion of context which cannot be reliably established independently. This section can be read as a plea to refrain from using the notion altogether, and characterize ‘topic’-markings independently along the lines suggested in the questions above.
Chapter 5
Qu estion-base d Models of In format i on Stru ct u re Leah Velleman and David Beaver
5.1 Introduction In this chapter we discuss accounts in which the information structure of a sentence, and the effects of focus in particular, are understood in terms of the question which the expression helps to answer.1 Such analyses are known collectively as Question Under Discussion (qud) models of discourse and information structure. qud models treat questions—either explicitly-asked or implicitly-understood—as the basic building blocks of discourse structure, and they analyse a wide range of empirical phenomena by reference to these questions. The empirical phenomena we will discuss in this chapter include question/answer congruence; contrast between overt, immediately adjacent discourse moves; the relationship of focus to large-scale, often covert discourse structure; the phenomenon of association with focus (see also Beck, this volume); and the notion of at-issueness (see also Horn, this volume). It has been common to draw a sharp division between semantic and pragmatic uses of focus. Many of the accounts we will discuss collapse this distinction, analysing all effects of focus (including ostensibly semantic ones) as arising from a single essentially pragmatic function: focus helps to indicate which qud is the Current Question, the question the current discourse move is intended to address. On such views, focus helps to indicate the Current Question, but does not do so alone. Further help in determining the Current Question is provided by certain other forms of information-structure marking (contrastive topic-marking in particular), and also by constraints on the structure of a coherent discourse. These constraints provide a connection between information structure, discourse structure, and the interlocutors’ beliefs, desires, and intentions. 1 The
authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the help of the editors of the handbook, and to thank two anonymous reviewers who provided very useful feedback.
Question-based Models of Information Structure 87
5.1.1 Semantic and pragmatic uses of focus We mentioned in the opening paragraphs the distinction between semantic and pragmatic uses of focus. To understand this distinction, it is helpful to start with association with focus, which some have taken to be an inherently semantic phenomenon. The clearest and best-studied examples of association with focus involve exclusive particles like English ‘only’. In general, ‘A only B’ (for NP A, and VP B) means that out of some range of properties A could have, the single property A actually has is B. Other alternatives are excluded, hence the term ‘exclusive’. Thus, ‘Mary only sings’ means that Mary has the property of singing, but does not have other salient properties, like dancing. The effects of focus can be seen in examples such as (1), which still have the form ‘A only B’, but where B contains a subconstituent which is narrowly focused.2 (1) a. We only go to the beach [on Friday.]F b. We only go [to the beach]F on Friday. c. We only go [to]F the beach on Friday. The variation in truth conditions between these sentences shows that focus helps determine which alternatives are excluded. In (1a), alternative dates are excluded, in (1b) alternative locations, and in (1c) alternative directions. In terms which have been standard since Rooth (1985), we can say that focus indicates alternatives, and a focus sensitive particle is one whose meaning depends on those focal alternatives. Such truth-conditional effects of focus can be differentiated from more clearly ‘pragmatic’ uses. Removing the exclusive ‘only’ from (1a–c) yields (2a–c), three examples which are truth-conditionally identical to each other, but differ pragmatically. The first emphasizes the date, the second the location, and the third the direction of travel. (2) a. We go to the beach [on Friday.]F b. We go [to the beach]F on Friday. c. We go [to]F the beach on Friday. Krifka (2008) describes pragmatic uses of focus thus: So-called pragmatic uses of focus relate to the public communicative goals of the participants, the common ground management. So-called semantic uses of focus relate to the factual information, the common ground content. The pragmatic use of focus does not have an immediate influence on truth conditions, but it helps in guiding the direction in which communication should develop, and it also aids in building the cognitive representations that are to be constructed by interlocutors. Here, failing to select the right focus typically results in incoherent communication. The semantic use of focus, on the other hand, affects the 2 In English, focus is typically indicated prosodically, at least in part, by a high pitch accent on a stressed syllable. We indicate this here by writing the word which bears this accent in small caps.
88 Leah Velleman and David Beaver truth-conditional content of the common ground. In this case, failing to set the focus right will result in transmitting unintended factual information.
Note that since at least Jacobs (1984b), it has been common to describe what Krifka labels above as ‘semantic’ uses of focus as involving ‘bound focus’, and describe ‘pragmatic’ uses as ‘free’. The intuition is that in the bound cases, there is some syntactically represented operator which is acting on the focus in a way which is at least analogous to quantificational binding, while in the free cases the focus indicates the presence of a free variable, which is thus dependent on pragmatics for its interpretation.
5.1.2 Questions and information structure in discourse As noted above, we will describe approaches which collapse the distinction between semantic and pragmatic focus. On these approaches, all focus is pragmatic; and the apparently semantic uses can be reduced to pragmatic uses.3 To achieve this, a rich model of discourse pragmatics—and of the role focus plays in it—is needed. Question-based approaches to focus include those of Ginzburg (1996, 2012) and Roberts (1998, 2012b). On these approaches, not only does focus always have a pragmatic function, it always has the same pragmatic function:4 it falls on the answering constituent to a question, thereby helping to indicate what question the speaker is addressing. A sizeable literature has grown up based on that assumption, offering explanations of focus phenomena and further phenomena related to discourse structure. Relatedly, Büring (2003) offers a question-based approach to contrastive topic (discussed in greater detail in Büring, this volume), according to which contrastive topic has a unified pragmatic function: it indicates the presence of other questions which the speaker is not currently addressing, but which are nonetheless relevant to the speaker’s broader goals.
3 Note that a few authors have tried to collapse the distinction in the other direction; their motto might be ‘all focus is semantic focus’ or ‘focus is always bound’. Thus, as described in the text above, Jacobs (1984a, 1984b) is suggesting that ‘free foci’ are bound to a silent pragmatic operator. We will not discuss this idea further here, but its symmetry with the pragmatic approaches which we do discuss is intriguing. If nothing else, it suggests that a number of linguists with very different points of view can still agree that the ‘semantic focus’/‘pragmatic focus’ distinction is somehow unsatisfying. 4 This functional homogeneity is not a necessary feature of pragmatic approaches to focus. One can also imagine an account on which all focus is pragmatic, but different tokens of focus can have different pragmatic functions. Asher and Lascarides (2003) take a step in this direction. In their model, focus plays a privileged role in several different rhetorical relations, including not only QAP (‘question– answer pair’)—the one and only pragmatic function for focus on the models we discuss here—but also Correction, Elaborationq (introducing requests for elaboration), and Backgroundq (introducing requests for background information). As Onea (2013) points out, many discourse relations Asher and Lascarides discuss could be modelled in terms of covert questions. For example, their Narration could be treated as involving a covert question ‘And then what?’ Asher and Lascarides do not commit themselves to the idea that all focus is pragmatic—in particular, they do not commit to a pragmatic analysis of focus sensitivity—but such a commitment could well be made consistent with their model.
Question-based Models of Information Structure 89 These question-based approaches to information structure go hand-in-hand with a question-based approach to discourse. On this approach, questions under discussion (quds) are taken to represent lines of collaborative inquiry, or, more broadly, discourse goals. Focus-marking in an assertion indicates which qud it answers (which question is the Current Question with respect to the assertion) thereby indicating the line of inquiry which it addresses or the discourse goal which it seeks to fulfil. Similarly, Büring (2003) takes contrastive-topic marking to indicate the presence of a larger discourse strategy consisting of a number of related quds, only one of which is the Current Question. The brief conversation in (3), adapted from Büring (2003), exemplifies the type of discourse structure the qud model can be used to describe. We adopt the convention here of putting overt moves in boldface to distinguish them from implicit moves that nevertheless play a role in discourse structure. Most of the examples which we will consider contain at least some implicit questions, but in (3) all of the moves—questions and answers both—are overt. (3) (q1: Alice: How was the concert? (q2: Alice: … Was the sound good? (a2: Bob: No, it was [awful.]F)) (q3: Alice: How was the band? (q4: Alice: … How was the drummer? (a4: Bob: [Just fantastic.]F)) (q5: Alice: And the singer? (a5: Bob: [Better than ever.]F)))) The first thing to note here is that Alice’s questions form a hierarchical structure. She starts with a big question—How was the concert?—and then breaks it down into subquestions about various aspects of the concert: the sound, the audience, the band. We can view these questions, and Bob’s answers to them, as forming what Büring calls a discourse-tree (or D-tree). The parentheses in (3) show the structure of this tree; it is presented in more graphical form in (4): (4)
How was the concert?
Was the sound good?
How was the band?
It was awful How was the drummer?
(How was) the singer?
Just fantastic
Better than ever
90 Leah Velleman and David Beaver
In this tree, each discourse move forms a node, and the relationships between discourse moves are indicated by the branching structure of the tree. For instance, answering moves are placed in the tree as children of the questions they answer; and subquestions are placed as children of the larger question they derive from. As we will see, the qud approach posits a similar hierarchical structure even for discourses which do not involve any explicitly-asked questions. Consider, for instance, the monologue in (5). (5) Bob: The [sound]CT was [awful,]F but the [drummer]CT was [fantastic,]F and the [singer]CT was [better than ever.]F According to the qud approach, this monologue has essentially the same structure as the dialogue in (3). We can represent it as follows, using boldface only for explicit moves: (6) (q1: How was the concert? (q2: Was the sound good? (a2: Bob: The [sound]CT was [awful,]F)) (q3: How was the band? (q4: How was the drummer? (a4: Bob: … but the [drummer]CT was [fantastic,]F)) (q5: How was the singer? (a5: Bob: … and the [singer]CT was [better than ever.]F)))) In other words, just as Bob’s utterances in (3) constituted answering moves, so do the clauses of his utterance in (6); but, unlike in (3), in (6) they are answers to implicit questions rather than explicit ones.5 Both (3) and (6) illustrate analyses of discourse structured by quds. In (3), the quds have been raised explicitly: they are the meanings of actual interrogative sentences which Alice has uttered. In (6), the quds have been raised implicitly: Bob’s audience must accommodate questions to make sense of the rhetorical structure of his utterances, and are aided in accommodating them by Bob’s use of prosodic focus and contrastive topic marking.
5.1.3 QUDs and Alternative Semantics Quds are often modelled as sets of alternative propositions, following Hamblin’s (1973) semantics for questions. This allows quds to be related to the Alternative Semantics 5
And in fact, this basic difference between the two discourses gives rise to two additional differences. First, the discourse in (3) has a great deal of ellipsis, since material which was given in an overt question can often be omitted from the answer; but this is not possible in (6), since the questions are not overt. And second, the discourse in (6) also has more complicated information-structural marking, involving contrastive topic marking as well as focus-marking; as we will see shortly, this is because information- structural marking plays an important role in making implicit discourse structure clear.
Question-based Models of Information Structure 91 of Rooth (1985, 1992).6 Indeed, it is possible that the question-based approach to focus can be treated as an add-on to Alternative Semantics rather than a wholesale replacement: Alternative Semantics with discourse-structural hot fudge and sprinkles, rather than the plain vanilla kind. But between plain vanilla Alternative Semantics and the question-based approach to focus, there are three important differences. First, in vanilla Alternative Semantics, focal alternatives are calculated directly from the logical form of a sentence, and for a given logical form there is one and only one possible way in which this calculation can be carried out. Now, sentences which sound identical can have different logical forms; and thus can lead to different sets of focal alternatives. A classic example of this, from Selkirk (1996), is the set of sentences in (7), which are pronounced identically but still generate different sets of alternatives because of differences in the scope of focus. (7)
a. Mary wrote a book about [bats.]F b. Mary wrote a book [about bats.]F c. Mary wrote [a book about bats.]F d. Mary [wrote a book about bats.]F e. [Mary wrote a book about bats.]F
But vanilla Alternative Semantics says little about how listeners choose the right logical form, except in cases where the discourse makes an antecedent set of alternatives explicit. The approaches discussed here contain a richer and fuller-featured theory of discourse structure which imposes additional constraints on how the Current Question may shift over time. These constraints are argued to be what enables us to arrive at the right focal alternatives: when we hear a sentence whose information structure is ambiguous, we choose the structure which leads to the fewest constraint violations and the least need for accommodation or repair. The second major difference is that the qud approach to discourse relates information structural marking to the interlocutors’ beliefs, desires, and intentions. This is possible because quds can themselves be viewed as representing a type of intention—namely, the intention of finding out the answer and making it part of the common ground. Information structure-marking, by indicating the Current Question, helps speakers to coordinate on strategies for meeting these goals.7 Thus, Roberts (1998) has argued that
6 Hamblin- style
questions differ technically from Rooth’s alternative sets. Other proposals for the semantics of questions, such as Groenendijk and Stokhof ’s (1984), also differ from alternative sets in important ways, as discussed in Chapter 2 of Beaver and Clark (2008). While there are formal differences between the models, it is not clear what empirical ramifications adopting one framework or the other has for the analysis of information structure. 7 There are other, non-qud models of discourse that emphasize goals and coordination in this way— see e.g. Grosz and Sidner (1986), Thomason (1990), Grosz et al. (1995), and Kehler et al. (2008)—and they are cited as important influences on the development of qud models by a number of authors. For some insight into how the idea of coordination itself might be formalized, see Clark (1996), who discusses this sort of discourse-level coordination—as well as many lower-level linguistic phenomena—in terms of Lewis’s (1969) game-theoretic account of coordination and linguistic convention.
92 Leah Velleman and David Beaver one major function of information structure-marking is to help direct interlocutors’ attention in the same direction, making the Current question jointly salient. This social and cognitive aspect is absent entirely from vanilla Alternative Semantics—which limits itself to linguistic phenomena and does not take on larger issues such as planning, coordination, and attention. The third major difference is that in vanilla Alternative Semantics, the effects of focus are semantically homogenous but pragmatically heterogenous. In other words, all focus is taken to induce a set of alternatives (a homogenous semantic effect), but sets of alternatives have many different pragmatic functions—some mark question/ answer congruence, some indicate contrast, some trigger implicatures of various sorts, and in fact some do not do any pragmatic work at all but have a purely semantic effect in associating with focus sensitive operators. By contrast, in many qud approaches, the effects of focus are pragmatically homogenous: focus always marks question/ answer congruence, and perhaps nothing else. Any time focus appears to be doing something else, it is argued, that ‘something else’ is actually just a side effect of this primary Current Question-indicating pragmatic function. So what look like focus- triggered implicatures, focus sensitive particles and so on must be reanalysed—they become implicatures triggered by raising a question, particles sensitive to the Current Question, and so on. As noted, to support a uniform pragmatic function for focus, qud approaches must posit implicit questions. It is uncontroversial that some uses of focus serve to mark answering constituents to overtly asked questions, and it is clear that the placement of focus depends on the question that was asked. (Krifka 2008 attributes this observation to Paul 1880, which may make it one of the oldest important results in pragmatics.) But discourses in which the question is overt and the answer direct and uncomplicated, account for a small fraction of natural language uses of focus. The crucial insight behind question-based approaches to focus is that we can generalize Paul’s observation by treating every assertion as an answer—if not to an overt question, then to one which is implicit.8 On this approach, a speaker who utters (8), with focus on ‘Mary’, thereby indicates that she is addressing the question ‘Who ate beans?’—whether or not the question has been explicitly asked. (8) [Mary]F ate beans. We have already seen an example of the sort of structure which this leads to in (6). To see how this sort of structure arises, we must look deeper into the formal details of the various question-based models of discourse which have been developed.
8 The use of implicit questions has an interesting pedigree. Both Roberts (1998) and Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) have pointed out that it plays a role in Wittgenstein’s later work. Within formal linguistics, we find early versions in Hintikka (1973), Lewis (1979), and Carlson (1985).
Question-based Models of Information Structure 93
5.2 Making question-based models explicit Several formal question-based models of discourse have been proposed. Perhaps the most widely adopted is Roberts’ (2012b) proposal, but it has a number of close relatives— earlier antecedents and subsequent developments—which differ from it in important ways. This section attempts to give an overview of the available options. A multiplicity of structures have been posited for discourses in question-based approaches. For instance, Roberts (2012b) and Grosz and Sidner (1986) discuss a stack of questions under discussion; Büring (2003) instead considers a tree structure which contains both questions and answers. On the stack model, questions that are answered or abandoned are popped off the stack; on the tree model, they remain on the tree. But this does not make the models incommensurable. As Asher and Lascarides (2003) point out, a discourse stack is equivalent to a discourse tree plus additional constraints about which locations on the tree are available for new moves to be attached. In particular, if we adopt the Right Frontier Constraint in (9) (Polanyi 1985; Asher 2008; Afantenos and Asher 2010), the tree model will behave identically to the stack model—questions which would have been ‘popped off ’ of a discourse stack are instead ‘fallen off the right frontier’ of a discourse tree but the result is the same.9 (9) The Right Frontier Constraint: Only the rightmost terminal node (i.e. the one representing the most recently made discourse move) and its parents are available as attachment points for new discourse moves. For generality and ease of comparison, then, we assume a hierarchical discourse structure, involving two types of moves: questions and answers. On the models discussed here, answers are always immediately dominated by a question; the question dominating the most recent answer can be described as the CQ or Current Question. Models vary with respect to whether questions must be dominated by a question. In some, a question can have an answer as its parent (Van Kuppevelt 1995); in others, this is impossible (Roberts 2012b). Similarly, models vary as to whether they are static or dynamic in their approach—that is, more or less, as to whether they describe a discourse as a timeless logical object (a list of moves, a tree) or as a series of updates made to an 9 There is a further complication. Stack models allow for questions to be popped off the stack the moment they are fully answered or abandoned as unanswerable. In a tree model, fully answered or abandoned questions may briefly remain on the right frontier in the interval before a new question is taken up. This suggests the need for two further (intuitively reasonable) constraints to bring the tree model and the stack model into perfect agreement: ‘Don’t discuss [i.e. attach new children to] questions that are already answered’ and ‘Don’t discuss questions that are unanswerable.’
94 Leah Velleman and David Beaver evolving information state.10 But this is a technical difference rather than a conceptual one. In both static and dynamic models, researchers are interested in the ways that discourse can evolve through time. Even on static models, it will often be convenient to say something like ‘This move closes q1, raises q2, and makes q2 the Current Question’— making it sound like an update to a mutable information state, even when the underlying model does not strictly speaking work that way.11 We will sometimes adopt this convenience here. So: if we think of discourse structure as a tree, we can think of the various models of discourse structure as sets of constraints on the structure of the tree. • Relevance constraints enforce certain relationships between the ordinary semantic value of a move and the ordinary semantic value of its parent. These may depend on the type of the move and of its parent—i.e. on whether they are questions or answers. For instance, in Roberts’s model, –if a1 is a child of q1, then a1 must be at least a partial answer to q1; –if q2 is a child of q1, then it must be the case that any complete answer to q2 would entail at least a partial answer to q1. • Congruence constraints require the focus-and contrastive topic-marking of a move to be congruent in certain ways with that move’s parent. For instance, in Roberts’s model, if a1 is a child of q1, then the focal alternatives to a1 must be identical to the possible answers to q1. • Availability constraints determine which points in the tree can have children attached to them at any given moment in the discourse. Often, these constraints are formulated in such a way that at any moment in the discourse, one qud is singled out as the Current Question—and every answering move is attached as a child of the Current Question under which it is uttered. These constraints do two things. First, they account for our intuitions that some discourses sound incoherent, some prosodic patterns sound incongruous, and some moves sound badly-timed. These ‘bad’ discourses are ones which irreparably violate constraints. But second—perhaps less obviously—the presence of these constraints in our model enables an account of question accommodation similar to Lewis’s (1979) account of presupposition accommodation, based on the idea that some constraint violations can be repaired. Suppose something is said that cannot be attached to the discourse tree without violating some constraint. If adding a question move to the tree in a permissible location would repair the violation, then that question move is silently added. It is this process of question accommodation that lets us model the discourse effects of focus and contrastive topic-marking. When a move is made which violates Relevance, 10
We are indebted here to the discussion of this point in Jasinskaja et al. (2004). instance, the qud stack in Roberts (2006) is, technically speaking, implemented in a static way rather than a dynamic one. In that paper, the object qud is not a mutable stack, but an immutable function from moments in time to ‘snapshots’ depicting the state of the stack at that moment. 11 For
Question-based Models of Information Structure 95 forcing a new question to be accommodated, focus and contrastive topic-marking constrain what that question can be. And focus and contrastive marking can also force question accommodation on their own, by violating Congruence to what is explicit in the discourse.
5.2.1 The constraints in action At this point it will be helpful to consider several additional examples. These will illustrate the effects of the types of constraint which we have mentioned above—and also help to motivate the various proposals which have been made concerning the specific forms which these constraints should take. Example (10), modified from Roberts (2012b), provides a simple case of question accommodation based on Congruence constraints. (10) (q1: Who ate what? (q2: What did Hilary eat? (a2a: [Hilary]CT ate [bagels]F) (a2b: and [tofu.]F)) (q3: What did Robin eat? (q4: Did Robin eat bagels? (a4: [Robin]CT [didn’t]F eat bagels,)) (q5: Did Robin eat tofu? (a5: but she [did]F eat tofu.)))) Consider what must happen when a4 is uttered. This assertion would not be Congruent with the previous CQ, q2. In order to repair this violation of Congruence without incurring violations against other constraints, the hearer must accommodate several discourse moves:12 (11) a. Make q1 the CQ. b. Attach q3 to q1; make it the CQ. c. Attach q4 to q3; make it the CQ. Once these moves have been accommodated, a4 can be attached felicitously. Focus-and contrastive topic-marking in a4 help guide the accommodation process, by indicating what the question to which a4 is attached must look like and how it must relate to previous questions. If the universe of discourse contains only two people (Robin and Hilary) and only two foods (bagels and tofu) then all open questions in (10) have been resolved and no further discourse is possible. On the other hand, if more entities are available, then new 12
Using Roberts’s own stack-based terminology, this amounts to popping q1 off the stack and pushing q3 and q4 on.
96 Leah Velleman and David Beaver questions can be added anywhere along the Right Frontier—either as children of q3 (one might for instance raise the question ‘Did Robin eat Spam?’) or as children of q1 (one might raise the question ‘What did Murgatroyd eat?’).13 Example (12), modified from Onea (2013), shows a more complex structure. (12) (q1: What do we know about Nero? (a1: He was quite simply a megalomaniac from a long line of psychopaths. (q2: Who were the psychopaths? (q3: Who was the first? (a3: His grandfather led the way. (q4: Why was he a psychopath? (a4: Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus had been savage and cruel. (q5: Why? (a5: The gladiatorial contests he organised were so bloody and vicious that the Emperor Augustus had to ask him to tone down things a little.)))))) (q6: Who was the second? (a6: His father, (q7: What was his name? (a7: Gnaeus,)) (q8: Why was he a psychopath? (a8: once rode his horse over a small child on the Appian way.)) Here, once again, the questions are all implicit and must be accommodated. But unlike the previous example, this one comes from a written text, with no overt focus-marking. So this accommodation cannot have been triggered by Congruence; it is guided by Relevance and Availability alone. The analysis in (12) requires some changes to Roberts’s proposed framework. First, some answering moves are non-terminal nodes, and this requires changes to Relevance (see Section 5.2.2.1). Van Kuppevelt (1995) refers to answering moves which have questions as children as ‘feeders’. Second, sub-sentential constituents— such as a6 and a7—are sometimes treated as distinct discourse moves, addressing distinct questions (see Section 5.2.2.2). Still, many features of Roberts’s model have been retained, including the Accessibility constraints and some of those on Relevance and Congruence. Yet another type of hierarchical discourse structure is shown in (13).
13
Equivalently, using Roberts’s stack-based terminology, we can say that q3 is that CQ at this point in the discourse, but that q3 can be popped off the stack leaving q1 as the CQ.
Question-based Models of Information Structure 97 (13) (q1: Alice: Where did John go? (q2: Bob: Where did who go? (q3: Alice: What? (a3: Bob: I said, ‘[Where did who go?]F’.)) (a2: Alice: Oh! I was asking, ‘Where did [John]F go?’)) (a1: Bob: I think he’s [getting more beer.]F)) Here, the questions depend on other questions; but unlike in the previous example, they are not in a sub-question/super-question relationship. Rather than q2 being part of a rational strategy of inquiry for answering q1, it is a request for clarification of q1, part of a repair sequence; and an additional repair sequence is needed before even q2 is fully understood. Nevertheless, q2’s answer—a2—satisfies Congruence constraints just like a normal, non-repair question would, with focus on the answering constituent.
5.2.2 Variants of the qud model The previous section exemplified analyses in qud-based models of discourse. Here we survey some changes and additions that have been proposed by various authors in order to make different sorts of analysis possible. For the most part, these differences involve changes to the constraints which govern discourse.
5.2.2.1 Relevance constraints Various proposals have been made for analysing Relevance constraints. Roberts (2012b) uses a relatively strict constraint: new questions must be entailed14 by their parent question; and answers must be among the alternatives in their parent question. This is reasonable for idealized, error-free, goal-oriented inquiries. Examples like (13) require Roberts’ Relevance constraint to be relaxed, since for example q2 is not entailed by q1, and, more generally, modifications are often proposed in order to handle looser or more errorful types of discourse. Roberts herself points out one case where a modification is needed: the discourse in (14). (14) Alice: What kinds of seafood will John eat? Bob: Isn’t John allergic to clams? She points out that (14B) is not strictly entailed by (14A), but nevertheless strikes us as relevant to (14A). In explaining this fact, first she posits that a bridging question is accommodated between these two moves, giving the structure in (15). 14
The notion of question entailment is from Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). One question entails a second if the second is redundant in the context of the first in the following sense: any complete answer to the first question would also completely answer the second. Crucially, even though a question is redundant in this semantic sense, it may still be pragmatically valuable, since it can provide a suggestion as to which part of an earlier question should be answered first.
98 Leah Velleman and David Beaver (15) (q1: Alice: What kind of seafood will John eat? (q2: What reasons would John have for not eating clams? (q3: Bob: Isn’t John allergic to clams? She notes that even in this structure, new questions are not strictly entailed by their parent question. But this structure does satisfy the following looser requirement: every question has the property that a full answer to it would entail a partial answer to its parent question if taken together with certain plausible common-ground assumptions.15 And so it is this looser requirement that she adopts as her Relevance constraint. Some proposed modifications would loosen the Relevance constraints even further. Van Kuppevelt (1995, 1996) and Onea (2013) use more relaxed Relevance constraints to analyse free-wheeling conversation, in which digression and free association are tolerated or even appreciated; and to analyse narrative and expository monologue, which are similarly tolerant of digression.16 Another possibility is to allow questions to be introduced as children of answering moves, and not just of other questions. This too appears in van Kuppevelt’s and Onea’s accounts (van Kuppevelt’s ‘feeders’) and again is demonstrated in (12). Note that this modification requires the previous one, since a question can never be entailed by an assertion. Finally, some authors allow meta-level questions which request clarification about how previous discourse moves should be interpreted. Ginzburg (2012) presents a detailed model of discourse with this feature, allowing repair sequences such as the ones in (13) to be modelled. Another issue concerns the use of answers which are not among the alternatives in their parent question. Consider this dialogue: (16) (q1: A: Where did John go? (a1: B: I think he went [to the store.]F)) Here, the answer fails to be among the alternatives in its parent question: a1 is of the form ‘I think John went x’, and the answers in q1 are of the form ‘John went x’. Simons (2007) points out that a number of other verbs can be used in the same way as think in (16), including believe, imagine, and hear; and with a third-person subject for the main clause verb, as in (17), verbs of speaking and other verbs describing sources of evidence are possible as well, provided the speaker considers the source of evidence being described to be a reliable one. (17) Henry said/suggested/found out/?dreamed that John went [to the store.]F 15
In this case, the assumption is that people will not eat things they are allergic to, but will generally eat anything unless they have a reason not to. 16 Onea’s example in (12) demonstrates the sort of structure this leads to. Note that it is anachronistic to speak of this as a modification to Roberts’s proposal, since the earliest model with this feature—van Kuppevelt’s—preceded Roberts’s work.
Question-based Models of Information Structure 99 One way to analyse these examples while preserving a strict notion of Relevance is by invoking an accommodated bridging question, as discussed for (14) above. Thus: (18) (q1: A: Where did John go? (q2: Where do you think John went? (a2: B: I think he went [to the store.]F)) (19) (q1: A: Where did John go? (q2: Where have people suggested that John went? (q3: Where has Henry suggested that John went? (a2: B: Henry suggested he went [to the store.]F)) But it has struck some linguists as counterintuitive to posit accommodation here. B’s move does seem to directly address A’s question; we do not get the intuition that B is changing the subject. The second possibility, then, would be to loosen the Relevance constraints on answers such that B’s move could be taken to address A’s question directly—not by fully answering it, but perhaps by suggesting a possible answer that merits closer consideration. See Roberts (2014) for a defence of the former (bridging- question-accommodating) approach, and Beaver and Clark (2008) for an example of the latter (Relevance-relaxing) one. Yet another issue involves ‘answers’ which provide practical suggestions for how to resolve a question, rather than giving information that helps resolve it directly. Thus for (20) loosening Relevance to allow a1 to be an immediate child of q1 may be inadequate, so that a bridging question could be needed, as in (21). (20) (q1: A: What time is it? (a1: B: [There’s a clock in the hallway.]F)) (21) (q1: A: What time is it? (q2: What resources are available for determining what time it is? (a2: B: [There’s a clock in the hallway.]F )) A third approach to such examples, considered by Roberts (2004, 2012a), is to introduce suggestions as an additional type of discourse move, on a par with questions and answers, and subject to different Relevance constraints.
5.2.2.2 Congruence constraints In Roberts’s model, Congruence is quite simple: a move is Congruent to its parent question if its set of focal alternatives is identical to the meaning of the Current Question. This leads to difficulty with discourses such as the following: (22) Alice: Do you want [coffee]F or [tea]F? Bob: I want [coffee]F .
100 Leah Velleman and David Beaver The meaning of Alice’s question contains two propositions: {want(you, coffee), want(you, tea)}; but the focal alternatives to Bob’s answer comprise a larger set: {want(you, x): x ∈ D}. Roberts handles this by arguing that the Current Question with respect to Bob’s utterance is actually of the form ‘What do you want?’, with the options coffee and tea made salient. Rooth (1992) shows another way that discourses like (22) can be handled: by adopting a Congruence constraint according to which an answer a is congruent to a question q iff the focal alternatives to a are a subset of the alternatives in q. Additional modifications might be required for several reasons. First off, any of the changes to Relevance constraints discussed above may need to be accompanied by a change to the Congruence constraints. For instance, if we allow an answer a1 to depend on a question q1 without being identical to one of the alternatives in that question, then there may no longer be a way to satisfy our original Congruence constraint—for there may be no possible focus-marking in a1 such that the focal alternatives to a1 are a subset of or equal to the alternatives in q1. In some cases, we can deal with this using Rooth’s squiggle operator (Rooth 1992; see discussion in Rooth, this volume), which roughly speaking allows a part of an answer to be congruent with its parent question; Beaver and Clark (2008) offer a squiggle-free implementation of the same idea. Second, there is the question of what sorts of Congruence relationship should be recognized. Congruent focus-marking between answers and their parent questions is universally required. Büring (2003) also requires congruent contrastive topic-marking between answers to sister questions; on the other hand, some authors—such as Wagner (2012)— have argued that contrastive topic-marking should be reanalysed as multiple focus. Multiple focus raises a third issue, for even if we do not adopt Wagner’s reanalysis of contrastive topic as focus, there are sentences which appear to contain multiple foci. An example is Partee’s (1999) oft cited (23b), or Onea’s (2013) example in (12), the relevant portion of which is repeated in (24). (23) a. Mary only eats [vegetables]F . b. Even [Paul]F knew that Mary only eats [vegetables]F . (24) …(a6: His father, (q7: What was his name? (a7: Gnaeus,)) (q8: Why was he a psychopath? (a8: once rode his horse over a small child on the Appian way.)) Intuitively, such sentences could be Congruent with multiple questions. Formally speaking we have two choices. One choice is to allow a single discourse move to address more than one question—in which case our discourse is no longer a tree, but a more complex graph. Another choice, reflected in Onea’s analysis of (24), is to allow a single clause to be decomposed into multiple discourse moves, each of which addresses its own qud. This latter choice is reminiscent of the SDRT treatment of conditional clauses, in which both the antecedent and the consequent count as independent discourse moves, and each can enter into rhetorical relationships independently of the other (Asher and
Question-based Models of Information Structure 101 Lascarides 2003). Coppock and Beaver (2012) offer another variant on the theme, allowing independent ‘local’ and ‘global’ questions in embedded contexts. This treatment of multiple foci can also be motivated in terms of discourse structure. For instance, parentheticals and non-restrictive relative clauses generally present information orthogonal to the Current Question (Simons et al. 2010; AnderBois et al. 2011). Often, though, they can be seen as anticipating—and addressing—a predictable side question such as a request for clarification; and this can be modelled as a ‘local’ question or as a question accommodated in between sub-sentential discourse moves, as q2 is in (25b). (25) a. (q1: A: Who lent you this book? (a1: B: [My brother]F lent it to me. (q2: A: Wait, which brother? (a2: B: The [really tall]F one.)))) b. (q1: A: Who lent you this book? (a1: B: [My brother]F (q2: Which brother? (a2: B:—the [really tall]F one—)) B: lent it to me.)) See Clark (1996) for evidence that interlocutors do indeed attempt to anticipate and address upcoming side questions in conversation. Onea and Volodina (2011) analyse English namely and German nämlich as conventionally marking appositives which address specific side questions: ‘Who?’ in the case of namely, and either ‘Who?’ or ‘Why?’ in the case of nämlich.
5.3 At-issueness There has been debate over the question of whether focus triggers an existential presupposition—see for example Geurts and van der Sandt (2004) and Sæbø (this volume). One approach is to treat the existential presupposition as the result of reasoning which we do about the speaker’s presuppositions, given that the speaker is addressing a particular question. Consider the existential inference from (26a) that someone laughed. When we embed (26a) under the modality ‘perhaps’, as in (26b), there is a tendency for the inference that somebody laughed to survive, and such embedding tests provide initial evidence that the inference is a presupposition. (26) a. [Mary]F laughed. b. Perhaps [Mary]F laughed. However, the existential inferences vanish in some contexts. Thus (27) clearly does not imply (or presuppose) that somebody laughed, and (28) does not imply that anybody will join the speaker for anything.
102 Leah Velleman and David Beaver (27) [Nobody]F laughed. (28) Perhaps Mary’s [mom]F will join us for [dinner]F . Question-based models provide a way of accounting for this phenomenon, as discussed briefly by Roberts (2012b). Consider (29a), for which (as noted by an anonymous referee) the existential presupposition that somebody laughed does not reliably project. It is clear that the example could be used in the context of quite different questions. If the question were ‘Who laughed?’ (in which case (29a) could just be a part of a larger list answer), then the speaker could reasonably be taken to be presupposing that somebody laughed. But in the more complex context in (29b), where the question is a variant of ‘Who didn’t laugh?’, the existential presupposition is that someone didn’t laugh rather than that someone did. (29) a. [Mary]F didn’t laugh. b. What is the name of the person that didn’t laugh when you had a coffee with her last week and told her you were a theoretical linguist specializing in the pragmatics of information structure? Existential effects of focus can be seen as resulting not from any presuppositional requirement of focus per se, but rather indirectly: focus is associated with presuppositions because sentences with focus must be congruent to a question, and the presuppositions are then inferences associated with the question. Thus in (26), the qud could be ‘Who laughed?’. In general, we expect a wh-question ‘Who X-ed?’ to be asked by people who assume that there are individuals who X-ed: that there is such a default is seen, for example, in the way that this default can be suspended, using locutions such as ‘Who X-ed, if anyone?’ (AnderBois 2009; also see Horn 1972 and Abbott 2005 for discussion of the general notion of presupposition suspension). The existential inferences in (26) thus arise from the fact that someone who poses what is most naturally taken as the qud typically takes for granted that someone has laughed. We can then explain why focus is not associated with an existential presupposition: it is because the corresponding qud need not lead to such an inference. In the case of (27), Congruence actually requires that the question has as one of its alternative answers that nobody laughed. A possible such question can be spelled out explicitly as ‘Did nobody laugh, or did somebody laugh?’(or, equivalently, ‘Did anybody laugh?’), which clearly does not imply the existential. In the case of (28), it is intuitively clear that the qud need not be ‘Who will join us for dinner?’, but rather could be something to the effect of ‘What might happen this evening?’. This makes it clear why there is no existential presupposition, although it leaves open the issue of why the apparent focus marking on (28) does not clearly reflect the qud. One possibility is that congruence must be loosened, but another is that the indicated focus marking is simply incorrect for the relevant intonational pattern: perhaps stress on ‘mom’ and ‘dinner’ is better analysed as involving broad focus encompassing both ‘mom’ and ‘dinner’.
Question-based Models of Information Structure 103 This type of account of existential presuppositions of focus is suggestive of how a broader range of presuppositional phenomena might be analysed, tying in with the idea that the phenomenon of at-issueness might be grounded in a qud-based model of discourse (cf. Horn, this volume). The idea is that what is at-issue in an utterance is whatever information provides the answer to the qud, while all other information encoded in an utterance is not-at-issue. The question may now be posed: what is the relationship between at-issueness and the more traditional notion of presupposition? Here Simons et al. (2010) have suggested that presupposition in general be seen as just one special case of non-at-issue meaning, so that, quite generally, we might potentially try to analyse the behaviour of presuppositions in a question-based model. More narrowly, it is suggested that many cases which have long been taken to involve conventionally marked presuppositions in fact do not, but rather manifest pre-suppositional behaviour as a result of pragmatic reasoning about the qud. Initial motivation comes from considering interactions between presupposition projection and focus that were first noted by Hajičová (1984) (and also discussed in Partee 1996 and Hajičová et al. 1998): (30) a. This time our defeat wasn’t caused by [Harry]f . b. This time Harry didn’t cause our [defeat]f . Hajičová’s observation is that the presupposition that we were defeated is projected in (30a), but not in (30b), the two examples differing only in the placement of focus. It seems natural to relate this difference in projection behaviour to the fact that the two examples would naturally be used in different discourse contexts, and specifically might be used in response to very different questions, for example (30a) to that in (31a), and (30b) to that in (31b): (31) a. Who caused our defeat? b. How did Harry’s squad perform in the competition? Another case to consider is cognitive factive verbs, like know, realize, and discover. Since Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970), these have been taken to involve a conventional presupposition of the truth of the factive complement, so that, for example, in (32) the complement ‘your work is plagiarized’ is presupposed. (32) The T.A. discovered that your work is plagiarized. Karttunen (1971) noted that cognitive factive verbs tend not to carry presuppositions uniformly,17 and suggested that they lacked the presupposition in some cases (e.g. first person uses). However Beaver (2010) suggests that the data cannot be fully understood 17 A reviewer points out that Karttunen’s distinction was foreshadowed by observations of Hintikka (1962) who proposed two alternative meanings for the cognitive factive ‘know’, one corresponding loosely to the projective cases, and one to non-projective cases.
104 Leah Velleman and David Beaver without considering information structural marking. Specifically he offers the following examples, which involve both first-and third-person occurrences of ‘discover’ embedded in the antecedent of a conditional, and with variation as to where focus is placed. The claim is that (33a) and (33c) do not imply that the addressee’s work is plagiarized, while (33b) (which is pragmatically infelicitous because the speaker appears to know something and yet discuss potentially discovering it) and (33d) do imply this. (33) a. If I discover that your work is [plagiarized]F , I will be [forced to notify the Dean]F . b. (#) If I [discover]F that your work is plagiarized, I will be [forced to notify the Dean]F . c. If the T.A. discovers that your work is [plagiarized]F , I will be [forced to notify the Dean]F . d. If the T.A. [discovers]F that your work is plagiarized, I will be [forced to notify the Dean]F . This data suggests that the presuppositional character of discover is not intrinsically dependent on whether it is in first-or third-person form. Rather, presuppositional readings tend to occur when the complement of the verb is in the post-nuclear de-accented region, and the occurrence of non-presuppositional readings is related in some way to the occurrence of focal marking within the complement. How could such a pattern be explained? Simons et al. (2010) and Roberts (2010) suggest that the best way to understand when the complement is presupposed is to study what the qud is in each case: the complement is presupposed just in case the qud itself presupposes it, Thus, in the case of stress on ‘discover’, we suppose that what is being implicitly asked is whether something has been discovered or not, with the status of that something not itself being at-issue. On the other hand, when there is stress within the complement, one can construct questions which are about what will be discovered. In such a case, it is at least possible that some of the alternative answers to the question involve the exact opposite of the complement, in this case the proposition that the work is not plagiarized. Thus it is logically possible that when there is stress in the complement, the antecedent clause answers an implicit question ‘will I (or the TA) discover that your work is plagiarized, or that it isn’t plagiarized’. If this is the qud (and it is merely one of many that would have this property), then clearly the complement is not presupposed.18 18 Interestingly, a reviewer notes that in the following example the complement of ‘know’ appears robustly not to project, independently of focus placement: ‘I don’t know that I can make it there on time.’ This type of example demonstrates the problems that might arise in a model in which projection was directly linked to focus, and highlights the potential value of relating focus and projection indirectly, via questions. For it is hard to construct a reasonable question other than ‘Do you know whether you can make it on time?’ or ‘Can you make it on time?’. Intonation is a source of evidence that we can use to decide which of various conceivable questions could be answered by a given utterance type, but it seems that it is not typically sufficient to cause us to consider questions that no sane person would ask or answer.
Question-based Models of Information Structure 105 More generally, the idea developed by Simons et al. (2010) (and explored empirically in Tonhauser et al. 2013) can be seen as an attempt to link up the literature on presupposition with the literature on information structure in a new way. Certainly, many have used terminology suggestive of such a connection—for example Lambrecht (1996). And certainly many have used presupposition in their analysis of information structural phenomena, notably Schwarzschild (1999), as well as Geurts and van der Sandt (2004), as discussed at the start of this section. The new departure in the Simons et al. (2010) work involves attempting not to explain information structure in terms of presupposition, but to explain both in terms of a broader theory of the pragmatics of questions.
5.4 Focus sensitivity In the introduction we raised the question of how focus sensitivity can be accounted for in a model in which all focus is pragmatic focus. Here we will briefly outline some of the possibilities, following the discussion in Beaver and Clark (2008), and concentrating on a possibility which is peculiar to this sort of model—one on which particles become focus sensitive by having a reference to the Current Question baked into their conventional meaning. One explanation for focus sensitivity, raised by Geurts and van der Sandt (1997, 2004) and Rooth (1999), is that focus sensitive operators are actually sensitive to presupposition. On this explanation, a sentence like (34) gets its meaning in two steps. (34) Mary only helped [Jim]F . First, focus in (34) triggers the presupposition p = ‘Mary helped someone’. And second, only associates with this presupposition, so that the sentence asserts ‘Whenever p holds, Mary helped Jim’ (i.e. ‘Whenever Mary helped someone, she helped Jim’). Now, as we saw in Section 5.3, questions can be taken to introduce a speaker presupposition. This means that on the qud approach to focus, Geurts and van der Sandt’s explanation is still viable, although now it will take three steps rather than two: first, focus in (34) indicates that the Current Question is ‘Who did Mary help?’; second, this indicates the speaker presupposition ‘Mary helped someone’; and third, only associates with this presupposition as before. Another possible explanation for focus sensitivity, discussed by Rooth (1992) and von Fintel (1994) among others, holds that focus sensitive operators contain a free variable which is bound to some salient set of alternatives—and that focus provides a suitable, salient set of alternatives. Consider again the example in (34). On this explanation, the steps by which its meaning is determined are as follows. First, focus makes salient the set of alternatives {helped(mary, x): x ∈ D}. Second, only is taken to introduce quantification restricted by a free variable, so that the meaning of (34) is λw.∀p ∈C p (w ) ↔ p = helped (mary , jim) . Finally, the free variable is bound to the
106 Leah Velleman and David Beaver salient set of alternatives, giving a plausible meaning for the sentence as a whole. Since, on qud models of discourse, raising a question serves to make certain alternatives salient, this explanation too is compatible with qud models. Once again, an extra step is all that is needed: focus indicates the Current Question; the Current Question makes a set of alternatives salient; and then the explanation proceeds as before. This raises a third possibility. Discourse particles index facts about the structure of the current discourse. On the models we have discussed here, discourse facts will generally be facts about quds, or the relationships between them, and in particular about the Current Question. This will be true even for discourse particles that do not appear to be focus sensitive in their behaviour. For instance, qud-based analyses can be given for contrastive or concessive particles such as but (Umbach 2004), for particles found in some languages which mark the use of a Contrastive Topic strategy (e.g. Lee 1999; Tonhauser 2012; Constant 2014), and so on. And if we allow discourse particles to refer to the Current Question, we can also use this to construct lexical entries for particles that are clearly focus sensitive. For instance, Beaver and Clark (2008) and Velleman et al. (2012) propose that ‘only p’ presupposes that something at least as strong as p is true, and asserts that p is the strongest true answer to the Current Question. This definition grants ‘only’ focus sensitivity, though again it is indirect focus sensitivity, routed through discourse structure. When I say ‘only p,’ what propositions I rule out depend on what propositions count as answers to the Current Question; and whatever the Current Question is, I will have focus-marked my utterance of ‘only p’ in order to be congruent with it. Is this semantic or pragmatic focus sensitivity? Well, in a way it’s both. Consider the steps a hearer must go through in order to interpret the sentence in (35); informally speaking, these steps will look something like (35a–d). (35) Only [John’s]F uncle laughed.
a. Based on the focus-marking of the sentence, the Current Question must be something like ‘Whose uncle laughed?’ b. So if that hadn’t been the Current Question previously, a hearer should accommodate it in as the new Current Question—at least for the sake of understanding what the speaker is trying to communicate.19 c. So that means I’m being told that the strongest true answer to ‘Whose uncle laughed?’ is ‘John’s uncle laughed.’ d. So that means I’m being told that nobody other than John has an uncle who laughed.
The first two steps, (35a) and (35b), are matters of pragmatic reasoning, though helped along by conventional linguistic constraints. (For instance, if there weren’t conventions 19 Ordinarily, a hearer might have the option to reject or contest this sort of shift in the Current Question. But here it doesn’t matter much: the speaker is assuring the hearer here that the strongest true answer is being given, and so as long as the hearer accepts that, the question is closed now anyway.
Question-based Models of Information Structure 107 in English about how to interpret the prosody of a sentence and determine which word counts as focused, (35a) wouldn’t have happened.) The next step, (35c), is purely semantic—it’s just a matter of looking up a lexical entry for ‘only’ and filling in the appropriate value. And (35d) follows from (35c) as a matter of logical deduction (assuming an appropriate definition for ‘strongest’).
5.5 Conclusion qud approaches constitute one particular approach to analysing the semantic and pragmatic effects of information structure, and in this chapter we have largely concentrated on one particular way of developing the qud model, based on extensions of the framework proposed by Roberts (2012b). The reader is strongly encouraged to also study further question-based proposals that we have mentioned, such as those of Carlson (1985), van Kuppevelt (1995), and Büring (2003), as well as placing the qud model in the broader context of the range of empirical and theoretical issues connected with the semantics and pragmatics of information structure that are discussed elsewhere in the handbook. In particular, the reader is directed to Chapter 2 on alternative semantics, Chapter 4 on contrastive topics, Chapter 6 on at-issueness, Chapter 7 on presupposition, and Chapter 12 on focus-sensitivity.
Chapter 6
In f orm ation St ru c t u re and the L and s c a pe of (non-) at-i ssue Me a ni ng Laurence R. Horn
Before determining the nature of information structure it helps to determine what constitutes information.1 This task may appear (relatively) straightforward in the case of what is said. But the last half-century of work, since Grice first distinguished conversationally and conventionally implicated material from each other and from what is said, has demonstrated the complex nature of information and of its transfer among interlocutors within a conversational context. One advance in this pursuit is the distinction between what is at issue (proffered content) and what is not. It is also helpful, though not always simple, to distinguish two aspects of the common ground: common ground (CG) content and CG management (Krifka 2008). This chapter will be largely devoted to the management side, with occasional spillovers into content. Exploration of the semantics/pragmatics borderland must begin by establishing the criteria of category membership. Conventionally implicated material (as with expressives or the notion of contrast invoked by the use of particles like but or even) constitutes part of encoded meaning that is irrelevant to the truth conditions of the full sentence. Assertorically inert material—semantically entailed but pragmatically not at issue—is truth-conditionally relevant but transparent to linguistic diagnostics. In this chapter I argue that the crucial factors for a variety of linguistic criteria involve not what is (or is not) truth-conditionally entailed but rather what counts (or does not count) as pragmatically at issue. As well as correlating with word order and prosodic new information effects in a variety of languages, as detailed in other contributions to this volume, assertion and related illocutionary forces across speech act types are often more reliable indicators than entailment in predicting the acceptability of negative 1 I am grateful to Barbara Abbott, Betty Birner, Chris Potts, Edgar Onea, Ellen Prince, Gregory Ward, the participants at DGfS 2013 in Potsdam, the editors of OUPHIS, and especially the two reviewers for suggestions, critiques, and feedback.
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 109 polarity items, the triggering of inversion, the distribution of complement types, and the ability of material to appear transparent to (or scope outside) embedding predicates. The discussion in Section 6.1 touches on the role of rhetorical opposition, the contribution of but clauses, and the variable strength of at-issue content. Section 6.2 displays the landscape of non-at-issue meaning, using a range of distributional diagnostics to distinguish between the phenomena of conventional implicature and of assertorically inert entailments. Finally, the case study in Section 6.3 shifts the focus to focus, in particular the semantic and pragmatic approaches to the relation between structural focus and exhaustivity.
6.1 Degrees of at-issueness In his canonical survey of information structure, Krifka (2008: 245) posits the concept of common ground (CG) as a basis for understanding when and how information can be transferred among interlocutors: ‘Information has to be packaged in correspondence with the CG at the point at which it is uttered.’ To illustrate this point he adduces the minimal pair in (1), which suggests that information cannot be introduced into the CG if it is already present by virtue of a prior assertion, entailment, or presupposition: (1) a. I have a cat, and I had to bring my cat to the vet. b. #I had to bring my cat to the vet, and I have a cat. The asymmetry is clear in this case—or in similar examples noted by Morgan (1969), Horn (1972: §2.1), and Sadock (1978): (2) a. John is here and Harry is here too. b. #John is here too, and Harry is here. [OK if ‘too’ has a prior licencer] (3) a. Dogs eat cheese and it’s odd that they do. b. #It’s odd that dogs eat cheese and they do. (4) John {shot/#killed} Alvin and Alvin died. (5) Johni didn’t {wish/#bother/#manage} to leave, and hei didn’t. On the basis of such contrasts it was proposed (Horn 1972; Sadock 1978) that this asymmetry might serve as a diagnostic for semantically entailed vs pragmatically implicated material, given the felicitous non-redundancy of asserting material previously implicated as opposed to material previously presupposed or entailed: (6) a. Some men—in fact all men—are chauvinists. b. It’s not only possible that it will snow, it’s certain that it will. c. #It’s odd that dogs eat cheese and they do.
110 Laurence R. Horn The thesis is that p and q is ill-formed when CG after the assertion of p contains q. But, as noted in Horn (1991), the generalization does not in fact extend to cases in which there is a rhetorical opposition between p and q, and where the appropriate coordinator is but (or a similar adversative) rather than and, yielding a well-formed concession/affirmation structure: (7)
a. It’s odd that dogs eat cheese but they do. b. I don’t know why I love you but I do. c. They {barely/#easily} won—they did win, though. d. Black women marry later, but they do marry. (Angela Stanley, ‘Black, Female and Single’, New York Times 11 Dec. 2011)
One way of cashing out the role of rhetorical opposition in examples like (7) is by appeal to argumentation theory (Anscombre and Ducrot 1983, cf. Merin 1999: 203–9 for a formalization within decision-theoretic semantics): a proposition q already introduced into CG by virtue of p can be felicitiously asserted if p and q are argumentatively opposed, that is, if q counts as an argument for ¬r where p counts as an argument for r. In uttering p but q, the speaker concedes the status of p as an argument for r, while presenting q as constituting a stronger argument for ¬r. This line extends naturally to cases in which p but q is acceptable in the absence of any intrinsic contrast between the two clauses or any denial of expectation, as in (8), adapted from Dummett (1973: 86): (8) A: Let’s invite Chomsky as the keynote speaker. B: Chomsky would draw a big crowd, but he lives too far away. This approach also predicts the asymmetry of p but q statements. The meaning contribution of but as opposed to and, whether based on semantic or rhetorical opposition, may well be that of a conventional implicature, a non-truth-conditional aspect of encoded meaning, as argued for by Frege (1892) and Grice (1989), or it may be a secondary component of what is said, as argued by Bach (1999) and Potts (2005); see Horn (2013) for discussion. But on anyone’s account, the utterer of p but q asserts both p and q and is committed to the truth of each at-issue conjunct. (9) a. He’s rich but he’s immoral. b. He’s immoral but he’s rich. As examples like (9) show, however, q can be in effect more at issue than p, highlighted as a more relevant, salient, or significant fact,2 just as in (7) the fact that q was already introduced into CG does not block a speaker from subsequently asserting it and thereby raising its salience for the hearer.
2 Along the same lines, note the backgrounded or concessive flavour of p in conventionally irreversible adjectival and adverbial but collocations, e.g. sad but true, bloody but unbowed, older but wiser, slowly but surely, close but no cigar, last but not least.
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 111 A given construction in which two propositions are at issue may serve to highlight exactly one conjunct,3 which accounts for the intuitive difference as to what point is being made and which conjunct is more accessible for continuations: He’s rich but immoral (… so you {shouldn’t/#should} date him, vote for him) vs He’s immoral but rich (—Then I might as well date him). Another construction exhibiting different degrees of at-issueness is that of inverted not only p clauses. In uttering not only p but (also) q as in (10), (10) a. Not only is it cold, it’s freezing, b. Not only is it cold, it’s snowing, I highlight or foreground q with respect to p, whether or not q in fact entails p (as in (10a)) or does not (as in (10b)). Evidence that p as well as q is at issue in such correlatives is provided by the ability of the former clause to host overt performatives as in the attested examples in (10′), due respectively to Oprah Winfrey and . (10′) a. Not only do I hereby retract my claim, but I also hereby apologize to the cattlemen in the great state of Texas. b. Not only do I promise to be a good and faithful husband to you, but also to be a patient, loving father to [children’s names]. But while at issue, these inverted p clauses—as opposed to canonical word order counterparts in which negation focuses narrowly on only—are indeed backgrounded, as seen in the contrasts in (11) and (12): (11) a. He had begun to long for her. The longing wasn’t only sexual but it was sexual. Ruth Rendell (1989), The Bridesmaid, p. 104
b. #Not only was the longing sexual, (but) it was sexual.
(12) a. I am not only a linguist, but I am a linguist. b. #Not only am I a linguist, (but) I am a linguist. In (11b) and (12b), the content of the second clause has already been established as part of CG by virtue of the first clause, making an assertion impossible. The narrow focus negation and concessive interpretation available for (11a) and (12a) (paralleling that in 3 The
notion of highlighting invoked here for assertions is related to, although distinct from, the use of highlighting in Inquisitive Semantics for questions (Roelofsen and van Gool 2010; Farkas and Roelofsen 2011; Pruitt and Roelofsen 2013): Questions can highlight one or more of the possibilities they propose but only highlighted disjuncts link to subsequent anaphora, e.g. yes and no particles. In response to a polar question such as ‘Is the door open?’ a yes confirms the sole highlighted alternative, which can be picked up by a continuation (Then the doctor is in). When two possibilities are highlighted as in the disjunctive question ‘Is the door open↑ or closed↓’, no yes/no answer is possible, nor any continuation along the lines of Then the doctor is in.
112 Laurence R. Horn (7c,d), which exhibit a similar double pitch accent) is ruled out in (11b) and (12b), where the inversion in the p clause of not only p but q signals that the main point of the utterance is q. Nor is the rhetorical opposition in the p but q examples of (7) available to salvage (11b/12b), given the argumentative co-orientation of the clauses linked by the not only p but q construction (cf. Horn 2000).
6.2 (Non-)at issue meaning: surveying the landscape While at-issue meaning can be foregrounded or backgrounded, non-at-issue meaning can vary not just in degree but in kind, as spelled out in Grice’s dichotomy between two varieties of implicature (1968: 225; see also Grice 1989: 118): The wider programme … arises out of a distinction I wish to make within the total signification of a remark, a distinction between what the speaker has said (in a certain favored and maybe in some degree artificial, sense of ‘said’), and what he has ‘implicated’…, taking into account the fact that what he has implicated may be either conventionally implicated (implicated by virtue of the meaning of some word or phrase which he has used) or non-conventionally implicated (in which case the specification of implicature falls outside the specification of the conventional meaning of the words used).
Conversational implicature, the principal subclass of non-conventional implicature, has been investigated in great detail by linguists, philosophers, and cognitive psychologists. The main focus has been on scalar implicature, arising from the maxim of quantity (Grice 1989: 26): ‘Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).’ In the locus classicus, a speaker utters Some Fs are G, thereby implicating that (for all she knows) not all Fs are G. Such scalar implicatures, however tempting to posit in particular contexts, cannot constitute part of ‘information’ in the strict sense, given the possibility of cancellation: Some of my friends speak English, in fact all of them do. (For a range of descriptive and theoretical approaches to conversational implicature and cancellability, see Horn 1972; Gazdar 1979; Hirschberg 1991; Levinson 2000; Chierchia 2004; Eckardt 2007; Geurts 2010.) The ugly stepsister of conversational implicature, Grice’s conventional implicature— a non-cancellable but truth-conditionally transparent component of content—has evoked much scepticism, with Bach (1999) consigning it to the dustbin of mythology, Carston (2002: 134) remarking that ‘there simply is no such thing,’ and Potts (2005) undertaking a rehabilitation that resituates the relevant notion within a drastically redrawn landscape. But Grice’s admittedly sketchy account of conventionally encoded content that does not affect the truth conditions of the asserted proposition has a rich lineage and a broad descriptive potential.
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 113 In his unpublished Logic, Frege (1897) explores the division of labour between the domains we now label semantics and (discourse) pragmatics. After noting that the substitution of but for and, the addition of particles like ach ‘ah’ and leider ‘unfortunately’, or the replacement of Hund ‘dog’ with Köter ‘cur’ ‘makes no difference to the thought’, he continues: The distinction between the active and passive voice belongs here too. The sentences ‘M gave document A to N’, ‘Document A was given to N by M’, ‘N received document A from M’ express exactly the same thought; we learn not a whit more or less from any of these sentences that we do from the others. Hence it is impossible that one of them should be true whilst another is false. … For all this we are not in a position to say that it is a matter of complete indifference which of these sentences we use. … If someone asks ‘Why has A been arrested?’ it would be unnatural to reply ‘B has been murdered by him’, because it would require a needless switch of the attention from A to B. Although in actual speech it can certainly be very important where the attention is directed and where the stress falls, it is of no concern to logic. (Frege 1897: 242)
Such alternations—the choice between members of active/passive pairs or converses like give and receive (motivated in each case by the goal of mapping topics into subject position); the choice among evaluatively positive, negative, and neutral forms that co-refer—involve variation in the packaging of content. On grounds of information structure or Prague school linguists’ functional sentence perspective (Firbas 1966), the speaker chooses among allosentences (Daneš 1964; Lambrecht 1994), variant expressions whose differences in syntactic or prosodic form correlate with differences in information packaging, while the information itself—what is said—remains constant. The same treatment arguably extends to a range of other natural language phenomena, including scalar adversatives like even (Karttunen and Peters 1979), familiar vs formal (‘T/V’) second person singular pronouns of modern European languages, epithets, and other expressives (Potts 2007; Williamson 2009; and papers in Gutzmann and Gärtner 2013), some evidential markers (Davis et al. 2007), modal particles (Gutzmann 2008), ‘ethical’ and ‘personal’ datives (Horn 2008; Bosse et al. 2012), and perhaps the uniqueness/maximality condition on definite descriptions (Horn and Abbott 2012). In each case, we find aspects of conventional content that are not truth-conditionally entailed and are not readily outscoped by logical operators; cf. Barker (2003), Gutzmann (2013), and Horn (2013) for elaboration. But while the non-at-issue contribution to meaning in such cases is by definition irrelevant to the truth conditions of the larger expression licensing the conventional implicature, there are other constructions in which material is truth-conditionally entailed yet pragmatically not at issue. Clauses with exclusive particles like only and exceptives like every … but or no … but or approximatives like almost and barely expand into conjunctions whose conjuncts are asymmetrical with respect to what is asserted or at issue. Thus, (13a) entails its prejacent (13b), as seen from the impossibility of #Only Chris came on time; in fact even Chris didn’t. But the point of the utterance is to assert that nobody else came on time.
114 Laurence R. Horn (13) a. Only Chris came on time. b. Chris came on time. c. No one other than Chris came on time.
prejacent entailment (inert) exclusion entailment (at issue)
(14) a. Gore almost won the election. b. Gore didn’t win the election. c. Gore ‘came close to’ winning.4
polar entailment (inert) proximal entailment (at issue)
(15) a. Bush barely won the election. b. Bush won the election. c. Bush ‘came close to’ not winning.
polar entailment (inert) proximal entailment (at issue)
Similarly for exceptives: Nobody but Kim showed up entails both that Kim showed up and that nobody else did (cf. García Alvarez 2011), but asserts only the latter. In each case, a proposition that constitutes a necessary condition for the truth of the larger expression may be assertorically inert (Horn 2002, 2009, 2011; Schwenter 2002; Amaral 2010) and hence transparent to linguistic diagnostics. Thus only XP, no … but XP, and barely VP establish suitable environments for NPI licensing despite the presence of veridicality (Giannakidou 2006) and the lack of downward entailment: (16) a. {Only/*Even} Chris ever comes on time. b. {Nobody/*Everybody} but Kim drank any of the punch. c. Dana {barely/*almost} lifted a finger to help. The characteristics of (non-)at-issue relations can be displayed as in Table 6.1.5 The last of the four properties listed in Table 6.1, the observation that non-at-issue material tends to scope out of higher predicates—in particular emotive factives and propositional attitudes—was introduced by Karttunen and Peters (1979) as a diagnostic for conventionally implicated as opposed to asserted material, but it can be repurposed as a diagnostic for non-assertion.6 Thus, just as the contrast between their poverty and their happiness or the unexpectedness of Pat’s failing the test are outside the scope of the corresponding factives in (17) and (18) respectively, so too the prejacent of the only clause, the proposition that the wealthy will benefit from the tax cuts, falls outside the assertive scope of the higher factives in (19). 4
‘Came close to’ here is a place-holder for a fully fledged representation of the proximal component in terms of what holds at alternative possible worlds or indices; see Sevi (1998) and Horn (2011) for elaboration. 5 As Chris Potts observes (p.c.; see also Potts 2015), filling out these rows and columns— including the non-exemplified combinations of Yes and No and the status of both semantic and pragmatic presupposition—is a matter of controversy, depending as it does on a range of significant assumptions that cannot be explored here. A kindred but more ramified counterpart of my Table 6.1 is presented in table 3 of Potts (2015). (See Sæbø, this volume, for more on the status of presuppositions.) 6 For other diagnostics for examining the projective behaviour of non-at-issue material, see Simons et al. (2010), Tonhauser et al. (2011), and work cited therein.
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 115 Table 6.1. The landscape of (non-)at-issue relations RELATION →
implicature assertorically inert / \ ↓ PROPERTY conversational conventional entailments
assertions / \ secondary primary
Is part of encoded meaning?
no
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
Affects truth conditions?
no
no
yes
yes
yes
yes
Is asserted? (≈ is at issue?)
no
no
no
yes
yes
yes
Projects? (e.g. takes wide scope)
no
yes
yes
yes
no
no
(17) a. I just discovered that they’re poor but happy. b. It’s curious that they’re poor but happy. (18) a. I just discovered that even Pat failed the test. b. It’s unfortunate that even Pat failed the test. (19) a. I just discovered that only the wealthy profited from the tax cuts. b. It’s too bad that only the wealthy profited from the tax cuts. If the CG already contains the content of the prejacent, an only statement can still be asserted or questioned, but if it contains the exclusion, this is ruled out: (20) a. I know the wealthy will profit, but will ONLY the wealthy profit? b. #I know nobody besides the wealthy will profit, but will ONLY the wealthy profit? c. We all knew that nobody who isn’t wealthy will profit, but guess what: (#only) the wealthy will profit. Similarly with the (inert) polar component vs the (at-issue) proximal component of almost and barely clauses: what Dana discovered here, or what the speaker regards as unfortunate, is the proximal (coming-close) component, not the polar one.7 (21) a. Dana just discovered that {Gore almost won/Bush barely won}. b. It’s too bad the tax cuts {almost passed/barely passed}. A particularly dramatic illustration of the contrast between at-issue and non-at-issue content comes from the contrast between almost and not quite, two approximatives that 7
The scopal diagnostic applies as well to the cases of secondary assertions like clausal not only and clausal appositives (non-restrictive relatives). Thus, while there have been various approaches to the semantic contribution of non-restrictives—see Frege (1892), Potts (2005), and Horn (2013) for a sampler—we can see that they behave similarly to but and almost with respect to the scopal frame: just as the assertorically inert polar components in (i) and the conventionally implicated signals of
116 Laurence R. Horn Table 6.2. almost vs not quite Entailed
Asserted
Proximal component (almost)
+
+
Polar component (almost)
+
–
Proximal component (not quite)
+
–
Polar component (not quite)
+
+
Source: Schwenter (2002).
are equivalent at the level of what they entail while differing as to what they assert, as seen in Table 6.2. The intimate semantic relation between almost doing something and not quite doing it, as seen in (22), belies their distinct behaviour with respect to the distribution of NPIs, which are acceptable just in case the negative entailment (that I completed my assignments) is at issue: (22) a. I almost completed my assignments. b. I didn’t quite complete my assignments. (23) a. I almost completed {some/*any} of my assignments. b. I didn’t quite complete any of my assignments. The difference between the two approximatives is also reflected in the contrast between the continuations in (24a,b): (24) a. It’s too bad you almost died in the accident (—now you’ll need months of difficult therapy). b. It’s too bad you didn’t quite die in the accident (—now I’ll have to finish you off). contrast and scalarity in (ii) take wide scope with respect to the higher factive, so too do the boldfaced clausal appositives in (iii): (iiia) might be uttered by a disappointed Democrat, while (iiib) is the sentiment of an angry Republican.
(i) a. It’s too bad the bill {almost passed/barely passed/didn’t quite pass}.
b. It’s too bad the Republican plan will help only [Fthe wealthy].
(ii) a. It’s too bad that she’s poor but honest.
b. It’s too bad that even Obama can’t fix the economy. (iii) a. It’s too bad that Obama, who is the President, can’t fix the economy.
b. It’s too bad that Obama, who can’t fix the economy, is the President.
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 117
6.3 Focus and exhaustivity One central locus of interaction between information structure and (non-)at-issue meaning is the treatment of focus phenomena. A long-standing dispute has centred on whether clefts and other structural (syntactically represented) focus markers entail or merely implicate exhaustivity. It’s α that ϕ’s and its cross-linguistic analogues typically imply that nothing distinct from α (within the relevant contextual domain) ϕ’s. On a straightforward presuppositional analysis, (25a) asserts (25b) and presupposes or conventionally implicates the exhaustive proposition (25c) as well as the existential premise in (25d). (25)
a. b. c. d.
It was [a pizza]F that Mary ate. Mary ate a pizza. Mary ate nothing (within a context-inferrable set) other than the pizza. Mary ate something.
What rules out any such approach to exhaustivity is that the projection properties of presupposition are not satisfied; neither the negative nor interrogative counterparts of (25a) commit the speaker to (25c). (26) a. It wasn’t a pizza that Mary ate. b. Was it a pizza that Mary ate? (Note by contrast that these sentences do commit the speaker to the existential presupposition in (25d).) Recognizing this, Halvorsen (1978) proposes that (25a) conventionally implicates not (25c) but rather the cardinality proposition that Mary ate at most one thing and hence—given the conventional implicature of (25d)—that she ate exactly one thing. As noted in Horn (1981), however, this view wrongly predicts that (27a) commits the speaker to the proposition that Mary ate exactly three things, one each from the pizza, calzone, and eggplant sub context classes, and that the unproblematic (27b,c) should constitute instances of conventional implicature cancellation.8 (27) a. It was/wasn’t [a pizza, a calzone, and an eggplant sub]F that Mary ate. b. It wasn’t a pizza that Mary ate, it was a calzone and an eggplant sub. c. Was it a pizza that Mary ate, or was it a calzone and an eggplant sub?
8
Furthermore, as noted in Horn (1981: 129), the speaker of (i)
(i) Is it the rational numbers that are non-denumerable (or is it the reals)? d oes not implicate or presuppose that something with the cardinality of the rationals is non- denumerable; it is this very matter that is at issue.
118 Laurence R. Horn Having eliminated presupposition or conventional implicature as analytic options for the exhaustivity implication (in either original or cardinality version), what does that leave? On one widely held view, this implication represents part of what is said in such ‘exhaustive focus’ constructions as it-clefts in English and dislocated (immediately preverbal) focus in Hungarian. This claim traces back to Bolinger (1972) and is formalized by Szabolcsi (1981: 519), who maintains that ‘by using a contrastive Focus one asserts that the claim he is making is in fact not true of anything else.’9 For Szabolcsi, ‘exhaustive listing’ is the ‘predominant semantic characteristic of Focus’, when the relevant item is in the dedicated (immediately preverbal) F(ocus) position in Hungarian in (28a) as opposed to the canonical word order in (28b). (28) Hungarian (Szabolcsi 1981: 519) a. [Mária]F látta Péter=t. Mary-foc see-pst Peter=acc
‘MARY saw Peter’
b. [Fe] Látta Péter=t Mária.
‘Mary saw Peter’
É. Kiss (1998: 245) associates such exhaustive readings with ‘identificational’ as opposed to simple new-information focus: ‘An identificational focus represents a subset of the set of contextually or situationally given elements for which the predicate phrase can potentially hold; it is identified as the exhaustive subset of this set for which the predicate phrase actually holds.’ In Krifka’s summary, [Exhaustive focus] indicates that the focus denotation is the only one that leads to a true proposition, or rather more generally: that the focus denotation is the logically strongest that does so. É. Kiss (1998) has pointed out that focus movement in Hungarian triggers this specific meaning, and it appears that cleft constructions in English trigger it as well: It’s [JOHN and BILL]F that stole a cookie. This example says that nobody else but John and Bill stole a cookie. (Krifka 2008: 259, emphasis added)
But is this inference in fact semantic or (‘merely’) pragmatic? Can we empirically evaluate the claim that structural focus constructions, as reflected by fronted focus in Hungarian, clefts in English and French, and preverbal focus in languages like Greek and Italian, assert and entail exhaustivity, as the standard view suggests? We examine three counterarguments to this view. Counterargument #1 is based on the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs). Focus expressions—clefts in particular—fail
9 See
Repp (this volume) for more on contrast and its relation to focus; focus is also addressed by Lohnstein (this volume), Zimmermann (this volume), and É. Kiss (this volume).
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 119 to license NPIs in English in the absence of a dedicated exhaustivity operator like only (here and in subsequent examples, the relevant licenser is boldfaced and NPIs underlined): (29) a. #It’s [Bush]F who ever proposed any tax cuts in wartime. b. #[Bush]F ever proposed any tax cuts in wartime. c. Only [Bush]F ever proposed any tax cuts in wartime. d. #Even [Bush]F ever proposed any tax cuts in wartime. While Linebarger (1991: 184) suggests that NPIs cannot occur in the ‘background portion’ of a focus construction as in (29a) or (30a) (her (42a)), background triggering is impeccable if there is an overt only upstairs: (30) a. *It was John who contributed a red cent to the ACLU. b. It was only John who contributed a red cent to the ACLU. c. It’s only [Bush]F who ever proposed any tax cuts in wartime. Other downward entailing operators similarly establish a suitable environment for the NPI, as in (31), (31) Small reptiles and rodents burrow or slide below the surface or cling to the shaded side of an outcropping. Movement is slow to preserve energy, and it is a rare animal which can or will defy the sun for long. (John Steinbeck 1961, Travels with Charley In Search of America, p. 164) As in (30b,c), it is not the focus itself that functions as the actual licenser here, but the modifier rare. The key point is that exhaustivity is part of what is at issue in (it’s) only statements, but not with simple (unexhaustivized) clefts as in (29a) or bare (in situ) focus as in (29b). What is at issue in focus constructions is the assignment of the value (x = John) for a given variable (λxFx). This contrast in NPI licensing potential extends to what have been called th-clefts. While a polarity item is fully acceptable in (32a), whether intoned by Dusty Springfield or Aretha Franklin, the presence of exhaustivity-asserting adjectival only is crucial here, as seen in (32b). Simple unmodified definites, which presuppose (or, as in Horn and Abbott 2012, conventionally implicate) exhaustivity but do not assert it are predictably incapable of licensing NPIs, as seen in (32c).10 10
The same paradigm obtains in other frames: a. You’re the only woman I ever loved. b. #You’re the woman I ever loved. (ii) a. The only time she ever slept with a man she got pregnant. b. #The time she ever slept with a man she got pregnant. (i)
This contrast extends to stricter NPIs as well; (iiia) is from an actual e-mail. (iii)
a. That’s the only e-mail address I have for her either. b. #That’s the e-mail address I have for her either.
120 Laurence R. Horn (32) a. The only one who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man. b. #The one who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man. c. #The guy who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man. Counterargument #2 for the non-at-issue status of exhaustivity in (even) ‘identificational’ focus constructions and for the sharp demarcation of such constructions from explicitly marked exclusive clauses is provided by the distribution of Karttunen–Peters scopal diagnostics introduced in Section 6.2. The evidence for this goes back to Horn (1981), where Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) analysis on which It was a pizza that Mary ate is essentially conflated with that of Mary ate a pizza and only a pizza (or perhaps, if this is logically distinct, to It was a pizza and only a pizza that Mary ate)11 is challenged by data like those in (33), indicating that ‘a cleft sentence is pointless to assert or to question, and idiotic to deny, if the corresponding simple [proposition] is already established’ in CG (Horn 1981: 130). The insertion of only renders exhaustivity at issue; the continuation is then no longer pointless, removing any infelicity. (33) a I know Mary ate a pizza, but it was {#a PIZZA/✓ only a pizza} she ate. b. I know Mary ate a pizza, but was it {#a PIZZA/✓ only a pizza} she ate? c. Mary kissed John, but it wasn’t {#JOHN/✓ only John} she kissed. The evidence presented so far bears on the assertoric status of the exhaustivity implication and confirms the view that exhaustivity is not at issue in the relevant clefts—or, as Wedgwood (2005) and Onea and Beaver (2009) note, in the corresponding examples with preverbal focus in Hungarian. What has not been shown is whether this non- at-issue component of meaning is a conversational implicature, as in Horn (1981), or is truth-conditionally relevant but inert in the manner of the prejacent of only/no … but sentences or the polar component of almost and barely approximatives.12 As we have seen, such inert entailments fail to affect NPI licensing and do scope out of higher 11 In subsequent work, especially Atlas (2005), Jay Atlas has posited distinct analyses for indefinite clefts (It was a pizza that Mary ate) and definites (It was John that Mary kissed); since both varieties are semantically upper-bounded (exhaustive), for our purposes this is a distinction without a difference. 12 One diagnostic for distinguishing entailed material (whether at-issue or non-at-issue) from purely pragmatically conveyed material is the ‘Griceogloss’ displayed by split-outcome situations as in (i) and (ii) (Horn 2009: 213–14).
(i) a. 20 students tried to solve the problem. b. 20 students don’t drink much. (ii) a. 20 students almost solved the problem. b. 20 students solved only the last problem.
[includes any who solved it] [includes any total abstainers] [excludes those who solved it] [excludes those solving none]
With clear instances of conversational implicature as in (i), we get inclusive readings for the subset described; the total number of students involved is 20. But with approximatives and exclusives as in (ii), only an exclusive reading is possible: if 5 students solved the problem, (iia) is understood to involve a total of 25 students—the 5 who succeeded and the 20 who (almost succeeded but) failed. Unfortunately, this diagnostic appears to be inapplicable for syntactic reasons in the case of the exhaustivity implication of clefts.
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 121 factives. Crucially, however, they are also uncancellable, which motivates their treatment as (non-at-issue) entailments rather than implicatures. Counterargument #3 to the semantic analysis of exhaustivity in structural focus constructions thus depends on showing that this implication is indeed cancellable. To this end we can begin with attested examples suggesting that exhaustiveness implications associated with clefts in positive contexts can be overridden (emphasis added): (34) a. He was just a burned-out little man with tired eyes and a drained smile, who had a gift that was too big for his soul, and it was the gift that killed him, as much as anything. (Robert Silverberg, Stochastic Man, via Ellen Prince; Horn 1981 (13b)) b. It’s the ideas that count, not just the way we write them. (Richard Smaby, lecture, via Ellen Prince; Horn 1981 (13d))
c. McGwire has been hurt, and while the Cardinals have been under .500 since he went down and struggled to mirror their record for home runs in April, it has been their bullpen and other malfunctions as well as the loss of McGwire’s presence in the lineup that has led to the Cards’ struggles. (Peter Gammons, espn.com, 26 April 2000) Consider in the same vein cite the 1911 poem by James Oppenheim later adopted by women workers’ movements (cf. ): (35)
As we go marching, marching unnumbered women dead, Go crying though our singing their ancient call for bread. Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses too!
The possibility of non-contradictory cancellations of the exhaustivity implication for both prosodic (in situ) and structural focus has been noted for a range of other cases.13 Thus, (36a) on the semantic theory of focus in Sgall et al. (1986) entails that English is
13
The other side of the coin is the apparent well-formedness of examples in which a speaker denies a structurally focused utterance on the grounds that exhaustivity is not satisfied:
(i) It wasn’t [Fa pizza] that Mary ate, it was a pizza and a calzone.
(ii) Hungarian (Onea and Beaver 2009: (3), after Szabolcsi 1981)
Nem
[FPéter]
not
Peter
aludt
a
padlón,
sleep=pst
the
floor-on
hanem but
Péter
és
Paul.
Peter
and
Paul
‘It wasn’t Peter who slept on the floor, but Peter and Paul’ Horn (1981: fn. 7) takes (i) to instantiate metalinguistic negation, and Onea and Beaver (2009) invoke the same analysis for (ii) (their ex. (3)).
122 Laurence R. Horn spoken only in the Shetlands and is thus false unless uttered as a response to a question like that in (36b). But in fact, Vallduví (1992) notes, (36a) is true, period. (See Blok 1993 for a similar point.) (36) a. English is spoken in the [FShetlands]. b. Is English spoken in the Faroe Islands or in the Shetlands? In characterizing structural ex situ focus as ‘exhaustive listing’, Szabolcsi invokes Kuno’s (1972) term for one use of Japanese -ga. As against -wa-marked nominals, standardly viewed as topics, a -ga marked nominal may indicate either ‘neutral description’ or ‘exhaustive listing’ in stage-level predications like (37a), while only ‘exhaustive listing’ is possible for the individual-level predication in (37b). (37) Japanese a. John=ga kita. John=ga came
‘John came’
b. John=ga kasikoi. John=ga smart
‘John is smart’
But as Shibatani (1990) and Heycock (1994) observe, the ‘exhaustive listing’ or narrow focus readings of nominals marked by -ga are not semantically exhaustive, as the continuation in (38b) makes clear. No such continuation is compatible following exhaustivity- asserting dake (‘only’) clauses. (38) Japanese (Heycock 1994: 158) a. Dare=ga kasikoi=no ka? who=ga smart=nom wh
‘Who is smart?’
b. John=ga kasikoi. John=ga smart
Sorekara, and
Mary=mo kasikoi. Mary=also smart
‘JOHN is smart. And MARY is smart too’
c. John=dake=ga kasikoi. #Sorekara, Mary=mo kasikoi. only
‘Only John is smart. And MARY is smart too’
Similar arguments are provided by Destruel (2012) for French c’est-clefts, based on minimal pairs like (39a,b):
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 123 (39) French (Destruel 2012: (3), (4)) a. Pierre n’ Pierre neg
a has qu’ he
pas seulement neg only mangé eaten
bien although
‘Peter didn’t only eat [pizza]F, though he did eat pizza.’ pas neg
[de of
bien qu’ although
il he
de of
la the
la the
[de la pizza]F , of the pizza
a′. *Ce n’ est It neg is
il ait has
mangé eaten
pizza. pizza
pizza]F pizza
ait has
mangé, eaten
‘It wasn’t pizza that Peter ate, though he did eat pizza.’ [Marie]F Marie
b. Thomas: Seule only
‘Only [Marie]F laughed.’
*Oui, yes
mais but
la the
a has
pizza. pizza
[Jean]F Jean
a has
ri laughed
aussi. also
‘Yes, but [Jean]F laughed too.’
b′. Thomas: C’ it
est is
[Marie]F Marie
qui who
‘It is [Marie]F who laughed.’
Oui, yes
de of
Pierre Pierre
ri. laughed
a has
Julie:
mangé eaten
que that
Julie:
mais but
[Jean]F Jean
a has
a has
ri. laughed
ri laughed
aussi. also
‘Yes, but [Jean]F laughed too.’
While preverbal (as opposed to postverbal) focus in Greek has been viewed as entailing and/or asserting exhaustivity, Gryllia (2009) shows that once again these accounts do not withstand closer scrutiny. While rejecting semantic exhaustivity for ex situ focus in Greek, Gryllia accepts the arguments from Szabolcsi (1981), Horvath (2010), and especially É. Kiss (1998, 2009) for semantic exhaustivity in Hungarian. It is thus worth noting that even in that case there have been recent dissenters. Wedgwood (2005) argues at length that exhaustivity is not part of the encoded meaning with either identificational focus or new-information focus. Rather, an exhaustivity inference derives pragmatically from the nature of alternative sets in discourse contexts and the function of preverbal focus. Edgar Onea and colleagues (Onea and Beaver 2009; Zimmermann and Onea 2011) have also maintained that exhaustivity is an epiphenomenon, arising from the interaction of focus with the question under discussion. More
124 Laurence R. Horn specifically, ‘immediately preverbal focus is grammatically constrained to be a question- answering constituent’ (Onea and Beaver 2009: 343), and as has often been remarked (cf. e.g. Schulz and van Rooij 2006), there is a tendency for answers to wh-questions to be taken exhaustively at least by default, modulo the mention-all vs mention-some distinction. At the same time, Onea et al.’s work confirms the widely held view that immediately preverbal focus in Hungarian does have a stronger link to exhaustivity than in situ focus. In the same way, contra Horn (1981), it is undeniable that someone hearing a cleft is more likely to infer speaker-intended exhaustivity than in the case of bare focus. One relevant factor may be the status of the existential proposition standardly taken as a presupposition or conventional implicature in the case of focus.14 We have reviewed evidence supporting a reanalysis of exhaustivity in focus constructions, including English clefts and ex situ identificational focus, as a matter of pragmatics. The treatment of exhaustivity as an epiphenomenon is rejected by É. Kiss (2009), who disputes both Wedgwood’s data and their interpretation. She points out that some of the examples supporting the pragmatic analysis (from Horn 1981 or Vallduví’s (1992) Shetlands example in (36a) above) can be seen as involving a failure to recognize domain relativization. Similarly, the acceptability of sentences like (40) (40) Hungarian (Onea and Beaver 2009: (13))
Péter Peter
többek among
között others
MARI=T Mary=acc
‘Peter among others kissed Mary’
csókolta meg. kiss-PST PRF
can be attributed to the possibility of including the ‘among others’ within the structural focus. It is less clear how this approach can be extended to cases in which the exhaustivity cancellation goes into the following clause or sentence, as in the examples in (34)–(35). Nor is it obvious how the unacceptability of the preverbal Hungarian focus counterparts of (33), cited by Wedgwood and by Onea and Beaver, is compatible with a semantic treatment of exhaustivity. Even more compelling for the pragmatic approach are the responses, confirmed both by intuition and experimentation, to sentences with clefts (or Hungarian preverbal focus) when the situation to be assessed is incompatible with the exhaustivity implication. In a recent study, Onea and Beaver (2009) examine the responses of Hungarian speakers when presented with the sentences in (41) along with a scene showing Marci and Peter both catching butterflies, and were then asked to choose one of the three possible responses in (42). 14 Dryer (1996) argues that while the existential proposition is indeed pragmatically presupposed in the case of clefts, the relevant sense of givenness in bare focus constructions is closer to ‘activated’ or ‘under discussion’. An anonymous reviewer, citing Geurts and van der Sandt (2004), points out that not everyone endorses the presuppositionality of existence for focus constructions.
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 125 (41) Hungarian (Onea and Beaver 2009): a. Marci Marci
meg-fogott prt-caught
egy a
lepkét. butterfly
‘Marci caught a butterfly’
b. MARCI fogott meg egy lepkét.
‘MARCI caught a butterfly’
c. Csak MARCI fogott meg egy lepkét. only
‘Only MARCI caught a butterfly’
(42) a. Yes, and Peter caught a butterfly too. b. Yes, but Peter caught a butterfly too. c. No, Peter caught a butterfly too. The subjects, unsurprisingly and with virtual unanimity, chose the negative response for (41c) and one of the two positive responses for the default case in (41a), but they also significantly preferred the ‘Yes, but’ response over negative responses in the case of the preverbal focus (41b), although a number of speakers did choose the (42c) option.15 A follow-up study with German speakers indicates that the in situ prosodic focus (an instance of informational as opposed to identificational focus as in É. Kiss (1998)) shows a decreased tendency to choose the (42c) option. If the exhaustivity effects are derived pragmatically from the relevant discourse functions, as Onea and Beaver maintain, these results can be taken to confirm that ‘Hungarian preverbal focus is more narrowly specialized for such functions than is German prosodic focus’, a conclusion supported by the increase in exhaustivity-compatible responses when the German data are presented in an explicit wh-question-answering paradigm, evoking the relevant existential proposition (Someone caught a butterfly—Who was it?). A related criterion for distinguishing truth-conditional components of meaning (including non-at-issue entailments) from merely pragmatic inferences employs the bullshit diagnostic (cf. Ward 2003, citing Craige Roberts for the inspiration; cf. also Horn 2013). The refutation marker bullshit seems (for most speakers) to be restricted to truth-conditional-based objections and thus does not readily serve to reject conventionally implicated material, as seen in (43).
15
A similar study for French (Destruel 2012) produces analogous results: ‘[T]he assumption that c’est-clefts do not contribute at-issue exhaustivity is confirmed. Instead, the inference is triggered by the not at-issue content of the clefts.’ Destruel also explores certain confounds in the data on French clefts relating to subject/object asymmetries and develops a stochastic OT analysis to account for the full range of data.
126 Laurence R. Horn (43) A: Even Hercules can lift that rock. B1: Bullshit—he can’t lift it. B2: #Bullshit—{he’s the only one who can/he’s the most likely to lift it}. But non-at-issue material can qualify for a bullshit response, provided it is entailed: (44) A: I love only you. B1: Bullshit, you love Robin too. B2: Bullshit, you don’t love anybody. (45) A: I almost cheated on you. B1: Bullshit, you would never dare even think of cheating on me. B2: Bullshit, you DID cheat on me. Consider, now, the possible responses to clefts with and without only, assuming a monogamous context in which Juliet considers Romeo’s former love Rosaline as a potential romantic rival: (46) R: It’s you I love. J1: Yes/Maybe so, but you love Rosaline too. J2: (#)Bullshit, you love Rosaline too. J3: Bullshit, it’s Rosaline you love. (47)
R: It’s only you I love. J1: #Yes/Maybe so, but you love Rosaline too. J2: Bullshit, you love Rosaline too. J3: Bullshit, it’s Rosaline you love.
While there is some variation in judgements, akin to those found in the studies reported by Onea and Beaver (2009) and Destruel (2012), the evidence from the contrast in the ‘Yes, but’ and ‘Bullshit’ responses in (46) and (47), though not definitive, tends to support the view that exhaustivity is not only external to the at-issue content of clefts but is also a non-truth-conditional aspect of the meaning contributed by structural focus. As we have seen, the case for exhaustivity as a non-at-issue meaning contribution of structural as well as informational focus constructions is compelling; the case that it constitutes a conversational implicature is less decisive, but is supported by the weight of the evidence. Based on the considerations we have reviewed, it seems plausible that exhaustivity is a matter of degree, varying with the discourse function associated with syntactic form and with aspectual considerations (cf. Hole 2011).16 As Zimmermann and Onea (2011: 1666) remark, 16
See Matić and Wedgwood (2013) for a foundational re-examination of these issues, including a challenge to the view that exhaustiveness is co-extensive with identificational focus, to the extent that the latter is a coherent cross-linguistic category.
THE LANDSCAPE OF (NON-)AT-ISSUE MEANING 127 Exhaustiveness is not part of the proffered content. Because of this, it-clefts do not motivate the assumption of a semantic primitive exhaustive focus, which is sometimes known as identificational focus (É. Kiss 1998). Indeed … the exhaustiveness effect seems to have a different origin and may be connected to the existential presupposition triggered by it-clefts.
Preverbal focus exhibits this feature to an even greater degree, while focus itself, as realized by prosodic highlighting in English or German, ‘does not trigger an existential presupposition’, as Zimmermann and Onea point out, and commensurately lacks an analogous exhaustivity implication. We have surveyed a range of cases illustrating the relation of information structure to truth-conditional semantics, grammatical form, and assertoric force (and see Velleman and Beaver (this volume) for another take on the interpenetration of pragmatics and information structure). I have argued that the variation in degree and kind among varieties of at-issue and non-at-issue meaning motivates the establishment of distinct species of meaning relations lying between the polar extremes of asserted entailment and purely pragmatic conversational implicature, ranging from secondary assertions to non-asserted entailments to conventional implicatures. While it may prove possible to collapse some of these categories, it remains to be seen what would be gained and what would be lost in explanatory power and empirical coverage by such reductionism. And in any case, particular constructions may move from one category to another, a point that is far from new: Of course borderline cases can arise because language changes. Something that was not originally employed as a means of expressing a thought may eventually come to do this because it has constantly been used in cases of the same kind. A thought which to begin with was only suggested by an expression may come to be explicitly asserted by it. (Frege 1897: 241)
Chapter 7
In f orm ation St ru c t u re a nd Presupp o si t i on Kjell Johan Sæbø
7.1 Introduction Presupposition is, like information structure itself, a many-faceted notion. Therefore, before addressing the areas where the two notions interconnect, it is useful to briefly survey some ways in which presupposition is conceived.1 Presupposition is (Beaver and Geurts 2011) the phenomenon whereby speakers mark linguistically the information that is presupposed or taken for granted, rather than being part of the main propositional content of a speech act.
This linguistic marking is done with presupposition triggers, forming a large and varied class; the ones of special concern in the present article are, first, prosodic focus marking (Sections 7.2 and 7.3), second, additive markers like too (Sections 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4), and third, clefts and factives (Section 7.4). Classically, presuppositions have been considered as conditions that the point of evaluation must meet for the sentences that carry them to be true or false. For the phenomena at issue in this article, however, they are more appropriately, in accordance with the dominant picture today, regarded as conditions that the context, or the Common Ground, must meet in order to be updated with the sentence. More specifically, the view where the context is not only to entail the presupposition but also to provide antecedents for referents in it, as most clearly expressed in Discourse Representation Theory (‘presupposition as anaphora’, van der Sandt 1992), is particularly relevant. In a looser sense of the term (‘pragmatic presuppositions’, Stalnaker 1974), a presupposition associated 1
See, e.g., Beaver and Geurts (2012) for a much more thorough description of the field.
Information Structure and Presupposition 129 with a sentence is something a speaker of the sentence will usually presuppose, that is, assume to be in the Common Ground; this notion has some relevance for the issues discussed in Section 7.3. Three main areas can be identified where notions of presupposition and notions of information structure interlock: 1. Arguably the most influential theory of focus interpretation, Rooth’s Alternative semantics, is a theory which ascribes a presupposition to a focus operator. 2. The background has traditionally been viewed as a presupposition, and this view has had a recent revival. 3. As both information structure and lexically or syntactically triggered presuppositions are sensitive to discourse structure, certain correlations can be expected to exist between these two types of phenomena. These three areas are interwoven; in particular, there is a tension between the focus presupposition in the sense of 1 and the background presupposition in the sense of 2. The following three sections are each devoted to one of these areas.
7.2 The presupposition in Alternative semantics The most successful understanding of focus, according to Krifka (2008: 247), is captured by the central claim of Alternative semantics (Rooth 1992): focus indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation. In the theory, this takes the form that focus introduces a presupposition about the presence of alternatives. The presuppositionality of focus under this theory is rarely concentrated on; this section surveys the distinctive features of the focus presupposition and its ability to account for various phenomena, such as question–answer congruence, anaphoricity, and bridging inferences.
7.2.1 Focus semantic values and the ∼ operator Alternative semantics has two central components (cf. Rooth 1992: 95): 1. a two-dimensional semantics defining focus semantic values with reference to the focus feature F and ordinary semantic values, 2. the semantics of the covert focus interpretation operator ∼, introduced in Logical Form.
130 Kjell Johan Sæbø Semantic composition proceeds on two levels: the ordinary level and the focus level. The ordinary semantic value of an expression α is conventionally notated as ⟦α⟧o, while its focus semantic value is conventionally notated as ⟦α⟧f. Informally, the focus semantic value comes from the ordinary semantic value by forming the set of semantic values where some alternative is substituted for the value of the focused phrase.2 For example, if the ordinary semantic value of (1a) is (1b), its focus semantic value is (1c), a set of propositions. (1) a. she1 takes it2 with [milk]F b. λw takew(g(2),milk, g(1)) c. λp ∃ Q p = λw takew(g(2), Q, g(1))
(= ⟦(1a)⟧o g) (= ⟦(1a)⟧f g)
The variables 1 and 2 are referential indices and g is the contextual variable assignment. Assume that the indexed focus interpretation operator ∼ adjoins to (1a): (1) d. [she1 takes it2 with [milk]F] ∼3 It is possible to give a direct definition of the meaning of ∼ if the meaning of an expression α, ⟦α⟧ simpliciter, is conceived as the pair < ⟦α⟧o, ⟦α⟧f >. (2) ⟦∼ i⟧g = λϕ: g(i) ∈ π2(ϕ). < π1(ϕ), {π1(ϕ)} > This tells us: the meaning of the ∼ operator, indexed by the variable i, at g takes a complex semantic value ϕ, consisting of an ordinary semantic value and a focus semantic value, and returns that complex semantic value where the latter is replaced by the singleton set containing the former, provided that the value assigned to i by g is a member of the focus semantic value. This proviso is a presupposition, here modelled as a definedness condition, in the notation of Heim and Kratzer (1998): λϕ: presupp. content.3 The meaning of (1d) is a consequence of applying the definiens of (2) for i = 3 to the pair consisting of (1b) and (1c) and abstracting over g, yielding a partial function from variable assignments to complex semantic values: (3) ⟦[she1 takes it2 with [milk]F] ∼3 ⟧= λg ⟦∼ 3⟧g (< ⟦(1a)⟧o g, ⟦(1a)⟧f g >) = λg: g(3) ∈ λp ∃ Q p = λw takew(g(2), Q, g(1)). The presupposition in (2) is in fact often represented in two versions, as a disjunction: g(i) is a member ∈ or a subset ⊆ of the focus semantic value. This disjunction 2
For a more detailed description, see Rooth (this volume). ⟦α ⟧o can in principle be of any (intensional) type; ∼ will mostly adjoin to a sentence, but it may also adjoin at a lower level, applying, e.g., to a ϕ where π1 (ϕ) is a property. 3
Information Structure and Presupposition 131 reflects an ambivalence in the theory; on the one hand, sometimes the contextually determined value of the free variable i appears to be a set of propositions, on the other hand, sometimes it appears to be simply a proposition. Thus in the context sketched in (4), a case of question–answer congruence, the value that can be assumed to be determined for i is a set of propositions: {that Mary takes her tea with milk, that she takes it with sugar, that she takes it with milk and sugar, that she takes it with nothing at all}, while in the context sketched in (5), it would rather seem that g(i) is a proposition: that Mary takes her coffee with nothing in it. (4) (–Does Mary take her tea with milk or sugar or both, or nothing?) – She1 takes it2 with [milk]F . (5) (At home, Mary takes her coffee with nothing in it, but whenever she has coffee here in France,) she1 takes it2 with [milk]F . Alongside its core function of accounting for focus as an information structural phenomenon, Alternative semantics has been taken to provide a key to predicting the partition of a sentence into restrictor and scope of a quantificational adverb or the like. It has been assumed that (the union over) (some subset of) the focus semantic value restricts the domain of quantification by being accommodated into the restrictor. This application of the theory has met with criticism (see Cohen 2009 and references there). But the ‘quantificational’ role of focus is not an integral part of the theory; indeed, Rooth (1992: 108f.) takes care to point out that ‘focus effects’ must be seen as optional. Alternative semantics is primarily a theory of the informational role of focus, and it is primarily as such that it is a presuppositional theory.
7.2.2 Anaphoricity Example (2) is a formulation of the meaning of focus in a static semantic framework. However, it is more adequate, and more in the spirit of Rooth (1992: 91f.), to give a formulation in a dynamic framework, for example, that of Roberts (2003), where meanings are functions from contexts to contexts, conceived as pairs of sets of discourse referents and sets of pairs of worlds and assignments. This can better reflect the typically anaphoric nature of the presupposition: the subset or element of the focus semantic value is a discourse antecedent. (This also makes it possible to dispense with the index on the tilde operator.) (6) ⟦∼⟧ = λϕ < λC: (∃ i ∈ DomC)(∀(w, g) ∈ SatC) g(i) ∈ π2(ϕ). π1(ϕ)(C), {π1(ϕ)} > This can be expanded to: the meaning of the focus interpretation operator maps a meaning ϕ containing an ordinary semantic value π1(ϕ), now a function from contexts to
132 Kjell Johan Sæbø contexts, and a focus semantic value π2(ϕ), now a set of such functions, onto the meaning where the first member is the operation on contexts which is only defined if there is a discourse referent i in DomC that all assignments g ‘in’ SatC (the set of pairs of worlds and assignments that satisfy C) map to a member of π2(ϕ) and which if defined returns what π1(ϕ) maps C to, and where the second member is the singleton containing π1(ϕ).4 The focus presupposition is now an anaphoric presupposition, parallel to the presuppositions of, for example, definite descriptions as described by van der Sandt (1992) and in later work in this tradition. There must be an accessible discourse referent which ‘is’ a member (or a subset) of the focus semantic value (under any assignment in the context). For a definite, by comparison, there must be an accessible discourse referent which ‘is’ a member of the meaning of the NP under any assignment and at any world in the context. This feature of the Roothian theory of focus as a presupposition trigger is important because it predicts that focus is typically (or paradigmatically) sensitive to discourse structure in the concrete sense of previous utterances, such as the utterances of the bracketed material in (4) and (5). It has other welcome consequences, too, which will be discussed in Section 7.2.3 Two properties set the presupposition introduced by focus apart from other anaphoric presuppositions, for example, that introduced by a definite article. First, a proposition (set) type discourse referent is assignment-independent, and thus so is the presupposition: any such referent k in DomC ‘is’ a member (or a subset) of π2(ϕ) under all g (and for all w) in SatC or under none. This constancy is spelt out in SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, Asher (1993) and later work in this tradition), where proposition type discourse referents are equated with representations of clauses as substructures in a multi-layered, or segmented Discourse Representation Structure. Second, accessibility is not a real issue at this level. As shown by Asher (1993: 225ff), for general reasons of anaphora resolution, it must generally be possible to declare a global-level discourse referent for a proposition, no matter how deeply embedded it is; proposition-type discourse referents will thus always be accessible. The same goes for other abstract entities such as sets of propositions and properties.5 In (7a), the antecedent for the pronoun it in the second clause is arguably the proposition that you are a lawyer, and to enable this resolution, there must be a discourse referent for that proposition accessible. In (7b), this same discourse referent can serve as a target for the focus presupposition: the proposition that is its constant value is a member of the focus semantic value. (7) a. I noticed you are interested in becoming a lawyer. It would make your mother proud of you. b. I noticed you are interested in becoming a lawyer. [My best friend]F is a lawyer. Note that—when, as usual, the ∼ operator applies at a sentence level—g(i) is, strictly speaking, no longer a proposition (or a set of propositions) but an operation on contexts (or a set of operations on contexts), since the focus semantic value is now a set of operations on contexts. For practical reasons, however, it will still be viewed and referred to as a (set of) proposition(s). 5 In the same vein, Rooth (1992: 88) takes note: ‘The semantic value of any phrase β is a discourse object, available as an antecedent for free variables.’ 4
Information Structure and Presupposition 133 Note, however, that this proposition is three times embedded, in particular, under the non-veridical predicate interested. It is not, therefore, entailed by the context. As in Dryer’s (1996) theory of ‘activated propositions’, it suffices that some certain proposition (set) is present in the context. Not anything goes, though. We have seen some examples of how the focus presupposition can be verified; here is a case where it fails: (7) c. I noticed you are interested in becoming a lawyer. ??I am a [lawyer]F . Some would say, with Kratzer (2004) (who raises the issue in connection with the stronger focus presupposition hypothesis discussed in Section 7.3, but the point applies here as well), that this infelicity is not typical of presupposition failure, it is too mild and it certainly does not entail a truth value gap. But it is not untypical of the incoherence effects one gets when presuppositions like those triggered by even or too fail; cf. Glanzberg (2005), who argues that not ‘all presupposition failures are expression failures’. The dynamic formulation (6) is weaker than the static formulation (2) in one key respect: what corresponds to the contextually determined value for the free variable in (2) is some previously introduced discourse referent. There are indications that the target for the focus presupposition must be salient and recent, in fact, even more than usual for an anaphoric presupposition. In the examples given so far, the antecedent was indeed quite local. One such indication will be considered more closely in Section 7.2.4.
7.2.3 Accommodation effects A hallmark of anaphoric presuppositions are so-called bridging inferences, or accommodation effects, observed and discussed by, inter alia, Clark (1975), Kripke (1991), and Kamp (1991) in connection with presupposition triggers such as the, again, and too. If a presupposition is not quite verified in the context, we tend to build on what is there and accommodate the rest, often yielding a stronger inference than if the presupposition were accommodated in total. That this pattern extends to focus presuppositions under Rooth’s theory serves to strengthen the case for that theory. Thus both (8a) and (8b) license the (false) inference that Kressmann is a German winery; while in the first case, this is due to the presupposition of the additive too, in the second case it is solely due to the focus presupposition. (8) a. Mary brought a bottle of Kressmann Monopole. As it happened, Sue, too, brought a bottle of German white wine. b. It was lucky that Mary brought a bottle of Kressmann Monopole. [Most]F German white wines are [sweet]F .
134 Kjell Johan Sæbø For a constituent of the first clause to not just partially but fully meet the condition of expressing a member of the focus semantic value of the second clause, Kressmann Monopole must classify as an alternative to the determiner most as applying to German white wines; hence the inference. Note that the inference does not arise for reasons of discourse coherence: the minimally different case (8c), focusing the modifier instead of the determiner, licenses the (true) inference that Kressmann is not a German winery.6 (8) c. It was lucky that Mary brought a bottle of Kressmann Monopole. Most [German]F white wines are [sweet]F . Lakoff ’s (1971) famous example (9a,b) fits smoothly into this picture. (9) a. Paul called Jim a Republican. Then he1 [insulted]F him2. b. Paul called Jim a Republican. Then [he1]F insulted [him2]F . Sentence (9a) only requires us to accommodate that calling somebody a Republican is a (distinct) alternative to insulting that person.7 Sentence (9b), on the other hand, requires us to accommodate—and thus licenses the inference—that calling someone a Republican is (a way of) insulting that person, as this is the only way that the first sentence can count as expressing a member of the focus semantic value of the second; that he1 is now Jim and him2 is now Paul is also necessary for the first clause to count as expressing a proposition of the form that some alternative to he1 insulted some alternative to him2.
7.2.4 Locality of the antecedent Kamp and Bierwisch (2008) note an asymmetry between the presupposition introduced by focus and the one introduced by the adverb again regarding their domain of justification, understood as that portion of context that can or must display their targets. This asymmetry comes to light in a contrast like that between (10), specifically (10b), and (11). (10) (The first night, she cried for almost 30 minutes, …. … The next night, she slept through till about 5.30am!) a. The [next]F night, she slept through [again]F , waking up just after 6am. b. #The [next]F night, she [slept through]F again, waking up just after 6am. (11) (Frankie was sleeping through but the other night he woke at 2am – I tried everything else but he was hungry and wolfed down 8 oz.) √ The [next] night he [slept through] again. F F 6
These examples display two foci where the first can be called, and could alternatively be treated as, a contrastive topic (see Büring, this volume). 7 The presupposed member of the focus semantic value ⟦·⟧f is required to be distinct from the ordinary semantic value ⟦·⟧o (Rooth 1992: 90; cf. also Zeevat 2004).
Information Structure and Presupposition 135 In (10a), both the focus presupposition and the presupposition of again are verified in the very last sentence, and the discourse is felicitous. But (10b), where the latter is again verified in the very last sentence but the former is only verified in the less immediate context, is infelicitous. This situation is reversed in (11), and this time, the discourse is again felicitous. Evidently, then, the focus presupposition is more in need of being justified locally, in the immediate context, than is a presupposition like that of again, though both are arguably anaphoric in nature. Why this should be so is not evident. But an explanation may be at hand if the notion of an antipresupposition (Percus 2006) is taken into account.8 The basic idea is that any sentence with a presupposition competes with the corresponding sentence without that presupposition, which, if used instead, will impose the condition that the presupposition is not verified. By this token, as far as focus presuppositions are concerned, (10b) will ‘antipresuppose’ what (10a) presupposes: that there is a proposition that some other night she slept through. So, while (10b) has its focus presupposition verified in the less immediate context, it has a focus antipresupposition, which should not be verified at all, verified in the immediate context. Example (11) has it the other way around: the presupposition is verified in the immediate context while an antipresupposition is verified in the less immediate context—which is evidently much to be preferred. If it can now be assumed that the immediate context has a prima facie priority over the less immediate context, then verifying the presupposition in the former gives a double gain: not just that the presupposition is verified in the prime piece of context but also that no antipresupposition is verified there. This might explain why focus presuppositions are so narrowly focused on the immediate context. What sets focus as a presupposition trigger apart from triggers like again in this regard is that for any focus structure, there is at least one alternative focus structure introducing a different focus presupposition, thus any utterance will give rise to at least one focus antipresupposition; as for again, or any other lexical or syntactic presupposition trigger, only utterances without it give rise to a related antipresupposition, utterances with it do not. It can be assumed that this is what allows its domain of justification to be less local than that of focus, where any intervening sentence is a potential target for an antipresupposition.
7.3 The background presupposition hypothesis ‘Presupposition’ is often mentioned in the same breath as ‘background’. In the tradition dating back to Chomsky (1972) and Jackendoff (1972), the term presupposition is used 8
For a treatment of the antipresuppositions of focus in Alternative semantics, see Sæbø (2007).
136 Kjell Johan Sæbø as a label for the complement of focus. Mostly, it is used in a loose sense, without a claim that this presupposition behaves like bona fide presuppositions in regard to projection and justification. Once the label is taken seriously, to imply that the focus–background structure of an utterance gives rise to an existential presupposition (the ‘focus closure’) which should be entailed by the context, two opposite positions are found. On the one hand, the putative presupposition is argued to be too strong or too different from bona fide cases (e.g. Rochemont 1986: 41ff., Dryer 1996). On the other, in a relatively recent paper Geurts and van der Sandt (2004) explicitly defend the view, present in work by, inter alia, Atlas and Levinson (1981: 17), Levinson (1983: 183), and Gundel (1985: 97), that focus induces a presupposition in the form of the existential closure of the background.
7.3.1 The proposal by Geurts and van der Sandt Geurts and van der Sandt (2004) defend what they call the null hypothesis, ‘which is that focus is systematically associated with presupposition along the following lines’: (12) The Background-Presupposition Rule (BPR) Whenever focusing gives rise to a background λx.ϕ(x), there is a presupposition to the effect that λx.ϕ(x) holds of some individual. This presupposition is stronger than the focus presupposition in the theory reviewed in the last section, which is that there is a member or subset of the focus semantic value (present in the context). In the terms of that theory, the BPR presupposition equals the union of the focus semantic value, to be entailed by the context. Indeed, Geurts and van der Sandt (2004: 5) contend that the predictions arising from Rooth’s theory tend to be too weak. In their view, a sentence like (13) ‘will normally be heard as implying that’ Paul does live in Paris. In a case like (14), the background ‘gives rise to the presupposition that’ someone did the dishes. (13) Paul doesn’t live in the [sixth]F arrondissement. (14) [I]F did the dishes. The paper by Geurts and van der Sandt (GvdS) was accompanied by a series of critical papers, several of which took issue with the BPR in (12) for making predictions that were too strong, at least if taken in conjunction with the claim that the focus presupposition acts like a bona fide presupposition, as implied by this quote: ‘The main prediction that the BPR gives rise to… is that focusing should cause the projection behaviour that is characteristic of definite noun phrases, factive verbs, and the like’ (Geurts and van der Sandt 2004: 14). Some of these criticisms are reviewed below; see also Reich (2012: Section 7.2.4).
Information Structure and Presupposition 137
7.3.2 Counterargument I: Negation As pointed out by Büring (2004: 67f.), to derive that Paul does live in Paris as a presupposition of (13) it is necessary to assume that the focusing that gives rise to the relevant background has narrow scope, applying below the negation. A background including the negation will trigger a presupposition to the effect that Paul does not live in some arrondissement, a presupposition which is entailed by the descriptive content of the sentence. If, on the other hand, the background does not include the negation, its existential closure, that Paul lives in some arrondissement, is predicted to project across that same negation, like a run-of-the-mill presupposition. Büring goes on to point out a problem with this assumption. To counter the argument against precursors of the BPR based on examples like (15a), which should not presuppose that somebody did the dishes, GvdS suggest that this is really a case of so- called verum focus (see Lohnstein, this volume) where just the negation is in focus, corresponding to (15b), where what is presupposed is that there is a polarity (position or negation) p such that p(someone did the dishes). Since this amounts to presupposing that someone or no one did the dishes, it is an innocuous, if (or exactly because it is an) uninformative, presupposition. (15) a. [Nobody]F did the dishes. b. [No]Fbody did the dishes. But here, Büring notes, it is necessary to assume that the focusing that gives rise to the relevant background scopes above the negation. It is not clear, though, that (13) shows the right focus structure for the intended reading of the sentence. von Stechow (1981: 113ff.) describes a parallel case as exhibiting two foci, corresponding to (16):9 (16) Paul does [not]F live in the [sixth]F arrondissement. If this move is made, it may not be necessary to assume that the background presupposition is computed under the scope of the negation after all; the presupposition will be that there is a polarity p and a number n such that p(Paul lives in the n’th arrondissement). Although this is again a tautology as long as negation is among the possible values for p, it gives the intended reading once (as assumed by von Stechow) alternatives to polarities are required to be distinct (the notion of distinctness in connection with focus alternatives is discussed by Zeevat 2004). 9 von Stechow is careful not to call the inference that, here, Paul does live in Paris a presupposition; for him, the conjunction of the descriptive content of the sentence and its ‘topic information’ (= its focus closure) is an implicature.
138 Kjell Johan Sæbø This will again create problems for the treatment of a sole polarity focus as in (15b), where it is essential that negation is among its own alternatives. So, it would seem that any way the desired inference is derived from (13)/(16) on the BPR, (15b) needs special treatment, whether in terms of the scope of focusing or of the domain of existential closure.
7.3.3 Counterargument II: Rooth’s examples Rooth (1999: 241f.) argued that a presupposition like the one that was eventually proposed by GvdS is too strong in certain cases where focus has a discourse-contrastive function. He considers two examples, (17) and (18). (17) A: Did someone borrow my badminton racket? B: I don’t know. If [John]F borrowed it, you can forget about getting it back in one piece. (18) A: Did anyone win the football pool this week? B: Probably not, because it’s unlikely that [Mary]F won it,and she’s the only person who ever wins. Rooth notes that if focus is supplemented by an it-cleft in (18), the response becomes infelicitous: (18) C: #Probably not, because it’s unlikely that it’s [Mary]F who won it, and she’s the only person who ever wins. This shows that the putative existential presupposition arising from focus is at any rate different in nature from the existential presupposition of clefts (the contrast cannot be due to the exhaustivity implication of the cleft, as only one person could have won the football pool anyway). Both examples show that an existential presupposition fails to project out of a context (the conditional clause, the operator unlikely) that a normal presupposition should, and the cleft presupposition does, project out of: it is incompatible with the larger context but this does no harm. Geurts and van der Sandt might respond to this objection by appealing to so-called local accommodation: the presupposition that someone borrowed it, arising in the conditional clause of (17), is accommodated in the same clause, resulting in the reading spelt out in (17C): (17) C: I don’t know. If someone borrowed it and [John]F borrowed it, you can forget about getting it back in one piece. But to this, Jäger (2004: 112) objects that ‘a generalization has been missed here because [in (17)] intuitively the focus in B’s answer is related to A’s question, and this fact is not
Information Structure and Presupposition 139 covered in a GvdS style explanation’. Indeed, an appeal to local accommodation would save an infelicitous discourse like (19) as well as a felicitous discourse like (17) or (18). (19) A: Did someone borrow my badminton racket? B: #I don’t know. If [John]F borrowed mine, I wouldn’t expect getting it back in one piece.
7.3.4 Counterargument III: Antecedent inaccessibility Another way to interpret the data in (17) and (18) in GvdS’s perspective is that the BPR presupposition has access to antecedent information that is inaccessible to other presuppositions, like those of clefts. In fact, GvdS argue that as long as presupposition and assertion do not share a discourse referent, there is no reason why the antecedent has to be accessible, and moreover, that their presupposition is not the only one that can access ‘inaccessible’ antecedents; Zeevat (2002) noted that under certain circumstances, that of too has this capacity (too): (20) (Harry may well stay in New York for dinner. /Bill believes that Mary will eat in New York.) √John is having dinner in New York too. Now while this piece of discourse may not be judged incoherent, there are many cases where the putative background presupposition and that of too show different behaviours. (7b) (from Section 7.2.2, repeated here as (21a), as compared to (21b)) is a case in point, as is (22a) as compared to (22b): (21) a. I noticed you are interested in becoming a lawyer. [My best friend]F is a lawyer. b. I noticed you are interested in becoming a lawyer. # [My best friend]F is a lawyer [too]F . (22) a. Why would I want to go to the University of Texas? [My father-in-law]F went there and wouldn’t … b. Why would I want to go to the University of Texas? # [My father-in-law]F went there [too]F and wouldn’t … GvdS might counter this evidence by saying that the presupposition that somebody is a lawyer or went to the University of Texas does not target a part of the local context but the Common Ground, where this information is uncontroversial; by contrast, the too presupposition is more anaphoric. But this contradicts the fact that the second sentence of (21a) or (22a) is infelicitous ‘out of the blue’, with a Common Ground but without a local context. In sum, it seems that the ability of the too presupposition to access
140 Kjell Johan Sæbø embedded antecedents is quite limited, and that the presupposition argued for by GvdS is rather special in so freely being able to do so.
7.3.5 The BPR as a default? GvdS actually distinguish two versions, or construals, of their BPR: On a strong construal…, backgrounds are invariably associated with presuppositions, while on a weak construal backgrounding generates presuppositions by default:… only in the absence of indicators to the contrary. In our view, the weak version of BPR is at least as plausible as the strong version… (2004: 3) [W]e are not at all convinced that the BPR must be viewed as a law that allows of no exceptions, and we would be just as happy arguing that it is… triggered only ceteris paribus… (2004: 37)
In the light of the foregoing discussion, it would seem that the weak version is the sensible one. This ties in with the Stalnakerian notion of presupposition (Stalnaker 1974), which leaves it to the conversational participants whether the presupposition is actually presupposed. The background presupposition would be ‘contextually defeasible’ (Simons 2001), or ‘soft’ (Abusch 2002). But if so, that is, if problematic cases like (17B), (18B), (21a), and (22a) are responded to by suspending the background presupposition, there being here ‘indicators to the contrary’, the question remains what can explain the fact that even in these cases there is something presupposed. In fact, something is presupposed which fits with the Roothian focus presupposition (cf. Section 7.2). Conversely, from the perspective of that theory, the question arises what can explain the observed tendency for focus to be understood as if it were to convey the background presupposition. Gawron (2004: 93) seeks to explain this tendency by asking how ‘propositional identity [= Roothian] presuppositions’ are typically bound. And it seems a very reasonable answer that they can be bound by asserted propositions, and that this always should be the first choice…. How should they be accommodated? And a reasonable answer is, they should be accommodated as asserted propositions whenever possible. (Gawron 2004: 95)
Thus if we hear (23), our first expectation is that a proposition that x took the letter for some alternative x to the butler is not just present in but entailed by the context, and if we hear it out of context, we accommodate that, so in effect we accommodate that someone took the letter. (23) Maybe [the butler]F took the letter. This account of the lure of the BPR is rooted in the theory of Rooth, where the presupposition is that there is a (set of) proposition(s) with (a) focus alternative(s) present in
Information Structure and Presupposition 141 the context, and it rests on the idea that being entailed by the context is the typical way of being present in the context. A more general account is proposed by Abusch (2010), also on the basis of Alternative semantics: the meaning of focus may not directly involve an existential presupposition, but through the set of alternatives, it does create the potential for a general process to generate a defeasible presupposition. The ‘Default Constraint L’ is to apply to other ‘soft’ triggers as well, in particular, to wh-questions, as long as they induce sets of alternatives. (24) Default Constraint L
If a sentence γ is uttered in a context with common ground c, and γ embeds a clause ψ which contributes an alternative set Q, then c is such that the corresponding local context d for ψ entails the disjunction of Q. (Abusch 2010: 66)
7.4 Presuppositions and IS: Correlations Even if the ‘background inference of focus’ (the term used by Abrusán 2013 for the presupposition argued for by Geurts and van der Sandt 2004) is not a proper presupposition, we might expect there to be an indirect connection between the focus–background structure of a sentence and any proper presupposition the sentence does carry. Perhaps more accurately, there are likely to be correlations between Givenness (Rochemont, this volume) and presupposition. The reason is that both are sensitive to discourse structure: what is marked as given must be present in the immediate Common Ground (Krifka 2008: 262) and—in a certain sense—vice versa (Schwarzschild 1999: 155ff.), and a presupposition should be entailed by the Common Ground; some should even find discourse antecedents. Indeed, Simons et al. (2011) subsume presupposition triggers, intonational backgrounding, and yet more under a single category of ‘not-at-issueness’. One would expect, then, a tendency for presuppositional parts of a sentence to be givenness marked (deaccented, say), and in particular, one would perhaps be surprised to see or hear a presupposition form a focus on its own. Yet this is not uncommon, for two different reasons. One is the relative ease with which some presuppositions can introduce new information through accommodation (Section 7.4.1).10 The other is that even when a presupposition is in fact entailed by the Common Ground, it is not necessarily present in the immediate Common Ground, at least not without alternatives along with it, in which case focus marking may override givenness marking (Section 7.4.2). On the other hand, one does find that presuppositions are often givenness marked in the extreme form of being elided (Section 7.4.3). 10 Abbott (2000), for one, warns against identifying the dichotomy presupposed/asserted information with the dichotomy given/new information.
142 Kjell Johan Sæbø
7.4.1 Negative evidence I: Accommodation We would only expect presuppositions to correlate with givenness when they are actually pre-supposed, that is, when they are verified in the sense of being entailed by the context. As several studies have shown, however, this is far from always the case for the presuppositions that (should) arise from, say, factive verbs or it-cleft constructions. For the latter, consider (25): (25) It was Harry who taught me how to tango. Steedman (1991: 276), referring to Delin (1989), comments: If we compare the function of such a sentence used as an answer to the question I know that Mary taught you the lambada, but who taught you how to tango? with its use as an answer to Why are you so fond of Harry?, then it is clear… that such a presupposition may either be assumed or used to supply novel information…. In the latter case, the presupposition that somebody taught the speaker how to tango will typically be ‘accommodated’…. Under these circumstances, the presupposition will typically be uttered with an H* LL% intonation, marking novel information.
Prince (1978) identified such cases as ‘informative presupposition’. Spenader (2002), studying naturally occurring factive verbs in corpora, shows that factives are commonly used when the factive complement is not previously established to be true. Most of the time factive presuppositions have to be accommodated (whether ‘globally’ or ‘locally’). Beaver (2010) goes a step further and establishes a link between the projection of factive presuppositions and information structure, concluding that ‘the crucial factor determining projection behavior is… the choice between an accented or deaccented propositional complement’. Spenader’s results, he writes, ‘seem much in accord with two observations I have made in this paper, both of which suggest a weakening of the generalization that factive complements are normally presupposed. First, even third person uses of factives do not imply that the speaker is taking the factive complement for granted. Second, for spoken utterances the presupposition only seems to fully kick in when the factive complement is deaccented.’ (Beaver 2010: 96) The following pair of examples may serve to illustrate: (26) a. If they [discover]F she was doping, her records will be erased. b. If they discover she [was doping]F , her records will be erased. In (26a) the presupposition projects but in (26b) it does not.11 There is a moderate and a radical reading of Beaver’s conclusions about the interaction between presupposition and information structure. On the former, if the complement is 11
As Beaver appears to concede, this may be an overgeneralization: a presuppositional reading may be available for (26b), at least if the factive verb is also stressed (2010: 94).
Information Structure and Presupposition 143 not deaccented, that is a sign that the factive presupposition is not verified but must be accommodated (in (26b) locally); on the latter, the presupposition does not even ask to be verified or accommodated when the complement is not deaccented; it does not, as it were, get off the ground in the first place but forms part of the at-issue content. Whether and how this radical conclusion can be sustained is a question which will not be pursued here, but note that it would restore a parallel between givenness and presupposition which is otherwise broken: factive presuppositions are not solely triggered by the factive lexical items but also to some extent by the givenness structure of the utterances they appear in.
7.4.2 Negative evidence II: Focus marking instead A presupposition can be verified in the sense of being entailed by the context and yet carry an accent (more exactly: that part of the utterance from which a part of the presupposition can be read off can carry an accent). The reason is that there may be reason to place (a part of) the presupposition in focus, and ‘focus accentuation overrides deaccentuation of given constituents, in the sense that focus has to be expressed by accent’ (Krifka 2008: 264). While there can be different reasons for focusing a presupposition, one is to express a contrast.12 Consider first a case of a factive verb, regret: (27) (A friend of mine had an abortion when she learned that her baby had no chance of living outside the womb. From what she’s said,) she [regrets]F that [it happened]F , but [not]F that [she had the abortion]F . A version where either or both of the factive complements are deaccented would be deviant. This is due to the juxtaposition of the two complements, along with the juxtaposition of the positive with the negative attitude. Note how this contrast focus accentuation overrides a givenness deaccentuation: both the fact that it happened and the fact that she had the abortion are present in the immediate context, but that does not warrant deaccentuation. Givenness marking and presupposition clearly part ways at this point. The presuppositions of so-called additive particles like too are generally taken to require discourse antecedents and to resist accommodation (see, e.g., Winterstein 2011), so here a parallel to givenness marking might seem particularly likely. And to be sure, in many cases, that part of the sentence that expresses a part of the presupposition is indeed deaccented, as in (28): (28) (I’ve decided to spend some energy focusing on my love of baking by taking a cake decorating course. My sister-in-law Becca suggested that we take it together,) as [she]F [too]F loves baking.
12
See Repp, this volume.
144 Kjell Johan Sæbø Informally, too adds the presupposition that for some alternative α to the particle’s ‘associate’ a, the sentence that comes from the ‘host’ sentence by replacing a by α is true. For a case like (28), this coincides with the presupposition that some member of the focus semantic value of the host sentence, distinct from its ordinary semantic value, is true: the associate she is the only constituent in focus in the host sentence, so the focus semantic value of this sentence is the set of propositions where some alternative is substituted for the value of this pronoun (the speaker’s sister-in-law Becca). But for various reasons—apart from accommodation—this is not always so. One reason has to do with locality: the presupposition may be verified in the context but not in the immediate context; not so recently as to even license deaccentuation. The following text fragment is an example of that. (29) (The Black Hills fill with 600.000 to 800.000 bikers…. Most were riding … Harleys…. We also saw an interesting electric car…. Interesting and unusual rock formations…. The Badlands are just an hour from Sturgis, and) [here]F [too]F , we saw [plenty of bikers]F . The presupposition of too—that we saw plenty of bikers somewhere else—is verified, but the verifying piece of text is so far removed that the focus marking of the object is appropriate, as the ensuing focus presupposition is also verified—in between we saw something other than plenty of bikers.
7.4.3 Positive evidence: Ellipsis and zero anaphora Ellipsis and deletion can be seen as extreme forms of deaccentuation and thus as further means of marking constituents as given (Krifka 2008: 263): what is not expressed but still supposed to be understood must be retrievable from the immediate Common Ground content. Do presuppositions correlate with ellipsis and deletion in significant ways? They do. For one thing, the presuppositions of additive particles can often not be determined from the utterances where the particles occur but must be recovered from the context— in fact, the very piece of context that serves to verify the presupposition. The ‘host’ sentence may consist in just the ‘associate’—we have a case of ‘stripping’ then, or ‘bare argument ellipsis’—or the associate plus a pro-verb (usually do in English)—VP ellipsis. (30) Met up with the girls yesterday; Mary too. (31) I love your tree. Mary does, too. These two examples are indicative of a broader pattern whereby ellipsis is supported or even enabled by presuppositional particles.13 13
See, e.g., Winterstein (2011) on the role of additives.
Information Structure and Presupposition 145 Secondly, presuppositions have been argued to be at the source of so-called zero argument anaphora (Sæbø 1996). The generalization here is that a zero argument has an anaphoric interpretation just in case it is involved in a presupposition triggered by the verb; and the explanation, set in DRT, rests on two assumptions: a discourse referent occurring in a presupposition is introduced in the presupposition, and a discourse referent introduced in a presupposition must (in the sense of van der Sandt 1992) be bound by a discourse antecedent. This gives the givenness effects observable in (32)–(34) and generally a species of ellipsis that can be called presupposition-driven. (32) George sometimes invited John and Paul to come over and play together, and his parents approved (of it). (33) The Abbey doesn’t belong to Lady Severinge, and I don’t fancy she will ever return (to it). (34) When George III died in 1820, Caroline became Queen Consort and returned to England, despite efforts to dissuade her (from it). The verbs approve, return, and dissuade all trigger presuppositions that involve their optional— and here parenthesized— arguments. Specifically, dissuade triggers the presupposition that the direct object has been planning to do P (what the subject dissuades her from doing). The variable P, as part of the presupposition, is introduced in the presupposition if it is not syntactically bound, and that means that it must be discourse bound. Thus the presuppositions of the verbs permit the arguments to remain covert but retain the anaphoricity of overt pronouns. Again, what we see is a pattern whereby lexical presuppositions correlate with, and indeed enable, givenness marking in its extreme form.
7.5 Conclusions This article has surveyed and discussed the core points of contact between notions of information structure and notions of presupposition. Section 7.1 was devoted to the ‘weak’ presuppositional semantics for focus developed by Rooth (1992), describing its properties with respect to verification and accommodation and showing that it can successfully account for a wide range of facts. Section 7.2 examined the stronger thesis, recently revived by Geurts and van der Sandt (2004), that focus–background structures give rise to existential presuppositions, and found the counterarguments that have been raised to carry considerable weight. Section 7.3, finally, looked into the relationship between Givenness and run-of-the-mill presuppositions, finding that this relationship
146 Kjell Johan Sæbø is looser than might be expected, mainly because a presupposition may need focusmarking instead of givenness-marking. Both lexical presupposition triggers and information structural markings impose conditions on the Common Ground. One property that distinguishes information structural conditions—be they presuppositions associated with focus, discussed in Section 7.2, or (in a sense their mirror images) conditions associated with givennessmarking, discussed in Section 7.4—from (other) presuppositions, however, is their sensitivity to the immediate Common Ground. As seen in 7.2.4, a focus presupposition should not be separated from its target by a piece of context that would be a target for an alternative focus presupposition; as seen in Section 7.4.2, presuppositions can have targets so far away that givenness-marking is no longer licensed. So locality emerges as a prominent property of conditions on the Common Ground imposed by information structural markings vis-à-vis (other) presuppositions; this is an issue that future research may fruitfully seek to further examine and explain.
Chapter 8
Inf ormation St ru c t u re A Cartographic Perspective Enoch O. Aboh
8.1 Introduction A question that is central to modern comparative syntax is whether there could be direct relations between information structure packaging and structure building (e.g. Chomsky 1971; Jackendoff 1972; Gundel 1974; Valduví 1990). Within the Minimalism framework, for instance, Chomsky (1995: 220) briefly addressed this question suggesting that surface effects (e.g. commonly associated with Topic–Focus articulation) ‘involve some additional level or levels internal to the phonology component, postmorphology but prephonetic, accessed at the interface along with PF and LF’. This view restates Chomsky’s (1971) original conclusion that information- structure- sensitive word order variations derive from PF (Phonological Form) and LF (Logical Form) interface properties. Section 8.1.2 briefly presents some recent proposals that adopt (some version of) this view. Zubizarreta (1998, 2010, this volume), for instance, argues that information- structure-sensitive surface rearrangements derive from the interaction between checking operations involving purely formal features, and phonologically conditioned movement operations (i.e. P-movement). Under this view, the interaction between information structure and clause structure is mediated by p-features. Szendrői (2001) and Fanselow (2006, 2007) adopt a more radical view in which surface manifestations strictly derive form syntax–PF interface phenomena that relate to information structure only indirectly. Alternatively, the cartographic approach, discussed in Sections 8.1.3 and 8.1.4, postulates that information structure directly relates to syntactic heads that project within the clausal left periphery (Rizzi 1997). This view is supported by data from cross- linguistic data (e.g. Romance, Germanic, Kwa, Bantu, Chadic, Gur, Sign Languages). In
148 Enoch O. Aboh some of these languages, information-structure-sensitive notions (e.g. topic, focus) are encoded by means of discourse markers that trigger various constituent displacement rules. Such empirical facts are compatible with the cartographic view in which lexical choices condition information packaging and clause structure. Section 8.1.5 concludes the chapter.
8.2 Information structure: a syntax–PF interaction Studies on stress assignment and focus meaning in English (e.g. Chomsky 1971, 1977; Jackendoff 1972; Selkirk 1984, 1995; Zubizarreta 1998, 2010, this volume) show that: (i) There is a correlation between stress assignment and focus interpretation. (ii) Stress assignment rules make reference to syntactic notions (e.g. c-command). (iii) Stress assignment rules correlate with prosody- driven movement (e.g. scrambling). (iv) Prosody-driven word order alternations affect meaning. In accounting for these four interrelated observations, Zubizarreta (1998) argues for a syntactic model that postulates two types of features: f(ormal)-features, involved in checking operations, and p(honological)- features, relevant for P- movement. f-features and p-features enter the computation at different points: the computation of p-features occurs after f-features have been ‘checked’ or ‘valued’. A converging sentence is therefore one for which both formal operations converge. Because Zubizarreta’s (1998, 2010) analysis in terms of P-movement involves the syntactic component, this view does not exclude the possibility that some languages (e.g. Bantu, Kwa) can display discourse marking functional items that may encode discourse-related f-features responsible for rearrangement rules. The question then remains how P-movement is parametrized. Fanselow (2006, 2007), Szendrői (2001, 2003) and much related work argue for a ‘pure’ syntax and seek to exclude discourse-related features from the syntactic component altogether. Under such views, the relation between clause peripheral phenomena and information structure is indirect. Szendrői (2003: 44, 47), for instance, claims that movement of the focused constituent to sentence-initial position in Hungarian results from an interaction between Hungarian stress rule, a stress–focus correspondence principle, and a stress-driven movement rule. Assuming that topics are adjoined, Szendrői (2001, 2003) argues that the constituent a kalapját ‘her cap’ in (1a) raises to the position left-adjacent to the verb in the clausal left periphery in order to bear the main stress rather than to check the focus feature in a focus phrase (as originally proposed by Brody 1990, 1995). An adaptation of Szendrői’s (2001: 42) representation is given in (1b).
A CARTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE 149
(1) a. [FP [DP A női [FP [DP a KALAPJÁTj] vette [VP [V the woman her cap-ACC took
le tV ] tDP tDP]]. off (Szendrői 2003: 48)
‘It was her hat that the woman took off (not her scarf).’ b.
FP a nő
FPfocus
a KALAPJÁT
Fʹ F vette
IP le
In this representation, the topic a nő ‘the woman’ is adjoined to FP containing the focus element. FP is a mere label for the Functional Projection hosting the fronted constituent. Although representation (1b) derives the right word order, a number of questions arise with regard to the structural and licensing properties of FP/FPfocus. One also wonders whether the heads of these projections can be morphologically expressed.
8.3 Mapping the clausal left periphery Rizzi (1997) addresses these questions showing that a unitary approach to the complementizer system (CP) coupled with a free adjunction rule, as in (1b), cannot account for the following sentences. (2) a. She thinks that [Top under no circumstances] [should] one start one’s own business. (McCloskey 1992: 16, 18) b. A Teeja a pensa che, a torta, STASELA che nu-a the Teresa scl thinks that, the cake, tonight that not-it
mangia nisciun, nu duman. eat nobody, neg tomorrow ‘Teresa thinks that nobody would eat the cake tonight, not tomorrow.’ (Paoli 2001: 276). c. Credo [Top a Gianni], [Foc QUESTO], [Top domani], gli dovremmo dire. ‘I believe that to Gianni, THIS, tomorrow we should say’ (Rizzi 1997: 295–296)
150 Enoch O. Aboh Sentence (2a) indicates that there are structural positions between the complementizer and the subject that license the fronted negative constituent under no circumstances and the inverted modal should. Similar data led Rizzi (1997) to conclude that the clausal left periphery (CP) involves a complex structure. Rizzi’s conclusion is compatible with the Italian examples (2b), which instantiates two complementizers che (Paoli 2001), and (2c) which indicate that the space between the two complementizers can host a rigid sequence of topics and focus represented in structure (3). (3) [ForceP … [TopP* … [FocP … [TopP* … [FinP … [TP … ]]]]]] ForceP is the interface between the propositional content expressed by TP and the superordinate structure (i.e. the main clause or the discourse). It encodes clause-typing. TopP and FocP on the other hand license topicalized and focalized constituents, respectively. Rizzi (1997: 288) argues that: the topic–focus system is present in a structure only if needed, i.e., when a constituent bears topic or focus features to be sanctioned by a spec-head criterion. If the topic focus field is activated, it will inevitably be sandwiched in between force and finiteness, as the two specifications must terminate the C system upward and downward, in order to meet the different selectional requirements and properly insert the C system in the structure.
FinP expresses tense and modal specifications that match with those of the TP domain. It represents the interface between the proposition and the complementizer system. Since Rizzi’s seminal paper, there has been a wealth of literature in support of the cartography approach to the clausal left periphery and its relation to information structure (cf. Haegeman 1995, 2003, 2012; Rizzi 1996, 1997, 2001; Belletti and Rizzi 1996; Belletti 1999, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2009; Poletto 2000; Frascarelli 2000; Benincà 2001; Aboh 2004a, 2004b; Aboh et al. 2007; Cinque and Rizzi 2008; Aboh and Pfau 2011; Benincà and Munaro 2011; Biloa 2013; among others). In terms of these studies, prosodic phenomena such as those discussed in Szendrői (2001, 2003), Fanselow (2006, 2007), are analysed as properties of the clausal left periphery. In the following paragraphs, I illustrate these views based on data from the Gbe languages, a subgroup of the Kwa family. Unlike the Romance and Germanic languages mostly discussed in the literature, these languages offer the empirical advantage that they express the functional heads in (3) by means of segmental and supra-segmental material. Indeed, studies on information structure that treat discourse-related constituent displacements as PF phenomena do not usually take into account the fact that what is seen as mere intonational pattern may sometimes be related to underlying morphemic specifications. This can be shown by the fact that some languages display segmental material in the contexts where other languages apparently make use of prosody.1 The Gungbe sentence in (4a) is comparable to the Hungarian example (1a). Yet, this example differs from the Hungarian 1
See Ladd (2008) for discussion.
A CARTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE 151 one only to the extent that, aside from using the clause initial position as Hungarian does, Gungbe exhibits a topic and a focus marker where Hungarian relies on intonation. (4) a. Náwè woman
lɔˊ DET
yà TOP
gbákún étɔˋ n hat her
wὲ FOC
é she
ɖè. [Gungbe] remove
‘As for the woman, she took off HER HAT.’ b. TopP spec náwè lɔ
Topʹ Top yà
FocP
spec gbákún étɔn
Focʹ Foc wε
FinP é ɖè gbákún étɔn
Likewise, fronted constituents in Hungarian and Gungbe tend to respect a hierarchy in which topics precede focus, as in (1b) and (4b). Given these representations, the only difference between the Hungarian structure in (1b) and the Gungbe one in (4b) is that the latter involves FocP and TopP which host the focused and topicalized constituents attracted by the focus and topic heads. Because these functional heads are obligatorily expressed in Gungbe topic and focus constructions and exhibit a particular syntax cross-linguistically (cf. Aboh et al. 2007; Biloa 2013), one cannot argue that they are mere equivalents of phonological prominence in Hungarian (pace Eilam 2011). Instead, Gungbe-type languages suggest that cross-linguistic surface manifestations, sometimes analysed as mere PF phenomena, could be expressions of tonemes functioning as discourse markers. This requires a change of perspective: information structure is primarily expressed by morphemes that may be segmental or tonemic. Due to their syntactic properties, these morphemes may trigger rearrangement operations which in turn may affect intonation (Aboh 2010a). Although this view may look a bold statement while analysing Indo-European languages, it is compatible with the following pieces of data from Fongbe and French.
8.3.1 Tonemes as functional heads Yes–no questions in Gungbe and Fongbe (two closely related tone languages) are marked by a sentence-final particle. The particle is a floating low tone (i.e. a supra-segmental element) in Gungbe, but a full segment in Fongbe. Sentence (5a) is a declarative in both Gungbe and Fongbe. Note that the verb wá ‘come/arrive’ bears a high tone. In the yes–no
152 Enoch O. Aboh questions (5b vs 5c), this verb is realized with an additional low tone (i.e. wâ) in Gungbe (5b), unlike in Fongbe in which a yes–no question includes the final marker à (5c). (5) a. Kòfí Kofi
wá. come
[Gungbe/Fongbe]
‘Kofi came.’ b. Kòfí Kofi
wâ? come.Q
c. Kòfí Kofi
wá come
[Gungbe] à? Q
[Fongbe]
‘Has Kofi come?’ Aboh (2004a, 2010a) accounts for the contrast between (5b) and (5c) arguing that the clause- final floating low tone represents the Gungbe question marker. This toneme has a syntax comparable to that of the Fongbe segmental question marker à: it occurs clause-finally, and when it co-occurs with other discourse markers it occurs to the right edge from where it attaches to the proposition. In this regard, Aboh (2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2010a) reports that even though the topic and focus markers realize the clausal left periphery in (4a) they can also mark the clause as a whole. In such contexts, these markers may cluster clause-finally together with the interrogative maker. This is instantiated by the Gungbe example in (6a) and its Fongbe equivalent in (6b). These sentences are felicitous in a context where a speaker being exasperated by the cries of the child asks whether she has not yet eaten as planned. In the Gungbe example, the floating tone attaches to the last particle in the sequence, yielding the form wɛ̏ with an extra low tone (6a). This contrasts with Fongbe in which the same focus marker retains its original low tone and precedes the question particle à (6b).2 (6) a. Ví child
lɔ̀ det
má neg
ɖù eat
nú thing
wɛ̏? foc.inter
[Gungbe]
wὲ foc
[Fongbe]
‘Has the child not eaten (yet)? b. Ví child
ɔ̀ det
ɖù eat
nú thing
ă neg
à? inter
‘Is it not the case that the child has eaten (as expected)?’ In accounting for the distribution of these discourse markers in relation to the expression of negation in Gbe, Aboh (2010b) argues that the Gungbe example in (6a) results from snowballing movement of the proposition (i.e. represented here by FinP) into 2
The Fongbe example is adapted from Lefebvre and Brousseau (2002: 135, 485).
A CARTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE 153 [spec FocP], forming the sequence ví lɔ́ má ɖù nú wὲ!’ the child has not eaten’ in (7). This sentence would be felicitous in a context where the speaker is exasperated by a repetitive question of an interlocutor about why the child is crying. (7) Ví Child
lɔ́ det
má neg
ɖù eat
wὲ … ! foc
nú thing
‘the child has not eaten (yet) … ’ In the context of a yes–no question like (6a), the sequence in (7) further pied-pipes to [spec InterP], whose head Inter is expressed by the floating low tone ‘ˋ’, thus generating the final wɛ̏ now represented in (8). (8) InterP spec
Interʹ Inter
FocP spec
Focʹ Foc wε
FinP ví lɔ má ɖù nú
This analysis extends to the Fongbe sentence (6b) in which the question marker à realizes Inter. Note that while negation is systematically expressed by the preverbal morpheme má in Gungbe, it may be encoded by the sentence-final particle ă in Fongbe (cf. Lefebvre and Brousseau 2002). In discussing this marker, Aboh (2010b) concluded that right-edge negative elements in Gbe are better analysed as modal elements belonging to the complementizer system where they encode (negative) evidentiality.3 Accordingly, the Fongbe negative particle is analysed on a par with left-peripheral markers (e.g. topic, focus, inter) which, as we saw already, occur to the right edge when they mark the proposition as a whole. In this analysis the complementizer system involves a negative phrase Neg°[C]that projects below the focus phrase. Neg° attracts the proposition in its specifier thus forming the negative sequence in (9a). This sequence can be further marked for focus, as in (9b) which is equivalent to the Gungbe example in (7). 3 Lefebvre
and Brousseau (2002: 128) reports that ‘ă appears to express the speaker’s disagreement with the content of the proposition.’
154 Enoch O. Aboh ɖù eat
(9) a. É 3sg
nú thing
ă. neg
‘It is not the case that s/he has eaten.’ [Not: s/he has not eaten.]4 ɖù eat
b. É 3sg
nú thing
aˇ neg
wὲ. foc
‘It is not the case that s/he has eaten.’ The sequence in (9b) may be subsequently questioned, for instance, in a context where a participant in the discourse doubts the utterance in (9b) and asks for confirmation as in the English sentence ‘Are you saying that it’s not the case that s/he has eaten?’ In Fongbe, such a sequence will be rendered as in our preceding example (6b). What is remarkable in this example is that the question particle à marks the sequence in (9b) which includes both the evidential negative marker and the focus marker, ǎ and wὲ, respectively. Following the rationale in (8), the Fongbe facts suggest that a sentence like (6b) derives from snowballing movement of the proposition to [spec NegP] within the left periphery, followed by pied- piping of NegP to [spec FocP], and pied-piping of FocP to [spec InterP] as illustrated in (10). (10) InterP spec
Interʹ Inter à
FocP spec
Focʹ Foc wε
NegP spec
Negʹ a
FinP ví ɔ ɖù nú
4
According to Lefebvre and Brousseau (2002) an English expression like ‘he did not eat’ will be rendered in Fongbe by means of a preverbal negative marker which also happens to be má in Fongbe.
(i) É 3sg
má neg
ɖù eat
‘S/he has not eaten.’
nú thing
[Fongbe]
A CARTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE 155 There is ample data from Niger-C ongo and other languages which support this analysis. Nkemji (1995), Koopman (2000) and Biloa (2013) for instance, present a detailed discussion of various (Grassfield) Bantu languages, where generalized pied-piping of the type discussed here licenses interrogative mood, aspect, negation, and focus. Similarly, Aboh et al. (2005) and Aboh and Pfau (2011) argue that Indian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), respectively display interrogative structures where the proposition must raise leftward to the specifier of the question particle that realizes Inter. Given these cross-linguistic facts, I conclude that (i) Discourse markers responsible for information structure packaging can take the form of (supra)-segmental material that encodes context independent meaning (e.g. topic, focus); and (ii) discourse markers expressing the features [topic], [focus] must be treated on a par with markers expressing the features [negative], [interrogative] together with which they realize the clausal left periphery. These markers trigger morphosyntactic operations that affect word order (see Section 8.1.4 for further discussion). The following section on French yes–no questions is compatible with the proposed cartographic approach to grammatical tonemes.
8.3.2 A toneme in French yes–no questions French yes–no questions come in three forms that can be contrasted with the declarative sentence in (11a). Such a declarative sentence typically displays an SVO order and a final falling contour. Accordingly, example (11a) forms a minimal pair with the yes–no question in (11b) which is pronounced with a final rising contour (cf. Post 2000).5 (11) a. Pierre est venu. Peter is come ‘Peter has come.’ b. Pierre est venu? Peter is come ‘Has Peter come?’ The examples in (12a,b) illustrate two additional strategies in French yes–no questions: (12a) involves complex inversion (cf. Kayne 1972; Kayne and Pollock 2001), while (12b) includes the ‘question marker’ est-ce que in initial position (cf. Munaro and Pollock 2005).
5
These examples are comparable to the Gungbe sentences in (5a,b).
156 Enoch O. Aboh (12) a. Pierre a-t-il mangé? Peter has.3sg eaten ‘Has Peter eaten?’ b. Est-ce is-dem
que comp
Pierre Peter
a has
mangé? eaten
‘Has Peter eaten?’ Setting aside complex aspects of French intonation, a common denominator to the yes–no questions in (11b) and (12) is the use of a final rise (cf. Di Cristo 1998: 202). Even though example (12) illustrates questions which are marked by a syntactic or lexical device, these strategies do not exclude the final rise typical of French yes–no questions. Looking at these examples from a Gbe perspective, a natural explanation for French yes–no questions would be to propose that examples (11b) and (12a,b) involve a yes–no question particle: a toneme that determines the final rising intonation. As in Gbe, this question morpheme expresses interrogative force. This would also mean that the syntactic strategies in (12) are not primarily motivated by the feature [interrogative] even though they may be conditioned by its syntax. Keeping to the same rationale, I therefore propose that the French question particle realizes Inter and attracts the proposition as a whole into its specifier position [Spec InterP]. Example (11b) can therefore be described as in (13) in which Inter contains a null morpheme indicated by a high tone ‘ˊ‘ for expository reasons (irrelevant projections are ignored). (13) InterP spec
Interʹ Inter
FinP Pierre est venu
Thus, data from Fongbe, Gungbe, and French support the cartographic view of the clausal left periphery. While it is traditionally accepted that Inter involves a formal feature [interrogative] associated with interrogative grammatical items, the status of focus markers as grammatical elements with the formal feature [focus] is still much debated. Looking at the distribution of the feature [focus] and its interaction with generalized pied-piping,
A CARTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE 157 the following section argues that [focus] must be analysed on a par with ordinary formal features.
8.4 The feature [focus] and generalized pied-piping in Gungbe The preceding section showed that Gbe languages involve discourse markers such as illustrated by the question–answer pair in (14). In the question (14a) the sentence-final floating low tone affects the last word: the determiner lɔ̂. In the answer (14b), however, the focus marker wὲ attaches to the focused phrase àvún lɔ́ ‘the dog’, while the topic marker yà attaches to the topic phrase àsé lɔ́ ‘the cat’. Note that in this case, the determiner marking the cat displays a high tone contrary to the example (14a) in which it bears an additional low tone expressing interrogative.6 (14) a. Mì 2pl
mɔ̀n see
àsé cat
lɔ̂? det.inter
‘Did you see the cat?’ b. Àsé cat
lɔ́ det
yà top
àvún dog
lɔ́ det
wὲ foc
nyàn-ὲn chase-3sg
sɔ́n from
xwégbὲ! house
‘As for the cat, the dog chased it out of the house!’ The description of these examples as compared to similar markers in other languages led me to conclude that discourse markers (e.g. focus, topic) as well as speech modality markers (e.g. interrogative) are expressed cross-linguistically by (supra)- segmental material and therefore project in syntax where they trigger specific rearrangement rules (i.e. Internal Merge). Given this stance, it must be the case that the discourse features [topic], [focus] are visible to the computational system similarly to other commonly assumed formal features.7 This would mean that [topic] and [focus] are context independent features that enter probe-goal relations whenever they are present in the derivation (Rizzi 1997). This view predicts that in addition to entering probe–goal relations, [topic] and [focus] can trigger other phenomena contingent on chain formation. A case in point is generalized pied- piping as discussed below. 6 Although I illustrate the focus marker in Gbe on the basis of Gungbe, I would like to stress that all Gbe languages display such a marker. The facts presented here are therefore not isolated. 7 See Chomsky (1995: 235ff) on formal features.
158 Enoch O. Aboh
8.4.1 focus, snowballing movement, and generalized pied-piping In terms of Aboh (2004a, 2004b, 2004c), snowballing movement, illustrated in (8), (9), (10), and (13) is an instance of generalized pied-piping in which the probe (e.g. Inter, Top, Foc) attracts the event head expressed by the verb. Consequently, FinP (or TP) as a whole, is fronted to the specifier of the relevant probe. Interestingly, however, this kind of pied-piping can also happen when the probe attracts a focused argument that cannot be extracted, as shown by the example in (15). Here, the wh-phrase ɛ́tɛ́ is attracted to the focus position, but the whole bracketed OV sequence containing the wh-phrase and the verb phrase is pied-piped to the left of the focus marker wὲ. Note that this example is interpreted as an object wh-question even though the wh-phrase is embedded in a larger constituent. (15) [ɛ́tɛ́ what
ɖà cook
ná to
Alúkû] Aluku.pcl
wὲ foc
Súrù Suru
tè? prog
‘What is Suru cooking for Aluku?’ In order to understand this example, we need to step back and consider wh- questions in Gungbe. In Gbe languages, the wh-phrase must occur to the left of a focus marker (16) (cf. Ameka 1992, 2010; Lefebvre and Brousseau 2002; Aboh 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2010a; Fiedler and Schwarz 2007). These examples briefly illustrate subject (16a), object (16b) and time adjunct (16c) wh-questions in Gungbe. Example (16d) shows that in-situ questions are excluded in Gungbe. (16) a. Mɛ́nù who
wὲ foc
ɖà cook
lɛ́sì rice
ná to
Àlúkú Aluku
sɔ̀? yesterday
‘Who cooked rice for Aluku yesterday?’ b. ɛ́tɛ́ what
wὲ foc
Súrù Suru
ɖà cook
ná to
Àlúkú Aluku
sɔ̀? yesterday
‘What did Suru cook for Aluku yesterday?’ c. Hwètɛ́nù when
wὲ foc
Súrù Suru
ɖà cook
lɛ́sì rice
ná to
Àlúkú? Aluku
‘When did Suru cook rice for Aluku?’ d. *wὲ foc
mɛ́nù who
ɖà cook
lɛ́sì rice
ná to
Àlúkú Aluku
‘Who cooked rice for Aluku yesterday?’
sɔ̀? yesterday
A CARTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE 159 Aboh and Pfau’s (2011) cross-linguistic study demonstrates that in wh-questions, the wh-phrase does not raise to license a wh-feature as usually assumed in the literature, but in order to check the focus feature under Foc (expressed here by the marker wὲ), see also Bošković (2001, 2002) for discussion. This view is fully supported by example (16) as well as the following indirect questions. (17) a. Ùn 1sg
ɖɔ́ that
kànbíɔ́ ask
ɖà cook
[[Súrù Suru
lɛ́sì rice
lɔ́] det
yȁ]? top.inter
‘I asked whether Suru cooked the rice (as expected).’ b. Ùn 1sg
ɖɔ́ [[[FocPSúrù that Suru
kànbíɔ́ ask
wὲ] ɖà lɛ́sì foc cook rice
lɔ́] det
yȁ]? top.inter
‘I asked whether Suru cooked the rice (as expected).’ ɖɔ́ [[[FocP Mɛ́nù that who
c. Ùn kànbíɔ́ 1sg ask
wὲ] foc
ɖà cook
lɛ́sì rice
lɔ́] det
yȁ]? top.inter
‘I asked who cooked the rice (as expected).’ In these examples, the verb kànbíɔ́ ‘to ask’ selects for an interrogative embedded clause, hence the clause-final additional low tone on the topic marker yà in (17a). The latter marks the embedded interrogative phrase and therefore occurs last (see Section 8.1.3 for discussion). In addition, the embedded proposition contains a focus phrase (FocP) that attracts focused elements (i.e. DPs and wh-phrases alike, 17b,c), as partially represented below.
(18) …… V kànbíɔ
ForceP spec
Forceʹ InterP
Force ɖɔ
Spec TopP
spec FocP
Interʹ Inter
Topʹ
Top Focʹ yà
spec mεnù/Súrù Foc wε
TP mεnù/Súrù ɖà lεsì lɔ
160 Enoch O. Aboh In this representation, Inter expressed by the interrogative floating low tone ‘ˋ‘ marks TopP headed by the marker yà. The latter marks the proposition containing FocP whose specifier is realized by the focused phrase Suru or the wh-phrase mɛ́nù itself marked by the focus marker wὲ under Foc. It appears from this description that the proposition embedding the topic phrase raises to [spec InterP] to license interrogative, while movement of the focused phrase to TopP licenses the topic feature under Top. Finally, movement of the focused constituent or the wh-phrase to [spec FocP] licenses the focus feature under Foc. That full clauses, DPs and wh-phrases are sensitive to movement to [spec FocP] indicates that the relevant feature responsible for this syntactic operation is the feature [focus], rather than [wh]. With this description in mind, let us now go back and consider object wh-questions in Gungbe OV sequences as illustrated in example (15).
8.4.2 Generalized pied-piping in Gungbe OV sequences Aboh (2004a, 2004b, 2009), and Aboh and Smith (2012, 2014) and references cited there discuss OV sequences in Gbe in great details. Due to space limitations, I will not repeat this discussion here, but I refer the interested reader to these studies and references therein. For the current discussion, it suffices to remark that Gungbe displays aspectually determined OV sequences of the type in (19). In this example, the construction encodes progressive aspect. (19) Súrù Suru
tò prog
lɛ́sì rice
ɖà cook
lɔ́ det
ná to
Alúkû. Aluku.pcl
‘Suru is cooking the rice for Aluku.’ Two observations are in order: (i) OV sequences are typically introduced by an aspectual particle or verb, here tò. The aspectual morpheme tò also encodes location and has the property of changing its form into tè, when its complement is displaced as indicated by the contrast in (20). (20) a. Súrù Suru
tò be.loc
xwégbè. house
‘Suru is at home.’ b. Xwégbè house
wὲ foc
‘Suru is at home.’
Súrù Suru
tè/*tò. be.loc
A CARTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE 161 (ii) OV sequences are typically delimited to the right by a final particle as indicated by the elements gbé and jí in (21). Example (21a) encodes purposive, while (21b) expresses inceptive. (21) a. Súrù Suru
wá come
lɛ́sì rice
ɖà cook
lɔ́ det
gbé. pcl
‘Suru came in order to cook the rice.’ b. Súrù Suru
jὲ start
lɛ́sì rice
lɔ́ det
ɖà cook
jí. pcl
‘Suru began to cook the rice.’ With regard to example (19), the clause-final particle (glossed as pcl) is a floating low tone that attaches to the last word, hence the high–low tone on the last syllable of Alúkû in (19) unlike in (16) where this personal name ends with a high tone (i.e. Àlúkú).8 Aboh (2004a, 2004b, 2009) derives OV sequences from an underlying VO structure by suggesting that the sequence to the right of the aspectual verb tò in (19), involves a complex structure embedding both an edge FP, headed by the particle that occurs clause-finally and an inflectional domain (IP) headed by an aspect phrase. It is further proposed that the inflectional domain involves an EPP position which is licensed by fronting of the object to a preverb position. Subsequently, IP raises to [spec FP], as a consequence of which the particle typical of OV sequences occurs clause finally. This analysis is described in (22). (22) tò [fp [f [ip …O…Asp….V….. O]]]
An important conclusion reached in Aboh (2009: 13) is that OV sequences form a constituent. In addition, the preverb object position qualifies as an EPP position, that is, a freezing position as defined in Rizzi and Shlonsky (2007). Be it so, object extraction to the clausal periphery for focus purposes cannot transit via this internal EPP position: the language must find a way to circumvent the freezing position. In this regard, Gungbe shows that when the object is extracted for focus or wh-question, the verb must reduplicate (23a) unless it is preceded by an aspect marker as in (23b). Example (23c) shows that failure to reduplicate the verb or to insert an aspect marker in the preverb slot leads to ungrammaticality.9 8 This is additional evidence that tonemes can indeed function as grammatical particles in Gbe and arguably in other languages as well. 9 See Aboh (2004a, 2007b, 2009), Aboh and Smith (2012) for discussion on OV sequences and reduplication.
162 Enoch O. Aboh (23) a. ɛ́tɛ́ what
wὲ foc
Súrù Suru
ɖìɖà cook.cook
tò prog
ná to
Alúkû Aluku.pcl
‘What is Suru cooking for Aluku?’ b. ɛ́tɛ́ what
wὲ foc
Súrù Suru
tò prog
ná prosp
(*ɖì)ɖà cook/cook
ná to
Alúkû Aluku.pcl
‘What is Suru about to cook for Aluku?’ c. *ɛ́tɛ́ what
wὲ foc
Súrù Suru
ɖà cook
tò prog
ná to
Alúkû Aluku.pcl
‘What is Suru cooking for Aluku?’ Under the assumption that reduplication is a form of INFL—comparable to the preverbal aspect—that allows the licensing of a null expletive in the preverbal EPP position, Aboh (2004a, 2007b, 2009) concludes that the focused phrase or the wh-phrase does not transit through the preverbal EPP position on its way to [spec FocP]. If this were the case, the wh-phrase or the focused constituent would be frozen in place leading to the ungrammatical sequence (24), where [spec FocP] remains empty. (24) *wὲ foc
Súrù Suru
tò prog
ɛ́tɛ́ what
ɖà cook
ná to
Alúkû Aluku.pcl
‘What is Suru cooking for Aluku? Yet, one possibility that comes to mind is that in contexts where the wh-phrase gets frozen in the EPP position, the language may allow generalized pied-piping of the whole constituent containing the wh-phrase. This is indeed what happens in example (15), which we can now describe as being subsequent to (24) where the wh-phrase is frozen in the EPP position. As a consequence the constituent containing the wh-phrase and the VP raises to [spec FocP] to check the focus feature. The derivation goes as follows. We first begin with the sequence in (25a) with the wh- phrase in its base position. In (25b), the wh-phrase raises to the preverbal EPP position where it freezes. Then the focus marker merges (25c) and attracts the wh-phrase bearing the focus feature. The latter, however, cannot extract from the EPP position. Consequently, the constituent containing the wh-phrase and the VP is pied-piped to [spec FocP], (25d = 15). (25) a. Súrù Suru
tò prog
[ɖà cook
ɛ́tɛ́ what
ná to
b. Súrù Suru
tò prog
[ɛ́tɛ́ what
ɖà cook
ɛ́tɛ́ what
Alúkû] Aluku.pcl ná to
Alúkû] Aluku.pcl
A CARTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE 163 c. wὲ Súrù foc Suru
tò prog
d. [ɛ́tɛ́ what
ɛ́tɛ́ what
ɖà cook
[ɛ́tɛ́ what
ɖà cook
ná Alúkû] to Aluku.pcl
ɛ́tɛ́ what wὲ foc
ná to
Alúkû] Aluku.pcl
Súrù tè [ɛ́tɛ́ ɖà ɛ́tɛ́ ná Alúkû] Suru prog
The change of the progressive aspect marker from tò into tè in a similar way to example (20b) provides us with a further piece of evidence that what fronts to [spec FocP] is the complement of tò, that is, FP. The focus feature on the wh-phrase is therefore responsible for the generalized pied-piping of FP to [spec FocP]. That this is indeed the case can further be shown by the fact that predicate focus in OV sequences also results in the generalized pied-piping of FP to [spec FocP]. (26) [Lɛ́si rice
ɖà cook
ná to
Alúkû] Aluku.pcl
wὲ foc
Súrù Suru
tè! prog
‘Suru is cooking rice for Aluku!’ As discussed in Aboh (2006a, 2010a) and Aboh and Dyakonova (2009), the Gbe languages display an asymmetry between predicate focus in VO structures versus OV structures in that the latter allow generalized pied-piping of the constituent containing VP to [spec FocP], while the former results in doubling structures in which a token of the verb realizes the focus position while a doublet occurs within IP as indicated in (27).10 (27) ɖà cook
(wὲ) foc
Súrù Suru
ɖà cook
lɛ́si rice
ná to
Alúkú Aluku
‘Suru cooked rice for Aluku.’ The cited references provide very detailed accounts of these structures in Kwa languages and beyond showing that generalized pied-piping is triggered in (26), but not in (27), due to the fact that the verb cannot be extracted from OV structures because it is part of a constituent that is licensed in the specifier of FP as described in (22). This is not the case in VO constructions.
8.5 Conclusion Put together, the cross-linguistic data presented here indicate that [focus], [topic], and [interrogative] represent formal features that are properties of lexical elements 10
See Aboh and Dyakonova (2009) for an analysis of these structures in terms of parallel chains.
164 Enoch O. Aboh and may sometimes trigger generalized pied-piping and snowballing movement. While these phenomena are not unexpected in a probe–goal theory where specific features can be probed over by higher heads and may thus lead to pied-piping of additional material, it seems to me hard to argue that these phenomena can alternatively be classified as mere surface PF manifestations. Note that pied-piping of FinP, FocP, and TopP as illustrated in this chapter is no more spectacular than commonly assumed phrasal movement. Indeed phrasal movement systematically results in generalized pied-piping. For instance, in the sequence, ‘which house did John buy?’ where the phrase [which house] fronts, the wh-feature being attracted to the left periphery is not a property of ‘house’ but ‘which’. Yet, what must front in this example is the whole sequence [which house]. Based on this, Chomsky (1995: ch. 4) argues that generalized pied-piping is a fundamental property of syntactic computation and it is contingent on the formation of chains. The latter, we know, only involves formal features. This chapter shows that discourse features [focus] and [topic] can participate in such generalized pied-piping (i.e. chain formation), a piece of evidence that they belong to the set of formal features visible to the syntactic computation.
Chapter 9
Nuclear Stre s s a nd Inf ormation St ru c t u re Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
9.1 Introduction It has long been recognized that information structure plays a fundamental role in modelling the prosody of a sentence, in particular prominence relations (e.g. Bolinger 1958, 1972; Halliday 1967; Chomsky 1971; Jackendoff 1972 for early works on English).1 Yet, it has remained a matter of debate what aspects of information structure and prosody fall under the purview of grammar. Among those early works, Chomsky (1971) and Jackendoff (1972) stand out in acknowledging that the notion of focus (the non- presupposed or asserted part of the sentence) is grammatically represented,2 and that the Nuclear Stress (NS) of the sentence plays a fundamental role in its identification.3 This 1 Research
in prosodic phonology across different languages (e.g. Jun 2005) has recognized two typological ways of encoding the phonological notion of prominence, culminatively (via the Nuclear Pitch Accent, which is aligned with its metrical counterpart—the Nuclear Stressed syllable) and demarcatively (via a prosodic juncture aligned with the edge of a syntactic category), e.g. Korean, Japanese, Bengali, and many Bantu languages; see also Féry (2001) on French. In the present paper, we will be concerned only with the culminative type of language, and in particular with Germanic (i.e. English, German) and Romance (e.g. Spanish, Italian). 2 Rochemont (1986) defines focus in terms of the dichotomy new versus old (or given) information. Yet other research has shown that the discourse-based ‘focus/presupposition’ dichotomy, which has semantic import (Rooth 1985), must be kept apart from the ‘new/old information’ dichotomy, which are discourse notions that may affect the prosody of the sentence but lack semantic import. In fact, the focused constituent can contain old (or given) information; see Ladd (1980, 1996), and 9.4 of this chapter. 3 The hypothesis that the focused constituent is directly identified by the NS as stated in (1) in languages that use pitch accents to define prominence (see note 1) has not gone unchallenged. An alternative proposal, put forth by Selkirk (1984, 1995) and Gussenhoven (1984), has argued that focus identification is directly related to the distribution of pitch accents in a sentence and not to the notion of NPA or its metrical counterpart—the NS of a sentence. More specifically, these authors argue that pitch– accent assignment and predicate–argument structure is mediated by focus projection rules or focus– domain formation rules. The NPA (which corresponds to the metrical notion of NS) is identified as the
166 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta constraint can be stated as in (1), where the NS is aligned with the intonational nucleus of the sentence, known as the Nuclear Pitch Accent or NPA4 (see also Zubizarreta 1998; Reinhart 2006). (1) The focused constituent must contain the rhythmically most prominent word, i.e. the word that bears the Nuclear Stress (NS). Thus, in a wide focus example such as (2a), where the entire sentence is focused, the NS falls on the rightmost constituent (i.e. the PP complement of the object). This is often referred to as the ‘unmarked’ stress pattern. The unmarked NS can identify the entire sentence as the focused constituent (wide focus), as well as varying degrees of narrow focus: the VP, the DP direct object, or the adnominal PP complement, as long as the constituent that bears the unmarked NS is contained within the focused constituent. Thus, (2a) is felicitous as an answer to a question like ‘What happened?’ (wide focus) as well as to an answer to a question such as ‘What did the cat do?’ (narrow VP focus) or ‘What did the cat read?’ (narrow DO). When the focus is narrowed down to a subpart of the sentence that does not contain the unmarked NS, for example the subject in (2b), the rhythmically most prominent stress must shift to the subject. Such a sentence is felicitous only as an answer to a question like ‘Who read a book about rats?’. This type of stress, which does not allow for ‘focus projection’,5 is referred to as ‘marked’ stress.6 This remains a fundamental fact that must be accounted for by any theory of focus identification. (2) a. The cat read a book about rats. b. The cat read a book about rats. In this chapter, we will use the term ‘unmarked stress pattern’ to refer to patterns that are unaffected by discourse factors, such as the focus/presupposition divide and previously-mentioned or given information (or information accommodated as such by the speaker/hearer). While such ‘distilled’ contexts, which are required to define the last pitch-accented word in the intonational domain (Newman 1946 on the NSR as a late rhythmic rule), but plays no fundamental role in defining the possible scope of the focus within the sentence. See also Nespor and Vogel (1986), who endorse the above ‘pitch-accent first’ view of focus–prominence relations, as well as Féry (2011, discussed in 9.2. We will not discuss Selkirk’s and Gussenhoven’s proposal in this chapter, but see Zubizarreta (1998: 78–85) for a review, as well as Myrberg and Riad (this volume). 4 The NPA, being the center of the intonational contour, plays a central role in constraining the type of intonational contours that can precede and follow it (see Ladd 1980, 1996 for an overview). 5 On ‘focus projection’ theories, see Arregi (this volume). 6 We will be concerned here only with primary stress in wide focus contexts, and not with secondary stress, which typically falls on the subject in a transitive sentence (e.g. the cat in example (2a) in the text). Unlike primary stress, secondary stress in ‘unmarked stress’ patterns is determined, at least in part, by eurhythmicity considerations; see Zubizarreta (1998: 38–40, 166 (note 3)). We note that the above mentioned view differs from that of other theories, which propose an algorithm that generates both the primary and secondary stress in wide focus contexts by the same general algorithm; see in particular Chomsky and Halle (1968), Halle and Vergnaud (1987), Cinque (1993), Reinhart (2006), Kahnemuyipour (2004/2009).
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 167 unmarked patterns, may at times seem elusive because of the ‘accommodation’ factor, we believe that a theoretical understanding of such patterns is important to gain insight into the ‘marked stress patterns’. Among scholars who have recognized the role of phrasal stress in the identification of the scope of the focus within a sentence, the domain of computation of phrasal stress itself has been under debate. Some have argued for the direct computation of NS on the syntactic structure (Cinque 1993; Kahnemuyipour 2004/2009; Reinhart 2006). We refer to it as the strictly syntactic approach. Scholars working within prosodic phonology have argued that phrasal stress is computed on prosodic domains, in particular on the so-called phonological or major phrase (the p-phrase), which are themselves defined in relation to syntactic categories, more precisely in relation to lexical syntactic categories (e.g. Selkirk 1995; Kratzer and Selkirk 2007; Féry 2011, among many others). We refer to it as the prosodic-phrasing approach. Truckenbrodt (2006) proposes a mixed approach, with phrasal stress computed directly on the syntactic structure, and NS identified as the last phrasal stress in the prosodic intonational domain. Other researchers have argued for the computation of NS on a metrically-interpreted syntactic structure, in which certain elements of the syntactic structure may be metrically invisible (Halle and Vergnaud 1987; Zubizarreta 1998; Zubizarreta and Vergnaud 2005; Nava and Zubizarreta 2010; Zubizarreta and Nava 2011). We refer to it as the metrically-interpreted syntactic approach. On the empirical side, two important issues have increasingly come to the forefront of discussion. One is the issue of variability of the positioning of NS in Germanic in wide focus contexts (the unmarked stress pattern). The other issue concerns the cross- linguistic variation in NS placement, in particular in Germanic languages, as opposed to the Romance type (e.g. Ladd 1996; Samek-Lodovici 2005; Vallduví 1995; Zubizarreta 1998; Nava and Zubizarreta 2010; Zubizarreta and Nava 2011). In Sections 9.2 and 9.3, we discuss how some of the above approaches deal with the variability within and across languages in the unmarked stress patterns, namely the proposal put forth by Kratzer and Selkirk 2007, who build on insights from Kahnemuyipour 2004/2009, by Féry (2011), and by Zubizarreta and Nava (2011, based on Zubizarreta and Vergnaud 2005). Another important question under debate is whether distinct algorithms, perhaps of an entirely different nature, are involved in the computation of ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ stress patterns. While some works assume such distinctions (e.g. Cinque 1993; Kahnemuyipour 2004/2009; Kratzer and Selkirk 2007), others have explicitly argued in favour of it (e.g. Reinhart 2006; Zubizarreta and Nava 2011). Bolinger (1972) explicitly denies this distinction, as do Schmerling (1976), Selkirk (1984, 1995), and Gussenhoven (1984). In Section 9.4, we present the view put forth by Reinhart (2006), in which the marked stress patterns are generated as a consequence of a process of anaphoric deaccenting (i.e. A-deaccenting triggers NS-Shift), as well as an alternative view by Féry and Kügler (2008), where it is suggested that discourse notions such as newness, givenness, and narrow focus directly modulate the pitch range of a sentence (a process referred to as ‘scaling’). Finally, we briefly review some results that support the view that the prosody of narrow focus is indeed generated by a distinct mechanism that has direct access
168 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta to information structure and is subject to dialectal/idioletal preferences, in stark contrast with the NS in the ‘unmarked stress pattern’, which is generated by an encapsulated grammatical algorithm. Yet, the debate on the origins of the marked vs unmarked stress pattern remains an open question and awaits further investigation.7
9.2 The domain of computation for phrasal stress In this section, we present a short overview of some of the more recent approaches to ‘unmarked’ stress in wide focus contexts. We center the discussion on how these approaches handle the variability of NS placement in Germanic.
9.2.1 The strictly syntactic approach vs the prosodic approach The classic Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) was put forth by Chomsky and Halle (1968). The cyclic application of this rule, along with certain conventions, predicts NS placement on the last constituent of the sentence, thus capturing the fact that in a transitive SVO sentence, the main prominence is on the object, as shown in (2a). One important challenge to the classic NSR, although certainly not the only one, is the fact that in V-final Germanic languages, in sentences like (3a) and (3b), NS does not fall on the last constituent (namely, the verb), but on the DO and PP complement, respectively. (3) a. Hans Hans
hat has
[[ein a
[Buch]] book
gelesen]. read
‘Hans has read a book.’ b. Peter Peter
hat has
[[an on
[einem a
[Papier]]] paper
gearbeitet]. worked
‘Peter has worked on a paper.’ 7 A reviewer
brings up another important issue which we will cannot give full justice to in this chapter, namely the question of whether the position of NS identifies the possible focus domains in wide and narrow focus contexts alike (the view assumed in this chapter), or whether syntactic structures associated with narrow focus should be annotated with a feature ‘focus’ that is then interpreted prosodically. A theoretical related question is: how ‘minimalist’ is core syntax? In the minimalist framework put forth in Chomsky (1995, 2001), it is assumed that the syntactic properties of phrases are uniquely determined by the properties of the lexical items that compose them. A syntactic feature ‘focus’ is an odd feature within such conception of grammar.
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 169 Cinque (1993) put forth a proposal that attempted to abstract away from word order by fully exploiting the structural information provided by the syntactic structure. More specifically, this author proposed an algorithm that identifies the NS position with the most deeply embedded node in the syntactic structure. The complement, being the most deeply embedded node in the VP, is identified as carrying main stress, regardless of whether the language is verb-final or verb-initial. Cinque’s proposal also provides an account for the complement vs adjunct distinction noted by Krifka (1984), if it is assumed that the adjunct is adjoined to the verbal projection, unlike the complement, which is a sister to the verb; cf. (3b) and (4). It is proposed that adjuncts and specifiers are not part of the ‘main path’ of the clausal syntactic structure and therefore their internal structure is invisible to the computation of NS. (4) Peter Peter
hat has
[vP an on
einem a
kleinen small
Tisch table
[vP gearbeitet]]. worked
‘Peter worked on a small table.’
With the introduction of the notion of ‘phases’ as the relevant syntactic domain for the interface components of the grammar (Chomsky 2001), a new way of thinking about the interaction of syntax and phrasal stress presented itself. Chomsky 2001 identified two syntactic categories as defining a ‘phase domain’: the CP and the vP, and their sister nodes, TP and VP, respectively, as the domain of spell-out and interpretation (i.e. the interface domains). Adger (2007) put forth the proposal in (5): (5) The spell-out domain of a phase is the domain for phrasal stress assignment. In an attempt to capture the primacy of objects in transitive sentences in both head initial and head final languages, Kahnemuyipour (2004/2009) further refines this proposal as in (6):8 (6) Assign phrase stress within the highest constituent within the spell-out domain. The rule in (6) accounts for the position of NS in (3) if it is assumed that the DP object in (3a) and the PP locative in (3b) are in a position higher than the verb within the spell-out domain at the point where the NS algorithm applies; this is attributed to the fact that V-to v applies, leaving the DO or the PP argument as the highest constituent in the structure.9 On the other hand, if the PP adjunct in (4) is outside the spell-out domain, it will not receive the NS. Given the V-to v assumption, the spell-out domain 8
Note that further assumptions need to be made concerning the ultimate placement of NS within a complex DP. Kahnemuyipour (2004/2009) argues, based on Persian, that the algorithm for phrasal stress assignment within the DP is independent of the algorithm for determining NS within the sentence. 9 See Kahnemuyipour (2004: 128) for a detailed discussion of ditransitive structures along the lines of Larson (1988).
170 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta (VP) will contain no phonological material. It is assumed that in such cases, the NS goes on the closest non-null element. In the case of (4), the closest non-null element is the verb.10 Kratzer and Selkirk (2007) propose a modified, prosodic version of Kahnemuyipour’s phase-based account of phrasal stress assignment. According to their proposal, the domain for phrasal stress is the phonological (or major) phrase, which itself is defined as the highest phrase within the spell-out domain of a phase; see (7). It is furthermore assumed that the prosodic head of the major phrase bears phrasal stress, and the last phrasal stress is identified as the NS. (7) The highest phrase within the spell-out domain of a phase corresponds to a prosodic major phrase in phonological representation. The DO in (3a) and the PP in (3b) constitute a major phrase and therefore a domain for phrasal stress, and being the last p-phrase in the intonational phrase (or i-phrase), they are ultimately identified as the bearer of NS. This framework can account for the contrast between (3b) and (4) to the extent that the PP adjunct is assumed to be outside the prosodic VP spell-out domain of vP. Another version of phrasal stress based on prosodic phrasing is proposed by Féry (2011), and it adds to the system the notion of ‘prosodic domain integration’. Unlike Kratzer and Selkirk’s analysis, Féry’s proposal is embedded within a constraint-ranking Optimality-Theoretic framework.11 We will abstract away from these theoretical differences to gauge the commonalities and differences between the two approaches. As in Kratzer and Selkirk’s analysis, in Féry’s proposal, XPs are mapped onto prosodic phrases (8), the head of each prosodic domain (p-phrase and i-phrase) is accented, and the prosodic head of an i-phrase is the rightmost one (9) (equivalent to the NS constituent in the classic NSR approach). The innovation proposed by Féry is that an XP argument can be prosodically integrated with its adjacent head into a larger p-phrase (10a), thus giving rise to cases in which a p-phrase is embedded within another p-phrase. Furthermore, a notion of prosodic subordination is introduced for adjuncts (10b), thus paving the way for a different account of the argument-adjunct contrast in (3)–(4). The complement PP in (3b) will be prosodically integrated with its adjacent head, but not
10 To
account for the fact that in English, the NS goes on the final constituent irrespective of whether it is a complement or an adjunct (e.g. John worked on the paper, John worked at the office), Kahnemuyipour adopts Cinque’s analysis of adverbials, whereby adverbials are universally generated as specifiers of functional projections above VP, and the English word order is obtained by moving the verbal phrase above the functional projection that contains the adverb. As mentioned earlier in the text, it is furthermore assumed that when the spell-out domain is empty (the lowest VP in this case), the NS goes on the closest non-null element. In the case of English intransitives with a PP locative adjunct, the closest non-null constituent would be the locative PP adverb. See Kahnemuyipour (2004: Section 4.5.2) for further details. 11 On the interaction of prosody and information structure in a constraint- based optimality framework, see Samek-Lodovici (this volume).
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 171 the PP adjunct in (4b), which is analysed as ‘subordinate’ to the argument-predicate prosodic domain.12
(8) A syntactic maximal projection including at least a prosodic word is contained in its own prosodic domain.
(9) Align the right boundary of every i-phrase with its head. (10) a. An XP argument can be prosodically integrated with its adjacent head into a larger p-phrase. b. The p-phrase of an adjunct is subordinated to the p-phrase of an argument- predicate complex.
In the next section, we discuss in further detail the systems put forth by Kratzer and Selkirk (2007) and Féry (2011), and how they deal with variability of NS placement in certain structural contexts.
9.2.2 Variability in NS placement in Germanic 9.2.2.1 The case of intransitives As is well-known, Germanic SV intransitives exhibit variability in the location of NS (Chafe 1974; Schmerling 1976; Selkirk 1984, 1995; Sasse 1987; Zubizarreta 1998; Nava and Zubizarreta 2010; Irwin 2012). Renditions with NS on the subject and with NS on the verb are both attested with SV intransitives in wide-focus contexts. While some authors have correlated the variability with the unergative/ unaccusative distinction (e.g. Zubizarreta 1998; Kahnemuyipour 2004/2009; Irwin 2012), it appears that variability in NS placement cuts across the two types of intransitives. Based on data from a Question & Answer production task with 34 native English speakers, Zubizarreta and Nava (2011) report that while variability is systematic with unergatives (e.g. an actress was crying vs an actress was crying; a guest sang vs a guest sang, where underlines indicate location of NS), it is more skewed with unaccusatives. In particular, while verbs of appearance systematically elicited NS placement on the subject (e.g. the aliens arrive, the police came, a rabbit appeared), some variability was found in other sub-classes of unaccusatives (the major fell, the magician disappeared). While alternating intransitives systematically elicited NS on the subject in that study (e.g. a window broke), Chafe (1974) and Sasse (1987) report variability with that verb class as well. Based on a fine-grained analysis of the context associated with variability of NS placement with intransitives, 12
As we will see later, the rules in (10a) should say ‘ … integrate with its adjacent head into a larger p-phrase or i-phrase’ and (10b) should say ‘ … subordinated to the p-phrase or i-phrase of an argument- predicate complex’.
172 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta Sasse (1987) argues that the distinction is related to the thetic (eventive) vs categorical (topic–comment) distinction. Verbs of appearance (arrive, come, appear) are typically associated with eventive predicates, and therefore they systematically give rise to NS on the subject. Kratzer and Selkirk (2007) recast the thetic vs categorical distinction in terms of stage-level vs individual-level predicates, and propose that while the subject of stage- level predicates occupies the Spec of Tense Phrase (TP) (a silent spatio-temporal topic is assumed to be present in such structures), the subject of individual-level predicates occupies the Spec of a higher Topic Phrase (TopP). Some further assumptions are made. In particular, it is assumed that when a verb (or verb cluster) is the only element in a spell-out domain, it moves out to the v projection, thus emptying out the VP. Prosodic spell-out skips spell-out domains that are empty. Thus, the example in (11a), with NS on the subject, has the structure in (11b). The VP being empty, it does not constitute a prosodic spell-out domain. The next spell-out domain will then be TP,13 rule (7) identifies the subject in Spec of TP as a major phrase, that is, the last one in the i-domain and therefore the locus of NS.14 (11) a. Ich I
hab’ have
gehört, heard
dass that
Metallarbeiter metal workers
gestreikt gone-on-strike
haben. have
b. [TopP pro [TP Metallarbeiteri [vP ei [VP gestreikt] gestreikt haben]]].
An example of a subject in Spec of TopP is given in (12a), and its associated structure in (12b). TopP is assumed to constitute a phase, and TP its spell-out domain. Furthermore, an Elsewhere Condition is postulated that states that a spell-out domain with eligible material must contain a major phrase stress. In (12b), the sole eligible element within the TP spell-out domain is the verb, so it will constitute a p-phrase, and ultimately bear the NS (being the last p-phrase within the i-domain).15 (12) a. Ich hab’ irgendwo gelesen, dass der König von Bayern spinnt. I have somewhere read that the king of Bavaria is.crazy
b. ...[TopP der König von Bayerni [TP ei [vP ei [VP spinnt] spinnt]]].
It should be noted that the assumption that the verb moves out of the VP and into the v projection when it is the unique phonological material in the VP (which is a crucial assumption to account for NS on the subject in (11)) is not without consequences. In
13
It is assumed that TopP (like CP) constitutes a phase, and TP its spell-out domain. Note that the assumption that the lexical verb has moved out of the VP in (11) is crucial in order to account for the fact that phrasal stress ends up on the subject. If the verb were to remain inside the VP, then it should carry phrasal stress, VP being a spell-out domain when it contains phonological material. 15 A reviewer notes that in Kahnemuyipour’s system, the individual- vs stage-level distinction would be modelled in terms of presence vs absence of a lower phasal domain. 14
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 173 particular, it undermines a possible explanation of the Krifka fact in (4). In effect, by the same logic that applied to (11), being the only element in the VP spell-out domain, the verb (or verb cluster) will move out to the v projection, thus emptying out the VP. Recall that prosodic spell-out skips domains that are empty. Consequently, in (4), the verb and the PP adjunct would no longer belong to distinct prosodic spell-out domains; they are both part of the TP spell-out domain. By rule (7), we would then expect that phrasal stress (and hence NS) will fall either on the subject, if the subject is located in Spec of T (see (4′i) below) or possibly on the PP adjunct, if the subject is in Spec of Top and the adjunct counts as part of the TP domain (see (4′ii)), but we would not expect phrasal stress to fall on the verbal participle which is assumed to be in the vP domain. Therefore, some further assumption would be needed to prevent the verb from moving out of the VP in such cases. The logic of the analysis suggests that the locative adjunct (for some reason that remains to be understood) forces the verb to stay in the VP; it would then constitute a major p-phrase and bear phrasal stress by the Elsewhere Condition mentioned earlier. (4′) (i) [TopP pro [TP Peter hat [an einem kleinen Tisch [vP ei [VP gearbeitet] gearbeitet]]]]. (ii) [TopP Peteri hat [TP ei [an einem kleinen Tisch [vP ei [VP gearbeitet] gearbeitet]]]]. To account for the variability of NS placement in SV intransitives, Féry also appeals to the topic status of the subject of categorical statements, which occupy a distinct syntactic position from that of subjects of thetic (eventive) statements. It is proposed that prosodic phrasing and prosodic integration are sensitive to that syntactic distinction. Thus, in the case of (11b), the subject XP located in Spec of T is mapped onto a p-phrase and is prosodically integrated within a larger prosodic domain that contains the verb (see rule (10a) and note 13), giving rise to a single i-phrase, as shown in (13a) (small caps indicate pitch-accented word). Since the subject is the sole p-phrase within the i-phrase, it functions as the head of the i-phrase and bears the sole pitch accent in that phrase (which corresponds to the NS). On the other hand, the topic in (12b) constitutes its own i-phrase. Thus, the subject and the verb in (12b) are mapped onto two distinct i-phrases, each with a pitch-accented head (or NS), as shown in (13b). (13) a. (ip (p-p Metallarbeiter) gestreikt haben). b. (ip der König von Bayern) (ip spinnt).
9.2.2.2 Locative and directional PPs Another domain of NS placement variability in Germanic, brought to the forefront of the discussion by Féry, is found in transitive structures with locative PPs (e.g. 14a) and directional PPs (e.g. 14b). Kratzer and Selkirk (2007) provide an unambiguous analysis for such cases, in which the DO systematically carries phrasal stress (and ultimately the
174 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta NS). Recall that in that analysis, only the highest phrase within the spell-out domain (the VP in this case) is parsed as a major phrase and therefore identified as containing phrasal stress. In (15), the DO is assumed to be the highest phrase in the spell-out domain; it therefore constitutes a major phrase and carries phrasal stress, while the following PP and verb lack phrasal stress. (14) a. ...dass that
Junge boy
eine a
geige violin
im in.the
Supermarkt kaufte. supermarket bought
‘that a boy bought a violin in the supermarket’
b. ...dass that
ein a
maria Maria
kinder children
in in
die the
Schule fuhr. school drove
‘that Maria drove children to school’
Féry notes that there is another prosodic pattern available for the sentences in (14), namely one in which both the DO and the PP are pitch-accented, with the PP, being the last one, as the bearer of NS, as shown in (15).16 (15) a. ...dass ein junge eine geige im supermarkt kaufte. b. ...dass maria kinder in die schule fuhr. It is worthwhile noting here that by standard assumptions, the directional PP in (15b) is an ‘argument’ since it is entailed by the lexical meaning of the verb drive.17 On the other hand, the locative in (15a) is not an ‘argument’ any more than the locative in Krifka’s example in (4) is. The fact that both (15a) and (15b) pattern alike is therefore intriguing. It suggests perhaps that the Larsonian approach (Larson 1988) to syntactic structuring of the VP adverbs is on the right track. Under that approach the syntax (not the lexical semantics of the verb) guides the structuring of XPs in the verbal domain.18 Larson’s proposal is that PP locative and temporal adverbs can be incorporated within the VP- shell analysis when there is a DO that can give rise to the binary VP-shell structure, as in (16) (adapted to German word order): (16) a. [vP [VP DP [VP PPLoc V]] v] b. [vP [VP DP [VP PPTemp V]] v] Accordingly, the PP in (15a) and in (15b) is automatically integrated into the binary syntactic analysis of a ‘VP shell’ because there is a DO that can function as its specifier, as 16 Féry
also discusses a less frequent option, in which the verb also carries a pitch-accent. We will ignore this option here. 17 Drive (like go) has a directed motion meaning, i.e. it entails a goal. 18 Larson furthermore assumes that a general thematic hierarchy determines the mapping of a verb’s thematic role onto the syntactic structure.
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 175 shown in (17). In other words, syntactically, the PP in (4) functions as an adjunct, but the locative in (15a) functions as part of the verbal predicate, as does the PP in (15b); such PPs could be referred to as ‘predicative PPs’. Something along these lines would need to be assumed for Féry’s analysis to work. (17) a. ...dass ein junge i [vP ei [VP eine geige [im supermarkt kaufte]] v]. b. ...dass mariai [vP ei [VP kinder [in die schule fuhr]] v]. Within that analysis, the patterns in (15) arise from the canonical analysis in which each XP inside the VP constitute ‘same level’ p-phrases, with the last one identified as the head of the i-phrase and therefore bearer of NS; see (18a). As for the patterns in (14), Féry argues that in this case, the PP is ‘prosodically subordinated’ with respect to the ‘argument-predicate’ complex (DO V) by the rule of Adjunct Subordination in (10b) (repeated below), giving rise to the pattern in (18b).19 This prosodic subordination is indicated by distinguishing different levels of p-phrases, P1, P2, etc., where P2 is subordinated to P1. In (18b), P1 is prosodically subordinated to the argument-predicate complex formed by the object and the verb, an i-phrase in this example. P1 will therefore bear the NPA (= NS) and since P2 is in post-nuclear position, its accent will be deleted. Féry suggests that the preference for (18b) is due to the preference for prosodic integration of the verb with its non-adjacent DO argument. 20 (18) a. (ip (P1 eine geige) (P1 im Supermarkt) kaufte) b. (ip (P1 eine geige) (P2 im Supermarkt) kaufte) (10b) The p-phrase of an adjunct is subordinated to the p-phrase of an argument- predicate complex. (but see note 13). The intent of (10b) is clear. It is meant to capture the intuition that as a syntactic head is prosodically subordinated to its XP argument, a PP in a transitive structure can equally be analysed as ‘prosodically subordinated’, despite the fact that it is not syntactically a head. We may speculate that the ‘prosodic subordination’ of the ‘predicative PP’ with respect to the DO is most likely due to the fact that such PPs in transitive structures break the natural adjacency between DO and V within the VP. On the other hand, in a head initial language like English, with a ‘V DP PP’ word order for transitive structures, the NS is generally on the PP in all-new wide focus structures (e.g. they bought a violin
19 Note that the term ‘adjunct’ with regards to the PP in (18) is technically a misnomer. As suggested earlier, a better term would be ‘predicative PP’. 20 Further research on ditransitives is needed to investigate whether the degree of pragmatic predictability of the choice of DO with respect to the verb might play a role with respect to the preference between the stress patterns with NS on the DO (e.g. (18b) vs nuclear stress on the PP (e.g. (18a)). Similar research also needs to be conducted for English.
176 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta at the market), as in the case of PP adjuncts with intransitive verbs (e.g. he worked at the office).21 To summarize, in Germanic, there are syntactic structures that allow for variability in the location of NS in wide focus contexts, two prominent cases being the SV intransitive structures and the transitives with a locative or directional PP. An adequate analysis needs to have the flexibility to capture such variability.22
9.3 The metrically-interpreted syntactic approach Building on insights in Halle and Vergnaud (1987), Zubizarreta (1998) put forward a system in which NS is computed on (abstract) syntactic structures, but with the option of ignoring certain syntactic elements, in particular functional categories. The metrical (in)visibility of functional categories is argued to be the locus of both intra-language variation, of the type examined in Section 9.2, as well as of cross-linguistic variation, as observed between Germanic and Romance languages (in particular of the Spanish variety). Zubizarreta’s (1998) original version was further revised in Nava and Zubizarreta (2010) and Zubizarreta and Nava (2011). Here we will present the latter version and refer to it as the metrically-interpreted syntactic (or MI-S) approach 23. In a Spanish-type language, NS is always at the right edge of the i-phrase. Thus, in a ‘DP V’ structure in Spanish, NS is always on the verb. This is the case not only in the case of SV intransitives discussed earlier (a dog’s barking vs un perro está ladrando), but also in infinitival relatives; cf. English there are problems to solve/there are problems to compute (Bolinger 1972) and Spanish Hay problemas que resolver/Hay problemas que computarizar. The MI-S approach crucially appeals to two properties to account for the fact that Germanic languages, but not Romance languages, have prosodic patterns with phrase-internal NS in all-new wide focus contexts. The first property, already mentioned above, is recapitulated in (19). (19) In Germanic, functional categories may be interpreted as metrically invisible, while in Romance, functional categories are always metrically visible.
21 See Zubizarreta and Nava (2011) for production data on such English ditransitives, but the issue of predictability mentioned in note 21 remains to be investigated. 22 Extra-grammatical factors, such as ‘predictability’ and ‘note-worthiness’ might influence the use of one prosodic pattern versus the other, giving rise to the illusion that ‘accent placement is predictable if you are a mind reader’ (Bolinger 1972). 23 An important difference between the two versions lies in the notion of metrical invisibility. In Zubizarreta (1998), all deaccented material is considered metrically invisible. In subsequent versions, deaccenting does not directly inform the metrical status of a syntactic category: only functional heads may be defined as metrically invisible for the purpose of computing the NSR.
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 177 The second property of the MI-S proposal is that the NSR is made up of two components: one which is sensitive to the ‘head-argument’ relation, and another (the ‘elsewhere’ case) that is sensitive to ‘linearity’. The proposed NSR for the languages under discussion is given in (20), where the NS constituent is uniquely dominated by metrically S(trong) constituents (Liberman 1975).24,25 The relevant notion of argument is that of lexico-syntactic (or l-s) argument, in the sense of Hale and Keyser (2002), and not that of a lexico-semantic argument.26 (20) Given two metrical sister nodes A and B: (i) If A is a head and B is its argument, assign S to B (specific-NSR). Otherwise, (ii) assign S to the rightmost constituent node in the phrase (general-NSR). To illustrate, consider the metrical structures for SV intransitives in (21). If T is metrically invisible, the first part of the NSR assigns S to the DP subject because it is an argument of its metrical sister V (21a), which is therefore identified as the NS-bearing constituent. If T is metrically visible, the first part of the NSR fails to apply because DP and V are not metrical sisters; the ‘otherwise’ part of the algorithm applies and ultimately assigns NS to the verbal constituent (21b). The same analysis applies to the German SV intransitives in (13) and extends to the infinitival relative structures in (22). In (22a), the non-finite T is analysed as metrically invisible and the head of the relative clause is identified as the locus of NS. In (22b), T is analysed as metrically visible and the verb within the relative clause is identified as the locus of NS. In Romance, on the other hand, functional categories are consistently metrically visible; therefore only prosodic patterns with sentence final NS are generated (namely, on the V in the structures under discussion).27 24 Following
Kayne (1994), Zubizarreta (1998) suggested that ‘rightmost’ is equivalent to ‘most deeply embedded’ (as in Cinque 1993). Szendrői (2001) has argued that this cannot be the case because there are languages, such as Hungarian, where the ‘elsewhere’ algorithm assigns NS to the left-most constituent. 25 A rhythmic (or metrical) grid is then derived from the metrical tree, where NS is the highest beat in the grid (Liberman and Prince 1977; Selkirk 1984; Halle and Vegnaud 1987). On the metrical grid, see also Myrberg and Riad (this volume). In Zubizarreta’s view, the sentence-level metrical tree only partially informs the sentence’s rhythmic grid. Other rules, based on phrasing and eurhythmicity, determine the shape of the rest of the rhythmic grid, with the NS serving as the central anchoring point of the grid. See note 6. 26 In fact, the relevant relation is not exactly between a head and its semantic argument, but between a head and its lexico-syntactic (l-s) argument, where a constituent is defined as an l-s argument of a head iff it is contained within the lexico-syntactic structure of the lexical head (in the sense of Hale and Keyser 2002). This revision is important because it allows us to capture the fact that low manner adverbs, contained within the verbal projection of the head, seem to attract NS. E.g. Hans hat ein Gedicht gut gelesen ‘Hans has read the book well’ (see Kahnemuyipour 2004:117 on similar cases in Persian). 27 Functional words in English may be stressed in certain cases. Auxiliaries—the functional category of immediate relevance for our present purposes—have been identified as acquiring stress in three environments: in sentence final position, stressed by a postlexical rule (see Inkelas and Zec 1993), in emphatic contexts, stressed via the Emphatic Stress Rule (see Zubizarreta 1998), and when the NS- bearing constituent to its right is informationally given and deaccented, triggering a shift of the NS onto the Auxiliary (on A-deaccenting & NS-Shift, see 9.4). Within the MI-S approach, such cases show that functional categories in English may function as metrically visible.
178 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta (21) (a) NS (a) dog
VW (is) barking
(b) NW
(a) dog
TS TW
VS
is
barking
(22) (a) NS
VW
problems (to) solve (b) NW
problems
TS TW
VS
to
solve
The proposal summarized in the previous paragraph ultimately aims to capture a connection between the basic (low-level) rhythmic property of the language and their phrasal (higher-level) rhythmic patterns, the linchpin of the connection being the prosodic status of their functional categories. In Germanic, all types of functional categories undergo reduction, including, crucially, the tense-carrying auxiliaries. This is not the case in Romance, not even in Catalan, a language with vowel reduction. In Catalan, many determiners and prepositions undergo reduction, but crucially the tense-bearing auxiliaries never reduce (see Solà et al. 2002). The relation between the metrical (in)visibility of functional categories and the prosodic status of functional words is an indirect one; that is, the metrical invisibility of functional categories depends on the
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 179 across-the-board reduction of functional categories (D, P, T, C); it is not based on a case- by-case basis. This makes sense in the MI-S system under discussion to the extent that the NS algorithm applies to abstract metrical structures (based on abstract syntactic structures) and not to phonological words.28 It is worthwhile noting that although theoretically different, the system put forward by Féry and the MI-S proposal summarized above have a certain conceptual similarity. While the former system describes (21a) and (22a) as cases of ‘prosodic integration’, the latter does so in terms of ‘metrical constituency’. Note though that Féry’s analysis appeals to a distinct topic position for the DP subject in (21b), obligatorily analysed as an i-phrase, with the verb forming another i-phrase (each with its own NS). It remains to be seen how Féry’s analysis would extend to (22b). On the other hand, the MI-S analysis assigns one single NS to the structures in (21b) and (22b), namely to V; the DP subject gets secondary stress by other rhythmical rules (see note 5). Note that the MI-S analysis is silent about the relation between NS placement and p-phrasing. Therefore, the option of a single p-phrase for cases such as (21b) is not excluded. Interestingly, cases of stress retraction, triggered by two adjacent stresses within the same p-phrase, suggest that such an option does exist; for example (ip ÀnneMarie bícycled) (example from Inkelas and Zec 1993). Yet, the possibility of insertion of an ip boundary after the subject at a later stage, with its own NPA, is not excluded; for example (ip Anne Maríe) (ip bícycled). We turn next to PPs. The German contrast between (3b) and (4) is dealt with straightforwardly by the NSR in (20). The DP in (3b) is an l-s argument of V and is therefore assigned NS by the first part of the NSR (Hans hat (ein Buch gelesen)). On the other hand, the PP in (4) is an adjunct and, therefore, the first part of the NSR fails to apply to it; the ‘otherwise’ part of the algorithm applies and assigns NS to the verb: (Hans hat (an einem Papier gearbeitet)). As for transitive structures with a locative or directional PP, the NSR will assign NS to the PP, to the extent that the PP is analysed as a lexico-syntactic argument of V, or more precisely, to the extent that the PP is part of the VP-shell of the verb as shown in (16a). Thus, the structures in (17) gives rise to the patterns in (15). As for the patterns in (14), something more needs to be said (as in Féry’s system). We may appeal to metrical incorporation of the PP into the V, contingent on the metrically invisible status of the P (an analysis along these lines was in fact proposed in Zubizarreta 1998: 65). If the PP is ‘metrically incorporated’ into V, the DP object and the V become metrical sisters and the first part of the NSR assigns NS to the object. As with Féry’s mechanism of ‘prosodic subordination’, the question arises as to what triggers ‘metrical subordination’. As suggested earlier, it might be the case that such a mechanism exists in German (but not in English) because, being a head-final language, PPs in transitive structures break the natural adjacency between an unscrambled
28 In
the version put forth in Nava and Zubizarreta (2010) and Zubizarreta and Nava (2011), the NSR in (20) is not parametrized. The fact that in Romance only part (ii) of the rule applies follows automatically from the fact that the functional categories in this language type are metrically visible and therefore part of the computation of the metrical tree.
180 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta DO and V within the verbal phrase. In a way, the prosody, via NS placement on the object (made possible by incorporation of the intervening XP into the metrical domain of V) makes up for the lack of syntactic (structural) closeness between DO and V. If this speculation is on the right track, we expect that metrical incorporation (or prosodic subordination) will only occur in structures such as those in (17). We should not expect NS to fall on an object that has scrambled out of the VP; in that case, the lack of NS on the object would itself point to the fact that the DO has moved out of the VP. To summarize, the variation in NS placement in Germanic, as well as cross-linguistic differences, militate in favour of a flexible approach to NS assignment. The prosodic- phrasing proposal put forward by Féry, as well as the MI-S approach presented in this section, have the inherent flexibility to deal with such variability. Yet, the two systems make fundamentally different claims regarding the theoretical status of NS. In the prosodic-phrasing approach, the NS position is a by-product of prosodic phrasing. In the MI-S approach, NS is computed independently of prosodic phrasing and it crucially determines the position of the NPA in the unmarked cases.
9.4 Discourse-given information and deaccenting We turn next to the ‘marked’ NS patterns in Germanic, in which discourse plays a major role in determining the location of NS. Two types of ‘marked’ prosodic patterns have been identified; one in wide-focus and another one in narrow-focus contexts. These are contexts in which the constituent which carries the unmarked NS gets deaccented by virtue of the fact that it is discourse-given (i.e. previously mentioned or inferred from the context).29 Because NS cannot be associated with deaccented material, it gets shifted to the left (Ladd 1980, 1996; Reinhart 2006; Nava and Zubizarreta 2010; Zubizarreta and Nava 2011, among others). We refer to this phenomenon as A(naphoric)-deaccenting & NS-Shift. Examples of ‘marked’ stress pattern, where the focus is ‘narrow’, are given in (23) (italics mark deaccented material). (23) a. Mary bought that old stamp. [Who bought that old stamp?] b. I am drawing pictures on the cover. [What are you drawing on the cover?] Deaccenting triggers a change in prosodic weight in the metrical structure. To illustrate, consider the metrical tree of the VP in sentence (23b). The NSR generates the metrical tree in (24a). Deaccenting (pitch-accent deletion) of the prepositional object triggers a shift in NS. According to the NS-Shift view, the metrical tree is relabelled as in 29
On givenness, see Rochemont (this volume). See also Baumann (2006) for a fine-grained study of the pitch-accents associated with different kinds of givenness in German.
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 181 (24b). More precisely, the prepositional object that bears the unmarked NS is relabelled W(eak). Consequently its sister node (the direct object) is relabelled S and is interpreted as bearing the (marked) NS (recall that the node that is uniquely dominated by S is interpreted as bearing NS). The prepositional object is therefore interpreted as rhythmically subordinate to the direct object. The same logic applies to (23a), where the deaccented VP is relabelled W, its sister node (the subject) is relabelled S and is interpreted as bearing the primary (marked) stress, with the object as rhythmically subordinate. (24) (a)
VPS VW drawing
NPS NW
NW
pictures (on the) covers (b)
VPS VW drawing
NPS NS
NW
pictures (on the) covers
In the case of narrow focus, as in the examples in (23), the ‘marked’ patterns are the only possible options, given the general NS-Focus correspondence constraint in (1): to the extent that the focused constituent must be prosodically identified as the bearer of NS, A-deaccenting & NS-Shift must apply in such cases.30 We turn next to ‘marked’ prosodic patterns in ‘wide focus’ contexts, illustrated by the examples in (25) (from Nava and Zubizarreta 2010 and Zubizarreta and Nava 2011, modelled on Ladd’s original examples). The post-nuclear deaccented material is given in italics and the discourse context in brackets. In (25a), the NPA is on the verb and the VP is the focused constituent; in (25b), the NPA is on the DO and the entire sentence is the focused constituent. (25) a. Because I collect stamps. [Why are you buying that old stamp?] b. Because I’m drawing pictures on the covers. [Why are these notebooks missing their covers?] 30 Reinhart (2006) proposes a competition between focus sets to meet prosodic interface requirements; the stress pattern obtained without NS-Shifting is preferred to the one obtained with NS-shifting.
182 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta The ‘marked’ patterns in (25) (wide-focus contexts) are different from those in (23) (narrow-focus contexts). As mentioned earlier, in cases of ‘marked’ focus, deaccenting must apply in order for the ‘marked’ focus constituent to be aligned with the NS, as required by (1). On the other hand, in the case of wide-focus sentences that contain informationally given material, there is a tendency to deaccent these in Standard English. Yet, it is not entirely systematic: of the 34 English native speakers (ENC) tested by Zubizarreta and Nava (2011), 75 percent deaccented the object in (25a) and 88 percent deaccented the PP in (25b).31 Furthermore, Ladd (1996) reports that there are dialects of English (e.g. Hawaiian) that do not deaccent given information in ‘wide-focus’ contexts. Under the view outlined above, the NSR is a grammatically encapsulated mechanism that determines the position of the NS (the rhythmically most prominent word within the sentence) in neutral contexts. On the other hand, NS-Shift is triggered by discourse factors (namely by deaccenting of given information). Under this view, the operation of NS-Shift triggers a change in the metrical structure. There is an alternative and attractive view, proposed by Féry and Kügler (2008) and Féry (2011), whereby discourse notions directly affect the default scaling of pitch accents, rather than the underlying metrical structure. As is by now well-known, in the unmarked intonational patterns (with all new information), there is a scaling of pitch accents due to a phenomenon known as ‘downstepping’, which applies left-to-right in the intonational domain and lowers a high tone with respect to an immediately preceding high tone (on English downstepping, see Pierrehumbert 1980; Liberman and Pierrehumbert 1984 and on German, see Féry and Kügler 2008, Féry 2011 and references cited therein). According to Féry and Kügler, this default sequence of downstepped tones can be further affected by discourse factors, for example narrow focus triggers the stepping up of a pitch accent, while givenness lowers it pre-nuclearly and compresses it post-nuclearly.32 If we adopt the Féry and Kügler proposal, we arrive at a view in which pitch–accent (more precisely, the NPA) and the NS (as determined by the rhythmical NSR) part company in the case of ‘marked’ patterns (see Kahnemuyipour 2004/2009 for a view along those lines). More specifically, in the discourse-neutral (wide focus) cases, the NS and the NPA would be aligned, but not in cases where discourse factors trigger pitch deletion of the NS-bearing constituent. This is a radically different view from the standard one, and it therefore deserves further investigation. Whatever the ultimate conclusion as to the specifics of how ‘marked’ patterns are obtained, what is important to retain is the point that ‘marked’ patterns are generated by a distinct, grammatically encapsulated mechanism, while some other mechanism (sensitive to discourse factors) generates the ‘unmarked’ patterns. Recent research on 31 The
study reported in Zubizarreta and Nava (2011) had a larger number of participants than the study reported in Nava and Zubizarreta (2010). 32 A question that could decide between the two approaches is whether metrical sisterhood is relevant in determining the position of ‘shifted NS’; see Ladd (1996) for discussion, as well as German et al. (2006) for some relevant experimental data.
Nuclear Stress and Information Structure 183 Spanish dialects and on the English of native Spanish speakers provides further support for this conclusion. It has often been reported that Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian do not deaccent given material and that sentence-internal NS is interpreted as emphatic in these languages (e.g. Ladd 1996; Cruttenden 1997; Zubizarreta 1998). It has been suggested that in the case of sentence-internal narrow focus, these languages use other strategies, such as word order, to align the focused constituent with NS (e.g. Zubizarreta 1998; Samek-Lodovici 2005). More recent research suggests that sentence-internal narrow focus is not completely excluded in Spanish, and that it is in fact preferred in some cases. Gabriel (2010) reports data on Argentinian dialects, which reveal that a sentence final informationally narrow-focused subject is preferred in the case of intransitive VS, as well as in the case of transitives with a cliticized object cl.VS (26a) (i.e. as an answer to ‘Who bought the book?’). On the other hand, in the case of an informationally narrow-focused subject in transitive structures with a lexical object, the SVO order (26b) is preferred to the VOS order (26c) (underlines indicate the focus, perceived as most prominent, and italics indicate deaccenting). For such dialects, it is possible that A-deaccenting & NS- shift (a marked option in Spanish) is preferred to a VXS order (possibly due to ‘weight’ considerations). Yet in other dialects, (26c) is preferred in cases of an informational narrow-focused subject, with (26b) interpreted as a case of correction or contrastive focus (Zubizarreta 1998) (as in JOHN bought the book, not PETER). Zubizarreta (1998) suggests that the accent of correction/contrast is generated by an Emphasis Stress Rule, which can also apply at the sub-word level (unlike the NSR or the NS-Shift rule). This rule would be comparable to Féry and Kügler’s pitch-upstepping rule, but it only serves to identify narrow contrastive focus (and corrections more generally) and not informational focus. On the prosodic distinction between narrow-contrastive and narrow- informational (or new) focus; see also Katz and Selkirk (2011). (26) a. El The
libro, book
lo acc cl
compró Juan. bought Juan
‘The book, Juan bought it.”
b. Juan compró el libro. c. Compró el libro Juan.
To summarize, while there is no dialectal variation regarding the location of the NPA in discourse-neutral contexts (NPA systematically occupies the final position in the intonational domain), there are dialectal (or perhaps even idiolectal) variations with respect to the position of the NPA in the marked cases, and in some dialects this preference is dependent on the interaction with other weight-related prosodic considerations. This supports the view that ‘marked’ patterns are more likely to be generated via a mechanism distinct from the one that generates the ‘unmarked’ patterns.
184 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta The research reported by Nava and Zubizarreta (2010) and Zubizarreta and Nava (2011) on the production of L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers point to the same conclusion. It was shown in that study that it was significantly easier for L2 speakers to produce sentence-internal ‘marked’ NS (in both narrow-focus cases such as (23) and wide-focus cases such as (25)) than in sentence-internal ‘unmarked’ NS (i.e. NS on the subject in eventive SV structures in wide-focus contexts, discussed in Section 9.2.1). The authors conclude that the Spanish grammar is compatible with A-deaccenting & NS-Shift and that acquiring the L2 mechanisms of A-deaccenting & NS-Shift do not require ‘out- competing’ any algorithm of the L1 grammar; therefore, Spanish speakers can readily incorporate this mechanism into their L2 English grammar. On the other hand, native Spanish speakers have a very hard time acquiring the ‘unmarked’ prosodic patterns with non-sentence final NS generated by the Germanic NSR. In the studies discussed in this chapter, few L2 speakers produced the Germanic stress pattern for eventive SV intransitives (and none to a native-extent). We also expect ‘marked’ stress patterns to be more easily affected by language contact. The same reasoning would apply under the alternative view (Féry and Kügler 2008; Féry 2011), where the ‘marked’ patterns are generated by directly manipulating the scaling of pitch accents. For Spanish native speakers learning German or English as a second language, the latter (discourse-dependent) mechanism would be easier to acquire than the grammatically encapsulated phrasing rule in (10a).
9.5 Summary As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it is now well-established that prominence relations within a sentence are intimately connected to information structure. We have presented and compared some of the recent proposals in light of empirical data, in particular data pertaining to NS variability in Germanic. Whatever the ultimate status of NS in the grammar (whether it is a by-product of prosodic phrasing or has a privileged status in the computation of metrical structure), a successful system needs to account for variable NS placement in certain Germanic structures and for the rigid nature of NS placement in the Romance languages (of the Spanish variety). Recent research on dialectal variability in Spanish and on the speech of L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers supports the view that ‘unmarked’ (wide-focus) patterns are generated by a different rule from the one that generates the ‘marked’ (narrow-focus) patterns (e.g. the former by the NSR and the latter via A-deaccenting & NS-Shift). The further issue of whether narrow informational-focus and narrow contrastive-focus are prosodically distinct (the former identified by the NS and the latter by emphatic accent) is yet another question, touched upon very briefly in this chapter and still a topic of current debate.
Chapter 10
Fo cu s Proje c t i on Theori e s Karlos Arregi
10.1 Introduction In languages that mark focus via prosodic prominence, a sentence with a prosodic peak on a given word is often compatible with more than one focus reading.1 For instance, the sentence Mary killed Bill with prosodic prominence on Bill over all other words in the sentence can be understood with focus on Bill, but this is also the prosodic profile corresponding to a sentence-wide focus reading. This, however, is not the case for Mary in this sentence: prosodic prominence on this constituent is only compatible with focus restricted to Mary. This phenomenon, and its constraints in different languages, is typically referred to in the literature as ‘focus projection’, and has received quite a bit of attention. In this chapter, I compare two types of accounts of focus projection, which I term Default Prosody and F-projection approaches. Under the former approach, constraints on focus projection are the consequence of default prosodic prominence rules that are independent of focus or any other IS-related concept. The only principle directly relating focus and prosody is Focus Prominence, a very general constraint requiring the focus to be prominent. On the other hand, the F-projection approach assumes a more direct relation between prosody and (syntactic) focus-marking, and default prosody rules (whether they exist or not) play no role in accounting for focus projection facts. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 10.2 reviews the basic facts, and Sections 10.3 and 10.4 summarize specific implementations of the Default Prosody and F- projection approaches, respectively. The two approaches are further compared in Section 10.5, which provides crucial evidence from the literature in favor of the Default Prosody approach. The review of the literature concludes in Section 10.6, which provides a brief summary of other aspects of theories of focus projection not covered in 1 I would
like to thank Michael Wagner, Caroline Féry, Shinichiro Ishihara, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments and suggestions. All errors are mine.
186 Karlos Arregi previous sections. Finally, Section 10.7 discusses potential counterevidence to Focus Prominence from focused unaccented words in Northern Biscayan Basque, and I propose a small modification of the principle in order to accommodate the facts. Throughout this chapter, I give only very basic illustration of focus projection and related facts, concentrating on English, and to a lesser extent, on other West Germanic languages and Basque. The interested reader should consult the works cited in the chapter to obtain a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the empirical domain, as well as of the different analyses that have been proposed in the literature.
10.2 Focus projection: The basic facts Focus projection2 is the expression used to refer to the fact that, in several languages, phonological marking of focus (prosodic prominence) on a word is compatible with semantic focus on different constituents containing that word.3 The phenomenon, which was described for English in Halliday (1967: 207–208) and was first brought to the attention of generative linguists in Chomsky (1971), can be illustrated by the following English sentence, where small capitals indicate prosodic prominence:4 (1) Mary killed Bill. Prominence on the direct object Bill in this sentence is compatible with focus on the direct object itself, but also on the containing VP killed Bill5 as well as the whole sentence.6 This ambiguity can be verified in several ways, for instance, by checking the felicity of uttering (1) as an answer to the following questions: (2) a. Who did Mary kill? b. What did Mary do? c. What happened? The fact that (1) is a congruent answer to all three questions shows that it can be interpreted with focus on the direct object (as an answer to (2a)), the VP (2b), or the entire 2
The use of this expression to refer to the phenomenon described below is due to Höhle (1982: 99). For the purposes of this chapter, ‘focus’ is understood as denotation focus in Krifka’s (2008) sense. 4 For the moment, I intentionally remain vague as to what exactly ‘prosodic prominence’ means, since theories of focus projection differ on this point. See Sections 10.3, 10.4 and 10.6 for details. 5 The present discussion abstracts away from details of clause structure that seem ultimately not to be relevant to these descriptive remarks. For instance, the constituent referred to as ‘VP’ here may be larger, under the assumption that V moves out of VP. What is important is that there be a constituent whose only overt subconstituents are the verb and the direct object. 6 Note that this description of (1) is compatible with the existence of phonetic differences correlating with the different focus readings, and, indeed, both Halliday (1967) and Chomsky (1971) note that those differences exist. See Gussenhoven (1983b), Breen et al. (2010), and references cited there, for relevant experimental literature showing that these phonetic differences are real. 3
Focus Projection Theories 187 sentence (2c).7 We can thus say that focus can project from the minimal constituent containing prosodic prominence to other constituents dominating it. Although much of the literature concentrates on the facts of English and other Germanic languages, the basic phenomenon is not restricted to this family. For example, the following sentence in Basque8 can have different focus readings (see A. Elordieta 2001: 130–134 for relevant examples and discussion): (3) Basque Mirenek Jon hil zuen. Miren.erg Jon.abs kill.abs aux:pst ‘Miren killed Jon.’ As in English, the claim that the sentence has several focus readings can be diagnosed by the fact that it can be an answer to the following questions: (4) Basque a. Nor hil who.abs kill.prf
zuen Mirenek? aux:pst Miren.erg
‘Who did Miren kill?’ b.
Zer egin what.abs do.prf
zuen aux:pst
Mirenek? Miren.erg
‘What did Miren do?’ c.
Zer gertatu zen? what.abs happen.prf aux:pst ‘What happened?’
Thus, (3) can be understood with focus on the prosodically prominent direct object Jon, but also on other constituents containing it, namely the VP Jon hil and the whole sentence. Observations of this type have led to the following hypothesis (see Sections 10.3 and 10.4 for specific implementations): (5) Focus Prominence9 The focused constituent in a certain domain (typically, the sentence), must contain some type of prosodic peak. 7
See Krifka (2008) and Rooth (this volume), for discussion of the role that focus plays in determining question–answer congruency under the notion of focus assumed here. 8 Unless otherwise noted, Basque examples are from Batua, the standard dialect. 9 The first formulation of a principle along these lines in the generative literature is in Chomsky (1971: 201).
188 Karlos Arregi This derives the facts above. In the case of (1), since Bill is dominated by (at least) three different nodes (the direct object, the VP, and the sentence), prosodic prominence on this word is compatible with (at least) three different focus readings. Several different theories of focus projection have been proposed in the literature. The main general observation that these theories attempt to account for is the fact that focus projection is not as unrestricted as suggested by the data discussed above. For instance, although focus can project from the direct object to the VP or the entire sentence in (1), focus projection from other constituents is severely limited. For instance, consider the following variation on (1) in which prosodic prominence is on Mary instead of Bill: (6) Mary killed Bill. Given Focus Prominence, this sentence is expected to not have an object-focus or VP-focus reading, since neither constituent contains Mary. Indeed, it cannot be an answer to (2a) or (2b). Similarly, (1) cannot be understood with focus on the subject (i.e. it cannot be an answer to the subject wh-question below), since this constituent does not contain Bill. Furthermore, the principle also correctly predicts the fact that (6) has a subject-focus reading (since the subject contains Mary) and can thus be an answer to Who killed Bill? However, a theory of focus projection that has no principle other than (5) wrongly predicts that (6) can be understood with focus on the entire sentence in an out of the blue context, since, trivially, the sentence contains Mary. Two main approaches have been adopted in the literature with the objective of accounting for the observed facts of focus projection. Both types of analyses complement Focus Prominence with other principles and rules that further restrict the possible relation between prosodic peaks and focused constitutents. In the Default Prosody approach, constraints on focus projection are the result of default prosodic prominence rules that are independent of focus. Under this view, Focus Prominence is the only principle that directly relates focus and prosody. This contrasts with the F-projection approach, in which focus and prosodic prominence are related in a more direct way by a set of rules that can license focus on different constituents of a sentence given a specific distribution of prosodic peaks in the sentence (i.e. the rules license ‘projection’ of focus from a word with a prosodic peak to constituents containing that word). Note that in this chapter I make a terminological distinction between ‘focus projection’, namely, the fact that a particular sentence is compatible with several focus readings, and ‘F-projection’, a particular type of analysis of this fact. This important terminological distinction is often not made in the literature reviewed below. These two approaches to focus projection are summarized and compared in the next three sections, where it is argued that the Default Prosody approach provides a more satisfactory account of the facts.
Focus Projection Theories 189
10.3 The Default Prosody approach In the Default Prosody approach, focus projection is accounted for in terms of Focus Prominence and default prominence rules. In this section, I discuss the analysis of focus projection in Jackendoff (1972: ch. 6), which provides the first explicit analysis of the facts under this approach. For reasons of space, I limit the main discussion to Jackendoff ’s account as a representative of the Default Prosody approach, and only briefly summarize the main alternatives in Section 10.6. Jackendoff ’s analysis is based on Focus Prominence, as defined in (7), and the Default Prominence hypothesis shown in (8):10 (7) Focus Prominence The focused constituent in a sentence is the prosodically most prominent element in that sentence. (8) Default Prominence Within a focused constituent, prosodic prominence is determined by default principles of prosody that are independent of focus. Under this approach, other than by (7), focus does not determine the prosodic shape of a sentence. Specifically, once the effects of Focus Prominence are taken into account, the relative prosodic prominence of any two constituents in a sentence is determined by principles of default prominence that are independent of focus. The analysis is also based on two further assumptions: (9) The notion of prosodic prominence relevant to focus is stress, that is, Focus Prominence and Default Prominence are stated in terms of levels of stress. (10) Default prominence in English is determined by the cyclic Nuclear Stress Rule in Chomsky and Halle (1968), according to which the prosodically most prominent daughter of a constituent is the rightmost one. Consider again the sentence Mary killed Bill. Recall that the basic facts of focus projection are that, while prominence on the direct object Bill is compatible with focus on the direct object, the VP, or the entire sentence, prominence on the subject Mary is only compatible with focus on the subject. In Jackendoff ’s analysis, the sentence can have 10
Jackendoff (1972: 237) states these two hypotheses in terms of a single condition that also subsumes (9) below: ‘If a phrase P is chosen as the focus of a sentence S, the highest stress in S will be on the syllable of P that is assigned highest stress by the regular stress rules.’ For his formal implementation, see Jackendoff (1972: 241–242).
190 Karlos Arregi all of the following syntactic representations, each of which corresponds to a different focus reading: (11) a. [S Maryf [VP killed Bill]] b. [S Mary [VP killed BillF]] c. [S Mary [VP killed Bill]]F d. [S Mary [VP killed Bill]F] In each of these structures, a constituent is F-marked (i.e. it is assigned a feature F). Semantically, this means that the F-marked constituent is focused (Jackendoff 1972: 245– 247; see Rooth 1992 for a widely assumed formalization of the relation between F and the semantics of focus). The principles in (7)–(10) ensure that the correct word in the sentence is assigned prosodic prominence. If the subject is focused (i.e. F-marked as in (11a)), Focus Prominence (7) ensures that prominence (nuclear stress) is on Mary, whereas if the object is focused (11b), this principle ensures that prominence is on Bill. The role played by the principles determining default prominence (8)–(10) in these cases is trivial, since the F-marked constituents in these cases only contain one (overt) word. The adoption of (8)–(10) (especially Default Prominence) is crucial for accounting for what we can informally refer to as the projection examples, namely those in which the F-marked constituent contains more than one word. In particular, sentence-wide focus (11c) results on prominence on the direct object Bill: Focus Prominence would trivially be satisfied by assigning prominence to any word, but Default Prominence and (10) determine that prominence is on the rightmost word, that is Bill. The role of Default Prominence can also be observed in the derivation of the VP-focus reading: Focus Prominence ensures that the VP is more prominent that the subject, but within the VP, the object is assigned prominence because it contains the last word in the VP. Focus Prominence alone cannot derive this, since no particular constituent within the VP is F-marked (i.e. informationally more salient than any other constituent within VP). Therefore, Default Prosody (together with the other elements in the analysis) correctly predicts that prominence on the object, but not the subject (or the verb), is compatible with a focus on VP and the entire sentence. This analysis can easily be extended to account for focus projection facts in other languages, with the caveat that other languages might differ from English in their rules of default prominence. For instance, default prominence in sentences in Basque is not on the last word of the sentence, but on the constituent immediately preceding the main verb.11 Thus, F-marking on the direct object, the VP, or the entire sentence in (3) above will result in prominence on the direct object, since the latter immediately precedes the main verb in all the former constituents.12 11 See Hualde et al. (1994), A. Elordieta (2001: 130– 143, 2002), Arregi (2002: ch. 4, 2006), and G. Elordieta (2003) for more detailed description and analysis of the facts in different dialects. 12 This also correctly predicts that F-marking on the subject in (3) is not possible, since the subject is not immediately preverbal in this sentence (Basque is an SOV language), and unlike English and
Focus Projection Theories 191 Importantly, this theory accounts for focus projection facts without rules or principles that directly determine focus projection: the fact that (transitive) VP focus in English requires prominence on the object is not derived by ‘projecting’ the focus from the object to the VP, but is a consequence of default prominence rules (which in English assign prominence to the rightmost constituent, i.e. the object in a transitive VP). Subsequent literature has challenged most of the components of Jackendoff ’s analysis, and the following sections provide a critical overview of this literature. Focus Prominence remains essentially unchallenged (with important modifications due to cases where the domain of focus is not an entire sentence, as in Rooth 1992 and Truckenbrodt 1995: ch. 4), but all the other components of the theory have been argued against. In the next two sections, I concentrate on the F-projection approach, whose most interesting feature is that it provides an account of focus projection that is not based on Default Prominence. Section 10.6 provides a brief summary of alternatives to Jackendoff ’s analysis that differ mostly on the principles that determine default prominence.
10.4 The F-projection approach As mentioned above, the defining feature of the F-projection approach is that it accounts for focus projection facts in terms of principles and/or rules that license focus on different constituents in a sentence given a specific distribution of prosodic peaks in the sentence (Selkirk 1984, 1995; von Stechow and Uhmann 1986; Rochemont 1986). Under this approach, default (i.e. IS-independent) rules of prominence play no role in accounting for focus projection. In this section, I provide an overview of Selkirk (1995) as representative of this type of approach. Part of the motivation for Selkirk’s analysis (and more generally, for the F-projection approach) comes from cases of so-called default accent, first discussed at length in Ladd (1980: ch. 4). Consider the following congruent question–answer pair, in which the focus in the answer is a VP containing an element that is co-referent with an element in the question (Bill): (12) a. What did Bill’s mother do? b. She killed Bill/him.
other Germanic languages, sentence prominence cannot be shifted to a different constituent. As a result, a focused argument or modifier must surface to the immediate left of the verb, which may result in deviations from the default SOV order (Etxepare and Ortiz de Urbina 2003). In addition, these alternative orders impose tighter restrictions on focus projection. See A. Elordieta (2001: 138–142) and Arregi (2002: 189–199) for specific analyses of these facts within the Default Prosody approach.
192 Karlos Arregi As an answer to (12a), the prominence in (12b) must be on the verb, not the object. In Jackendoff ’s theory, this is predicted to be possible only if the context requires a focus on the verb. However, the context in this case (i.e. the wh-question) determines that the focus in (12b) is the entire VP, not just its head. This contrasts with the following question–answer pair (assuming that no mention of Bill has been made in the conversation up to this point): (13) a. What did Mary do? b. She killed Bill. In this case, the prominence in the answer is on the object, as expected for VP focus. The crucial difference is that, by mentioning Bill, the question in (12a) makes the object in (12b) given,13 which is not the case in (13). Selkirk uses examples of this type to justify a theory that has the following components. Relying on the fact that a prosodically prominent word has a pitch accent, Selkirk takes the latter (and not stress) to be the primary exponent of focus.14 Pitch accents are freely assigned to words in the syntactic structure, and the rest of the analysis ensures that placement of a pitch accent on a given word is paired with the correct semantic interpretation. More specifically, a set of F-assignment rules regulates which constituents can be F-marked, given a specific distribution of pitch accents. Unlike the Default Prosody approach, focus projection is directly encoded in the representation of the sentence in terms of the licensing of F-marking, and default prominence plays no role in the analysis. The F-assignment rules are the following (Selkirk 1995: 555): (14) Basic F-rule An accented word is F-marked. (15) F-projection rules a. Head Projection F-marking of the head of a phrase licenses the F-marking of the phrase. b. Argument Projection F-marking of an internal argument of a head licenses the F-marking of the head. Note that (15b) makes argument structure an important factor in determining focus projection. This represents another important departure from Jackendoff ’s analysis (Section 10.3 above), in which focus projection (as encoded by rules determining 13 See Rochemont (this volume) for discussion of the notion of givenness. The definition of ‘given’ and ‘givenness’ assumed here is from Krifka (2008). 14 On the relation between pitch accent and stress (including default phrasal stress) in this analysis, see Selkirk (1995: section 2).
Focus Projection Theories 193 default prominence) is not related to argument structure (see Section 10.6 for a brief discussion of this aspect of Selkirk’s and others’ views on the role of argument structure in focus projection). The implicit asymmetry in (15) between arguments and modifiers (which are not mentioned by the F-projection rules) is due to observations made in Gussenhoven (1983a; see Section 10.5 below for relevant discussion). A different set of principles relates F-marking to the semantics (and pragmatics) of focus and givenness (Selkirk 1995: 555–556): (16) a. The focus of a sentence is an unembedded F-marked constituent (i.e. an F- marked constituent not dominated by any other F-marked constituent). b. An embedded F-marked constituent is new (i.e. not given). c. A non-F-marked constituent is given. Statement (16a) is the equivalent of the Focus Prominence principle: it requires the focused constituent to be F-marked, and given the F-assignment rules, this consituent must contain a pitch accent. Note that the rules in (16) treat F-marking and non- F-marking in a different way: while the latter always entails givenness, the former only entails newness in F-marked constituents dominated by other F-marked constituents. As discussed below, this asymmetry is crucial in accounting for sentences in which the focused constituent is given. Consider first (1), in which the direct object has an accent. Given the F-assignment rules, it can have all of the following representations: (17) a. [S Mary [VP killed BillF]] b. [S Mary [VP killedF BillF]F] c. [S Mary [VP killedF BillF]F]F In all these representations, accent on the direct object Bill licenses F-marking on this constituent (by the Basic F-rule). In the absence of any other F-mark, as in (17a), the interpretive rule (16a) determines that the focus of the sentence is the direct object, as desired. F-marking on the direct object can license F-marking on the verb (by Argument Projection), which in turn licenses F-marking on the VP (by Head Projection), resulting in (17b), in which the VP is the focus (by (16a)) and both the verb and the direct object are new. Head Projection can also license F-marking on the entire sentence,15 as in (17c), in which case the entire sentence is the focus. The F-marking on (17b) and (17c) is also compatible with an accented verb, which accounts for the optional presence of an accent on the verb in all-new F-marked transtivie 15
This can be derived under the assumption that the verb is the head of the sentence. With respect to this, Selkirk (1995: 556) states that F-marking of the VP licenses F-marking of the entire sentence ‘via licensing of the various intervening inflectional heads’. What seems to be implicit here is a principle to the effect that F-marking of the complement of a functional head h licenses F-marking of h, which may be considered a subcase of Argument Projection.
194 Karlos Arregi VPs. This contrasts with the behaviour of the subject Mary, for which the absence of F- marking in these cases is correctly predicted to entail that this constituent is given (by (16c)). This contrasts with a sentence in which both the subject and direct object are accented: (18) [S MaryF [VP killedF BillF]F]F In this case, the subject is new, since it has an embedded F-mark. The analysis thus correctly predicts that all-new sentences must have an accent on the subject (as well as the direct object). As shown above, Argument Projection (15b) accounts for the fact that focus can be projected from the direct object to the dominating VP (via the V head). In Selkirk’s (1984) original formulation of this rule, F-marking on any argument of a head could license F- marking of the head. The observation that Argument Projection must be restricted to internal arguments is due to von Stechow and Uhmann (1986: 308), and accounts, for instance, for the fact that prosodic prominence on a transitive subject, as in (6), does not seem to license sentence-wide focus (see Section 10.5 for relevant discussion on this fact). Importantly, default prominence plays no role in this theory. The fact that under both a VP-focus and a sentence-focus reading, prominence is on the object in a transitive sentence has nothing to do with default prominence rules in English, but with rules that constrain the distribution of F-marks in a sentence. One of the main advantages of this approach over Jackendoff ’s Default Prosody approach is that it makes more nuanced (and correct) predictions about the relation between the prosodic shape of a sentence and the discourse status of its subconstituents. This is due to its reliance on the distribution of accents (as opposed to nuclear stress), and a more fine-grained theory of the information-theoretic interpretation of F-marking (which takes givenness in addition to focus into account). A further advantage of the F-projection analysis is that it provides a straightforward account for sentences of the type discussed at the beginning of this section, in which givenness within the focused constituent results in ‘shift’ of the accent to the head of the constituent. Consider (12), repeated here: (19) a. What did Bill’s mother do? b. She killed Bill/him. The analysis licenses the following F-marking on the answer:16 (20) [S She [VP killedF Bill/him]F] In this case, the accent on the verb directly licenses F-marking on VP (by Head Projection), which can thus be interpreted as the focus. This shows that no accent on the object is necessary to license focus on the VP. In fact, in this particular context in which 16 Example
(19b) is also compatible with F-marking on just the verb, which must therefore be the focus. Thus, (19b) can also be an answer to What did Bill’s mother do to Bill/him?.
Focus Projection Theories 195 Bill/him is given, accenting the object is not possible, since that would entail F-marking on the object, which by (16b), would have to be interpreted as new. The analysis also accounts for sentences in which the focus is given, as in the following question–answer pair: (21) a Who did Bill’s mother kill? b. She killed Bill/him. Given the question, the focus of the answer must be the direct object, which limits F- marking to just this constituent: (22) [S She [VP killed Bill/himF]] Since (16b) only requires embedded F-marked constituents to be new, the focus (i.e. an unembedded F-marked constituent) can be given, as shown by this example. In summary, Selkirk’s analysis differs from Jackendoff ’s in a number of ways, including the central role played by argument structure in determining focus projection, and the adoption of a more articulated theory of the relation between F-marking and semantic/pragmantic interpretation. In addition, Selkirk’s analysis of focus projection does not rely on principles of default prosody. As discussed in the next section, this latter aspect of the theory leads to certain predictions about the interpretation and prosodic prominence of parts of the focused constituent of a sentence that have been shown to be wrong in the later literature. This work thus provides crucial evidence that default prominence plays a central role in accounting for focus projection.
10.5 Evidence for the Default Prosody approach The F- projection approach makes the following strong predictions about focus projection: (23) a. Limited Projection Focus on a phrase can only project from its head or the internal argument(s) of its head. b. No All-Given Focus At least one subconstituent in a nonterminal focused node must be new. Jacobs (1988, 1991), Schwarzschild (1999), and Büring (1996, 2006) argue that these predictions are wrong and conclude that focus projection is primarily determined by
196 Karlos Arregi principles of default prominence.17 As discussed below, counterexamples to Limited Projection are relatively simple to produce, but it is not completely clear that No All- Given Focus can be shown to be false. Nevertheless, the argument against Limited Projection is strong enough to justify abandonment of the F-projection approach. Limited Projection follows straightforwardly from the F-assignment rules in (14)– (15). F-marking of a phrase is only licensed by Head or Argument Projection. Since the Basic F-rule ultimately grounds F-marking on accent, it follows that either the head or an internal argument of the head must contain an accent. In other words, focus pojection cannot proceed from any subconstituent that is not a head or an internal argument. The following question–answer pair provides the first counterexample to Limited Projection (from Büring 2006: (13), attributed to Büring 1996): (24) a. I know that John drove Mary’s red convertible. But what did Bill drive? b. He drove her blue convertible. The adjective is the only accented word, which is therefore F-marked by the Basic F- rule. Since it is a modifier (not an argument) of the NP object it is contained in, no F-projection is allowed to any other constituent, including the dominating NP. The F- assignment rules can thus only license the following: (25) He drove [NP her [AP blue]F convertible] However, the question requires focus on the NP, which wrongly predicts the answer to be unacceptable. What seems to be the required F-marking on the answer given the question is the following: (26) He drove [NP her [AP blue]F convertible]F This requires projection from a modifier, which is not allowed by the F-projection rules. The following is a another counterexample to Limited Projection (from Büring 2006: (17)): (27) a. Why did Helen buy bananas? b. Because John bought bananas. c. [S because [NP John]F bought bananas] The F-assignment rules do not allow projection from the transitive subject to the sentence in (27b), as shown in (27c). Since the question requires focus on the entire sentence,
17 Due to space limitations, I cannot offer an overview of all the arguments in the literature against the F-projection approach, and limit myself to those related to the predictions in (23). Other arguments can be found in Wagner (2005: 285–303), Büring (2006: section 4), and Breen et al. (2010: 1092).
Focus Projection Theories 197 the answer is wrongly predicted to be infelicitous.18 See Schwarzschild (1999: 167–169) and Büring (2006: section 3) for related counterexamples. The prediction No All-Given Focus (23b) is a bit more involved. First, a focused element is an F-marked constituent not dominated by any other F-marked constituent, by (16a). Second, according to the F-assignment rules (14)–(15), this F-marked constituent must contain at least one F-marked subconstituent (unless the F-marked constituent is a terminal node, in which case F is licensed directly by the Basic F-rule (14)). Since this subconstituent is an embedded F-marked node (i.e. it is dominated by the focused node), it must be new, by (16b). Thus, a (nonterminal) focused node must contain at least one part that is new. Counterevidence to No All- Given Focus is discussed by both Schwarzschild (1999: 171–173) and Büring (2006). The following is a relevant question–answer pair from Büring (2006: section 6): (28) a. What did Sue do when you called Bill’s sister? b. Sue called Bill. The question requires focus on the VP in the answer, but both elements (the verb and the direct object) in this VP are given: (29) Sue [VP called Bill]F Although the direct object is accented, it cannot be F-marked: that would make it an embedded F-marked constituent, hence new. However, for reasons given in Büring (2006: section 6), it is not completely clear that the context in (28a) does not require F- marking on Bill in (28b) (despite its being given), due to the fact that called Bill’s sister in (28a) contrasts with called Bill in (28b). Hence, the argument against F-projection based on No All-Given Focus is not conclusive. To summarize so far, it looks like F-assignment to phrasal nodes is unconstrained: it can be licensed by any F-marked subconstituent, and, in fact, if conclusive arguments against No-All Given Focus can be found, it might even be possible to license it directly, without any embedded F-marking. Although the predictions are stated in terms of Selkirk’s (1995) specific implementation of F-projection, this criticism of the approach is more general, and independent, for instance, of the central role that argument structure plays in Selkirk’s analysis, since the counterexamples discussed above provide evidence that there need not be any special relation between F-marking in a phrase and a constituent in it, however that relation is defined. As a consequence, Schwarzschild and Büring argue for a Default Prosody approach, namely one that assumes both Focus Prominence, which requires the focus to be prominent, and Default Prosody, which assigns prosodic prominence in a phrase 18 The
observation that focus can project from a transitive subject (in German) is due to Jacobs (1988: 132; see also Jacobs 1991: 20–21).
198 Karlos Arregi independently of focus. This is, of course, not to say that these and other authors adopt the same analysis as Jackendoff (summarized in Section 10.3). In particular, one of the main insights of F-projection approaches is that givenness is an important factor in determining the relation between prosody and semantic/pragmatic interpretation, and current Default Prosody approaches to focus projection take givenness into account in some way or another (i.a. Neeleman and Reinhart 1998; Zubizarreta 1998; Schwarzschild 1999; Samek-Lodovici 2005; Wagner 2005; Büring 2006; Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006; Reinhart 2006). Another aspect in which versions of Default Prosody differ from Jackendoff ’s (and from each other) is what exactly constrains default prominence (hence, indirectly, focus projection), which is the main topic of the next section.
10.6 Other aspects of the theory of focus projection As summarized in the previous section, the literature has reached a consensus with respect to what kinds of principles govern focus projection. Specifically, it seems that both Focus Prominence and Default Prominence are necessary components of any successful account. Where the authors disagree is on the specifics of Default Prominence, that is, on the question of what syntactic and/or semantic aspects of an expression determine the patterns of default prosodic prominence within that expression. This section summarizes and compares the different approaches to Default Prominence present in the literature. Since the questions addressed here are mostly not about focus projection per se, but about patterns of default prominence, the discussion is brief, and the interested reader is referred to the work cited in this section, as well as Zubizarreta (this volume). One of the core cases of focus projection and default prominence discussed throughout this chapter has to do with transitive sentences in which both the verb and the object are included in the focus, for instance, in VP-focus cases, as in the following question–answer pair: (30) a. What did Mary do? b. Mary/she killed Bill. The relevant generalization that needs to be captured is that the direct object is more prominent than the verb. As was shown in Section 10.3, Jackendoff ’s Default Prosody analysis accounts for this in terms of Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) cyclic Nuclear Stress Rule, which is based on linear order: the object is more prominent than the verb because the former follows the latter. This word-order-based approach to default prominence was adopted in a number of works, including Liberman and Prince (1977), Ladd (1980), Culicover and Rochemont (1983), and Halle and Vergnaud (1987). Starting with Schmerling (1976), a number of authors have criticized this approach to default prominence, based on both English and other languages. For instance, it cannot
Focus Projection Theories 199 account for unaccusative sentences, where the subject is typically more prominent than the verb: (31) John died.
(Schmerling 1976: 81)
Moreover, in Germanic OV languages, the object is more prominent than the verb, even though the latter is rightmost in the VP:
(32) German weil because
ich Hans sah I Hans saw
‘because I saw Hans’
(Schmerling 1976: 84)
Based on this and related evidence, a number of accounts have been proposed in which principles of default prominence make direct reference to argument structure, including Schmerling (1976), Gussenhoven (1983a), Jacobs (1988, 1991), Zubizarreta (1998), Schwarzschild (1999), Büring and Gutiérrez-Bravo (2001), and Büring (2006, 2012). The basic idea in this approach is that the overarching generalization in these cases is that the internal argument of a head (e.g. the subject of an unaccusative verb, or the direct object of a transitive verb) is more prominent than the head.19 With a similar objective of accounting for cross-linguistic generalizations involving default prominence, Cinque (1993) proposes that the crucial notion involved is syntactic depth of embedding, not argument structure. More specifically, Cinque proposes a very minimal Nuclear Stress Rule that, by applying cyclically to successively larger constituents, derives prosodic prominence (stress) on the most deeply embedded constituent in the sentence. In the Germanic transitive VP examples discussed above, relying on the fact that direct objects (more generally, complements) are phrasal, some word in the direct object is more deeply embedded than the verb within the VP, and thus is assigned prominence over the verb. Other syntax-centred accounts based on similar ideas include Zubizarreta (1998, whose analysis also takes argument structure into account) and Arregi (2002). A somewhat different type of syntax-centred approach to default prominence, based on cyclic phase-by-phase computation, can be found in Legate (2003), Kahnemuyipour (2004, 2009), Adger (2007), and Kratzer and Selkirk (2007), who develop ideas originally due to Bresnan (1971). An important variant of the Default Prosody approach is defended in Neeleman and Reinhart (1998), Szendrői (2001, 2003), and Reinhart (2006: ch. 3).20 In this version of the 19 Selkirk (1984, 1995), von Stechow and Uhmann (1986), and Rochemont (1986) can also be considered to be accounts along these lines, but, as discussed in Section 10.4 above, these works adopt an F-projection approach in which argument structure is relevant in determining F-projection, rather than default prominence. 20 The approach to focus projection adopted in Chomsky (1971) also falls within this variant of the Default Prosody approach.
200 Karlos Arregi approach, the main factor determining focus projection is Default Prominence, but the relation between prosodic prominence and focus is not mediated by syntactic F-marking. Rather, the Focus Prominence principle assumed in this analysis directly relates semantic focus to prosodic prominence in the sentence. For instance, the principle in Neeleman and Reinhart (1998) states that the focus set of a sentence consists of the constituents containing the main stress in the sentence. This means that several constituents can be the focus in a given sentence, but focus is not itself directly encoded in the syntax. Rather, discourse conditions determine which is the actual focus in the context the sentence is uttered. Finally, another aspect in which analyses of default prominence can differ has to do with the type of structure over which prominence is determined. In most of the works cited above, in addition to Truckenbrodt (1995), Samek-Lodovici (2005), and Féry (2011), prominence is determined on the basis of prosodic structure, a structural representation of sentences that is built on—but which is independent of—their syntactic structure. This follows a long-standing tradition in phonology according to which the relation between syntax and phonology is mediated by prosodic structure. On the other hand, the syntax-centred accounts in Cinque (1993), Zubizarreta (1998), Arregi (2002), and Kahnemuyipour (2004, 2009) make direct reference to syntax, without the mediating role of prosodic structure.
10.7 Unaccentable elements and the status of the Focus Prominence principle Despite the variety of approaches to focus projection discussed above, the principle of Focus Prominence, which requires the focused constituent to be prosodically prominent, remains essentially unchallenged. Data from Northern Biscayan Basque (NBB)21 prove to be problematic for this principle. The basic facts are discussed for the variety of Lekeitio in Hualde et al. (1994) (see also A. Elordieta 2002, G. Elordieta 2003, 2007, as well as Arregi 2002, 2006 for the variety of Ondarru). As illustrated below, many words in NBB are unaccentable in certain syntactic positions, even when interpreted as focused. This provides prima facie counterevidence to Focus Prominence, as these words can be (semantically) focused even if they are not prosodically prominent. In this final part of this chapter, I give a brief description of the relevant NBB facts, and propose a modification of Focus Prominence that can account for the data.
21 The label ‘Northern Biscayan Basque’ is used in the literature on Basque accentuation (e.g. Hualde 1999, 2003) to refer to the group of varieties of Basque that have pitch-accent systems. This accent-based grouping does not correspond to standard dialectal groupings based on other criteria (i.a. Zuazo 2013).
Focus Projection Theories 201 In NBB, some words are lexically accented and others are not. The former always surface with a pitch accent (H*+L) on some syllable,22 and the latter only surface with a pitch accent (also H*+L) assigned at the phrase level in a specific syntactic position described below. For instance, ergative plural definite lagúnak ‘friends’ is lexically accented and thus always carries an accent on its penultimate syllable. On the other hand, its singular counterpart lagunak is not lexically accented, but can contain a phrasal accent when it surfaces in a specific syntactic position, namely when it is contained in a phrase immediately preceding the verb, which, as discussed more generally for Basque in Sections 10.2 and 10.3 above, is the prosodically most prominent phrase in the sentence. Within this phrase, the accent surfaces on the last syllable (in some varieties the phrasal accent is on the penultimate syllable). A lexically unaccented word can thus have an accent and carry prosodic prominence in a very limited set of contexts: it has to be the word containing the last (penultimate in some varieties) syllable in a phrase immediately preceding the verb. This is illustrated in the following sentence: (33) Lekeitio Basque Neure lagunák ekarri dau. my friend.sg.erg brought aux:prs ‘My friend brought it.’
(Hualde et al. 1994: 62)
The immediately preverbal subject neure lagunák has a syntactically determined phrasal accent that falls on the last syllable of the phrase. Both neure ‘my’ and ergative singular lagunak ‘friend’ are lexically unaccented, hence the only accent that is possible in this phrase is the phrasal accent on lagunak, which happens to contain the last syllable in this phrase. Furthermore, the phrase containing that accent must also contain the focus of the sentence, which follows from Focus Prominence, under the natural assumption that the phrasal accent makes the accented phrase prosodically prominent (see the discussion of Basque in Sections 10.2 and 10.3). However, the process that assigns this accent to the preverbal phrase treats this phrase as unanalysable prosodically,23 and can only place the accent on the last syllable of the phrase, which leads to clear violations of Focus Prominence. For instance, (33) can be uttered felicitously in a context requiring a focus on neure ‘my’ (e.g. with the continuation es seuriak ‘not yours’; see Hualde et al. 1994: 62). Even in this case, the phrasal accent must be on the last syllable of the phrase immediately preceding the verb, and must thus be assigned to the last word in this phrase. Under no circumstance can the phrasal accent be shifted to the first word (*neuré lagunak). This, however, does not prevent the first word neure from being interpreted as focused (contexts forcing focus on the last word lagunák or the entire phrase are of course also 22 The specific placement of the accent within the word is subject to some variation. See references cited above. 23 The phrasal domain the accent is assigned to can be quite large, e.g. embedded adjunct clauses, or DPs containing relative clauses. See Arregi (2006) for an analysis of these facts.
202 Karlos Arregi possible). Thus, (33) has a reading in which neure is focused, even though this word does not contain an accent, in clear violation of Focus Prominence.24 Note, however, that some version of Focus Prominence must be in play in NBB. If a word is focused, it must be contained in the phrase that contains a phrasal accent, even if the word itself is not assigned the accent. In (33), a focus on neure is only possible if it is contained in the phrase immediately preceding the verb; for instance, placing an overt direct object between the subject neure lagunak and the verb in (33) makes a focus on neure (or any other element in the subject) impossible. Although Focus Prominence as standardly understood is violated, something like this principle ensures that the focused constituent is in the correct syntactic position. Let us assume, following the discussion above, that the preverbal phrase is unanalysable prosodically, so that any of its subconstituents are in effect prosodically invisible. Then, the following modification to Focus Prominence, adapted from Arregi (2002: 172–175), accounts for the NBB facts: (34) The minimal prosodically visible constituent containing the focused constituent in the sentence must contain a prosodic peak. By restricting prosodic peaks to prosodically visible constituents, this reformulation of Focus Prominence takes into account the fact that, even though focus can affect the prosody of a sentence, there are certain (language-particular) prosodic principles and constraints that cannot be violated, even under focus. In (33), neure lagunák ‘my friend’ is prosodically visible, but its subconstituents are not, even if they are focused. The revised Focus Prominence principle thus determines that neure lagunák, not neure, has a prosodic peak (i.e. the phrasal accent on the last syllable of lagunák), even if the focus is just neure.
10.8 Conclusion The current literature on focus projection is largely based on a consensus on two basic principles: Focus Prominence, which requires a focus to be phonologically prominent, and Default Prominence, which determines prosodic prominence independently of focus. In effect, focus projection is an epiphenomenon, derived from these principles, and no mechanisms of actual focus projection are needed. Although the NBB facts reviewed in the last section show that more research is needed on the relation between prosody and focus, especially in languages outside Germanic, it seems that they do not warrant straying too far from this consensus. 24 As expected, lexically accented words contrast with lexically unaccented words precisely in this respect. When focused, lexically accented words are prosodically prominent, even when not immediately preverbal. See references cited above for relevant examples.
Chapter 11
C on straint C onfl i c t a nd Inf ormation St ru c t u re Vieri Samek-L odovici
Whether the universal constraints of grammar conflict with each other or not is an empirical question. If they do, analyses that take this into account will provide better models of the underlying linguistic reality. The study of information structure (IS) is of particular interest in this respect, as constraint conflict approaches have proved particularly apt at modelling the conflicting constraints affecting constituents carrying discourse functions and showing how the associated empirical data reflect the different ways these conflicts are resolved. Complex patterns can then be explained in terms of simple and independently necessary constraints, while handling exceptions in a principled way and deriving cross-linguistic variation with minimal appeal to language specific provisos. This chapter provides a survey of conflict-based analyses of IS in the last fifteen years (for a different approach see Aboh, this volume). Most analyses concern the effects of prosody on the syntax of focus, but purely syntactic analyses are mentioned too. Purely phonological studies on IS and prosodic phrasing are instead absent except for aspects of Truckenbrodt (1995) which fed many subsequent syntactic and prosodic analyses (but see Truckenbrodt, Zubizarreta, and Myrberg and Riad, in this volume). Conflict- based analyses not involving IS are also ignored except for Harford and Demuth (1999) which first considered how syntactic variation could emerge from the conflict between prosodic and syntactic constraints under an optimality-theoretic perspective. For reasons of space, I concentrate on what I consider particularly significant claims, inevitably simplifying the original analyses and keeping the references there cited to a minimum. To convey the relations holding across different analyses, I also use invariant names for constraints with identical or similar definitions (similar in that the differences are irrelevant for the patterns discussed here), often departing from the original names. Readers interested in specific analyses are strongly invited to consult the original papers. All analyses are cast in terms of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004). OT provides a formal definition of grammaticality under constraint conflict and
204 Vieri Samek-Lodovici a rigorous framework for testing the empirical predictions of conflict-based analyses. I will keep technicalities to a minimum and keep the discussion accessible to all readers. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning now that under OT, constraints are universal and individual languages are identified by particular rankings of these universal constraints (where ‘C1>>C2’ indicates that constraint C1 is ranked above constraint C2). A linguistic expression is grammatical when its underlying structure is the best possible under the constraint ranking of the corresponding language (i.e. the structure is optimal for that language). A structure is optimal when it outperforms any other competing structure. This is determined as follows: given two structures A and B, A is better than B if the highest ranked constraint on which A and B differ is one that A violates less than B. The consequences of these definitions will become clear as soon as we consider concrete examples. Those interested in a more thorough introduction to OT may consult Prince and Smolensky (1993, 2004), Kager (1999), and McCarthy (2001). For a general review of OT-syntax see Müller (2015). This chapter contains three main sections. Section 11.1 illustrates the potential insights offered by a conflict-based perspective using a recent focalization study from Italian (Samek-Lodovici 2015). Section 11.2 surveys several past analyses of the prosody– syntax interface in relation to IS, highlighting the historic and conceptual relations holding between them. Section 11.3 concludes the chapter considering possible future developments.
11.1 Constraint Conflict Affecting the Focalization of Italian Post-verbal Constituents Italian VP-internal constituents can be contrastively focalized in situ (Brunetti 2004; Samek-Lodovici 2015). See for example the focused subject in (1a) which occurs post- verbally consistently with its specVP position. Like any VP-internal negative constituent, it also requires licensing by the negative marker ‘non’ located in T (Penka 2011). This is expected if the subject occurs in situ and also shows that it is not placed in a focus projection a la Rizzi (1997, 2004) because negative phrases in this position need no licensing.1 (1) Context: Parleranno tutti. Will.speak all
‘Everybody will speak.’
1 Placing the subject in Rizzi’s focus position also requires remnant movement of the TP non parlerà to a higher position. This disrupts the c-commanding relation between ‘non’ and ‘nessuno’ necessary for licensing (Cardinaletti 2001; Samek-Lodovici 2006, 2015).
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 205 a. No. No.
Non Not
parlerà will.speak
NESSUNOF . anybody
‘No. NOBODY will speak.’
The post-verbal area of the clause hosts movement operations that are non-trivially conditioned by the discourse status of the involved constituents. Consider the pattern in (2) from Samek-Lodovici (2015). An unfocused object can raise above a subject focalized in situ, as in (2a), but the same movement is ungrammatical under any other assignment of discourse functions. The object cannot move when contrastively focused (2b), nor when object and subject are both unfocused (2c), both contrastively focused (2d), or both within a wider presentationally focused phrase (2e). The corresponding data are provided in (3)–(7); native speakers must always read the context sentence before assessing the data. The symbols ‘F’ and ‘NewF’ mark contrastive and presentational focalization and main stress is represented in capitals. In (6), the first of the two foci carries secondary stress, represented in small caps. In (7) the position of the subject is marked by the stranded quantifier, represented as ‘QS’. The pattern is fully general, also applying to pairs involving subjects and sentential complements, objects and sentential complements, or lower adverbs in Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy.2 (2) a. b. c. d. e.
V *V * VF *V * [V
O OF O OF O
SF S S SF S
tObj tObj tObj tObj tObj]NewF
(3) Context: I veneziani non The Venetians not
hanno have
invitato invited
nessuno? anybody?
‘Did the Venetians invite nobody?’
No. Non hanno invitato nessuno i MILANESIF. No. Not have invited anybody the Milanese
‘No. The MILANESE did not invite anybody.’
2 The ungrammaticality of (2b) is not caused by the focused subject intervening between ‘non’ and the negative object. As the grammatical (5a) shows, a focused verb can intervene between non and nessuno without disrupting licensing. Similarly, focused subjects may intervene between non and an unfocused negative object; see (i) where the auxiliary inflection makes MILANESI a subject (Samek- Lodovici 2015).
(i) Non Not
hanno have
invitato invited
I the
MILANESIF Milanese
‘THE MILANESE have not invited anybody.’
nessuno. anybody
206 Vieri Samek-Lodovici (4) Context: I The
nessuno? anybody?
‘The Venetians? Nobody invited them?’
a. No. No.
veneziani? Non li ha invitati Venetians? not them has invited
Non ha Not has
invitato invited
nessuno i MILANESIF . anybody the Milanese
‘No. Nobody invited the MILANESE.’
b. * No. No.
Non Not
ha invitato i MILANESIF has invited the Milanese
nessuno. anybody
(5) Context: Ma allora … nessuno ha ordinato il vino rosso?
‘But then … nobody ordered the red wine?’
a. No. Non ha BEVUTOF nessuno il vino rosso. No. Not has drunk anybody the wine red
‘No. Nobody DRANK the red wine.’
b. * No. No.
Non ha Not has
BEVUTOF il drunk the
vino rosso wine red
nessuno. anybody
(6) Context: Hai detto che tutti hanno mangiato fragole.
‘You said that everybody ate strawberries.’
a. No. Che non ha mangiato nessunoF i LAMPONIF . No. That not has eaten anybody the raspberries.
‘No. That NOBODY ate the RASPBERRIES.’
b. ?? No. Che non ha mangiato i lamponiF NESSUNOF . No. That not has eaten the raspberries anybody. (7) Context: Perchè così contento?
‘Why so happy?’
a. [I ragazzi hanno salutato tutti la maestra]NewF . The boys have greeted all the teacher
‘All the boys greeted the teacher.’
b. * [I The
ragazzi hanno salutato la maestra tutti] NewF . boys have greeted the teacher all
How do we model the observed movement? An analysis in terms of the intrinsic features of the moving constituent would have to explain why the movement in (2a) does not generalize to (2b–e). Stipulating which the feature triggering movement is only available
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 207 to unfocused constituents accounts for the ungrammaticality of (2b), (2d), and (2e), but it incorrectly predicts (2c) to be grammatical since raising here involves an unfocused object. The problem is that (2a) and (2c) are only distinguished by the focused or unfocused status of the subject, which is a property external to the object that cannot be captured in terms of the object’s features. The ungrammaticality of (2c) thus constitutes a serious obstacle to any analysis where movement may only be triggered by the intrinsic features of the moving phrase. The paradigm instead follows straightforwardly from a constraint conflict perspective. As argued in Zubizarreta (1998), Szendrői (2001), and Samek-Lodovici (2005 , 2015), the association of main stress with focus places focused items under conflicting requirements. The constraints governing stress placement in Italian, here collectively identified as ‘Rightmost Stress’, require stress to occur clause-rightmost and therefore favour the raising of lower unfocused constituents to the left of focus, as this aligns focus and the associated stress with the clause right edge. But this operation is opposed by the constraint against free movement, here called ‘Stay’ as in Grimshaw (1997) and capturing Chomsky’s (1995) economy of movement. As described below, the focalization pattern in (2) above emerges straightforwardly whenever the conflict between Rightmost Stress and Stay is resolved in favour of Rightmost Stress. This is best expressed through an OT analysis where for every possible assignment of discourse functions to the subject and the object, the structure raising the object and the one leaving it in situ compete against each other and are assessed relative to the ranking Rightmost Stress>>Stay (i.e. Rightmost Stress dominates Stay), with the structure that satisfies this ranking best being chosen as grammatical. As explained below, this ranking selects raising the object as optimal only when the subject is focused and the object unfocused, as in (2a) above, whereas leaving the object in situ is optimal in all other cases. When the subject is focused and the object unfocused, raising the object as in (2a) is optimal because it leaves the focused subject and the associated stress clause right- most, thus satisfying Rightmost Stress at the cost of violating Stay. This is illustrated in tableau (8) (where the symbol ‘*’ represents individual constraint violations while the main stress is represented as ‘x’). The structure leaving the object in situ in (8b) violates Rightmost Stress because the object intervenes between main stress and the clause right edge, but it satisfies Stay because it involves no movement. The structure raising the object in (8a) instead satisfies Rightmost Stress but violates Stay. Since Rightmost Stress outranks Stay, the conflict is resolved in favour of Rightmost Stress, thus choosing movement in (8a) against in-situ realization in (8b). Following OT conventions, the optimal structure is signalled by the hand symbol . (8) Input: V SF O
a. V
O
Rightmost Stress x SF
x b. V SF O
Stay *
tObj *
208 Vieri Samek-Lodovici Any other discourse function assignment selects in-s itu realization of the object as optimal, completing the derivation of paradigm (2). Consider first tableau (9), illustrating the case where focalization affects the object while the subject is left unfocused. Leaving the object in situ in (9a) satisfies both constraints because movement is absent and stress occurs rightmost, whereas raising the object in (9b) violates both constraints because movement is present and the subject intervenes between stress and the clause right edge. Consequently, in-s itu realization in (9a) is optimal, accounting for the ungrammaticality of object raising in pattern (2b). (9) Input: V S OF a. V
S
Rightmost Stress
Stay
*
*
x OF
x b. V OF S
tObj
When the subject and the object follow a focused verb and are both unfocused, Rightmost Stress is violated by both structures because the main stress on the verb is always two constituents away from the clause right edge; see (10a) and (10b). Raising the object as in (10b) adds a violation of Stay, making this structure less optimal than (a). This accounts for pattern (2c) above. (10) Input: VF S O
x a. VF S
Rightmost Stress
Stay
** O
x b. VF O SF tObj
**
*
When subject and object are both focused, as in (11a) and (11b), Rightmost Stress is satisfied by both structures provided that stress falls on whichever of the two constituents occurs rightmost. Once again, raising the object adds a violation of Stay, making (11b) suboptimal relative to (11a). This accounts for pattern (2d). (11) Input: V SF OF
Rightmost Stress
Stay
x a. V SF OF x b. V OF SF tObj
*
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 209 Similarly, when subject and object participate to a wider presentational focus, as in (12), Rightmost Stress is satisfied by both structures provided that stress falls on whichever of the two constituents occurs rightmost. As before, raising the object adds a violation of Stay and is suboptimal, accounting for pattern (2e). (12) Input: [V S O]NewF
Rightmost Stress
Stay
x a. [V S O] NewF b. [V
x O S tObj]NewF
*
A finer-grained analysis of the conflict between stress alignment and movement is available in Samek-Lodovici (2005, 2015). Some of the theoretical insights made available by a constraint conflict perspective, however, are already apparent in the analysis just described. Simple, independently needed constraints—Paradigm (2) is accounted for in terms of the interaction of simple constraints which are independently needed for Italian but also outside it, since rightmost stress assignment and movement economy are found in many languages. By exploiting their conflict, the analysis asserts that paradigm (2) is a direct consequence of the constraints ultimately governing stress placement and movement economy. This is significant, as it avoids saddling the grammar with constraints specific to the observed paradigm, such as ‘no scrambling above higher generated foci’. Paradigm-specific constraints tend to be excessively descriptive and unnecessarily add to the complexity of human grammar, making its acquisition appear more complex than it needs to be. Cross-linguistic variation—Paradigm (2) is a direct consequence of ranking Rightmost Stress above Stay. Grammars with the opposite ranking would resolve the conflict in tableau (8) above in favour of Stay, preferring (8b) to (8a), thus disallowing object raising even in (2a). The corresponding language would differ from Italian in that all patterns in (2) would be ungrammatical, including (2a). These are also the only languages predicted to be possible: unless new constraints are introduced, languages where all patterns in (2) are grammatical, or where everything is grammatical but (2a) (the mirror image of Italian) are predicted to be impossible. Cross-linguistic variation thus emerges from the different structures that are selected as optimal across different rankings of the same constraints (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004). Cross-linguistic variation is also rooted in UG constraints, being present only where they conflict and manifested in the forms dictated by the conflicting constraints. Interface modelling—Interface phenomena emerge from the conflicts arising between constraints in distinct linguistic modules (e.g. prosody and syntax). The conflict is the way distinct modules interface with each other. While this does not eliminate the need for interface constraints, it reduces their complexity by restricting the set of phenomena requiring them. For example, stress placement in Italian and other Romance languages
210 Vieri Samek-Lodovici is best analysed through purely prosodic constraints requiring right-aligned prominence across all major prosodic constituents in Selkirk’s prosodic hierarchy (Selkirk 1984, 1986, 1995; Truckenbrodt 1995). We may model stress in this principled way and still derive paradigm (2) in terms of the conflict between Stay and the prosodic constraints just mentioned (Samek-Lodovici 2005, 2015. See also Section 11.2). Once again, this leads to a model of human grammar with fewer, simpler, and independently required constraints. Systematic exceptions—Systematic exceptions to otherwise regular paradigms should receive principled explanations. Constraint conflict predicts the existence of such exceptions: they are bound to arise for any structures affected by higher-ranked constraints that happen to conflict with the constraints immediately responsible for the observed empirical paradigm. For example, paradigm (2) extends beyond subjects and objects, but focused finite verbs constitute a systematic exception because they raise above unfocused subjects in specVP. This challenges the analysis because focused items should not raise above higher unfocused ones as this worsens stress alignment. Under a constraint conflict perspective, however, such exceptional behaviour is the inevitable consequence of the constraint forcing verb raising in Romance. When ranked higher than Rightmost Stress, this constraint will raise focused verbs from V to T even if this adversely affects stress placement. The same constraint does not apply to any other VP-internal constituents, explaining why these items follow the distribution in (2). What is noteworthy here is the possibility to account for the exceptional behaviour of finite verbs through an independently established non-controversial property of theirs rather than by stipulation. The same solution is not as straightforwardly available outside constraint conflict, because the conditions being posited to prevent focused items from raising are likely to apply to finite verbs as well, unless verbs are excluded by stipulation. However worded, such a stipulation is the price paid for assuming constraint conflict to be impossible.
11.2 Constraint Conflict at the Syntax–P rosody Interface The last fifteen years have seen a flourishing of analyses that accounted for focalization paradigms across a substantial set of languages by exploiting the conflict between syntactic constraints governing the position of specific constituents and prosodic constraints governing stress placement. Most of them benefit of the theoretical properties discussed in the preceding section. Here, I describe a few, chosen for the particular properties they illustrate.
11.2.1 Harford and Demuth (1999)—Prosody Forcing Verb Raising Harford and Demuth contributed one of the very first OT analyses showing how syntactic phenomena can emerge from conflicts between syntactic constraints and
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 211 independently attested prosodic ones. While not directly related to IS, their study showed that the direct interaction between syntax and prosody could lead to a simpler model of syntax, one free of the additional conditions that would otherwise be needed to account for the same phenomena. Furthermore, if prosodic constraints affect the syntax of focus, as claimed by the other analyses examined in this section, we ought to see syntactic effects even outside focalization and Harford and Demuth’s study provides such an example. Specifically, Harford and Demuth (1999) observe how the order of subject and verb in the object relative clauses of the SVO Bantu languages Sesotho and Chishona depends on the prosodic weight of the complementizer introducing the relative clause. In Sesotho, where the complementizer tseo is disyllabic, the subject obligatorily precedes the verb. In Chishona, which involves a monosyllabic complementizer dza, the complementizer obligatorily cliticizes onto the verb once the verb has raised to C, resulting in subject verb inversion (except for a marginally acceptable marked construction where the subject precedes the complementizer). A similar alternation is found in Kiswahili, where the SV order is found after the multisyllabic complementizer amba-cho, formed by the lexical item amba plus the relative morpheme cho expressing agreement with the relative head noun, but not when the complementizer is reduced to the monosyllabic cho alone, which always forces verb raising to C and the ensuing subject verb inversion. (13) Sesotho object relative clauses: Chishona object relative clauses:
O tseo S V O dza-Vi S ti
(14) Kiswahili object relative clauses: Kiswahili object relative clauses:
O amba-cho S V O cho-Vi S ti
Harford and Demuth show that the observed patterns emerge from the conflict between the independently attested constraint MinPW (minimal prosodic word) requiring words to be at least bimoraic (McCarthy and Prince 1991), which in the Bantu languages discussed here translates in the required presence of at least two syllables, and the constraint Stay against movement introduced in the previous section. Multisyllabic complementizers, such as Sesotho’s tseo, satisfy MinPW and therefore can occur as free-standing words. This, in turn, allows the verb to remain in T, determining the SV order shown in (15a) below. Raising the verb to C as in (15b) violates Stay and provides a suboptimal structure when compared to (15a). (15) Input: tseo (dysillabic C)
a. O b. O
tseo
MinPW
Stay
S V
tseo-Vi S ti
*
212 Vieri Samek-Lodovici Monosyllabic complementizers, like Chishona’s dza, violate MinPW when occurring as free-standing words, see (16a). Raising the verb to C, as in (16b), violates Stay but provides a head the complementizer can cliticize to, forming a multisyllabic word that satisfies MinPW. Under the ranking MinPW>>Stay, which Harford and Demuth claim to occur across all three languages, (16b) outperforms (16a) because it satisfies the higher ranked MinPW and is selected as optimal, thus determining the observed subject inversion pattern. (16) Input: dza (monosyllabic C) a. O dza
b. O
S V
dza-Vi S ti
MinPW
Stay
* *
The conflict between MinPW and Stay thus immediately accounts for the correlation between verb raising and the prosodic weight of complementizers in these Bantu languages. A prosody-free account would end up modelling the effects of MinPW through additional syntactic conditions that Harford and Demuth’s analysis shows to be unnecessary.3
11.2.2 Truckenbrodt (1995)—Focalization Affecting Prosodic Phrasing This survey cannot address the vast literature focusing on the prosodic effects of IS, but Truckenbrodt’s (1995) seminal research in this area needs to be mentioned because the prosodic constraints there proposed have frequently been used in many subsequent analyses of IS-effects in syntax. Here, I consider his analysis of the prosodic phrasing of the Bantu languages Chi Mwi:ni, Chicheŵa, and Kimatuumbi. As for the effects of focalization, I examine Chicheŵa alone (Truckenbrodt 1995: ch. 6). Truckenbrodt notes how the distinct mappings of ditransitive VPs into phonological phrases in these three languages follow from three simple constraints. The constraint NonRec against recursion disallows placing a phonological phrase (or ‘pp’) inside another pp. The constraint StressXP requires lexically headed maximal projections to be prosodically prominent in the pp containing them (i.e. it requires them to be stressed at pp-level). The constraint WrapXP requires lexically headed maximal projections to be contained into a single pp. 3
Harford and Demuth’s analysis also suggests the interesting possibility that the constraint Obligatory Heads, requiring heads to be syntactically realized (Grimshaw 1997) and often used to explain verbal movement (e.g. Dehé 2005), might at least in part be subsumed by MinPW. Empty syntactic heads would attract lower heads in order to become legitimate minimal words. I leave this suggestion open to further research.
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 213 The different pp-phrasings found in Chicheŵa, Chi Mwi:ni, and Kimatuumbi when none of the items in the VP is narrowly focused are provided in the first column of (17), with pp-boundaries shown as parentheses and pp-level stress represented as an ‘x’ mark over the stressed constituent. Each distinct phrasing violates one constraint. Chicheŵa violates StressXP because the first NP is not phrasally stressed.4 Chi Mwi:ni violates WrapXP because the entire VP, including the verb and both NPs, is not contained in a single pp. Kimatuumbi violates NonRec due to pp-recursion. (17) Input: [VP V NP NP]
NonRec WrapXP StressXP x NP)
Chicheŵa
(V
NP
Chi Mwi:ni
(V
x NP)
x (NP)
((V
x NP)
x NP)
Kimatuumbi
* * *
Each phrasing arises from a specific ranking of these three constraints. For example, when NonRec and WrapXP both dominate StressXP, wrapping all items into a single pp as in Chicheŵa provides the best solution to the conflict involving these three constraints, as the other two phrasings violate either NonRec or WrapXP. Similarly, Chi Mwi:ni’s phrasing emerges when NonRec and StressXP dominate WrapXP and that of Kimatuumbi when WrapXP and StressXP dominate NonRec. Crucially, the same independently established constraints also account for how focalization affects Chicheŵa’s prosodic phrasing through their interaction with the additional constraints Focus and Align-Ø (defined in Truckenbrodt 1995: 178–82). The first constraint, here renamed ‘StressFocus’, requires focused constituents to receive the highest prosodic prominence in their focus domain. The second constraint, here renamed RightStress(pp), demands every pp to show rightmost stress, thus being similar to the Rightmost Stress constraint discussed in Section 11.1 but defining the pp as the relevant domain. In Chicheŵa, focalization forces a pp-boundary at the right edge of the focused constituent. For example, focalizing the first object of a ditransitive VP forces a pp-boundary after that object, see (18a) below. This new phrasing diverges from the discussed VP- wide pp found when narrow focalization is absent. Under Truckenbrodt’s model, the prosodic rephrasing induced by focalization follows from the constraint ranking characterizing Chicheŵa, where StressFocus and RightStress(pp) dominate WrapXP, and WrapXP dominates StressXP (thus consistently with the earlier ranking where WrapXP dominated StressXP). As tableau (18) shows, the attested phrasing in (18a) violates WrapXP because the VP is no longer contained in a single pp, but it satisfies the 4
The VP as a whole satisfies StressXP, because the phrasal stress on the second NP also counts as stress for the entire VP. The same holds for the Chi Mwi:ni’s and Kimatuumbi’s structures.
214 Vieri Samek-Lodovici higher ranked constraints StressFocus and RightStress(pp) by respectively ensuring that the focused NP is stressed and that each pp is rightmost stressed. Furthermore, the ranking ensures that the alternative phrasings in (18b) and (18c) are all suboptimal relative to (18a). The stress in structure (18b) is not pp-rightmost, as the second NP intervenes between stress and the right pp-edge. Structure (18b) fails StressFocus because the focused NP is unstressed. (The constraint NonRec has been omitted because it is satisfied by each listed competitor.) (18) Input: [VP V NPF NP]
StressFocus RightStress(pp) WrapXP StressXP
x x a. (V NPF) (NP)
*
x _ b. (V NPF NP) c. (V NPF
x NP)
* *
* *
Amongst its many merits, Truckenbrodt’s analysis is significant because it shows how language-internal variation induced by focalization in Chicheŵa and cross-linguistic variation in pp-phrasing both follow from the same set of simple, general, universal constraints, none of which details how specific constituents are to be phrased nor how focus is to affect phrasing. The observed phrasing patterns all emerge as the best possible solutions, under specific constraint rankings, of the conflicts that arise between the proposed constraints.
11.2.3 Samek-Lodovici (2005)—Focus-induced Variation at the Syntax–Prosody Interface Truckenbrodt’s (1995) model of prosodic phrasing enabled linguists to apply Harford and Demuth’s hypothesis about the interaction of prosody and syntax to focalization patterns. Since then, many focalization paradigms across several languages have been shown to emerge from the conflicts arising between syntactic constraints and Truckenbrodt’s prosodic ones (on prosody affecting word order see also Neeleman and van de Koot, this volume). Most of these analyses concern patterns in a single language. Under OT, however, different rankings of the same constraints impose different solutions to existing constraint conflicts, potentially accounting for cross-linguistic variation in the syntax of focalization much like Truckenbrodt-derived variation in prosodic phrasing. For example, Samek-Lodovici (2005) derives aspects of the focalization paradigms of Italian, French, and English (amongst other examined languages). When the entire clause is focused, these languages share an ‘S V O IO’ order and also a
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 215 similar prosodic structure where the entire clause is wrapped in a single intonational phrase ip with rightmost stress. As the table in (19) shows, cross-linguistic variation emerges when focalization is narrowed to single constituents. Focused subjects are necessarily preverbal in English and French but may occur post-verbally in Italian. Focused objects precede indirect objects in English but may follow indirect objects in Italian and in (some varieties of) French. Examples involving simple tenses show a similar distribution, but the presence of V-to-T movement in Italian and French and its absence in English slightly adds to the complexity of the analysis and is thus here ignored. (19)
Sentence wide focalization
Focused subjects
Focused objects
Italian
[S aux V]F
aux V SF
S aux V IO OF
English
[S aux V]F
SF aux V
S aux V OF IO
French
[S aux V]F
SF aux V
S aux V IO OF
Greatly simplifying the original analysis, variation is analysed as arising from the conflict between the syntactic constraints Stay and EPP—where Stay penalizes movement and EPP requires subjects to raise to specTP (Grimshaw and Samek-Lodovici 1995, 1998; Grimshaw 1997)—and Truckenbrodt’s prosodic constraints StressFocus and RightStress(ip), where StressFocus requires focus to carry stress while Right Stress(ip) requires stress to occur rightmost in the ip encompassing the clause, thus providing a more accurate definition of the constraint Rightmost Stress used in Section 11.1. Leaving StressFocus aside, although I will return to it later, the three focalization patterns in (19) arise from the three rankings in (20). (20) Italian: English: French:
RightStress(ip) >> EPP >> Stay EPP >> Stay >> RightStress(ip) EPP >> RightStress(ip) >> Stay
When the entire clause is focused, subjects raise to specTP in all three languages. As (21) shows, subjects raise because in all these languages EPP dominates Stay. This ranking favours the raised subject in (21b), which satisfies EPP, rather than the subject in- situ of (21a), which satisfies Stay but violates the higher ranked EPP. The ranking of RightStress(ip) is irrelevant here since it is satisfied by both structures by stressing the verb. (For space reasons the listed structures abstract away from past-participle movement, thus showing the verb in-situ preceded by in-situ subjects even though past- participle movement forces the opposite order in Italian and French. The violations of Stay caused by the omitted movement affects all competing structures equally and can therefore be safely ignored.)
216 Vieri Samek-Lodovici (21) Clause-wide focus
EPP S
x V]]F)ip
a. ([TP
aux [VP
b. ([TP S
x aux [VP tSubj V]]F)ip
Stay
* *
The position of focused subjects in each language follows from the ranking of RightStress(ip) relative to EPP. If RightStress(ip) dominates EPP, as is the case in Italian, focused subjects remain in situ and the verb raises above them as in (22a). Under the opposite ranking, found in English and French, focused subjects raise to specTP as in (22b). (22) Focused subject
RightStress(ip)
a. (aux V [VP
x SF
tv])ip
x b. (SF aux
tSubj
V])ip
EPP
Stay
*
*
* [VP
*
The position of focused objects, instead, follows from the ranking of RightStress(ip) relative to Stay. If RightStress(ip) dominates Stay, as in Italian and the relevant varieties of French, the indirect object raises above the object as in (23a). Under the opposite ranking, found in English, the indirect object remains in situ as in (23b). (23) Focused object a. (S aux
RightStress(ip) EPP [VP V
b. (S aux [VP V IO
x OF IO])ip x OF tIO])ip
Stay
* *
The different positions of focalized constituents across otherwise similar languages thus emerge from the possible resolutions of the conflicts arising between syntactic and prosodic constraints induced by narrow focalization. Constraint conflict makes it possible to derive the distinct patterns in terms of fully general, universal, constraints, none of which directly concerns the position of focalization. Descriptive parameters, such as Vallduví’s (1991) plasticity parameter, which separate languages where focalization affects prosody (e.g. English) from those where it affects syntax (e.g. Italian), can be dispensed with, since the properties they describe follow from the conflicting constraints themselves. Similarly, Zubizarreta’s (1994, 1998) insight about the central role played by prosody in Romance focalization is accounted for through the independently necessary prosodic model of Truckenbrodt (1995) rather than by positing syntax-based parametric stress rules as in Zubizarreta (1998, this volume).
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 217
11.2.4 Zerbian (2006), Downing (2006)—Extending the Cross-linguistic Typology to Unstressed Foci Truckenbrodt (1995), Samek-Lodovici (2005), and most analyses of focalization exploiting the conflicting demands of prosody and syntax under focalization concern languages where the constraint StressFocus outranks any other conflicting constraint, thus ensuring its satisfaction. For example, in Samek-Lodovici (2005) StressFocus dominates EPP in Italian and RightStress(ip) in English. Were this not the case, placing stress on unfocused verbs would incorrectly be selected as the optimal realization of focused subjects in intransitive clauses in both languages. This is shown in (24) where stressing the final unfocused verb in (24a) violates StressFocus and yet it beats the stressed post-verbal focused subject found in Italian and shown in (24b) because (24b) violates the higher ranked constraint EPP. Structure (24a) also beats the stressed preverbal focused subject of English in (24c) because (24c) violates the higher ranked constraint RightStress(ip). (24) Focused subject in intransitive clauses Unstressed focus a. (SF aux
Italian
b.
English
x c. (SF
Right EPP Stress Stay Stress(ip) Focus
x [VP tSubj V])ip
(aux V [VP
x SF
* *
[VP
*
tv])ip *
aux
*
*
tSubj V])ip
If cross-linguistic variation follows from constraint reranking, as predicted by OT, there ought to exist languages that rank StressFocus sufficiently low in the constraint hierarchy as to leave focused constituents unstressed. Zerbian (2006) shows that the Bantu language Northern Sotho instantiates one such language. The focused constituents of this language are never marked by pitch accents, prosodic phrasing, or tone sandhi. Yet, as Zerbian points out, its focalization pattern follows from the same conflicting constraints proposed in Samek-Lodovici (2005) and Truckenbrodt (1995), provided that RightStress(ip) and Stay both dominate StressFocus. A similar analysis is also available in Downing (2006) for unstressed foci in the Bantu language Chitumbuka.5 (For a more general survey of IS in Bantu languages see Downing and Hyman, this volume.) Amongst several other results, Zerbian (2006: 166) shows that when focalization affects the verb of a transitive sentence, the canonical SVO order of 5 Like Zerbian (2006), Downing (2006) argues for a conflict-based analysis where StressFocus is dominated by prosodic constraints. See also Cheng and Downing (2009: fn13, 2012: fn7) involving lack of stress on focus in Durban Zulu, but proposing new constraints that might affect the analysis of Chitumbuka (Downing p.c.).
218 Vieri Samek-Lodovici the language remains unaltered. Rightmost stress—w hich in this language is expressed via syllabic lengthening—f alls on the unfocused final object, see (25a), rather than on the focused verb. Competing structures that stress the focused verb, whether raising the object as in (25b) or leaving it in situ as in (25c), respectively violate the higher ranked constraints Stay and RightStress(ip) and are therefore ungrammatical. (25) Focused verb
a. (S
RightStress(ip) x VF O)ip
x VF O)ip
StressFocus *
x b. (S O VF tObj)ip c. (S
Stay
* *
Zerbian’s and Downing’s results are significant in many respects. First, they add to the growing cross-linguistic typology of focalization patterns determined by the conflict between syntactic and prosodic constraints. Second, they provide interesting evidence for an OT approach to constraint conflict by showing that even constraints long held as inviolable, such as the association of focalization with prosodic prominence (Jackendoff 1974), are indeed violable and violated, as expected if conflicting constraints are re- ranked across different languages. Finally, they provide a particularly clear case for the need to distinguish formal constraints from the empirical generalizations that support them (McCarthy and Prince 1994). As their analyses show, the observation that the empirical effects mandated by StressFocus are absent in some specific languages, does not entail that the constraint StressFocus is not present in the grammars of those languages. Rather, what is specific to these languages is the low rank of StressFocus relative to RightStress(ip) and Stay: their satisfaction forces the violations of the lower ranked StressFocus and prevents it from having visible effects. Under a constraint conflict perspective, the analytical worth of a constraint must thus be assessed from the overall success of the analyses it is part of and the contribution it brings to those analyses, rather than the existence of direct empirical correlates across all known languages.6
6 This does not imperil falsifiability, including falsifiability of specific constraints. See for example Samek-Lodovici (2005: 735ff) where the need to account for non-culmination in Chicheŵa forces a weaker version of StressFocus. See also Ishihara (2011) and Hoot (2012).
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 219
11.2.5 Dehé (2005)—Revealing the Syntactic Effects of Prosody Where They are Least Expected Dehé examines the impact of focalization on the syntax of particle verbs in English and German. Her analysis is significant in two important respects. First, it shows that prosodic constraints affect word order in English as well, thus challenging the widespread view that English word order is rigid and entirely driven by syntactic constraints as proposed in Vallduví (1991), Zubizarreta (1998), and Szendrői (2001). Second, her analysis provides independent evidence for Samek-Lodovici’s (2005) claim that constraint conflict concerns individual constraints, not entire linguistic modules such as Syntax vs Prosody, thus allowing individual constraints across distinct modules to be intermingled as in the ranking for French focalization ‘EPP >>RightStress(ip)>>Stay’ described above where the prosodic constraint occurs sandwiched between two syntactic ones (see also the discussion of Szendrői 2001 in Section 11.2.6). With respect to English particle verbs, Dehé (2005) observes that when the object is focused, the verb and its particle are contiguous and precede the final stressed object, see (26). When focus narrows to the verbal complex alone, however, the verbal particle must follow the object and carry main stress, see (27). The two sentences are respectively assigned the structures in (28). In both, the object moves to SpecAgrOP for case reasons and the verb moves from V to v. The only difference concerns whether the latter movement involves the entire verb–particle complex, as in (28a), or just the verb, with the verbal particle stranded in situ as in (28b). (26) The boys drank up the BEERF. (27) The boys drankF the beer UPF ti tk]]]. (28) a. [The boys]s [vP ts [drank up]i [AgrOP [the beer]k ti [VP ts b. [The boys]s [vP ts dranki [AgrOP [the beer]k ti [VP ts [V ti up] tk]]]. According to Dehé, pied-piping verbal particles to v as in (28a) violates the syntactic constraint NPPP (NoParticlePiedPiping). The alternation between (26) and (27), as well as several other data examined in Dehé’s paper, can then be accounted for in terms of the conflict between RightStress(pp) and NPPP. When the object is focused, pied-piping the verbal particle as in (29a) below violates NPPP but places stress pp-finally as required by RightStress(pp). Stranding the verbal particle as in (29b) satisfies NPPP but violates RightStress(pp) because stress is no longer rightmost. The ungrammatical status of (29b) shows that RightStress(pp) outranks NPPP, thus letting (29a) emerge as optimal.
220 Vieri Samek-Lodovici (29) Input: Focused object
RightStress(pp)
NPPP
x a. … ([drank up]i the BEERF ti)pp
*
x b. … (dranki the BEERF [ti up])pp
*
When focus affects the verb, pied-piping the verbal particle as in (30a) violates NPPP as well as RightStress(pp), because stress is no longer rightmost. Stranding the verbal particle in V as in (30b) is instead optimal, as it satisfies NPPP by avoiding pied-piping and also RightStress(pp) by placing stress rightmost. The different positions taken by verbal particles under different focalization assignments are thus a direct consequence of the prosodic constraint RightStress(pp), which prevents particles from stranding when they are unfocused even though their stranding is favoured by the lower ranked NPPP. (30) Input: Focused particle verb
RightStress(pp)
NPPP
*
*
x a. … ([drank UP]F,i the beer ti)pp
x b. … (drankF,i the beer [ti UPF])pp
The prosodic constraint RightStress(pp) is itself dominated by syntactic constraints. As Dehé points out, this conclusion follows when considering the position of focused simple verbs. As (31) shows, focused simple verbs raise to v rather than being stranded in V as in (31b), even though the latter structure would place stress rightmost as required by RightStress(pp). (31) a. The boys DRANKF the beer. b. * The boys the beer DRANKF . Dehé attributes this pattern to the effects of the syntactic constraint ObHd (Obligatory Heads) requiring syntactic heads to be non-empty (Grimshaw 1997; Vikner 2001). As shown in (32), the higher ranking of this constraint relative to RightStress(pp) ensures that simple verbs are raised to v even when focused, even though this places stress non- rightmost and violates RightStress(pp). (32) Input: Focused simple verb
OBHd RightStress(pp) NPPP
x a. … (DRANKF,i the beer ti)pp x b. … (øv the beer DRANKF)pp
* *
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 221 (33) English focalization: ObHd>>RightStress(pp)>>NPPP Dehé’s analysis thus supports a view of grammar where prosodic constraints affect word order even in languages with an otherwise fairly rigid syntax such as English. Furthermore, the ranking emerging from the above discussion, in (33), alternates syntactic and prosodic constraints, thus supporting the hypothesis that cross-modular conflict concerns individual constraints rather than linguistic modules in their entirety.
11.2.6 Szendrői (2001) and Other Analyses Szendrői’s constitutes one of the first conflict-based studies of the relevance of prosody for IS. It proposes that conflict affects linguistic modules in their entirety, not individual constraints from distinct modules (although constraints may still conflict within each module). Linguistic expressions are represented as pairs involving a syntactic and a prosodic representation. Prosody and Syntax act as meta-constraints that order these pairs according to the wellformedness of their prosodic or syntactic representation. A third module, named ‘Map’, orders the pairs according to constraints that govern the mapping between prosodic and syntactic representations. These three modules conflict whenever they select different pairs as best wellformed. The expression selected as grammatical depends on the ranking of Prosody, Syntax, and Map in each language. For example, English ranks Syntax and Map above Prosody and consequently shows an invariant syntax and a flexible stress system (Szendrői 2001: 173). Amongst several interesting results, Szendrői’s model derives the distribution of focalization in Hungarian from its stress system, thus dispensing with the need for a dedicated focus position. It also accounts for focalization patterns in English and Italian through distinct rankings of the linguistic modules. Szendrői’s research raises the issue of whether conflict may involve individual constraints across distinct modules. As mentioned, such conflicts are claimed to be necessary in Dehé (2005) and Samek-Lodovici (2005), but see Teeple (2007) for a defence of Szendrői’s approach and a critique of Dehé and Samek-Lodovici. The issue is whether the results in Dehé’s, Samek-Lodovici’s, and other similar analyses, can still be derived once crossmodular conflicts between individual constraints are removed. Further analyses of IS based on the prosody–syntax interface—The last fifteen years have seen many analyses examine the key role played by prosody in shaping IS, especially with respect to focalization. Several of them directly contributed to the research programme outlined by the studies described so far by examining the impact on the syntax of focalization of constraints strictly or loosely based on Truckenbrodt’s (1995) prosodic model. They are listed below ordered by the examined language. Arabic—Teeple (2011) on focus and accusative pronouns in Arabic. Dutch—Bouma and de Hoop (2008) on pronominal scrambling.
222 Vieri Samek-Lodovici French—Hamlaoui (2008) on the preference for cleft-sentences in specific focalization contexts. Hamlaoui (2011) on the influence of prosody and discourse factors on the syntax of wh-phrases. German—Büring (2001, 2002) on focalization and (in)definiteness in German double object constructions. Schmid and Vogel (2004) on dialectal variation in verbal clusters. Féry (2006) on object fronting under sentence-wide focus. English—Anttila et al (2010) on the dative shift alternation and its triggers. Mandarin Chinese—Li (2009) on information focus. Spanish—Hoot (2012) on rightmost focus. Western Chadic Languages—Zimmermann (2006) on a unified analysis of focalization in Hausa, Tangale, and Guruntum. Lovestrand (2009) on focalizaton in Hausa. Cross-linguistic studies—Büring and Gutiérrez-Bravo (2002) and Gutiérrez-Bravo (2002) on focus-induced word order variation in English, Spanish, and German. Dehé (2004) on word order variation in double object constructions in Icelandic and German. Vogel (2006) on object shift in Danish, Swedish, and English. Büring (2006) on the potential elimination of focus projection rules with data from English and German. A second set of analyses pursued a similar programme but under a substantial revision of Truckenbrodt’s prosodic model that involves the addition of phase-sensitive prosodic constraints following and adapting Kratzer and Selkirk (2007), where the boundaries of prosodic phrases are required to match those of syntactic phases.7 See amongst others Cheng and Downing (2009, 2012) on the focalization and dislocation patterns of Durban Zulu, Elfner (2011, 2012) on the different positions of weak and strong pronouns in Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, López (2009) on the conflict between linearization and prosodic phrasing and its relevance for the representation of left and right dislocation in Spanish, and Göbbel (2012) on how prosodic phrasing affects the availability of relative clause extraposition in English. Non-prosodic analyses—Older analyses and a few more recent ones propose constraints that directly encode the preferred position of focused or topic constituents, rather than deriving their position from their relation to prosody. They include, amongst others, Grimshaw and Samek-Lodovici (1995, 1998) and Samek-Lodovici (1996) on the impact of IS on the syntax of Italian subjects; Bresnan (1997) on Chicheŵa’s pronominal system; Sells (1997) on Korean morphology; Samek-Lodovici (1998, 2001) on focalization in Kanakuru, a Chadic language, and its cross-linguistic implications; Costa (1998, 2001) on IS and word order variation in several languages; Choi (1999, 2001) on the import of IS in scrambling; Legendre et al. (2000) on IS factors in BasqueV2; Payne and Chisarik (2000) on focus and negation in Hungarian; Choi (1999), Müller (1999), Heck 7 Preliminary comparisons between Truckenbrodt (1995) and Kratzer and Selkirk (2007) are available in Truckenbrodt (2012) and Elfner (2012). An overview of different theories of the syntax–prosody interface is available in Elordieta (2008). Some problematic aspects in Kahnemuyipour’s (2004) stress model, which inspired Kratzer and Selkirk (2007), are considered in Samek-Lodovici (2013).
Constraint Conflict and Information Structure 223 (2000), and Büring (1997) on Lenerz’ paradigm8 (Lenerz 1977); Keller and Alexopoulou (2001) on IS in Greek; Engdahl et al. (2003) on Swedish word order; Vikner and Engels (2006) on object shift and scrambling in Scandinavian and Continental West Germanic languages; Gabriel (2010) on the distribution of focalization in Argentinian Spanish; and El-touny (2011) on focalization in Cairene Arabic wh-phrases.
11.3 Conclusions Besides the issues identified in the above discussion, such as the potential restrictions on cross-modular conflicts, there are three main directions in which research in this area might develop. A first obvious one involves the study of IS in additional constructions and languages such as those examined in Aboh (this volume), adding to the empirical coverage of conflict-based analyses. A second desirable development would be the analysis of IS-functions other than focalization; a notable instance in this respect is Choi’s (1999) analysis of four different discourse functions in terms of the possible values of two underlying features [±discourse prominence (i.e. saliency)] and [±new]. Finally, the existing analyses could be integrated further, possibly identifying a single set of constraints that accounts—via constraint reranking—for the entire IS typology currently described. As this survey shows, this is already happening, as IS-paradigms across several different languages have been successfully analysed through similar constraints. But further progress appears possible. For example, could ObHd be replaced by the MinPW constraint used by Harford and Demuth (1999), with head movement occurring to provide the target position with sufficient prosodic content? If so, the pervasive V-to-T and T-to-C movement would itself be an instance of prosodically-induced syntactic movement. Similarly, while the NPPP constraint in Dehé (2005) cannot be directly reduced to Stay (c.f. Dehé 2005: 221, fn4), it could perhaps be reduced to specific rankings of the simpler constraints shown to derive the effects of Stay in Grimshaw (2001, 2002, 2006)9. The typological import of Grimshaw’s constraints in all other examined analyses is also worth pursuing. There is clearly plenty of interesting work ahead.
8
Lenerz’ paradigm concerns the scrambling of German objects above preceding indirect objects, which is possible when the object is unfocused and the indirect object focused but not vice versa. As mentioned by an anonymous reviewer, it would be interesting to examine the potential relations between Lenerz’ paradigm and paradigm (2) at the beginning of this chapter. 9 Specifically, Grimshaw’s constraints AlignHeadLeft and AlignCompLeft would favour raising a simple verbal head V above raising a complex verbal head ‘V+P’, since the latter gives rise to additional left-alignment violations. It remains to be examined whether an appropriate ranking exists that is consistent with this intuition and Dehé’s analysis and data.
Pa rt I I
C U R R E N T I S SU E S ON I N F OR M AT ION ST RU C T U R E
Chapter 12
Fo cu s Sensi t i v e Operators Sigrid Beck
12.1 Introduction This chapter examines operators that evaluate focus. I adopt an alternative semantics for focus as in Rooth (1985, 1992); see also Rooth (this volume). Focus sensitive operators are thus expressions that operate on alternatives.1 Two questions central to this chapter are raised in Section 12.2. The first is which alternative sensitive operators evaluate the alternatives introduced by focus. An obvious approach would be to take the expression whose interpretation is sensitive to focus (quantifiers like only, even, also, always, etc.) to be the alternative evaluating operator. However, Rooth (1992) offers a very general theory according to which focus is uniformly evaluated by the abstract operator ~. Beaver and Clark (2008) in turn argue against a uniform theory and in favour of an analysis that has the focus evaluated by a set of expressions. Section 12.2.1 contrasts Rooth’s (1992) theory with Beaver and Clark’s (2008) analysis and proposes a way of incorporating their insights into Rooth’s theory. Following Rooth, the ~ operator is the alternative evaluating operator, not quantifiers like only, even, always, etc. (see Krifka, this volume, for a discussion of these expressions as focus sensitive).
1 I am
very grateful to Thomas Ede Zimmermann for discussion of points important to this paper. I would also like to thank the participants of my class on focus semantics in the summer semester 2012 at the Universität Tübingen: Nadine Bade, Polina Berezovskaya, Lucas Champollion, Remus Gergel, Jutta Hartmann, Stefan Hofstetter, Vera Hohaus, Anna Howell, Saskia Ottschofski, Konstantin Sachs, Sonja Tiemann, and Sara Wallsworth. This paper builds on Beck (2006) and Beck (2007) and I am still grateful to everyone mentioned there. I will also use this opportunity to thank Shravan Vasishth for working with me on Beck and Vasishth (2009), which plays an important role for the perspective taken here. Finally, thank you to three anonymous reviewers for OUP and to the editors.
228 Sigrid Beck The second question is where else in the grammar alternatives are used, and hence what other alternative evaluating operators there are besides the one(s) that evaluate(s) focus. Alternatives have been argued to be at work in the semantics of questions (Hamblin 1973; von Stechow 1991), polarity items (Krifka 1995; Lahiri 1998; Chierchia 2006), Japanese -mo/ka constructions (Shimoyama 2001, 2006) and others. Expressions that operate on alternatives thus also include the operators involved in question formation, negative polarity item licensing, and so on. Section 12.2.2 introduces the (to my mind) clearest other cases of alternative semantic constructions. The types of data covered by the discussion are illustrated in (1) (alternative triggers are highlighted in boldface and indicated by ‘Alt-Trigger’; alternative evaluating operators are also in boldface and indicated by ‘OP’). (1) a. They only sent Arnim the AUdiobook. [only C [~C [they sent Arnim [the Audiobook]F]]] OP Alt-Trigger
(focus)
b. What did you send Arnim? [Q [what did you send Arnim]] OP Alt-Trigger
(questions)
c. I didn’t see anything. [ScalAssert [NOT [I saw OP
(NPIs)
anything]]] Alt-Trigger
A first important point made in this chapter is that alternative semantics should be developed under a general perspective, where questions, focus, etc. all use the same concept and formal semantic object. Having identified a set of operators whose semantics is based on alternatives, the relation between the expression that introduces alternatives and the evaluating operator is examined in Section 12.3. In Section 12.3.1, we consider how fixed the relation between the kind of alternative trigger and the evaluating operator is. Some triggers come with a formal requirement identifying particular evaluating operators that have to be in the structure. In Section 12.3.2, we look at configurations with several triggers and several operators, in particular multiple focus configurations (e.g. Krifka 1991; Rooth 1996; Wold 1996). Example (2) illustrates what types of data are relevant to the discussion. (2) a. I only wonder who JOHNF invited. [only ~1 I wonder [Q2 [who2 JOHNF1 invited]]] ‘There is no x≠John such that I wonder who x invited.’ b. I also only introduced MarilynF to BOB KennedyF . [also ~1 [only ~2 [I intro MarilynF2 to BobF1]]] ‘Another person who I introduced only Marilyn to is Bob Kennedy.’
Focus Sensitive Operators 229 Our understanding of such data is crucial for the semantics of alternative sensitive operators including in particular focus evaluation. The data indicate that some alternative sensitive operators are selective while others are unselective. A second important outcome of this chapter is thus that the option for selective alternative evaluation has to be there. This requires an alternative semantics in the style of Kratzer (1991) and Wold (1996) rather than Rooth (1985, 1992), which I specify in detail in the appendix. Section 12.4 concludes the chapter.
12.2 Collecting triggers and operators The goal of this section is to identify a set of alternative triggers and alternative sensitive operators. I first discuss focus and then turn to further constructions with an alternative semantics. The section summary lays out my view of which triggers and operators we should minimally consider when we try to figure out the grammar of alternatives.
12.2.1 Focus I begin with a Roothian (1985, 1992) implementation of the notion of alternatives (see also Rooth (this volume) for discussion and Appendix A for the formal details of Roothian composition of alternatives). Under Rooth’s theory, (3a) has the ordinary semantic value in (3b) and the alternative semantic value in (3c). (3) a. They sent Arnim [the audiobook]F . b. λw. they sent Arnim the x: audiobook(x) in w c. {λw. they sent Arnim z in w | z∈D} Combining (3) with the adverb only results in a focus sensitive interpretation. Truth conditions change according to where the focus falls. (4) a. They only sent Arnim [the audiobook]F . They didn’t send Arnim anything but the audiobook.
b. They only sent arnimF the audiobook. They didn’t send anyone but Arnim the audiobook.
This observation suggests an analysis of (4a) according to which the operator only takes as its arguments both the ordinary and the alternative semantic value of its sister; that is, only could be a focus sensitive operator, as worked out in (5) (see e.g. Rooth 1985). ([[α]]o stands for the ordinary semantic value of α and [[α]]Alt for the alternative semantic
230 Sigrid Beck value. In (5), [the audiobook]F is the alternative trigger and only the alternative evaluating operator.) (5) a. [[only S]]og = λw.∀p[p∈[[S]]Altg & p(w)=1 → p=[[S]]og] b. [[only [they sent Arnim [the audiobook]F]]]og = λw.∀p[p∈[[they sent Arnim [the audiobook]F]]Altg & p(w)=1 → p=[[they sent Arnim [the audiobook]F]]og] = λw. ∀p[p∈ {λw′. they sent Arnim z in w′ | z∈D} & p(w)=1 → p=λw′. they sent Arnim the x: audiobook(x) in w′] ‘For all propositions p that are “that they sent Arnim z” for some z: if p is true then p is the proposition that they sent Arnim the audiobook.’ The seminal paper of Rooth (1992) instead pursues a much more general analysis of focus. The focus sensitive interpretation of quantifiers like only is distinguished from the interpretive impact of focus itself. Rooth points out that the various interpretive effects of focus—question/answer congruence, contrast, and constraining domains of quantification, among others—all have one thing in common: focus restricts the value of a free variable. The free variable is anaphoric and can play various roles in the semantics/pragmatics (see Velleman and Beaver, this volume, for discussion of the pragmatic effects of focus). Rooth captures this generalization by introducing the operator ~ defined in (6) (slightly simplified version; additionally I will leave out the second and third conjuncts in the definedness condition in what follows). This operator always evaluates focus alternatives. (6) If α is a tree [β ~ C], then: [[α]]og is defined only if [[C]]og ⊆ [[β]]Altg, [[β]]og ∈ [[C]]og, ∃γ[γ ∈ [[C]]og & γ≠[[β]]og]. If defined, [[α]]og =[[β]]og [[α]]Altg = {[[β]]og} The free variable C in (6), the focus anaphor, can be put to various uses. In particular, it can be the domain of quantification of an adverb like only. The interpretation of our example (4a) is now derived as in (7). The adverb only itself in (7a) would be focus sensitive, in the sense that the interpretation of a sentence in which it occurs depends on where the focus falls; but only is not itself a focus evaluating operator. (7) a. [[only]] = λC.λp.λw. ∀q[q∈C & q(w)=1 → q=p] b. [[onlyC [~C [they sent Arnim [the audiobook]F]]]]og is only defined if g(C) ⊆ [[they sent Arnim [the audiobook]F]]Alt i.e. if g(C) ⊆ {λw′. they sent Arnim z in w′ | z∈D}. If so: c. [[onlyC [~C [they sent Arnim [the audiobook]F]]]]og = λw. ∀p[p∈ {λw′. they sent Arnim z in w′ | z∈D} & p(w)=1 → p=λw′. they sent Arnim the x: audiobook(x) in w′]
Focus Sensitive Operators 231 According to this theory, there is just one focus evaluating operator, the ~. What we call focus sensitive expressions interact with this operator via the focus anaphor, and this gives rise to focus affected interpretations. Rooth’s theory has recently been challenged in particular by Beaver and Clark (2003, 2008). Beaver and Clark observe that Rooth’s analysis leads us to expect that all focus sensitive operators should be alike. They point out important differences in behaviour between, in particular, the operators only and always. They conclude basically that a Roothian theory captures the properties of association with always perfectly, but does not account for the different properties of association with only. Therefore they propose a different analysis for only in which it is directly focus evaluating. This is incompatible with Rooth’s uniform theory of focus evaluation. Since this issue concerns precisely the set of focus evaluating operators, their challenge is discussed here. Let us first consider a pair of examples from Beaver and Clark that illustrates how only and always are, at first glance, very similar. (8) a. Sandy only feeds fidoF Nutrapup. If Sandy feeds Nutrapup to anyone, it’s Fido. b. Sandy always feeds fidoF Nutrapup. If Sandy feeds Nutrapup to anyone, it’s Fido. Next, (9) and (11) provide two types of example that make only and always come apart. The first data type concerns expressions that cannot bear focus, so-called ‘leaners’ like unstressed pronouns (’im in (9)). The example pair shows that while always permits an interpretation in which it appears to associate with the leaner, this is impossible for only. (9) Context: You had many discussions with Sandy, but what I want to know is the extent to which you talked about Fred. Of all the times you talked with Sandy, how often was Fred the person you talked about?
a. I [always]F discussed ’im with Sandy.
‘Whenever I discussed someone with Sandy, I discussed Fred.’
b. I [only]F discussed ’im with Sandy.
Cannot mean: ‘I only discussed Fred (and no one else) with Sandy.’ Beaver and Clark interpret this as evidence that always associates with a contextually provided domain of quantification, as indicated in (10). It does not directly work with focus. This is exactly what we would expect under a Roothian analysis. But then the same cannot be true for only (contra the Roothian analysis in (7a)). (10) [[always]] = λC.λp. ∀s[s ∈C → p(s)] In [[always D] [~C [S]]] the domain restriction of always may be derived from [[S]]Alt as D=∪C. This yields a focus sensitive interpretation. Other values of the domain restriction (D≠∪C) are possible.
232 Sigrid Beck The second type of example from Beaver and Clark that I will mention here is illustrated in (11). They observe that the restrictor for always can be found by means other than focus, for example in (11a) a reading is prominent in which the presupposition of manage contributes the relevant restriction, and the focus on exams is ignored for the purpose of the quantification effected by always. The parallel reading is unavailable for only, illustrating that only invariably associates with focus. (11) a. Mary always managed to complete her [exams]F . ‘Whenever Mary took exams, she completed them.’
?‘Whenever Mary completed something, it was invariably an exam.’
b. Mary only managed to complete her [exams]F . *‘What Mary did when taking exams was complete them and do nothing else.’
‘What Mary completed was an exam and nothing else.’
Beaver and Clark provide more arguments for distinguishing only from always than I can report here—see in particular Beaver and Clark (2008). But (9) and (11) are sufficient to demonstrate that some aspect of only is missing in the Roothian analysis. What do Beaver and Clark suggest? My version of their semantics for only is given in (12) (their actual semantics differs in various ways; (12) is adapted to the present discussion but preserves their main points). Example (12) differs in two respects from the Roothian analysis in (7). First, it directly accesses the focus semantic value of only’s sister. Secondly, it adds the presupposition that the focus semantic value of only’s sister be identical to the current question under discussion QUD (Roberts 1996). (12) [[only S]]og is only defined if [[S]]Altg = QUD. If defined, [[only S]]og = λw. ∀q[q ∈ [[S]]Altg & q(w)=1 → q=[[S]]og] The definedness condition is important for our understanding of only. Beaver and Clark suggest that the lexical contribution of only is to tell us about how the discourse is being managed. Only is not merely a universal quantifier. The interpretive impact of only +S can be described as ‘S is an exhaustive answer to the current question under discussion’. Beaver and Clark argue that its core meaning is pragmatic, in the sense that its lexical semantics is about discourse management. Since focus is equally about discourse management, only’s relation to focus is different from the relation of always to focus. Always being a regular universal quantifier over situations, it interacts with focus because it interacts with context. A Roothian analysis captures that. The differences that Beaver and Clark observe between only and always are intriguing. At the same time, giving up Rooth’s strong theory that focus is always evaluated by the ~ loses an important generalization. According to Rooth, focus can never do anything but affect the value of a free variable (compare in particular Rooth’s 1996 discussion of the non-existing verb tolf). I am not aware of counterevidence to this generalization.
Focus Sensitive Operators 233 Note that the truth conditions in (12) are the usual ones and fall firmly within the range of phenomena Rooth’s theory is designed to capture: quantifiers must have a restriction, which may be covert, and covert variables can be constrained by focus. Furthermore, I suggest that the definedness condition derives much of the empirical impact that Beaver and Clark aim for. It is there that the discourse management function of only is located. Thus I propose the analysis in (13) for only which combines a Beaver and Clark meaning of the adverb with Rooth’s ~. (13) a. [[onlyB&C]] = λC:C=QUD.λp.λw. ∀q[q ∈C & q(w)=1 → q=p] b. [onlyB&C C [~C [S Sandy feeds fidoF nutrapup]]] Comparing (12) with (13), there is a missing step in that (12) but not (13) ensures that the domain of quantification of only is the alternative semantic value of only’s sister: C=[[S]]Alt. This is strictly speaking optional in (13). But question/answer congruence demands that S contain a constituent whose alternative semantics is the same as the current question. If [[S]]Alt = QUD and C = QUD, then we have in the end the same interpretive requirements as (12) imposes. The case of always would be different because there is no requirement that the domain of quantification be identical to the QUD. Future research will have to show to what extent such an analysis can capture all the differences that Beaver and Clark observe between only and always. For now, I adopt Rooth’s (1992) theory, according to which the focus evaluating operator is uniformly the ~.
12.2.2 More alternatives As mentioned in the introduction, the notion of alternative has played a role in the analysis of further linguistic phenomena besides focus. For questions, this was proposed as early as Hamblin (1973) and von Stechow (1991). To illustrate, the WH-question in (14a) evokes the alternatives in (14b). A listener confronted with a question is asked to indicate which proposition(s) from the set is/are true. Similarly in the alternative question in (15). (14) a. What did you send Arnim? b. {λw. we sent Arnim z in w | z∈D} (15) a. Did you send Arnim [the movie]F or [the audiobook]F? b. {λw. we sent Arnim z in w | z∈{the movie, the audiobook}} I assume that the same notion of alternative is at work in questions and in focus, and that the same semantic objects are involved in their analysis. A compositional analysis of (14) in terms of alternative semantic values is sketched in (16). The WH-phrase is the alternative trigger. Alternatives are compositionally inherited up to the point where they are evaluated. The evaluating operator is the Q operator, which elevates the alternative
234 Sigrid Beck semantic value of its sister to the level of ordinary meaning (i.e. the alternatives evoked are the meaning of the question). The case of the alternative question is parallel except that the disjunction is the alternative trigger. More detailed formal definitions can be found in Appendix A. (16) a. [Q [what did you send Arnim]]
(Logical Form)
b. [[what]]Alt = {z | z∈D} [[what did you send Arnim]]Altg = {λw. we sent Arnim z in w | z∈D} c. [[Q S]]og = [[S]]Altg [[[Q [what did you send Arnim]]]]og = {λw. we sent Arnim z in w | z∈D} Another well-established analysis in terms of alternatives is the licensing of negative polarity items. I concentrate on Krifka’s (1995) analysis of the licensing of weak NPIs. The familiar pattern is repeated in (17): NPIs like anything are licensed in downward monotonic contexts (Ladusaw 1979), that is, in contexts that permit inferences from supersets to subsets. Negation is an operator that reverses the inferential properties of a sentence. It turns ‘normal’, upward monotonic (18a) into downward monotonic (18b). NPI anything is allowed in (17b) but not (17a). (17) a. * I saw anything. b. I didn’t see anything. (18) a. I saw a raven. → I saw a bird. b. I didn’t see a bird. → I didn’t see a raven. c. [[raven]]⊂[[bird]]
(upward monotonic) (downward monotonic)
Krifka’s goal is to explain how NPIs come to impose such a requirement on their sentence context. The first key ingredient to his analysis concerns the semantics of the NPI. The NPI has an ordinary semantic value, which is very weak—the weakest element on an inferential scale. It also triggers the introduction of alternatives into the calculation, all of which are semantically stronger than the NPI itself. The alternatives project to sentence level in the usual manner. (19) a. [[anything]]o = λP.[[thing]]∩P≠∅ b. [[anything]]Alt = {λP.Q∩P≠∅ | Q⊂[[thing]]} (20) a. [[I saw anything]]og = λw.I saw a thing in w b. [[I saw anything]]Altg = {λw.I saw a Q in w | Q⊂[[thing]]} The second key ingredient to Krifka’s analysis is the assumption of an operator generating scalar implicatures, ScalAssert. I sketch its semantics in (21) (Krifka 1995; more modern versions are available in Chierchia 2006; Fox 2007; Chierchia et al. 2011; and
Focus Sensitive Operators 235 subsequent work). It operates on the ordinary and the alternative semantic value of its sister; it says that the proposition expressed by the ordinary semantic value is true, and that all alternatives that are not entailed by that proposition are false. That is, all semantically stronger alternatives to the ordinary meaning asserted are false. (21) [[ScalAssert XP]]og (w) = 1 iff [[XP]]og (w) =1 & ∀q ∈[[XP]]Altg: ¬([[XP]]og =>q) → ¬q(w)
‘XP is true and all more informative alternatives to XP are false.’
The operator is part of the structure of sentences with NPIs. In cases like (17a), it is predicted that assertion and implicatures together are systematically contradictory, cf. (22). This is Krifka’s idea for the reason for the unacceptability of the example. (22) [[[ScalAssert [I saw anything]]]]og (w) =1 iff I saw a thing in w & ∀q ∈{λw.I saw a Q in w | Q⊂[[thing]]}: ¬(λw.I saw a thing in w =>q) → ¬q(w) iff I saw a thing & there is no particular thing that I saw. -contradiction! Something has to distinguish the acceptable example (17b) from the unacceptable example (17a). The inference reversing operator NOT now comes into play. Alternatives of the structure with negation are as in (23b). The alternatives are now less informative than the assertion. The ScalAssert operator is harmless in this case: there are no stronger alternatives, and so nothing is added to the assertion. (23) a. [[[NOT [I saw anything]]]]og = λw.I didn’t see a thing in w b. [[[NOT [I saw anything]]]]Altg = {λw.I didn’t see a Q in w | Q⊂[[thing]]} (24) [[[ScalAssert [NOT [I saw anything]]]]]og (w) =1 iff I didn’t seee a thing in w & ∀q ∈{λw.I didn’t see a Q in w|Q⊂[[thing]]}:¬(λw.I didn’t see a thing in w =>q) -> ¬q(w)
iff I didn’t see a thing.
Thus we have an analysis of why weak NPIs require special contexts. The reason lies in the interaction of the somewhat pathological alternatives triggered by the NPI with the ScalAssert operator. See also Lahiri (1998) and Chierchia (2006) for further relevant discussion including strong NPIs and other polarity sensitive items; for present purposes I will leave it at the sketch above. (Although it would seem an obvious way to go, I will also not explore the possibility of decomposing ScalAssert into an operator only and an operator (like the) ~.)
236 Sigrid Beck A final case of alternative semantics I want to mention is Japanese -mo/ka constructions, because they open an angle to cross-linguistic variation in the domain of alternative semantics. It is well-known that an indeterminate phrase in Japanese (nani ‘what’ in (25a)) can associate with the question particle -ka (see e.g discussion and references in Shimoyama 2006), and this looks similar enough to the English question in (16), with -ka appearing to instantiate the question operator Q. More surprising from an anglocentric perspective is the construction with -mo, which expresses universal quantification. The example in (25b) is an instance of a Japanese mo-construction taken from Shimoyama (2001). There is a DP ‘which student’s mother’, attached to which is the morpheme -mo. The whole DP semantically contributes ‘every student’s mother’. (25) a. Taro-wa Taro-top
tazunemasita asked
ka? Q
[Japanese]
‘What did Taro ask?’
b. [Dono which
nani-o what-acc
gakusei-no okaasan]-mo student-gen mother -mo
odotta. danced
‘Every student’s mother danced.’
It seems that the morpheme -mo contributes universal quantification over the indeterminate phrase. Sentence (26) is another example; here we have a DP corresponding to ‘the teacher that which student invited’, to which -mo attaches. Sentence (27) illustrates that in the absence of an indeterminate phrase, -mo is semantically like also/even. (26) [[Dono which
syootaisita] invited
sensei] -mo teacher -mo
odotta. [Japanese] danced
‘For every student x: a/the teacher(s) that x had invited danced.’
(27) Sono that
gakusei-ga _ student-nom
syoonin-mo witness-mo
damatteita. was.silent
[Japanese]
‘That witness was also silent./Even that witness was silent.’
Shimoyama argues that quantification is not actually over the indeterminate phrase directly, but over alternatives, as indicated in (28)–(30). The indeterminate phrase introduces alternatives, which are passed on compositionally and become relevant as we encounter the operator -mo. -Mo expresses universal quantification over the alternatives provided by its sister, cf. (29). The example is interpreted in (30), resulting in the desired semantics. According to this analysis, we must add Japanese -mo to the set of alternative evaluating operators. (28) [[which student]]Altg = {Rachel, Ross, Joey} (supposing those are the students) [[DP which student’s mother]]Altg = {Rachel’s mother, Ross’s mother, Joey’s mother}
Focus Sensitive Operators 237 (29) [[XP -MO]]og = λP.∀x ∈ [[XP]]Altg: P(x)=1 (30) a. [[[which student’s mother] -mo]]og = λP.∀x∈ {Rachel’s mother, Ross’s mother, Joey’s mother}: P(x)=1 b. [[[which student’s mother] -mo danced]]og = ∀x ∈{Rachel’s mother, Ross’s mother, Joey’s mother}: x danced This survey of constructions involving an alternative semantics is not intended to be exhaustive. It is very likely that there are more alternative triggers, and more potential alternative evaluating operators, than the ones mentioned so far. In addition to negative polarity items, free choice items are plausible candidates for alternative triggers (e.g. Chierchia 2006; Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002). These works also mention morphological/typological considerations (see references cited there) that should make us look for a common core meaning of such items—alternative triggering. Alternative questions brought disjunctions to our attention, and hence we should wonder about elements like either which seem to evaluate the alternatives introduced by the disjunction (Zimmermann 2000; Aloni 2003). Cross-linguistically we might find more elements like -mo/ka with an alternative semantics (some possibilities from Mandarin Chinese are considered in this light in Beck 2007). I will not consider any of these possibilities in more detail in what follows. Let us instead take stock of what we have.
12.2.3 Summary We have found a set of expressions that have been analysed in the semantics literature as introducing alternatives into the semantic calculation, including the ones in (31). The assumption that all of them operate with the same semantic object is made explicit in (32). (31) Alternative triggers: focus, WH-phrases, disjunction, negative polarity items, indeterminate phrases (32) Grammar of Alternatives: Natural language makes available two semantic objects, ordinary and alternative semantic values—for a given expression α [[α]]o and [[α]]Alt. Compositional interpretation has to be modelled for both tiers of meaning. Alternative semantic values [[.]]Alt are at work in the interpretation of focus, questions, polarity items, indeterminate phrases, and probably others. This position entails that there are several alternative sensitive operators, according to our present knowledge including at least the following: (33) Alternative sensitive operators: ~, Q, ScalAssert, --m o/ka
238 Sigrid Beck These are operators whose meaning makes reference to [[.]]Alt. We need a system of alternative semantic values and a grammar of alternative evaluation that works for all of them. The next section takes some steps in this direction.
12.3 Grammar of alternative evaluating operators This section refines the analysis of the grammar of alternatives that we have so far. The first subsection contains a syntactic addition. The second subsection expands on the grammar of alternative sensitive operators and will lead to a revision concerning the compositional semantics of the alternative semantic tier.
12.3.1 Relation operator—trigger Now that we have a set of alternative triggers and a set of alternative evaluating operators, the question arises which operator evaluates which alternatives. With the Roothian composition of alternatives discussed so far (with the specific assumptions laid out in Appendix A), we might expect free association: any operator can evaluate alternatives triggered by any type of trigger. This does not seem to be right; (34a) cannot be understood as a multiple question (34d), for example, which we would expect if the alternatives triggered by focus were evaluated by the Q operator. Thus some form of constraint has to be added to the analysis we have at the moment. (Note also that the alternatives our grammar generates are (34c), and this is unsuitable for evaluating the alternatives triggered by focus and the WH-phrase in two different places. This semantic issue will be addressed in the next subsection.) (34)
a. b. c. d.
I wonder who JohnF invited. I wonder [Q [who JohnF invited]] [[who JohnF invited]]Altg = {λw.x invited y in w | x,y ∈D} I wonder who invited whom.
Let us examine the opposite position then: is the connection between operator and trigger completely fixed? For example, there is a WH-phrase in the structure iff there is an evaluating Q, a focus iff there is an evaluating ~, and so on? This position may be too strong. Notice that the Q operator can evaluate the alternatives triggered by a WH-phrase or by a disjunction in the case of an alternative question. Similarly, Krifka (1995) motivates the ScalAssert operator more generally with structures that contain a focus and are informationally ordered—so ScalAssert would be able to evaluate weak NPIs and focus. Conversely, however, we need to be sure that there is a ScalAssert in the
Focus Sensitive Operators 239 structure whenever a weak NPI is in the structure, otherwise the licensing conditions on NPIs would no longer follow. It seems that an operator would in principle be willing to work with alternatives no matter what triggered them. The triggers, however, are picky. We need to be able to ensure that a particular operator is present in the structure when a certain type of trigger is. Example (35) summarizes the constraints that I think are plausible.
(35) Potential constraints: a. a WH-expression must be evaluated by Q. b. a weak NPI must be evaluated by ScalAssert. c. a focus cannot be evaluated by Q. Focus can be evaluated by ~ and perhaps by ScalAssert.
Chierchia’s (2006) analysis contains the ingredient missing in our discussion so far: The alternatives introduced by an NPI have to be evaluated by a matching operator. This is enforced by giving the NPI an uninterpretable feature which he calls [+σ]. The feature has to be checked against an operator bearing the same feature [+σ], but interpretable— this is our ScalAssert operator. The structure with the feature that enforces this formal connection is given below. (36) [ScalAssert[+σ] [NOT [I saw anything[+σ]]]] A parallel constraint has to be operative for the other alternative triggers that are picky about their evaluating operators (e.g. [+WH], a feature familiar from the WH-criterion, see for example Haegeman 1991 for discussion and references). Thus a syntactic/formal component has to be added to the semantic analysis.
12.3.2 More than one operator Next we turn to structures that contain more than one alternative evaluating operator. A strictly Roothian alternative semantics makes wrong predictions about them. This subsection will thus result in a revision towards an alternative semantics in the style of Kratzer (1991) and Wold (1996).
12.3.2.1 Interaction of ~ and Q We begin by considering the two alternative evaluating operators ~ and Q. We are interested in nested configurations. There are four possible combinations: (37)
a. b. c. d.
[Q [...[Q[... Alt-trigger ...]]...]] Baker ambiguities [~ [...[~ [... Alt-trigger ...]]...]] multiple focus [Q [...[~ [... Alt-trigger ...]]...]] intervention effects [~ [...[Q [... Alt-trigger ...]]...]] focus out of a question
240 Sigrid Beck The issue is in each case whether the higher operator can evaluate an appropriate Alt- Trigger, which skips the intervening lower operator. If this is possible, then alternative evaluation by the lower operator is selective: it affects some, but not all alternative triggers in its scope. Note that our current system is unselective: both the ~ and the Q operator simply take the alternative semantic value of their sister, and that includes all the alternatives triggered in the scope of the operator. Our prediction is thus that the higher operator cannot evaluate appropriate alternatives in any of the four configurations. What are the facts? It is fairly clear that an intervening Q operator can be skipped. Thus Q is a selective operator. Combination (37a) is instantiated by Baker ambiguities (Baker 1970). The example in (38) permits a reading according to which it expresses a multiple matrix question. I indicate interpretations informally by coindexing alternative trigger and evaluating operator. Example (39) is even clearer. Focus on embedded John can be evaluated in the matrix clause, skipping a Q operator. Parallel considerations let Wold (1996) draw the conclusion that the indices in (38), (39) on the alternative triggers are a special kind of variable, and that the indices on the alternative evaluating operators act as variable binders, selectively binding some alternative variables and passing on others (Kratzer 1991 was lead to a similar conclusion on different grounds). See Appendix B for an implementation of this version of alternative semantics. (38) a. Who knows where we bought which book? b. [Q1,3 who1 knows [Q2 [where2 we bought [which book]3]]]
‘For which person x and book y: x knows where we bought y’
(39) a. I only wonder who JohnF invited. b. [only ~1 I wonder [Q2 [who2 JohnF1 invited]]] ‘There is no x other than John such that I wonder who x invited.’ The other two configurations in (37) have the ~ as the lower operator. Combination (37c) amounts to an intervention effect exemplified in (40) (see e.g. Beck 1996, 2006; Pesetsky 2000), which has been argued to arise because the ~ accidentally, unselectively, accesses the alternatives triggered by the WH-phrase. We concentrate on (37b), however. A relevant example is given in (41) (Rooth 1996; also Krifka 1991; Wold 1996). (40) a. * Which boy did only Susan introduce which girl to _? b. Which boy did Susan introduce which girl to _? c. * [Q1,2 [which boy2 [only ~3 [SusanF3 introduced which girl1 to _ ]]]] (41) a. I also only introduced MarilynF to [Bob Kennedy]F . b. [also ~1 [only ~2 [I intro MarilynF2 to BobF1]]]
Focus Sensitive Operators 241 The interpretation of (41) that is of interest here is one in which each focus sensitive operator associates with one of the foci. This becomes more plausible in a context like (42). Only associates with Marilyn (which is realized as a second occurence focus; see Baumann (this volume on second occurence focus) and also associates with Bob Kennedy. (42) I only introduced MariLYN to John Kennedy. I also only introduced Marilyn to BOB Kennedy. = another person who I introduced only Marilyn to is Bob Kennedy. Such data have been discussed controversially in the literature. Rooth (1996), Wold (1996), and Krifka (1991, 2006) take them to be acceptable under the relevant interpretation (modulo, perhaps, constraints imposed by syntactic structure). But von Fintel (1994) already observes that at least some such structures are impossible (cf. (43B2)). (43) A: I know that John drank water at the party. What else did he drink? B1: Besides water he only drank [carrot juice]F . B2: #He only also drank [carrot juice]F . Beck and Vasishth (2009) conducted an experimental study that shows them to tend towards the unacceptable in general, and to be significantly worse than data with the same interpretation that avoid the problematic nested configuration. One of their test items is given below. (44) Context: A and B are detectives in the San Francisco police force. They are building a case against the well-known director of a local bank. Their main evidence consists of a set of photographs and a video showing the suspect in incriminating circumstances. Their assistants are trying to find eye witnesses to the events taking place in the pictures. Unfortunately, there has been a leak to the press. A and B are trying to find out how the information could have gotten out. Target: A: You only showed [the photos]F to Carol. B: Right. I also only showed [the photos]F to RobinF . [also ... [only [X ... F2 ... F1 ....]] ...] Control: A: You only showed [the photos]F to Carol. B′: Right. Another person that I only showed [the photos]F to is RobinF . I will side with Beck and Vasishth and consider (42) to be deviant under the relevant interpretation. This means that also cannot access the focus on Bob Kennedy across the intervening only and its ~. This, in turn, I interpret as the ~ being an unselective operator, evaluating all alternatives in its scope. Those alternatives are then lost for the purposes of all further alternative generation upstairs.
242 Sigrid Beck The upshot is, then, that we can stick with Rooth’s original definition of the ~ operator, but have to revise the definition of the Q operator from (16c) to a selective operator. This is done in Appendix B. There I specify a Woldian alternative semantics, which in contrast to a Roothian is able to do just that.
12.3.2.2 Further configurations The foregoing discussion has not included two other alternative evaluating operators mentioned earlier, ScalAssert and -mo/ka. There is some interesting discussion in the literature concerning structures with several alternative evaluating operators including these two. Linebarger (1987), Chierchia (2006), Guerzoni (2006), and Beck (2007) discuss data instantiating the configuration in (45). They are judged deviant. An example is given in (46). (45) [ScalAssert [... [~[... NPI ...]] ...]] (46) a. I didn’t wear any earrings at every party. b. # It is not the case that for every party x, there are earrings that I wore at x. c. * [ScalAssert [... [every party [~ [...NPI...]]]]] Similarly, Shimoyama’s (2001, 2006) main point is to show that indeterminate phrases always have to associate with the closest potential evaluating operator. A relevant example is (47). (47) [[[[
Taro-ga Taro-nom yonda] read
nan-nen-ni what-year-in sensei]-mo teacher-mo
nani-nituite what-about
totemo very
tukareta got.tired
kaita] ronbun]-mo Wrote paper -mo [Japanese]
(48) a.
‘ The teacher who read, for every topic x, every year y, the paper that Taro wrote on x in y also got very tired.’ b. * ‘For every year y, the teacher who read, for every topic x, the paper that Taro wrote on x in y got very tired.’ c. ** ‘For every topic x, the teacher who read, for every year y, the paper that Taro wrote on x in y got very tired.’ d. (?) ‘For every topic x, every year y, the teacher who also read the paper that Taro wrote on x in y got very tired.’
This indicates that we need to decide for each operator whether or not it is selective. Concentrating on the three operators we have considered for English, this means that we should systematically investigate the configurations in Table 12.1. The first column of Table 12.1 stands for the various intervention effects (called the general minimality effect in Beck 2007). The ~ operator that evaluates focus is unselective and causes higher operators to lose access to alternatives triggered in its scope, hence
Focus Sensitive Operators 243 Table 12.1 Operator combinations high OP \ low OP
~
Q
ScalAssert
~
* (multiple focus)
√ (Focus out of Q)
_(Focus out of NPI)
Q
* (intervention effect)
√ (Baker Ambiguity)
_(NPI inside Q)
ScalAssert
* (intervention NPIs)
√ (NPI out of Q)
_(nested NPIs)
these structures are ungrammatical. The second column stands for the data that show that Q, on the other hand, is transparent, hence selective. The missing data point ‘NPI out of questions’ means NPI licensing across a Q operator and is illustrated by (49) ((49c) only has a biased interpretation, unlike (49a), so the NPI is not licensed by the question in (49a) and (49b) is the relevant configuration). These structures thus seem acceptable. (49) a. Nobody wonders whether to give these people a red cent. b. [ScalAssert [nobody wonders [Q whether to give these people [a red cent]NPI]]] c. # John wonders whether to give these people a red cent. The third column concerns transparency of the ScalAssert operator as the lower operator. This issue has not, to my knowledge, been investigated. The sentence in (50) is an example of focus being evaluated across an NPI licensing configuration (‘Focus out of NPI’ in Table 12.1). In (50), even associates with the red cross, which is contained in the argument of ScalAssert. The focus alternatives triggered by focus on the red cross thus need to skip the intervening ScalAssert operator in order to associate with even. The sentence seems fine, which would indicate (perhaps surprisingly, in view of its semantic similarity to only) that ScalAssert is selective, like Q and unlike the ~. But of course this has to be looked at more carefully before we draw such conclusions (hence the missing acceptability judgement for such structures indicated by the _in Table 12.1). (50) I even promised not to give a red cent to [the red CROSS]F . [evenC [~C [I promised [ScalAssert [not [I give [a red cent]NPI to [the red CROSS]F]]]]]]
‘Even the red cross is such that I didn’t promise to give them a red cent.’
12.3.3 Alternative evaluation—upshot The data considered in this section show that some of the operators that evaluate alternatives are selective, while others are unselective. To capture this, I propose a grammar
244 Sigrid Beck of alternatives based on variable binding, with details provided in Appendix B. Looking at several different alternative constructions simultaneously and at their interaction has led us to discover an important feature of the grammar of alternatives and a revision of what is standardly used. In addition to the semantics, syntax also has some work to do regarding the association of triggers with their evaluating operators: we have to be able to establish a formal/structural connection between operator and trigger.
12.4 Conclusions and open questions 12.4.1 Summary This chapter has offered a fairly general and abstract discussion of focus sensitive operators. Two considerations have guided me in this. First I have followed Rooth (1992) in distinguishing between the interpretation of focus itself, and the interpretation of expressions that yield focus affected readings. I find Rooth’s general perspective on the contribution of focus still the most insightful one. This means that the set of focus sensitive operators in the narrow sense boils down to just the ~, and it is the ~’s behaviour in the grammar we must investigate. The analysis of focus affected interpretations involves, in addition to the ~, the interaction of the grammar with context, for example in the shape of covert domain restrictions. Secondly, I have argued that an insightful theory of focus alternatives links them with alternatives as used in other constructions like questions, polarity items, and so on. Thus the question operator and the ScalAssert operator also count among the alternative sensitive operators. This is not, per se, a new or controversial position; but I have followed up some theoretical consequences of making this connection and ended up arguing for a version of alternative semantics with distinguished variables instead of alternative sets.
12.4.2 Open questions A general question is how we identify the set of alternative evaluating operators. From what I have said above, it looks like a small set. An important choice point here is the distinction between abstract operators vs visible morphemes (e.g. ~ vs only). It is difficult to decide in individual cases what the actual alternative sensitive operator is. We have seen that there is some cross-linguistc variation w.r.t. the set of alternative evaluating operators available. Is there also a stable core—for example the ~, Q, and ScalAssert? If so, do these three have the same semantics cross-linguistically? Perhaps the most important question to my mind is this. If the way I sketch things in this chapter is on the right track, then there are two separate ways to effect quantification in natural language: quantification over ordinary variables and quantification over
Focus Sensitive Operators 245 distinguished variables. This is particularly obvious in the Kratzer/Wold system where the operators are variable binders. Why should the grammar double mechanisms in this way? And when does a grammar choose which quantificational system?
Appendix Compositional semantics for alternative semantic values For a theory of compositional interpretation for ordinary semantic values, I adopt Heim and Kratzer (1998). Our task, then, is to enrich this theory so as to include the compositional calculation of alternative semantic values. (While the theory as offered is limited to an extensional semantics, I hypothesize that the compositional theory itself is basically sufficient as is. An intensional semantics is added in this manner, for example in Hohaus and Beck (2010), and Beck and von Stechow (2015). But see Heim and Kratzer (1998 ch. 12) and von Fintel and Heim (2008) for different extensions to intensionality). Below, I first offer an implementation of Rooth’s alternative semantics in this theory (which runs into a known problem with lambda abstraction) and then an implementation of the Kratzer/Wold version (in which the problem goes away).
Appendix A: Roothian alternatives added to Heim and Kratzer In (1) I specify the rules that allow us to interpret the most basic examples. The first clause of these rules is always from Heim and Kratzer; the second clause for alternative semantic values supplements it. Examples (2) and (3) provide an illustration. (1) a. Lexical Terminal Nodes (LTN): If α is a lexical item, then for any g: [[α]]og =[[α]]o which is defined in the lexicon. [[α]]Altg={[[α]]og} b. Pronouns and Traces: If αi is a pronoun or a trace, then for any g: [[αi]]og =g(i). [[αi]]Altg={[[αi]]og} c. Function Application (FA): If α is a binary branching tree with daughters β and γ, then for any g: if [[β]]og is a function whose domain includes [[γ]]og, then [[β γ]]og = [[β]]og ([[γ]]og) [[β γ]]Altg= {β′(γ′): β’∈[[β]]Altg and γ′∈[[γ]]Altg} d. Focus: If α is βF then for any g: [[βF]]og = [[β]]og [[βF]]Altg = Dτ, where τ is the semantic type of β.
246 Sigrid Beck (2) [S [NP BillF] [VP left]] (3) a. [[BillF left]]og = λw. Bill left in w b. [[left]]og = λx.λw.x left in w [[BillF]]og = Bill [[BillF]]Altg = De = {Bill, John,...} c. [[BillF left]]Altg = {[[left]]og (Bill), [[left]]og (John), ...} = {λw.Bill left in w, λw.John left in w,...} = {λw. x left in w |x∈D} In (4) I repeat the (simplified) definition of the ~ and in (5) I give an example of its use (question/answer congruence). In (4), the first clause of the definition ensures that the alternatives generated in the sister constituent of the ~ are ‘stored’ in the focus anaphor C (to be made use of by anaphoric processes like question/answer congruence). The second clause says that the ~ adds nothing to the ordinary semantics. The third clause says that the alternatives within the scope of the ~ do not contribute to the generation of alternative sets above the ~. That is, those alternatives are hereby evaluated and are not passed on compositionally. (4) Squiggle: If α is a tree [β ~ C], then: [[α]]og is defined only if [[C]]og ⊆ [[β]]Altg. If defined, [[α]]og =[[β]]og [[α]]Altg = {[[β]]og} (5) [D [S3 Q [who left]] [S1 ~ C [S2 [NP BillF] [VP left]]]] [[S1]]og is defined only if [[C]]og ⊆ [[S2]]Altg.Then, [[S1]]og =[[S2]]og S3 is the antecedent of the focus anaphor, i.e. g(C) = [[S3]]og (and [[S3]]og ⊆ [[S2]]Altg, i.e. {λw. x left in w |x∈D}⊆{λw. x left in w |x∈D}) What is missing from the Heim and Kratzer system of compositional interpretation are the rules Predicate Modification and Predicate Abstraction. The first can be unproblematically provided as in (6a) and would be applicable in examples like (6b), cf. (6c–6e). (6) a. Predicate Modification (PM): For any branching tree with daughters β and γ of type and any g: [[β γ]]og = λx.[[β]]og (x)=[[γ]]og (x)=1 [[β γ]]Altg = {λx.β′(x)= γ′(x)=1 | β′∈[[β]]Altg and γ′∈[[γ]]Altg} b. a Yellow bike/a yellow Bike c. [λx. x is yellow and x is a bike] d. {[λx. x is yellow and x is a bike], [λx. x is green and x is a bike], ...} e. {[λx. x is yellow and x is a bike], [λx. x is yellow and x is a car], ...} The rule of Predicate Abstraction, however, is a problem. We need it for instance to cover examples like (7). It is tempting to write (8), but note that the metavariable x in (8),
Focus Sensitive Operators 247 focus semantic value definition, after the ‘|’, is not bound. Rewriting the formula as in (9) reveals that it doesn’t give us the desired result (thanks to Ede Zimmermann p.c. for making this clear to me): (7)
a. (I only talked to a man) who invited Bill/ who invited Bill b. [λx. x invited Bill] c. {[λx. x invited Bill], [λx. x invited John], ...} d. {[λx. x invited Bill], [λx. x visited Bill],...}
(8) For any branching tree with daughters β1 and γ (β1 is just an index): [[β1 γ]]og = λx.[[γ]]og[x/1](x)=1 [[β1 γ]]Altg = {λx.γ′=1 | γ′∈[[γ]]Altg[x/1]} (9) [[β1 γ]]Altg = {F | ∃γ′[F=[λx.γ′=1] & γ′ ∈ [[γ]]Altg[x/1]]} ‘λx. γ′=1’ is a constant function, which is not intended. This is the motivation behind Rooth’s (1985) official proposal (and also von Stechow’s 1991 version of it), which uses a framework in which meanings are functions from variable assignments to denotations of the usual types (so if g is the type of variable assignments, then referential expressions would now be and propositions would be and so on). In such a framework the problem can be avoided. See Poesio (1996), Shan (2004) and especially Novel and Romero (2010) for discussion. We have independent reasons for redesigning the system specified so far, however. The rule in (10) adds wh-phrases and the Q operator, and (11) illustrates that Q is necessarily unselective—an undesired feature of alternative semantics, cf. the discussion of (38) and (39) above. Appendix B introduces my official proposal, which allows selective alternative evaluating operators. (10) b. [[what]]Alt = {z | z∈D} c. [[Q S]]og = [[S]]Altg (11) a. [[who JohnF invited]]Altg = {λw.x invited y in w | x,y ∈D} a′. [[Q [who JohnF invited]]]og = {λw.x invited y in w | x,y ∈D} b. [[where we bought which book]]Altg = {λw.we bought y (y a book) at x in w | x,y ∈D} b′. [[Q where we bought which book]]og={λw.we bought y(book(y)) at x in w|x,y ∈D}
Appendix B: A version of Wold’s (1996) alternative semantics Wold (1996) perceives the need for selective evaluation of alternatives and proposes a version of alternative semantics in which alternative triggers introduce variables. An
248 Sigrid Beck alternative sensitive operator can then bind (selected) variables. Wold implements this in a very clever way using only the ordinary assignment function g, combined with definedness conditions that ensure that we generate alternatives in just the right places. I concede that this is possible and elegant, but I invariably get confused. The version specified below uses a proposal by Kratzer (1991) according to which alternative triggers introduce distinguished variables, to be interpreted by a second variable assignment function h for the distinguished variables. I begin once more with a set of composition rules that gets us off the ground: (12) a. Lexical Terminal Nodes (LTN): If α is a lexical item, then for any g,h: [[α]]g = [[α]] which comes from the lexicon. [[α]]g,h = [[α]]g b. Pronouns and Traces (P&T): If αi is a pronoun or a trace, then for any g,h: [[αi]]g = g(i) [[αi]]g,h = [[αi]]g c. Function Application (FA): If α = [β γ] then for any g,h: if [[β]]g is a function whose domain includes [[γ]]g, then: [[α]]g = [[β]]g([[γ]]g) [[α]]g,h = [[β]]g,h([[γ]]g,h) d. Focus: If α = βFi, then for any g,h: [[α]]g = [[β]]g [[α]]g,h = h(i) if i is in the domain of h, [[α]]g otherwise. (13) [[BillF1 left]]g = λw. Bill left in w [[BillF1 left]]g,h = λw.h(1) left in w
(if 1 is in the domain of h)
At the level of focus semantic values, the focus is replaced by a distinguished variable. The alternative semantic value is of the same type as the ordinary semantic value. Alternative sensitive operators bind the distinguished variables. I assume that we always start with the empty assignment for h. Rule (14) is the ~ operator in such a Wold/Kratzer system (the requirement that h be total is to say that the ~ unselectively binds all distinguished variables in its scope). (14) Squiggle (Rooth’s meaning): If α = [~ C β], then for any g,h: [[α]]g is only defined if g(C)⊆{[[β]]g,h |h a total distinguished variable assignmt}. Then [[α]]g = [[β]]g [[α]]g,h = [[β]]g,∅ This is Rooth’s ~, an unselective operator which doesn’t allow any alternatives to be passed on beyond its scope, as argued for above. (A Woldian selective ~ is defined in (15) (and this is presumably what we would use if we didn’t side with Beck and Vasishth (2009) on the multiple focus issue). But my proposal is (14).) An example of (14)’s
Focus Sensitive Operators 249 application is given in (16); (16) is the same as what we calculated above with Roothian alternatives. It shows that the familiar alternative sets can be generated. The result can be used in a discourse like (5) above. (15) Squiggle (Wold’s meaning): If α = [~iC β], then for any g,h: [[α]]g is only defined if g(C)⊆{[[β]]g,h[x/i] | x ∈Di}. Then [[α]]g = [[β]]g [[α]]g,h = [[β]]g,h (16) [[[~ C [BillF1 left]]]]g is only defined if g(C) ⊆{[[BillF1 left]]g,h |h a total distinguished variable assignment}, i.e. g(C) ⊆ {λw.x left in w | x∈D}. Then, [[[~ C [BillF1 left]]]]g = [λw. Bill left in w]. I specify the rule for Predicate Abstraction in (17). The problem with lambda abstraction doesn’t arise in this version of alternative semantics. Under a Woldian theory, there is then no need to make all meanings functions from assignments to normal denotations. My motivation for the Woldian system comes from questions, which I add to the theory in (18)–(23). (17) Predicate Abstraction (PA): If α = [i β] where i is a numerical index or a relative pronoun, then for any g,h: [[α]]g = λx.[[β]]g[x/i] [[α]]g,h = λx.[[β]]g[x/i],h (18) wh-phrases: If α = whi, then for any g,h: [[α]]g is undefined. [[α]]g,h = h(i) if i is in the domain of h, [[α]]g otherwise. (19) a. [[who1]]g is undefined b. [[who1]]g,h = h(1) if 1 is in the domain of h, undefined otherwise. (20) a. [[who1 left]]g is undefined b. [[who1 left]]g,h = λw.h(1) left in w (if 1 is in the domain of h) (21) question operator (Q): If α = [Qi β], then for any g,h: [[α]]g ={[[β]]g, ∅[x/i] | x∈D}. [[α]]g,h ={[[β]]g,h[x/i] | x∈D} (22) a. Who left? b. [Q1 [who1 left]] c. [[[Q1 [who1 left]]]]g = {[[[who1 left]]]g, ∅[x/1] | x∈D} = {λw.x left in w | x∈D}
250 Sigrid Beck The question operator saves structures with WH-expressions from uninterpretability: (23) Principle of Interpretability: An LF must have an ordinary semantic interpretation. I have simplified things, leaving out restrictions on WH-phrases and multiple WH- questions, but this is essentially how I propose questions fit into a two-tier semantics with ordinary and alternative semantic values (see Beck 2006 for more details and discussion).
Chapter 13
Quantificati on a nd Inf ormation St ru c t u re Manfred Krifka
13.1 What is quantification? And why is it relevant for information structure? In linguistic semantics, the term quantification refers to evaluating the relation of two sets, prototypically expressed by quantificational determiners like every, some, no, or most. This is illustrated in the following examples; imagine a set of dice of different colours, some of which might be loaded. (1) a. Every black die is loaded. b. Some black die is loaded. c. Most black dice are loaded.
⟦black die⟧ ⊆ ⟦loaded⟧ ⟦black die⟧ ⋂ ⟦loaded⟧ ≠ ∅ #(⟦black die⟧ ⋂ ⟦loaded⟧) > ½ #(⟦black die⟧)
If α is an expression, ⟦α⟧ stands for the truth-conditional meaning of α; ⟦black die⟧ is the set of black dice, and ⟦loaded⟧ is the set of loaded objects. Quantificational determiners express relations between the two sets, for example every, the subset relation. The NP black die is called restrictor, and the VP loaded, (nuclear) scope, or matrix. Quantificational statements like (1) are further restricted to the entities being talked about (like the dice under investigation); this is the domain of quantification, which can be specified, for example as far as these dice are concerned, but it is often left implicit. (2) ⟦Every black die is loaded.⟧DOM is true iff [⟦black die⟧ ⋂ DOM] ⊆ ⟦loaded⟧ Quantifiers have been studied in Generalized Quantifier theory (cf. Barwise and Cooper 1981; for recent overviews Szabolcsi 2010; Keenan 2011; for typological
252 Manfred Krifka treatments Matthewson 2008, Keenan and Paperno 2012). They increase the expressive power of human languages compared to languages that only have referential DPs, like John or the thief. Human language also exceeds the expressive power of first-order predicate logic, which has two (interdefinable) quantifiers, existential ∃ and universal ∀, which would not be able to express (1c). The examples in (1) differ in their truth conditions. So, why have a chapter on quantification in this handbook, as information structure is concerned with the way how information is presented, or ‘packaged,’ in the sense of Chafe (1976)? Because the marking devices of information-structural features like focus, givenness, and topic influence the interpretation of quantificational clauses (cf. Partee 1991, 1999). This can be seen best with a type of quantification not expressed by determiners (called D-quantification), but by adverbial quantifiers like always, generic sentences, or modal operators like must (called A-quantification; cf. Bach et al. 1995). In the following example, the stress pattern, normally expressing focus, leads to truth-conditional differences. (3) a. Always, a black die is loaded. b. Always, a black die is loaded.
⟦black die⟧ ⊆ ⟦loaded⟧ ⟦loaded⟧ ⊆ ⟦black die⟧
The effect of stress in quantificational statements has been observed by various authors. Halliday (1970) noticed it with modal statements. The warning sign Dogs must be carried gets the unintended reading that the escalator is only for dog-holders with stress on dogs. Sgall et al. (1987) pointed it out for clauses with frequency adverbials, as in Londoners most often go to Brighton, which gets different truth conditions with stress on Londoners (‘all Brighton visitors are Londoners’) or Brighton (‘all visits by Londoners are to Brighton’). Krifka et al. 1995 attended to ambiguities in generic sentences as in Typhoons arise in the Pacific, which are a generic statement about typhoons with stress on Pacific, and about the Pacific with stress on typhoons (cf. also Cohen and Erteschik-Shir 2002). There is one important finding of generalized quantifier theory that will play an important role, conservativity. According to Keenan and Stavi (1986), it is sufficient for judging the truth of a D-quantificational statement to consider the entities in the restrictor, which is given by the NP argument. For (1), it is sufficient to check the black dice; other entities such as the white dice or the roulette wheels are irrelevant. The restrictor indicates the entities that the sentence is about (here, the black dice). This corresponds to the notion of topic, whereas the nuclear scope corresponds to the notion of comment. With D-quantifiers, the syntactic structure [[DP D NP] VP] indicates how the clause should be evaluated: NP is the restrictor, VP the nuclear scope, and D expresses the relation between restrictor and nuclear scope. With A-quantifiers as in (3), the identification of restrictor and nuclear scope is supported by prosodic means or syntactic movement, like scrambling, see below. Configurations of quantifier, restrictor, and nuclear scope have been called tripartite structures by Partee (1991) and Heim (1982). There are certain phenomena relating to quantification that are treated in other articles of this handbook. In particular, Chapter 12 treats particles like only, also, and even
Quantification and Information Structure 253 that have quantificational force. And Chapter 3 treats phenomena relating to definite and indefinite DPs that have quantificational effects on the level of discourse.
13.2 Information structure in A-quantification 13.2.1 Focus effects in a situation-based theory Adverbial quantifiers, as observed in (3), have been analysed as quantifying over times, cases, or situations (cf. e.g. Lewis 1975). Their restrictor can be provided by a when- clause. Assuming situations (cf. von Fintel 1994), we can illustrate this as follows: (4) When Mary goes to the movies, she always invites John to go along with her. ⟦Mary goes to the movies⟧ ⊆ ⟦Mary invites John to go along with her⟧ = {s | Mary goes to the movies in s} ⊆ {s | Mary invites John to go with her in s} Rooth (1985) explains the influence of information structure on quantification as an effect of focus, understood as indicating alternative meanings that play a role in semantic interpretation (cf. Chapter 2). In addition to the regular meaning ⟦α⟧ there is a focus meaning ⟦α⟧f, a set of meanings of the same type, which is relevant for the interpretation of certain operators, including adverbial quantification: (5) Mary always takes JohnF to the movies.
‘Every situation in which Mary takes someone to the movies, it is John.’
(6) MaryF always takes John to the movies.
‘Every situation in which someone takes John to the movies, it is Mary.’
The regular and the focus meaning of (5) without always are as follows: (7) a. ⟦5⟧ = {s | Mary takes John to the movies in s} b. ⟦5⟧f = {{s | Mary takes x to the movies in s} | x∈PERSON} = {S | ∃x∈PERSON[S = {s | Mary takes x to the movies in s}]} The restrictor is provided by the union of the focus meaning, ⋃⟦α⟧f. With always we get the following interpretation for (5): (8) ⋃⟦5⟧f ⊆ ⟦5⟧ = {s | ∃x∈PERSON[M. takes x to the m. in s]} ⊆ {s | M. takes J. to the m. in s}
254 Manfred Krifka For (6) this would result in the following interpretation: (9) {s | ∃x∈PERSON[x takes J. to the m. in s]} ⊆ {s | Mary takes J. to the m. in s} This represents the intended reading, but at the price of assuming different ways in which adverbial quantifiers are interpreted: In (4) the restrictor is provided by a when- clause, in (5)/(6) by the focus meaning.
13.2.2 Focus effects mediated via context Starting with Rooth (1992), focus effects were seen as mediated through context, thus leading to an overall more restrictive theory of how focus influences interpretation; von Fintel (1994) carried this out for A-quantification. Previous work by Kasper (1987), Schubert and Pelletier (1987), and Berman (1989) had suggested that the presuppositions of a clause form the restrictor of an A-quantifier. This is illustrated by (10), where hit the target presupposes that the subject aims and shoots at a target. (10) Robin Hood always hits the target.
{s | RH aims and shoots at a target in s} ⊆ {s | RH hits the target in s}
Presupposition is a form of givenness, an information-structural notion (Chapter 7). The focus structure gives a linguistic clue about the kinds of situation talked about, which in turn influences quantificational statements. Von Fintel takes up a device introduced by Rooth (1992) for context-sensitivity: The alternatives at the propositional level that are introduced by focus restrict a contextual parameter C, which is related to the clause by a squiggle operator ~: (11) ⟦ϕ ~ C⟧ = ⟦ϕ⟧, provided that⟦C⟧ ⊆ ⟦ϕ⟧f. C is interpreted as a subset of the focus alternatives ⟦ϕ⟧f (von Fintel also requires that ⟦ϕ⟧ and at least one other element must be in ⟦C⟧). C is further constrained by the presuppositions of the clause, by a when-clause, or by the discourse topic of the sentence. With adverbial quantification, C determines the restrictor. Consequently, focus is just one of the factors restricting the domain of quantification. Consider (12): (12) ⟦[When Mary feels lonely [[she always takes JohnF to the movies] ~ C]]⟧ true iff ⋃⟦C⟧ ⊆ ⟦Mary takes JohnF to the movies⟧, provided ⟦C⟧ ⊆ ⟦Mary feels lonely⟧, ⟦C⟧ ⊆ ⟦Mary takes JohnF to the movies⟧f This states that in all situations s in ⋃⟦C⟧, Mary takes John to the movies. As C is not explicitly restricted further, we should take it to be the maximal set satisfying
Quantification and Information Structure 255 the provision, which results in the intended reading: whenever Mary feels lonely and takes someone to the movies, she takes John. C can be restricted further by the context, for example by the leading question (13), in which case the interpretation would be appropriately restricted to situations in which Mary takes John, Bill, or Sam to the movies. (13) ⟦Who does Mary take to the movies, John, Bill, or Sam?⟧ = {{s | M. takes x to the movies} | x∈PERSON, x = John ∨ x = Bill ∨ x = Sam} Beaver and Clark (2008) distinguish three ways of how focus can affect meaning: quasi association, where a non-veridical propositional operator like negation applies to a proposition, which in turn has to be an answer to a question under discussion; free association, where an operator depends on the setting of a contextual variable; and conventionalized association, as with additive and scalar particles like also, only, and even, where association with focus arguably is hard-wired into the grammar. Quantification belongs to the second kind: Focus helps to restrict a domain variable, which then is intersected with the restrictor of a quantifier (cf. de Hoop and Solà 1996 for a related proposal). Other constructions whose interpretation depends in similar ways on focus are superlatives like MaryF gave John the biggest box ( = Mary gave a bigger box to John than anyone else gave to him) and emotive factives like The students were glad that BradyF taught semantics. ( = The students preferred Brady over another person to teach semantics). But for quantifiers, Beaver and Clark (2008) make the point that their focus dependency cannot be explained by mere sensitivity to presupposition, as has been argued in the light of examples like (10) by Rooth (1999) and Cohen (1999). Consider (14). (14) (a) Every Friday Sandy goes to town. (b) She always realizes that the Harley Davidson she is riding there is going to attract a lot of attention. Realize is factive, hence (14b) presupposes that Sandy rides a Harley Davidson to town and attracts a lot of attention. If this presupposition would restrict the domain of always, then (14b) should mean ‘Whenever Sandy is riding a Harley Davidson and it attracts a lot of attention, then Sandy realizes that it attracts a lot of attention’. Example (14b) does not have this meaning. Beaver and Clark argue that (14a) introduces a set of situations of Sandy going to town, one for each Friday, that cannot be reduced further by the presupposition of the following sentence. Rather, this presupposition is accommodated: we understand (14) as saying that every Friday situation that Sandy goes to town is a situation in which her Harley Davidson attracts a lot of attention. The resulting picture then is as follows: quantification depends on a given set of situations, and the presuppositions within the quantified sentence corresponds to that set of given situations. Focus in turn helps to determine the presuppositions of the sentence,
256 Manfred Krifka by the union over the alternatives of the focus. We do not have to stipulate a direct relation between quantification and focus.
13.2.3 The requantification problem Von Fintel (1994) notices a problem with quantification over situations which arise with indefinite DPs. Consider (15), after Krifka (1995). (15) A cowboy always chews tobaccoF . {s | ∃y∃x[cowboy(x) ∧ x chews y in s]} ⊆ {s | ∃x[cowboy(x) ∧ x chews tobacco in s]} We understand this as: when a cowboy chews something, he chews tobacco. But the representation given actually states: for any situation s, if there is a cowboy that chews something in s, then there is a cowboy (potentially another one!) that chews tobacco in s. For this, a situation s would constitute a positive instance in which one cowboy chews tobacco, and nine others chew bubble gum. We cannot achieve binding between the x in the restrictor and the x in the scope. This is the requantification problem. Von Fintel (1994) suggests that we quantify over minimal situations in the restrictor and in the scope (cf. also Berman 1987; Heim 1990; Elbourne 2005): each minimal situation s in which a cowboy chews something is a minimal situation in which a cowboy chews tobacco. This strategy gives us the right truth conditions. But it forces an assumption of identity between the two cats in (16): (16) Always, if a cat is hungry, a cat cries. This interpretation might be possible (von Fintel discusses examples like Show me a man who plays hard and I show you a man who deserves a beer). But clearly, (16) invites the reading ‘If a cat x is hungry, then there is a distinct cat y such that y cries’. The problem does not go away in a dynamic framework that is designed to capture the introduction and uptake of discourse referents, such as Heim (1982) or Kamp (1981). If we adapt the interpretation rules for focus and A-quantifiers to such a framework, as in Rooth (1995), then a cowboy in the scope in (15) would require the introduction of a novel discourse referent, leading to the wrong interpretation. Rooth’s solution is to relax the novelty condition and allow for the index to be in the input meaning. However, this creates problems in cases like (16), where we actually want the indefinite DP in the scope to come with the novelty condition. Hinterwimmer and Schueler (2012) propose that sentences like (15) are not about situations, but events. As the participants have unique roles in events, we do not need any reference to minimal situations: For any event e of chewing, there is a unique agent, and hence the agent of the event in the restrictor and the agent of the event in the scope must be the same. Example (16) is different: There are two clauses, which allow for the agent of the first
Quantification and Information Structure 257 event (being hungry) and the agent of the second (crying) to be different. Hinterwimmer and Schueler (2012) also discuss (17a) in which the indefinite DP in the scope is interpreted as co-referent with the indefinite DP in the restrictor, in contrast to (17b). (17) a. When Alan praises a student, he always praises a smart student. b. When Alan talks to a student, he always praises a student. Hinterwimmer and Schueler argue that in case the predicate in the restrictor and the scope is the same, as praise in (17a), there is a tendency that they pick out the same event; this is not the case if the predicates are different, as in (17b). In addition, as the descriptive part of the indefinite in the scope is partly novel in (17a), the speaker could not use a pronoun or a definite description, and so there is no pragmatic inference that the two entities are distinct.
13.2.4 Givenness in a representation based on discourse referents Chierchia (1995) and Krifka (2001a) propose that it is givenness, not focus, which affects adverbial quantification. They analyse the accentual pattern of (15) as the result of deaccentuation of a cowboy. (18) [A cowboy]G always smokes tobacco. The contextual effects of adverbial quantification discussed in 2.2 can be explained in terms of givenness, as it is inversely related to focus (cf. Schwarzschild 1999). Krifka argues that this solves the requantification problem if we assume that adverbial quantification involves discourse referents anchored to entities. Givenness implies that the entity referred to is already present in the context (cf. Chapter 3). Now, the discourse referent of a given indefinite as in (18) is obviously not present, as then a pronoun or definite DP would have been used. Krifka calls such indefinites non-novel, and assumes that they trigger accommodation of a context in which they are given. The quantifier always then states that each way in which the context can be accommodated makes the sentence true. (19) Every way in which the context can be accommodated such that [a cowboy]G,i smokes tobacco can be interpreted, —i.e. every way to anchor a discourse referent i to some cowboy or other, is also a way that makes the sentence [a cowboy]G,j smokes tobacco true, —i.e. it also holds that i is anchored to a cowboy that smokes tobacco. In support of the givenness analysis, Krifka points out that non-novel indefinites can be marked by the word given, and that they carry other givenness markings, for example they are marked as topics in Japanese.
258 Manfred Krifka (20) The fact that a given phenomenon is successfully predicted by a theory does not prove the theory to be correct. (21) taitei, midori no me o shita inu wa rikou de aru usually green gen eye acc did dog top intelligent decl is
‘Usually, a green-eyed dog is intelligent.’
Furthermore, scrambling in languages like German can be seen as evidence for givenness of indefinite DPs that yields a restrictor for A-quantifiers (cf. Chapter 19). This has been argued for by Diesing (1992) with data like the following: (22) a. weil [IP doch because part
gewöhnlich [VP Kinder auf usually children on
der the
Straße spielen]] street play
‘because there usually are children playing on the street’
b. weil [IP Kinderi doch gewöhnlich [VP ti auf der Straße spielen]]
‘because children usually play on the street’
Finally, accommodated indefinites support cataphora, as in If a vegetarian owns it, he usually takes good care of [a donkey]G. This is to be expected if their antecedent is given (cf. Reinhart 1986). One argument for the analysis based on discourse referents over situation-or event-based theories relates to stative predicates, as in (23). This is a statement about square numbers, not about situations containing such numbers, whatever this should be. (23) A square number can end only with digits 1, 4, 6, 9, 00, or 25. Krifka also considers non-novel indefinites in the restrictor of biclausal quantificational sentences, arguing that they trigger accommodation of their discourse referent as well. (24) If a vegetarian owns [a donkey]G, he usually takes good care of it.
‘Most donkeys owned by a vegetarian are taken good care of by him.’
Sentence (24) asymmetrically quantifies over donkeys (cf. Kadmon 1987), which is indicated by deaccenting a donkey. This reading can be achieved if we assume that its discourse referent is accommodated, and usually quantifies over accommodations: most ways to accommodate the context such that x is a donkey support the following: if a vegetarian owns x, he takes good care of x.
Quantification and Information Structure 259
13.3 Information structure in D-quantification 13.3.1 D-quantification over situations While information-structure effects have been initially discovered with A-quantification, they also affect sentences with D-quantification. Krifka (1990) discusses D-quantifiers that involve quantification over events as in (25), and Geilfuß-Wolfgang (1995) and Eckardt (1999) treat examples like (26) in detail. (25) Every ship passed through the lock at night.
‘Every ship passing through the lock occurred night.’
(26) Most tickets were sold at checker four.
‘Most tickets that were sold were sold at checker four.’
Geilfuß-Wolfgang 1995 develops an analysis in which the focus in the scope of the quantifier affects the nominal complement of the quantificational determiner. Assume that MOST expresses the relation between two sets A, B that holds if #(A⋂B) > ½ #(A), cf. (1c), then we have the following interpretation for (26). Just as with A-quantification, the restrictor is determined by a combination of factors, here the NP argument of the determiner and the focus of the nuclear scope. (27) MOST(⟦tickets⟧ ⋂ ⋃⟦were sold at checker fourF⟧f, ⟦were sold at checker four⟧) = MOST({x | x is a ticket} ⋂ {x |x was sold at some checker}, {x | x was sold at checker four}) In (26) quantification appears to be over entities (tickets). However, as each ticket is sold exactly once, it may be that quantification is over events. Eckardt (1999) takes up this issue with examples like (28). (28) Ludwig washed most cars with X-polishF .
‘Most cars that Ludwig washed he washed with X-Polish.’
This cannot simply be understood as a quantification over cars that Ludwig washed: if Ludwig has ten cars and washes six cars once with X-Polish, and washes two others fifty times with another product, (28) is not an appropriate description. It is also not just the washing events that count: if Ludwig washes one of his cars fifty times with X-polish,
260 Manfred Krifka and six of his cars once with some other product, (28) does not seem to be true either. Eckardt suggests that such sentences suggest a one-to-one mapping between entities and events; in our case, that each car was washed exactly once. Hence focus sensitivity appears to be a property of event or situation quantification, even with D-quantifiers.
13.3.2 Information structure effects in the restrictor: many and few Focus does not only influence D-quantification in the scope of the quantifier, but also in the nuclear scope. This was first pointed out by Herburger (1993, 1997), based on an observation in Westerståhl (1985), with examples like the following: (29) Many ScandinaviansF won the Nobel price in literature.
‘Many winners of the Nobel price in literature were Scandinavians.’
(30) Few cooksF applied.
‘Few applicants were cooks.’
The usual restrictor–scope relation appears to be reversed; now the nominal complement determines the scope, and verbal predicate the restrictor. Hence, such uses of quantifiers do not satisfy conservativity. Herburger also showed that in cases when part of the restrictor is focused, the non-focused parts remains in the restrictor, resulting in a compositionality problem. (31) Few [incompetentF cooks] applied.
‘Few of the applicants that were cooks were incompetent.’
The phenomenon occurs with few and many; it does not show up with every or most: (32) Many incompetentF cooks applied.
‘Many of the applicants that were cooks were incompetent.’
(33) Most incompetentF cooks applied.
Not: ‘Most of the applicants that were cooks were incompetent.’
Herburger (1997) argues that the determiners for which it obtains must be weak in the sense of Milsark (1974): they must form quantificational sentences that can occur as subjects of there-sentences (cf. There were many cooks among the applicants vs *There were most cooks among the applicants). Such determiners are intersective, that is, the truth condition of [[D NP] VP] can be stated as a condition on the intersection ⟦NP⟧ ⋂
Quantification and Information Structure 261 ⟦VP⟧ (cf. Keenan 2003). Intersective quantifiers are symmetric, that is, the truth conditions of [[D α] β] are the same as for [[D β] α], hence the distinction between restrictor and scope is irrelevant. Consequently, the syntactic position of the determiner D is no longer required to identify the restrictor. Herburger suggests that there are two construals, one in which the determiner phrase DP takes scope, with the nominal complement as restrictor, and one in which the determiner D raises and takes scope over the nominal complement and the restrictor, interpreted conjunctively. (34) a. [few [incompetent cooks]] [x applied] b. [few [[x incompetent cooks] [x applied]] Example (34b) expresses the unary reading of the quantifier that also occurs in there- sentences, as in (35). In this, the determiner is a cardinality predicate on a set—here, that the set {x | x is a child ∧ x is playing} contains many /three elements. (35) There were many /three children playing. [many /three [[x children] [x playing]] In (34b) there is no syntactically marked restrictor, hence focus will affect the interpretation just as with A-quantification. When we analyse a case with focus on incompetent following Rooth (1985), we get the reading in (36), where we assume that the alternative to incompetent is competent. (36) ⟦[few [incompetentF cooks applied]]⟧ = FEW(⋃⟦incompetentF cooks applied⟧f, ⟦incompetentF cooks applied⟧) = FEW({x | x is a competent or incompetent cook ∧ x applied}, {x | x is an incompetent cook ∧ x applied}) This corresponds to the paraphrase given in (31). The approach extends naturally to cases in which the focus is located within the verbal constituent: (37) ⟦[few [competent cooks applied lateF]]⟧ = FEW({x | x is a competent cook ∧ x applied at some time or other} {x | x is a competent cook ∧ x applied late}) We can also deal with cases of multiple focus spread over the nominal complement of the determiner and the verbal predicate. The resulting meaning is that among the cooks that applied, the number of competent late-appliers was low. (38) ⟦[few [competentF cooks applied lateF]]⟧ = FEW({x |x is a competent or incompetent cook ∧ x applied some time or other} {x |x is a competent cook ∧ x applied late})
262 Manfred Krifka Herburger’s analysis has been criticized by Büring (1996), de Hoop and Solà (1996), Cohen (2001), and Beaver and Clark (2008). In particular, the syntactic structure (36) does not correspond to the fact that syntactically, few is a nominal determiner, resulting in a D-Quantifier, not an adverbial or A-Quantifier. As an alternative, Büring (1996) suggests the following general scheme for the interpretation of an expression with focus: (39) [ … F … ] is true iff F, rather /to a higher degree than an alternative A, make [ … X … ] true. Notice that according to (39), focus is not bound by the quantifier; rather, it is a general interpretation scheme for focus effects. (40) [[many incompetentF cooks] applied] is true iff incompetent, rather than /to a higher degree than competent, makes [many X cooks applied] true. The interpretation in (40) holds if many incompetent cooks applied is judged true, whereas many competent cooks applied is not judged true, or true to a lesser degree. This asks us to compare the following two statements: (41) a. ‘the number of incompetent cooks that applied is higher than expected’ b. ‘the number of competent cooks that applied is higher than expected’ Interpretation (40) says that many incompetentF cooks applied is true iff (41a) holds, but (41b) does not hold to the same degree. This results in the correct interpretation. The sentence asserts that the number of incompetent ones among the cooks that applied was higher than expected, not that the number of competent cooks that applied was higher than expected. Herburger (1997) wrongly predicts similar effects for other intersective quantifiers. Focus does not seem to have an influence on truth conditions in (42). (42) Three incompetentF cooks applied. Büring (1996) has the same problem, as the interpretation scheme (39) is compatible with quantifiers like three as well. What is special for many and few? As argued by Lappin (1988), these quantifiers are comparative. Solt (2009) analyses them as dimensional adjectives like big and small that relate individuals to a standard value of a scale that is dependent on some comparison class. The comparison class required for the interpretation of many and few is delivered by the restrictor of the quantifier, which depends on focus alternatives. This kind of sensitivity to the alternatives provided by focus shows up in sentences involving the as compared to construction: (43) Few / many / *three cooksF applied, as compared to someliers or pastry chefs.
Quantification and Information Structure 263 The analysis Solt proposes for few cooksF applied amounts to (44) when referring to focus alternatives, where ⋃⟦cooksF⟧f is the union of the alternatives, here ⟦cook⟧ ⋃ ⟦somelier⟧ ⋃ ⟦pastry chef⟧. (44) #(⟦cookF⟧ ⋂ ⟦applied⟧) 0.1 × 10. This is correct, even though there were more cooks that applied than there were someliers. Notice, also, that (44) represents not a proportional reading, but a cardinal reading of few /many, a point that is argued to be correct by Solt as well.
13.3.3 Information structure effects with proportional determiners Sauerland (2014) also discusses cases in which focus affects the interpretation of D- quantifiers; interestingly, this involves proportional quantifiers that are not intersective like many and few. The phenomenon was first recognized for Korean by Park (2007); related effects are observed in French and (for non-subject quantifiers) in English as in (45), a newspaper headline. Sauerland discusses German cases like (46). (45) Most recent class of NASA astronauts consists of 50% women. (46) a. 60 60
Prozent percent
(der) (of.the)
Frauen women
haben have
gewählt. voted
‘60 percent of the women have voted.’
b. 60 Prozent FrauenF haben gewählt.
‘60 percent of the voters were women.’
Sauerland argues with case and agreement facts that the syntactic structures of the DPs are different: in (46a) it is [DP 60 [D′ [D Prozent] [DP (der) Frauen]]], whereas in (46b), [DP [DP 60 Prozent] [NP Frauen]]. He assumes that (46b) allows for an interpretation like Herburger’s analysis in (34b), yielding the logical form (47): (47) [[DP 60 Prozent] [S [NP Frauen]F [VP haben gewählt]]].
264 Manfred Krifka The availability of (47) corresponds to the fact that in (46b), the DP 60 Prozent and the NP Frauen seems to be more loosely connected, and rather ambiguous as to which constituent forms the head. This structure is made clear with the alternative (48), in which the quantifier is expressed by an adverbial. (48) [PP Zu to
60 Prozent] 60 percent
haben have
FrauenF women
gewählt. voted
In (47) the union of the focus meaning can determine the restrictor of the quantificational DP, 60 Prozent, similar to few in (36): ‘60 percent of the men or women that voted were women’. In spite of these parallels, it is not clear whether the focus sensitivity of many/few and proportional quantifiers is the same phenomenon, given the problems of Herburger’s original analysis, and its crucial assumption that the determiners it applies to are intersective, not proportional.
13.3.4 Focus-sensitive determiners So far we have investigated focus effects in the scope and the restrictor of nominal quantificational determiners. There are also determiners that appear to be sensitive to the focus within them. Krifka (1999) discusses cases with comparative quantifiers such as (49). (49) a. More b. Less
than than
threeF threeF
boys left. boys left.
Classical General Quantifier analysis did not distinguish between the determiners and more than three and four, representing them as λP′λP[#(P⋂P′) > 3] and λP′λP[#(P⋂P′) ≥ 4], respectively. These are truth-functionally equivalent, hence semantically indistinguishable. The reason for the representation of numerals like four as expressing ≥ 4 is to account for the fact that Four boys left is true if more than four boys left; it is only by scalar implicature that this sentence gets the interpretation that exactly four boys left. Sentence (49a) lacks the implicature that excludes more than four boys being left, a fact not expected in General Quantifier theory. Krifka proposes that the determiner head, more, binds the set of alternatives introduced by focus, making them unavailable for scalar implicature. This is implemented in a theory in which the numeral three does not form part of the determiner, but is a numeral adjective that applies to sum individuals consisting of three atomic individuals. This provides the correct results for sentences with more than one quantifier, as in More than four girls kissed more than seven boys (in the cumulative reading), and it is extended to quantifiers headed by less or fewer as in (49b). Krifka (1999) applies a similar analysis for quantifiers headed by at least and at most. Newer work has pointed out that these superlatives are different in important respect.
Quantification and Information Structure 265 Geurts and Nouwen (2007) have argued that they are of a modal nature, and Cohen and Krifka (2011, 2014) proposed that they represent quantifications over speech acts. In any case, they also are sensitive to focus, just like comparative quantifiers. The focus of more than can be broader than the numeral, as in (50). (50) I ate more than [three apples]F—I also ate two pears. Another case of a determiner that appears to be inherently focusing is German lauter, which is derived from the adjective meaning ‘pure’ (cf. Eckardt 2002). (51) In dem Kasten waren lauter perlenF. in the box were LAUTER pearls
‘In the box there were only pearls, and a lot of them.’
In contrast to only (or German nur), lauter is a proper determiner that attaches to nominal expressions (mass and count), but not to names or to other constituents.
13.4 Information structure on determiners and quantifiers The cases discussed so far involved the interaction of determiners and quantifiers and expressions with a special information status, especially focused and given items. We now consider determiners and quantifiers that are themselves focused and/or given.
13.4.1 Focus on determiners In (52), the determiner is in focus, and the quantifier is a contrastive topic: (52) [[SomeF] cooks]Top were [hiredF] In this case, some carries a rising accent, which is often considered to be a special marking for contrastive topics (cf. Chapter 3); here it is understood as indicating alternative topics. As usual, focus indicates alternatives, the alternatives being other quantifiers. The alternatives to some, naturally, are other quantifiers such as all, most, or no. These alternatives are used for the computation of scalar implicatures: If there is an alternative α that leads to a sentence that entails the one that is uttered, but not vice versa, then the sentence with this alternative is implicated to be false. In (52), the sentence All cooks were hired implicates Some cooks were hired, but not the other way round (things are less clear with most). Hence, (52) implicates that not all cooks were hired.
266 Manfred Krifka The relevant alternatives in the case of (52) are sentences in which the quantified DP is a topic—for example, [all cooks]Top were hired, [most cooks]Top were hired, etc. This suggests a context question like What happened to the cooks? Were they hired or fired? This context question requires that there is a given set of cooks that the discourse is about. As a consequence, this forces a partitive reading of some cooks, a phenomenon observed and explained in this way in Büring (1996). A partitive (or strong) reading of a quantificational DP is one in which the nominal part is given in the context; it can generally be expressed with a partitive construction such as some of the cooks. However, the partitive reading does not hinge on the topichood of some cooks. Example (53) also has a partitive reading without a topical interpretation of some cooks, as a context question like the one indicated is enforced. (53) [A: Were the cooks hired?] B: [Some]F cooks were hired. Again, a salient alternative is All cooks were hired. Hence, a partitive reading of a quantifier is enforced if there is a focused-induced alternative that is itself partitive. If the focus-induced alternatives are not easily construed as partitive, as with number words, then focus does not lead to a partitive reading: (54) [A: How many cooks were hired?] [Three]F cooks were hired. While the numeral three can be used in partitive constructions—as in three of the cooks were fired—focus on three as in 54 does not invoke other partitive quantifiers as alternatives. This also shows up in the following pattern of implicature cancellation: (55) a. Some cooks have been fired, perhaps all / most /four cooks b. Three cooks have been fired, perhaps *all / *most / four cooks. Hence focus data show that there are two classes of quantification determiners, those that are naturally interpreted as partitive, and those that are not so interpreted.
13.4.2 Topical and focused quantifiers A quantified DP can be in focus, as in the following case: (56) A: What did the students have to memorize? B: The students had to memorize [every chemical element]F . As a consequence, the relation between quantifiers and topicality is certainly less strict than suggested in Section 13.1. It is conceivable that quantifiers start out with restrictors that are topics, but then, as DPs, are subjected to general syntactic rules, and as a result occur in other DP positions as well. We would perhaps predict that quantifiers
Quantification and Information Structure 267 occur first in topic positions in language acquisition, and that quantifiers occur more frequently in topic positions—but this is still unknown. The information structure status of quantifiers influences their scope. Sæbø (1997) observes that topical quantifiers have wide scope over focused quantifiers. (57) a. A: What did the candidates attend? B: [Several candidates]Top attended [every meeting]F.
‘For several candidates it holds that they attended every meeting.’
b. A: Who attended the meetings? B: [Several candidates]F attended [every meeting]Top.
‘For every meeting it holds that several candidates attended it.’
Krifka (2001b) argues that topical quantifiers can even scope over speech acts. (58) a. What did [every guest]Top bring to the party? b. What did [every]F guest bring to the party? While every guest in (58a) can scope over the wh-constituent, leading to a quantification into a question (‘For every guest x, what did x bring to the party?’), this is not available in (58b) (‘For which y does it hold that every guest brought y?’). The scopal behaviour can be captured structurally within a framework that assumes that topics occupy syntactic positions that c-command foci, as in the ‘cartographic’ theory of Rizzi (1997). As for quantification, such phenomena have been treated by Szabolcsi (1997), who identifies three pre-verbal positions in Hungarian that differ in their information-structural potential, and can be occupied by different quantificational expressions. The outermost position is reserved for referential DPs, but can also be accessed by quantifiers headed by a legtöbb ‘most’. The next position is taken by distributive quantifiers, for example DPs headed by minden ‘every’, and the immediate preverbal position is accessible to ‘counting’ quantifiers headed by for example kevés ‘few’ or hatnál több ‘more than six’. Sometimes, one and the same DP can occur in distinct positions, leading to distinct interpretations (e.g. ‘Mary saw two movies, namely X and Y’ vs ‘The number of movies Mary saw was two’). Ebert (2009) performs similar tests with German, using an observation by Frey (2004) that only topics can occur within the German middle field in front of certain sentence adverbials. Consider the following example: (59) Während during
des the
Vortrags talk
hat/haben aux.3sg/3pl
interessanterweise geschlafen. interestingly slept
‘During the talk, interestingly, X students slept.’
D D
Student(en) student(s)
268 Manfred Krifka In the position of D, determiners like ein ‘a’, zwei ‘two’, einige ‘several’, viele ‘many’, die meisten ‘most’, and perhaps also jeder ‘every’ are fine, whereas determiners like kein ‘no’, wenige ‘few’, weniger als drei ‘less than three’ or höchstens drei ‘at most three’ are bad. Quantifiers like mehr als drei ‘more than three’, genau drei ‘exactly three’, fast jeder ‘nearly every’ or mehr als die Hälfte der ‘more than half of the’ are degraded in the D position. The first group of quantifiers can be understood as topical, in contrast to the second. The generalization, following Szabolcsi (1997), is that monotone decreasing quantifiers are definitely excluded from the topic position. These are quantifiers like no student, few students, and less than three students for which it holds that if D(α)(β) holds, and β′ applies to a subset of β, then D(α)(β′) holds as well—for example, if no student slept is true, then no student slept and snored is true. Why should this be so? Szabolcsi (1997) invokes the notion of a minimal witness set. A witness set for a quantifier Q is a set W such that Q(β) holds if and only if Q(β⋂W) holds. For example, for every student the minimal witness set is the set of all students, and for three students a minimal witness set is any set that consists of three students. Now, a statement with a topical quantifier can be rephrased as being about such a minimal witness set of the quantifier: [[D students] left] is interpreted as: there is a minimal witness set W of [D students], and W left. Szabolcsi notes that for monotone decreasing quantifiers like fewer than three students the minimal witness set is empty, and hence this paraphrase does not work. We can modify Szabolcsi’s criterion by talking about witness sets in general. Notice that the truth conditions of sentences of the form [[D NP] VP] with quantifiers [D NP] that are not upward monotone cannot be rephrased as statements about their witness sets. Ebert (2009) suggests that topical quantifiers have the additional property that rephrasing them as statements about their witness sets does not change their anaphoric potential. This applies to quantifiers like three students, and distinguishes them from quantifiers like every student. The latter quantifier introduces discourse referents with a life span limited to the sentence in which it occurs, whereas its reformulation in terms of statements on minimal witness sets involves discourse referents with unlimited life span. Topicality has also been invoked to explain the discourse effects of indefinites. Cresti (1995), as well as Ebert (2009), have suggested that the wide-scope effects of specific indefinites come about as a result of their topicality.
13.5 Conclusion It was the goal of this chapter to present the many ways in which quantification interacts with the information-structural features like focus, givenness, and topic. I have argued that there is a fundamental connection, insofar as the restrictor of a quantifier can be understood as given. This fact relates to natural-language quantifiers being conservative. There are different ways by which the restrictor can be determined. With adverbial quantifiers, or A-quantification, it is particularly obvious that information-structural
Quantification and Information Structure 269 features play a major role, be it focus, givenness, or topicality expressed by prosody, syntactic movement, or morphological markings. With nominal quantification, or D- quantification, the restrictor is more rigidly defined by syntactic structure, as the NP complement of the determiner. However, we have seen a variety of exceptions to this rule with the determiners many /few, with proportional determiners, and with focusing determiners, where D-quantification is subject to similar rules as A-quantification. We furthermore have observed that the topichood or focusation of quantifiers themselves can affect their scope, and other aspects of their interpretation.
Chapter 14
C ontrast Dissecting an Elusive Information-Structural Notion and its Role in Grammar Sophie Repp
14.1 Introduction Contrast is a much-studied phenomenon in linguistics. For many languages, linguists have identified prosodic and/or morphosyntactic marking strategies that seem to be applied if a sentence is in a contrastive relation with another sentence. However, as we will see in this chapter, despite the apparent abundance of evidence for contrast playing a role in grammar, the question of whether contrast indeed plays a role in grammar—or, to approach the matter in a more cautious way—in the grammar of particular languages, is a rather tricky one and not easy to answer. The reason is an imprecise understanding of the notion of contrast, which more often than not is defined only intuitively. As a pre-theoretical term, contrast is understood as referring to differences between similar things. For instance, in the Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oxforddictionaries. com) contrast is described as ‘the state of being strikingly different from something else in juxtaposition or close association’, and in the Merriam-Webster online service (http:// www.merriam-webster.com) as ‘the difference or degree of difference between things having similar or comparable natures, [and] the comparison of similar objects to set off their dissimilar qualities’. Applying these pre-theoretical notions to a discourse of two sentences s1 and s2, we can say that s1 and s2 may be construed as being in a contrastive relation if s1 contains an element α that can be construed as an alternative to an element β in s2, where being construed as an alternative reflects the notions of juxtaposition and comparison in the dictionary definitions. A prototypical example for such a discourse is (1), a sequence of two sentences with two contrast pairs, which in addition to the contrastive elements contain identical material, i.e. display some parallelism, which we may assume helps ‘setting off the dissimilar qualities’. Example (2) is less prototypical because
Contrast 271 there is no parallelism. Still, the subjects of the two sentences are overt alternatives to each other and therefore may be viewed as contrasting with each other. (3), from Rooth (1992: 80), illustrates contrast between elements within one sentence.1 (1) [Pete]contrast.1 went to [Rome]contrast.2. [Marc]contrast.1 went to [London]contrast.2. (2) [Pete]contrast slept for an hour. Then it was [Marc’s]contrast turn. (3) An [American]contrast farmer was talking to a [Canadian]contrast farmer. The alternativeness of elements—that is of constituents or their denotations—is only one angle from which the notion of contrast can be approached. Another is the role of discourse relations between two sentences—or more generally—between two discourse segments. If we compare (1) above and (4) below intuition tells us that (4), which contains but, feels ‘more’ contrastive than (1)—which illustrates the idea of ‘degrees of difference’ in the dictionary definitions. We could also say that (4) has some additional contrastive meaning component, which, if not indicated by some special prosody, is absent in (1). (4) [Pete]contrast.1 went to [Rome]contrast.2 but [Marc]contrast.1 went to [London]contrast.2. In this chapter, I argue that we need to look both at the way alternatives are construed, that is at the issue of contrastive constituents, and at the discourse relations that connect two discourse segments in order to gain a precise understanding of the notion of contrast (cf. Umbach 2004), and as a consequence, a good understanding of the grammatical effects contrast may or may not have in particular languages. In order to do this I first discuss views from the literature on these two aspects of contrast, and I formulate three hypotheses which are to serve as a proposal for critical evaluations of existent findings about grammatical reflexes of contrast, as well as for future investigations on this topic. Then I report empirical findings from the literature against the background of these hypotheses.
14.2 Elements of contrast 1: alternativeness of constituents The examples in (1)–(4) all contain overt pairs of alternatives, that is the alternatives are expressed linguistically, which is often considered to be necessary for applying the 1
In English, contrast is usually marked by pitch accents at least on the second contrastive element β. I do not indicate pitch accents in this chapter.
272 Sophie Repp notion of contrast. Sometimes the contextual or situational salience or predictability of an unexpressed alternative is considered sufficient, for instance a strong accent on the subject in PETE went to Rome would signal that Pete contrasts with some implied alternative, that is a person that did not go to Rome, even if this sentence were uttered out of the blue (e.g. Halliday 1967; Chafe 1976; Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). Still, overtness of alternatives is usually viewed as a reliable indicator for the presence of contrast, and it is one of several conditions that have been proposed to be a necessary condition for contrast marking in grammar. Quite similar to but subtly different from the overtness condition is É. Kiss’s (1998) proposal, according to which there must be a restricted set of alternatives in the context (also Bolinger 1961; Chafe 1976) which are clearly identifiable by the discourse participants. For instance in (5), John in the second sentence would be marked for contrast in languages that mark contrast, because the first sentence provides a restricted alternative set such that the alternative chosen in the second sentence (John) as well as its complement set ({Pete, Josie}) are clearly identifiable. (5) John, Pete and Josie all offered help. I asked John. This view of contrast is not symmetrical in the sense that the first sentence contrasts with the second and vice versa. Rather the second sentence contains an element for which there is an alternative set in the context. This element is assumed to be contrastive and consequently might be marked by specific prosodic or morphosyntactic means in a given language. This reflects the observation that often only the second element in a pair of contrastive elements is marked (see below). É. Kiss also applies her notion of contrast to question–answer discourses, for example after the question in (6A) the focus in the answer (6B), John, would be contrastive, whereas after (6A′) it would not be contrastive because (6A) but not (6A′) provides identifiable alternatives: two people in the situational context versus an open set of people. (6) A: Who of you two lied? A′: Who lied? B: John lied. Another non-symmetric view on contrast is that the alternative set must not be provided by the context but is made available by the sentence containing the contrast-marked element (López 2009). For instance, a wh-question makes available an alternative set and therefore involves contrast, that is the wh-phrase is contrastive—even though there is no overt alternative in the left context. The answer to a wh-question, however, does not involve contrast because the alternative set has already been made available by the question. The second element of the contrast pairs in (1)–(4) is contrastive on this view because it can be construed as being in an alternative set with an element in the context, that is the alternative set will be made available when the second sentence is uttered.
Contrast 273 A very widely applied definition of contrast is that there must be an alternative to the element at issue such that substituting the original with the alternative results in a false statement (e.g. Halliday 1967; Chafe 1976; Kenesei 2006; Neeleman and Vermeulen 2012; many of the empirical studies discussed below). This captures the intuition that corrections, see (7), are a contrastive discourse type (see Section 14.3), as well as the intuition that the sun in (8) cannot be contrastive because—ordinarily—only the sun can shine through the clouds (Kenesei 2006). The exclusion of alternatives view therefore brings exhaustivity (roughly the meaning contribution of only) into the picture. (7) John didn’t smile, Pete smiled. (8) The sun is shining through the clouds. As for (1)–(3) above, we find that they can be considered as not involving contrast on this view: (1) comes with the implicature that Pete did not go to London but this is only an implicature: the discourse can be continued with and Pete went to London too. Alternatively, one could argue that the contrastive reading of (1) is one with a silent Exhaust operator (Chierchia 2004), whereas in the non-contrastive reading this operator is missing, that is (1) is ambiguous. For (4), the reading without Exhaust is less easily available, that is the implicature is less easy to cancel. A weaker version of the exclusion view is that the speaker is committed to the chosen alternative but not to another (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990), which would fit better with (1) involving contrast. As adherents of the exclusion view do not necessarily require the excluded alternative(s) to be overt, this notion of contrast can be very broad but (2) and (3) above would still not involve contrast. Note that although I discussed the exclusion view in this section on alternatives it actually imposes conditions on propositions associated with discourse segments (see Section 14.3), rather than on alternative-denoting contrastive constituents. Another broad definition of contrast, according to which (1)–(4) would all be contrastive, is that alternatives always contrast with each other no matter what the alternative set looks like or what operators operate on it, simply because alternatives are different from each other (Vallduví and Vilkuna 1998; Selkirk 2008; Katz and Selkirk 2011). This notion of contrast is virtually identical to the notion of focus in Alternative Semantics (Rooth 1985, 1992, this volume; Krifka 2008). Indeed, for (3) above, which Rooth (1992) pre-theoretically describes as involving contrast, Rooth argues that it is just one of several discourse types whose interpretation is best explained under the assumption that focus—as indicated by the presence of a pitch accent, which signals the presence of a syntactic F-feature on the focused constituent—introduces a set of alternatives from which the focused element is drawn. Other discourse types involving focus and thus alternatives are question–answer sequences, or sentences with a focus particle. Proponents of the alternatives = contrast view assume that what is sometimes referred to as new information focus does not involve focus, at least not in the Alternative Semantics
274 Sophie Repp sense. In other words there is new information on the one hand, and ‘contrastive’ focus on the other (Katz and Selkirk 2011). Finally, contrast has been related to the interlocutors’ belief systems: the alternative selected by the speaker is unexpected, or in some other way remarkable (e.g. Halliday 1967; Frey 2006, 2010). Other researchers view unexpectedness as only loosely connected with, or independent from contrast (e.g. Zimmermann 2008; Brunetti 2009a). These issues also touch on the role of discourse relations (section 14.3). This overview shows that opinions on what contrast is differ dramatically even if one only looks at possible restrictions on the (set of) alternatives. This has consequences for the evaluation of observations concerning grammatical manifestations of contrast. Statements like In language x contrast is marked in way y might mean very different things depending on the definition of contrast applied. A priori, languages might differ in their grammatical sensitivity to particular characteristics of the (set of) alternatives. For instance, the alternatives = contrast view might make the right predictions for the application of particular marking strategies in language x whereas in language y similar marking strategies might require the presence of a clearly identifiable alternative set. It is therefore necessary to take into account particular characteristics of the alternative set, and thus of the constituents denoting the alternatives, when making claims about contrast marking. In hypothesis C-Const in (9) I define three semantic relations between constituents of two sentences that according to the literature potentially turn these constituents into contrastive constituents. I describe these relations for overt constituents and ignore the issue of contextually salient but non-explicit alternatives. (9) Hypothesis about contrasting constituents (C-Const) An F-marked constituent βF is a candidate for being a contrastive constituent in a sentence if one of the conditions in (a)–(c) holds: (a) There is a constituent α in a preceding sentence, ⟦α⟧° ≠ ⟦β⟧°, such that ⟦α⟧◦ ∈ ⟦βF⟧f = explicit alternative (ExplAlt)2 (b) There are constituents α1, … , αn (n>1) in a preceding sentence or preceding sentences such that ⟦βF⟧f = {⟦α1⟧°, …., ⟦αn⟧°} = explicit alternative set (ExplAltSet) (c) There is a constituent α in a preceding sentence such that ⟦α⟧° corresponds to ⟦βF⟧f, where ‘correspond to’ subsumes relations between kinds and their representatives, plural individuals and their atomic parts, generalized quantifiers and elements of their witness sets. = implicit alternative set (ImplAltSet)
is a special case of (b) but since the presence vs absence of ⟦β⟧ in the context might affect contrast marking (a) and (b) are listed separately. 2 (a)
Contrast 275 (9a) defines the basic case with an explicit alternative in the context. It borrows from Rooth (1992), who proposed that an F-marked constituent β is to be construed as contrasting with a constituent α, if the ordinary semantic value of α is an element of the focus-semantic value of β.3 In other words, the denotation of α must be in the set of focus alternatives of β. For instance, in a context where we are interested in what John ate, we might say John ate an apple. Then he ate [a banana]F . where α = an apple and β = a banana. Examples (1)–(4) in the introduction are all of the explicit alternative type. Rooth points out that the relation between α and β is normally symmetric: they are both F-marked. This captures the intuition that contrast is a relation between two elements and not a feature of just one element. However, as already mentioned in the discussion of example (5) above and as we will see in more detail later, often only element β is marked grammatically for contrast. Therefore I consider symmetry as not being crucial here. In the second semantic relation, see (9b), the context contains several explicit elements that form a set of which β can be a member, for example John bought a banana and an apple. He ate [the banana]F . This is the explicit alternative set type. We encountered it in É. Kiss’s (1998) contrast definition. Finally, the focus-semantic value of β might correspond to the ordinary semantic value of α but not vice versa: John was choosing fruit. He picked [a banana]F, where α = fruit. This is the implicit alternative set type, see (9c). It includes cases where α is a wh-constituent, assuming that wh-constituents are indefinites. Hypothesis C-Const will be put to work in Section 14.4.
14.3 Elements of contrast 2: discourse relations In the discussion of (4) in Section 14.1, I mentioned that contrast might be a gradable phenomenon, which is a view that is defended in several works, for example Molnár (2006), Paoli (2009), Calhoun (2010) (also cf. Bolinger 1961; Lambrecht 1994; Asher and Lascarides 2003). The idea is perhaps most intuitive for different discourse relations (as opposed to contrastiveness in terms of alternatives). In Section 14.1 I said that discourse (4) with but is probably more contrastive than its cousin (1) without but. Corrections are intuitively even more contrastive. Now, if contrast comes in different degrees we may expect that these degrees correlate with the application of additional or different grammatical means. For instance the peak of a pitch accent may be raised higher and higher with an increasing degree of contrastiveness, or languages may differ as to how contrastive discourses must be before certain marking strategies are applied. Many studies (e.g. in the Romance prosody literature, for Spanish Sosa 1999; Nibert 2000; Face 2001, 2002; Hualde 2002; Willis 2003; Face and Prieto 2007; Simonet 2010, O’Rourke 2012; Vanrell 3 Rooth
of focus.
(1992: 81, 85ff.) eventually dispenses with this definition and treats contrast as a subcase
276 Sophie Repp et al. 2013) ignore this potentially important aspect. Consider (10), a typical stimulus, where participants utter the same sentence twice. The context for the two utterances differs. The critical element is the NP banana, which in the first utterance is a new non- contrastive constituent (there are no contextual alternatives), and the discourse relation with the previous discourse segment is non-contrastive. In the second utterance, banana is a given contrastive constituent (the context provides the explicit alternative apple), and the discourse relation is highly contrastive (a correction). (10)
Experimenter: Participant: Experimenter: Participant:
What did Mario say? That he finished the girl’s banana. That he finished the girl’s [apple]contrast? No. That he finished the girl’s [banana]contrast.
This paradigm reliably produces prosodic differences between the two utterances but since the utterances differ with respect to several features, we cannot identify the feature that is responsible for the effects. Is it the presence vs absence of the overt alternative? Is it the non-contrastive vs highly contrastive discourse relation? Do we need both the alternative and the highly contrastive relation? Would less contrastive relations have the same effects? Looking at the inventory of discourse relations in various discourse theories, we find that all theories have a relation contrast. How this relation is defined is—maybe unsurprisingly—different in each theory, which also has to do with the different overall number of discourse relations and the concomitant degree of specificity for the individual relations. For instance, contrast in SDRT (Asher and Lascarides 2003) subsumes the RST relations contrast, concession, and antithesis (Mann and Thompson 1988; Mann and Taboada 2014). Wolf and Gibson (2005), following Hobbs (1985), distinguish contrast from violation of expectation (≈ concession) but not from antithesis. The basic ingredient to the contrast relation in all theories is that there must be similarities as well as dissimilarities between two discourse segments, much like in the dictionary definitions discussed in Section 14.1. Additional meaning aspects like an incompatibility between the denoted states-of-affairs (antithesis, see (11) for a correction example), or a violation of expectation (see (12)) are either thought to be a possible additional aspect of the contrast relation, adding to the degree of contrastiveness (Asher and Lascarides 2003), or they are assigned to a different discourse relation (antithesis, concession). (11) [Miller]contrast was hired, not [Smith]contrast. (antithesis) (12) Although [Miller]contrast is the expert [Smith]contrast was hired. (concession) The above-mentioned theories also have a discourse relation of similarity, which is called parallel (Hobbs 1985; Asher and Lascarides 2003), similar(ity) (Wolf and Gibson 2005) or, less transparently, list (Mann and Taboada 2014). I will use the term similar.
Contrast 277 In a similar relation, similarities between corresponding sets of entities or events are established, for example (13) describes two similar—in fact, identical—actions carried out by different agents. The similar-typical marker too occurs. Examples like (14) are also often classified as similar: various people are engaged in similar activities—they are all gardening. However, examples like (14) are also often classified as a contrast relation: there are similarities and dissimilarities. (13) John was mowing the lawn. Pete was too. (similar) (14) John was mowing the lawn. Pete was pruning the roses. (similar/contrast) The problem with the similarity–dissimilarity rhetoric is that it is vague. I propose to classify (14) as similar because meaning components like an incompatibility of state- of-affairs or violation of expectation are absent. Whether or not similar discourses involve contrast beyond the level of contrastive constituents (C-Const), however, is doubtful. Example (15) is a minimal variant of (14) with a causal discourse relation. Intuitively, (15) does not involve more or less contrast than (14). I suggest therefore not to view cases like (14) as contrastive discourse relations in a substantial sense, that is independently of constituent alternatives. (15) John was mowing the lawn because Pete was pruning the roses. In (16) below I define the similar relation as one where the discourse segments make the same contribution to the current question under discussion. This captures the intuition that similar discourses are smooth discourses without real or perceived incompatibilities. Contrastive meaning components like incompatibility and violation of expectation are often conveyed by discourse markers like but, although, still, etc. In the literature, most expository examples for the contrast relation—independently of the particular theory—contain the conjunction but,4 which we already encountered in Section 14.1. But is traditionally assumed to signal that the first conjunct serves as an argument for some background assumption whereas the second conjunct serves as an argument against it (e.g. Anscombre and Ducrot 1977). For instance, the insertion of but between the two discourse segments in (14) may be taken to indicate that the background assumption was that John and Pete would mow the lawn together. Example (14) with but implies that this expectation is violated. More generally we may say that but signals that the two conjuncts make opposing contributions to the current question under discussion (e.g. Lang 1991; for recent refinements see Sæbø 2003; Umbach 2005). I use the label oppose for this kind of discourse relation to avoid the term contrast, and to make it more general than violation of expectation. 4
Spenader and Lobanova (2009) show that the different contrastive relations defined in RST tend to come with different markers.
278 Sophie Repp The definition is given in (16) below. Intuitively, oppose is more contrastive than similar, that is we are dealing with a truly contrastive discourse relation. On the other side, oppose is intuitively less contrastive than the antithesis relation, recall (11) above, because there is no correction involved. I use the label corr for correction rather than antithesis to cover both monologic antithesis and dialogic rejections, as the latter are often used in investigations of contrast.5 The definition of corr is also given in (16). The discourse relations I have examined so far tend to involve discourse segments that are associated with declaratives. In Section 14.1 we saw that sequences of interrogatives and declaratives, interrogative discourses for short, have also figured prominently in the contrast debate. If an interrogative discourse consists of a question and a congruent answer (= q–a in (16) below) the discourse relation involved intuitively is non-contrastive. If, however, the declarative sentence in the discourse is used to reject the question as in A: When did Pete complain? B: JOHN complained!, where B rejects a presupposition of the question, namely that Pete complained, we have a corr relation. Hypothesis C-DRel in (16) summarizes the discussion of discourse relations and their relation to contrast and potential degrees of contrast. It covers the non-contrastive discourse relations q–a and similar because they have been used in empirical investigations of contrast unlike other non-contrastive relations. Note that the issue of degrees of contrast has also been discussed in relation to focus size, which I ignore in my hypotheses but discuss in Section 14.5. (16) Hypothesis about contrastive discourse relations (C-DRel) The degree of contrastiveness of the discourse relation between two discourse segments d1 and d2 increases from (n) to (ii).6 (n) Smooth discourses (= non-contrastive) a. [q-a(n)]: d1 is associated with a question meaning, i.e. a set of propositions; the proposition associated with d2 is an element of that set b. [similar(n)]: the proposition associated with d1 and the proposition associated with d2 can both be true in the evaluation world; d1 and d2 make the same kind of contribution to the current question under discussion (i) [oppose(i)]: the proposition associated with d1 and the proposition associated with d21 can both be true in the evaluation world; d1 and d2 make opposing contributions to the current question under discussion
5
Evidence in Bianchi and Bocci (2012) suggests that the monologique vs dialogique nature of corr has syntactic reflexes in Italian. Also cf. Steube (2001) for different correction types. 6 The abbreviations I use contain subscripts as a mnemonic for the potential degree of contrastiveness (nihil to ii).
Contrast 279
(ii) [corr(ii)]: d2 rejects d1 because certain background assumptions for the felicitous use of d1 are not met, or because the propositions associated with d1 and d2 cannot both be true in the evaluation world
14.4 Contrast in grammar Taking together our observations about potentially contrastive constituents and about potentially contrastive discourse relations, I propose the following hypothesis for the role of contrast in the grammar of a particular language: (17) Hypothesis about the role of contrast in the grammar (C-Gram) Contrast is a grammatically relevant notion in the grammar of a language L if in discourses consisting of two discourse segments d1 and d2, L uses grammatical means to mark d2 in the following way: • A constituent that is a candidate for being a contrastive constituent in C-Const is marked differently from non-contrastive constituents and it is marked differently from candidate contrastive constituents in at least one class of C- Const (a)–(c) that is different from its own. The constituent is marked by the same means for all discourse relations in C-DRel. = contrast based on type of alternatives If L marks all the discourse types in C-DRel for all contrastive constituent types in C-Const by the same means contrast marking is F-marking in L, and ‘contrast’ is focus. • The constituents that are candidates for being contrastive constituents in C- Const (a)–(c) are marked differently when they occur in oppose(i) or corr(ii) in comparison to when they occur in other discourse relations. = contrast based on discourse relations Contrast is a gradable notion if there are differences in the marking of oppose(i) and corr(ii).
C-Gram does not cover cases where a subset of the contrastive constituent types is marked in a subset of the discourse relations. There are many combinatorial possibilities (not all of which are equally plausible from a conceptual point of view). Languages might choose specific marking strategies for various combinations.7 Depending on the empirical situation, specific theoretical notions have to be defined to capture such licensing conditions. They cannot be captured by a general notion of 7 Even
the two ‘contrast options’ in C-Gram leave room for flexibility. For instance, languages may differ in the specific class of contrastive constituent they mark by grammatical means.
280 Sophie Repp contrast, and using a more specific terminology will help to highlight the licensing conditions of individual cases. In my assumptions I deviate from much of the earlier literature, which has tried to come up with a notion of contrast that holds across languages.
14.5 Test paradigms In this section I describe discourse types that have been used in tests for prosodic and/or morphosyntactic manifestations of contrast—either as contrastive or as non-contrastive discourses, depending on the notion of contrast applied. Oppose(i) discourses have not been tested systematically so I will not discuss them.8 Interrogative discourses with wh- questions usually are q–a(n) discourses. Wh- questions can license wide (= broad) focus in the answer, or different kinds of narrow focus (cf. Arregi this volume): (18) a. A: What happened? B: [John called Mary]F. — wide focus b. A: What did John do? B: John [called Mary]F. — ‘semi-narrow’ c. A: Who did John call? B: John called [Mary]F. — narrow focus Wide focus in q–a(n) discourses unequivocally is considered to be non-contrastive. Narrow focus in q–a(n) is considered to be non-contrastive by some authors (many of those cited in Section 14.6), and contrastive by others (e.g. Calhoun 2006, 2010; Lee and Xu 2010). Calhoun (2010) proposes that the size of the focus domain correlates inversely with the degree of contrast. If we implement ‘size’ in terms of the containment relation between constituents, the object focus in (18c) is narrower, and thus would be more contrastive than the VP focus in (18c): an object is contained in the VP. The semantic relation between the contrastive constituents typically is the implicit alternative set ImplAltSet but the alternatives can also be explicit (ExplAltSet), for example Who of Mary and Ann did John call? Section 14.6.1 reports on prosodic reflexes of a narrowing focus domain in q–a(n) discourses. However, whether or not these reflexes should be related to contrast is unclear: the focused constituent always has the same relation with its antecedent in terms of alternative type. Looking at other discourse relations, we find that a wide focus can easily be contrastive, for example in corr(ii), see (27) further below. Interrogative discourses with polar questions are mainly used as corr(ii) discourses. In (19), B does not answer A’s question with a simple yes or no. Rather B seems to answer the implicit wh-question Who sang last night?. The subject in the question, John, is replaced by a different subject in the answer, Pete (= ExplAlt). With the appropriate prosody, for example with a high tone on Pete followed by post-focal deaccentuation
8
But see Umbach et al. (2004).
Contrast 281 and a low boundary tone at the end of the utterance, the answer can be interpreted as a congruent answer: Pete is interpreted as an exhaustive focus and the answer implies that John did not sing last night: it is a pragmatic no-answer. (19) A: Did [John] sing last night?
B: [Pete]contrast sang last night.
B’s utterance in (19) is a rejection of the question as pragmatically inappropriate: the possibility, entertained by A, that John might have sung last night, is rejected as a non- possibility, hence the classification of (19) as a corr(ii). See Section 14.6.1 for studies testing such discourses. The rejection reading is not the only reading available in (19). There is a rejection only if element α in the question, John, is unaccented. If α is accented—and thus focused—the possibility that someone other than John sang is already part of the question meaning. Glossing over some details, this corresponds most closely to q–a(n). Yet another interpretative option is that B’s utterance is a refusal to answer, because B does not know the answer, or does not wish to answer. B’s utterance would have a different prosody then, possibly the rise–fall–rise contour of contrastive topics (cf. Büring, this volume). Intuitively, replies signalling ignorance are less contrastive than corrections but this is an unexplored issue. Interrogative discourses with polar questions and implied answers may also contain ImplAltSet constituents, see (20A,B), which is modelled on Bartels and Kingston (1994: 5). The indefinite subject in A’s utterance delivers the implicit alternative set. With the exhaustive focus prosody (falling accent on β, son, in B) the implied answer is yes, rather than no as in (19), that is the discourse relation is not corr(ii) but resembles the variant of (19) with focused α (≈ q–a(n)). (20) A: Did any of John’s [children] sing last night? B: John’s [son]contrast sang last night. Interrogative discourses with alternative questions are q–a(n). They involve ExplAltSet constituents: the answerer chooses one of at least two alternatives provided in the question, see (21A,B). (21) A: Did [William] or [Chuck] like the present that Shirley sent to her sister? (Cooper et al. 1985: 2143) B: [William]contrast liked the present that Shirley sent to her sister. Declarative similar(n) discourses have been used in various test paradigms. One is a coordination with parallel conjuncts like (1) in the introduction, that is with ExplAlt constituents. These constituents have been proposed to be contrastive topics with a focus (e.g. Braun 2005; Winkler 2005) but they do not necessarily come with the rise– fall–rise contour or with the implicational pragmatics usually associated with the term contrastive topic (cf. Büring, this volume). The word topic is here usually applied in the aboutness sense (Reinhart 1981). For clarity, I call such topics non-implicational
282 Sophie Repp contrastive topics. A (slightly modified) example from a read-aloud production study by Braun (2006: 461) is (22). The context introduces a set of explicit alternatives, and two target utterances each contain an element from this set, that is the contrastive constituents have an ExplAltSet relation with the context, and an ExplAlt relation with each other. (22) [Malaysia and Indonesia]alternative set are neighbouring countries in the South China Sea. Despite their geographical adjacency, the living and working conditions of the Malaysians and the Indonesians differ tremendously. [In Indonesia]contrast, tourism is very important and there are many jobs in this sector. [In Malaysia]contrast people live from agriculture. They have mainly focused on the cultivation of rice. Another example with two kinds of alternative relations where the— this time interrogative—context provides an ImplAltSet, is (23) from Horvath (2010: 1357): (23) A: Do you know [what]alternative set 1 they stole from [your classmates]alternative set 2 in the gym? B: [Mary]contrast2 lost [her watch]contrast1 [John]contrast2 lost [his wallet]contrast1. Another similar(n) paradigm is (24), modelled on Krahmer and Swerts (2001: 394). ExplAlt constituents occur as constituents of DPs in fragmentary utterances. In studies using this paradigm, participants describe scenes to each other that are visible to themselves but not to their interlocutor (Dutch: Krahmer and Swerts 2001; Swerts 2007; Swerts et al. 2002; English: Speer and Ito 2011; Italian: Swerts et al. 2002). (24)
A: [red] circle B1: [red]contrast square B2: blue [circle]contrast B3: [red]contrast [circle]contrast
There are paradigms of this sort with full clause utterances (Romanian: Swerts 2007), which have also been used in psycholinguistic comprehension studies (English: Dahan et al. 2002; Chen et al. 2007; Ito and Speer 2008; Watson et al. 2008; German: Weber et al. 2006; Japanese: Ito et al. 2012). A fourth Similar(n) paradigm is (25) from Katz and Selkirk (2011: 774). They investigate prosodic effects of the presence versus absence of F-marking. The context introduces two elements, both of which can be construed as alternatives with an element in the final target sentence (= ExplAlt). The target sentence contains the focus particle only and hence is assumed to involve F-marking. There is also an ImplAltSet relation with a constituent earlier in the context: the paintings he buys.
Contrast 283 (25) Gary is a really bad art dealer. He gets attached to [the paintings he buys]impl. alternative set. He acquired [a few Picassos] and fell in love with them. The same thing happened with [a Cezanne painting]. So he would only offer [that Modigliani]contrast to MoMA…. Declarative corr(ii) discourses can be dialogues ((26), (27)), and monologues ((28), (29)). (26) A: John had [ice-cream]. B: (No.) He had [cake]contrast. (27) A: [It’s raining outside.] B: [The sun is shining!]contrast Look out of the window! (28) John didn’t have [ice-cream], but [cake]contrast. (29) Three pupils of class 10a earned some money in the last week of the school vacation by now and then cleaning machines in the BMW factory. Unfortunately, Friday’s attendance list went missing. The secretary told the head of department that [all three pupils]impl. alternative set had worked on that day. But she was wrong. On Friday, only [Sabine]contrast came. The others weren’t in the mood for working any longer. Examples (26)–(28) have ExplAlt constituents. In (27) the contrastive constituent is a full sentence, which illustrates that contrast may involve wide focus.9 In (29), which is modelled on Sudhoff (2010: 1462), the context introduces a set of students whose members are left implicit (= ImplAltSet). Something is claimed about this set, which then is corrected: the claim is reduced to a claim about one student. For this discourse to be felicitous, the particle only is required, that is prosodic marking alone cannot signal the exhaustiveness. Declarative corr(ii) discourses have been tested for example in German (Sudhoff 2010), Mandarin Chinese (Chen 2006); Korean (Jun and Lee 1998), and Yucatec Maya (Kügler and Skopeteas 2007).
14.6 Empirical findings In this section I discuss a selection of findings from the prosodic and syntactic literature on contrast. Because of space limitations I ignore interactions of prosody and syntax.
9
To my knowledge, wide focus corr(ii) discourses have not been tested experimentally.
284 Sophie Repp
14.6.1 Prosodic reflexes of contrast There are three kinds of prosodic reflexes that contrast has been claimed to have. The first is a special contrastive accent on the contrastive constituent, that is contrast is claimed to correlate with categorial differences and thus a special phonology. The second kind is gradual changes in acoustic features, that is a special phonetics. Relevant features are maximum and mean pitch, pitch excursion (= difference between minimum and maximum pitch of the accentual tones that are associated with the accented syllable), pitch register (range between minimum and maximum pitch used by a speaker in an utterance), pitch compression (reduction of pitch register), pitch peak position (earlier or later), duration, and intensity. Many of these features show higher measurements (e.g. a longer duration) for the more contrastive discourse in particular comparisons. Sometimes the differences are subtle in the sense that there are no reliable differences between a contrastive constituent in one utterance and its counterpart non-contrastive constituent in a minimally different utterance, that is there are no absolute differences, but there are differences between differences, that is relative differences. For instance, the difference in intensity between a contrastive constituent and other constituents in the same utterance might be larger than the difference in intensity between the counterpart non- contrastive constituent and other constituents in the non-contrastive utterance. The third kind of reflex is rephrasing: phrase boundaries are removed or added, weakened or strengthened, which is reflected for example in segmental processes, duration, or boundary tones. The following overview of findings in English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese illustrates some central issues in the investigation of prosodic effects of contrast. For English, Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) proposed a special contrastive accent, a rising L+H*, as opposed to H*, which marks new information. The contrast notion underlying this claim is very wide with L+H* apparently indicating a salient, but not necessarily linguistically explicit, set of alternatives. The proposal has been extremely influential: the existence of a contrastive accent is often taken for granted, not just for English, but also for other languages. However, none of the production and contextual appropriateness rating studies for English (e.g. Bartels and Kingston 1994; Welby 2003; Breen et al. 2010; Katz and Selkirk 2011) could support the existence of a special accent, see Table 14.1 for paradigms that were applied to test for it. Some psycholinguistic comprehension studies report effects of accent type (L+H* vs H*) in similar(n) discourses with vs without ExplAlt constituents, for example quicker identification of referents (Ito and Speer 2008) or enhanced recall (Fraundorf et al. 2010) but in the materials these studies used, accent type always correlated with acoustic measures like pitch height, duration and/or intensity (all higher for L+H*). Consequently, these results cannot serve as evidence for a special contrastive accent. Acoustic measures in English do differ in various test paradigms. For instance, narrow focus contrastive constituents have different
Table 14.1 Test paradigms used in some of the studies discussed in this section. The example numbers refer to the illustrations in Section 14.5. Study
Task
Bartels & Kingston (1994)
English contextual rating, two comparisons
Breen et al. (2010)
English quasi-free production, dialogue
• q-a(n) broad focus, (18a) • q-a(n) narrow focus, ImplAltset, (18c) • polar interrogative corr(ii), ExplAlt, (20)
Katz & Selkirk (2011)
English read-aloud production, monologue
• similar(n), with new non-contrastive constituents • similar(n), ExplAlt & ImplAltSet,a (25) with new contrastive and new non- contrastive constituent
Baumann et al. (2006) and Baumann et al. (2007)
German read-aloud production, dialogue
• q-a(n) broad focus, (18a) • q-a(n) ‘semi-narrow’ focus, ImplAltSet, (18b) • q-a(n) narrow focus, ImplAltSet, (18c) • corr(ii) with polar question, ExplAlt, (20)
Braun (2005, 2006)
German read-aloud production, monologue
• similar(n) without ExplAltSet or ExplAlt • similar(n) with ExplAltSet & ExplAlt, (22)
Sudhoff (2010)
German read-aloud production, monologue
• similar(n), ExplAlt • similar(n), ExplAltSet, (25) • declarative corr(ii), ExplAlt, (28) • declarative corr(ii), ImplAltSet, (29)
Chung (2012)
Spanish read-aloud production, dialogue
• q-a(n) narrow focus, ImplAltSet, (18c) • declarative corr(ii), ExplAlt, (26)
Frota (2002)
Portuguese read-aloud production, dialogue
• q-a(n) broad focus, (18a) • q-a(n) narrow focus, ImplAltSet, (18c) • similar(n), ExplAltSet, (22) • polar interrogative corr(ii), ExplAlt, (20)
a
Test paradigms compared • similar(n), ExplAlt & ImplAltSet, (23) • declarative corr(ii), ExplAlt & ImplAltSet, (26) • polar q-a(n) broad focus • polar q-a(n) narrow focus, ImplAltSet, (20)
The use of ImplAltSet is inconsistent in the materials. The study focused on ExplAlt.
286 Sophie Repp phonetic characteristics in corr(ii) discourses than in q–a(n) discourses (Breen et al. 2010). It is tempting to interpret this as an effect of discourse relation (C-DRel) but note that the discourse relation (corr(ii) vs q–a(n)) is conflated with the alternative type (ExplAlt vs ImpAltSet). Breen et al. also found effects of the presence vs absence of ImplAltSet constituents in q–a(n): there were absolute and relative differences between narrow focus contrastive constituents and their counterpart non- contrastive constituents in wide focus discourses. This finding could be an effect of F-marking, which needs to be investigated in future research on different alternative types. Katz and Selkirk (2011) found effects of F-marking in similar(n) discourses: if there are ExplAlt constituents these discourses have different characteristics than if there are no contrastive constituents. In German, there is evidence for different accents in some of the potentially contrastive discourse types. The results are somewhat preliminary though because in several studies the findings were not statistically reliable. Still, in corr(ii) discourses contrastive constituents seem to be realized with rising accents (L*+H or L+H*) rather than with H* more often than in Similar(n) discourses (Sudhoff 2010). In q–a(n) discourses a narrowing focus domain seems to be accompanied with a categorial distinction between downstepped versus unchanged H*, and in corr(ii) discourses upstepped H* occurs more often than in q–a(n) with narrow focus (Baumann et al. 2006; Baumann et al. 2007). Whether or not different alternative sets (C-Const) play a role for the choice of accent is unclear. For similar(n) discourses with non-implicational topics, which are typically realized by rising accents, Braun (2005, 2006) found phonetic differences between discourses with vs without ExplAltSet/ExplAlt constituents but no special accent. Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007), who analysed a corpus of radio conversations, identified a special accent in similar(n) with ExplAlt (L*+H vs L+H* for new aboutness topics). As for the acoustic correlates of contrast, the German findings resemble those for English. Turning to Spanish, recall from Section 14.3 that many studies are not so informative due to the use of a coarse test paradigm (ex. (10)), but there are also some more detailed findings. In Castilian Spanish, narrow focus contrastive constituents have a higher maximum pitch (García-Lecumberri 1995; Chung 2012), a longer absolute duration, an earlier pitch peak, and a greater pitch range (Chung 2012) when they are in corr(ii) discourses compared to q–a(n) discourses. The earlier pitch peak corresponds to a phonological difference between L+H* (corr(ii)) versus L*+H (q-a(n)) (Chung 2012). Thus, there seem to be prosodic effects of the discourse relation but, as in Breen et al. (2010) for English, the discourse relation correlates with alternative type (ImplAltSet/ExplAlt). For Portuguese, Frota (2002, 2012) identified a special accent (earlier peak) on a narrowly focused contrastive constituent in q–a(n) and in corr(ii) discourses (H*+L) compared to non-contrastive constituents in non-contrastive discourses (H+L*). In Similar(n) discourses with ExplAlt non-implicational topics, there are phrasing effects (Frota 2002): topical subjects are mapped exhaustively onto an intonational constituent,
Contrast 287 non-contrastive new broad-focus subjects and q–a(n)/corr(ii) narrow focus subjects are not. To summarize the prosodic findings, in some languages (English, German, Spanish) contrastive constituents are marked differently in discourses with contrastive discourse relations than in discourses with non-contrastive discourse relations (but there is some conflation of discourse relation and alternative type). In non-contrastive discourse relations, the presence or absence of ExplAlt/ExplAltSet matters for prosodic marking in English and German, which points to an influence of F-marking whose demarcation from contrast is an open issue. Many effects are of a gradient phonetic nature rather than of a categorial phonological one (esp. English), but in some languages (Spanish, Portuguese), there is a special accent.
14.6.2 Morphosyntactic reflexes of contrast Morphosyntactic reflexes that are typically associated with contrast, are the movement of a contrastive constituent to a left-peripheral position in the clause, the use of specific constructions, for example clefts, and the use of specific morphological markers (e.g. Japanese wa, see Hara 2006; Vermeulen 2013; Tomioka, this volume). Studies investigating syntactic reflexes of contrast also usually address the issue of how precisely an information-structural category like contrast can have an effect on a syntactic derivation (for discussion see e.g. Aboh; Neeleman and van de Koot; Samek-Lodovici, all in this volume). Among those who assume contrast-coding features in the syntax are Molnár (2006) and López (2009). Neeleman and Vermeulen (2012) assign the syntax- contrast association to mapping procedures at the interfaces. In what follows I discuss a small selection of contrast-related findings about left- peripheral movement in Hungarian and Italian. Both languages have figured prominently in the syntactic contrast debate, and the discussion illustrates some of the intricacies of the issue. I start with Hungarian and É. Kiss’s (1998) definition of contrast, where a constituent is contrastive if every member in its alternative set is clearly identifiable (= ExplAltSet or ExplAlt; recall Section 14.2). É. Kiss argues that contrast is a feature of one of two focus types, identificational focus (the other type being information focus). Identificational focus is specified for [±contrastive] and [±exhaustive], the particular specification, [+]or [−], being language-dependent. For Hungarian, É. Kiss argues that identificational focus is [+exhaustive] but [−contrastive]. She observes that both in q–a(n) discourses with ExplAltSet constituents (Who of you two broke the vase?) and in q–a(n) discourses with ImplAltSet constituents (Who broke the vase?), the focused XP in the answer occurs in a designated left-peripheral position for identificational focus (cf. Brody 1990) if and only if it is interpreted as exhaustive (cf. É. Kiss, this volume). Thus the availability of implicit vs explicit alternative sets has no syntactic effects, only exhaustiveness does. Horvath (2010) shows that in similar(n) discourses with ExplAlt constituents and ImpAltSet in the context (see (23), Section 14.5) none of the contrastive constituents occurs in the focus position.
288 Sophie Repp However, in declarative corr(ii) discourses the contrastive constituent does (e.g. Szabolcsi 1981). The latter fact can be ascribed to the exhaustive meaning contribution of corrections. Thus, Hungarian left-peripheral movement is not influenced by alternative type (C-Const) but the discourse relation is relevant because corr(ii) typically implies exhaustiveness. Comparing this situation to Italian, where so-called focus fronting (FF) has been argued to involve contrast (e.g. Rizzi 1997),10 we find that in q–a(n) discourses the potentially contrastive constituent in the answer is not fronted with ImplAltSet (e.g. Rizzi 1997; Zubizarreta 1998; Belletti 2004) but with ExplAltSet it can be (É. Kiss 1998; Brunetti 2004). Thus Italian differs from Hungarian in its sensitivity to alternative type. In Italian similar(ii) discourses there is no FF (Bianchi and Bocci 2012). In corr(ii) discourses with ExplAlt constituents, as in q–a(n) with ExplAltSet, FF has been claimed to be optional (Frascarelli 2000; Brunetti 2004; Samek-Lodovici 2006), although López (2009) maintains that the non-movement variant in corr(ii) is only felicitous in the presence of the answer particle no, see the interrogative corr(ii) discourse in (30): (30) A: Have you given the winner a T-shirt? (Italian, Samek-Lodovici 2006: 837) B: a. No. no
Abbiamo have.3pl
dato given
al to.the
vincitore winner
[una a
medaglia]. medal
b. #Abbiamo dato al vincitore [una medaglia]. (López 2009: 56) c. [Una medaglia] abbiamo dato al vincitore. ‘(No.) We gave the winner a medal.’ López (2009) suggests that no expresses the contrast and that the in-situ focus is non- contrastive information focus (also Brunetti 2009b). However, Bianchi and Bocci (2012) present quantitative experimental evidence from declarative corr(ii) discourses, where speakers choose FF in only 25 per cent of corrective sentences without no, so there is optionality, and even a preference for the non-movement variant. Thus, a contrastive constituent may, but need not, front with ExplAlt/ExplAltSet, and it does not front with ImplAltSet. There are various proposals to account for the optionality of FF in corr(ii). Brunetti (2009a) argues that for a fronted focus, the alternative set can be identified more easily than for an in-situ focus because focus projection is impossible. Easier identifiability is advantageous when the relevant set of alternatives is not clearly marked in the context, for example in dialogic corrections or when the speaker’s utterance conflicts with implicit beliefs of the interlocutor, or is otherwise ‘unexpected’. The proposal cannot account for the effects of alternative type but the relevance of (un)expectedness for 10 In
Italian, as in other Romance languages, the association of left-peripheral movement with contrast concerns FF as well as clitic left dislocation, see López (this volume) for the latter.
Contrast 289 syntactic movement is also emphasized in Zimmermann (2008), Frey (2010), and Paoli (2009). A different account comes from Bianchi and Bocci (2012), according to whom the contrastive constituent in corr(ii) discourses always moves, the movement being licensed by an incompatibility presupposition (recall that C-DRel identifies incompatibility as essential for corr(ii)). Crucially, at the syntax–phonology interface the lower rather than the higher copy in the movement chain may be realized, if that produces a less marked prosodic structure. Since FF produces a marked prosodic structure the prosodic constraint favours the realization of the lower copy in corr(ii). The constraint is violable so sometimes we observe FF. This brief discussion has shown that two left- peripheral movement types in Hungarian and Italian are sensitive to different ‘ingredients’ of contrast. Whereas Italian FF is sensitive to alternative types, Hungarian focus movement is not. In both languages, the discourse relation matters: corr(ii) requires leftward movement in Hungarian, and allows it in Italian. The particular motivation for corr(ii) having these effects might be different, with Hungarian being sensitive to exhaustiveness, and Italian possibly being sensitive to the particular discourse relation.
14.7 Conclusion I have argued that contrast is a multi-faceted phenomenon, and that it is important to subject these facets to detailed investigation in individual languages. Languages show similarities, for example in the probability with which the corr(ii) discourse relation has prosodic or syntactic reflexes, but languages also differ in their sensitivity to discourse relations and/or alternative types. Fine-grained comparisons of alternative types and/or discourse relations often yield rather subtle phonetic differences, and contrast- related effects in the syntax may be optional, which provides challenges in the modelling of the effects. Overall, I conclude that grammars of individual languages are sensitive to aspects of contrast, and that which aspects these are requires careful specification.
Chapter 15
Verum Fo c u s Horst Lohnstein
15.1 The phenomenon Höhle (1988, 1992: 112) labeled a focus phenomenon in German which is realized in the position of the finite verb or a complementizer in left-peripheral clausal position as verum focus. The phenomenon is based on the functional effect of an accent produced by the speaker; in emphasizing, the speaker wants to affirm the truth of his thought. In German—the language in which Höhle investigated this phenomenon—verum focus is indicated through a pitch accent in the left periphery of main (1a)–(1d) as well as embedded (1e)–(1g) clauses. In the case of verb final structures, a verum effect can be observed if the finite verb bears the accent and is—at the same time—semantically rather light, as for instance in the case of auxiliaries (1h)–(1j): (1) a. Karl Carl
hat has
den the
Hund dog
gefüttert. fed.
Hund dog
gefüttert? fed?
‘Carl did feed the dog.’ b hat Has
Karl Carl
den the
‘did Carl feed the dog?’ c Wer Who
hat has
den the
Hund dog
‘Who did feed the dog?’ d fütter Feed
jetzt now
den the
‘feed the dog right now!’
Hund! dog
gefüttert? Fed
Verum Focus 291 e (Aber Maria glaubt,) (But Mary believes)
dass that
Karl Carl
in in
Urlaub holidays
gefahren driven
ist. is.
‘(But Mary believes) that Carl did go on holiday.’ f. (Jetzt will ich wissen,) (Now want I know)
wen who
Karl Carl
eingeladen invited
hat. has
‘Now, I want to know who Carl did invite.’ g. (Das ist der Wagen,) (This is the car)
den which
Karl Carl
gefahren driven
hat. has.
‘This is the car which Carl did drive.’ h. (Aber Maria glaubt,) (But Mary believes)
dass that
Karl Carl
in in
Urlaub holidays
gefahren driven
ist. is.
‘But Mary believes that Carl did go on holiday.’ i. (Jetzt will ich wissen,) (Now want I know)
wen who
Karl Carl
eingeladen invited
hat. has.
‘(Now I want to know) who did Carl invite.’ j. (Das ist der Wagen,) (This is the car)
den which
Karl Carl
gefahren driven
hat. has.
‘(This is the car) which Carl did drive.’ The examples in (1a)–(1d) carry different sentence moods; (1a) is a declarative, (1b) a yes/no-interrogative, (1c) a wh-interrogative, and (1d) is an imperative. The embedded clauses in (1e)–(1g) are a declarative complement clause in (1e), a wh-complement clause in (1f) and a relative clause in (1g). The same kinds of clauses are given in (1h)–(1j) with the focus on the auxiliaries in final position. Höhle describes the function of the specific accent in (1a)–(1d) as follows: An element verum —the so called F-verum focus—is assigned to the finite verb. This triggers the effect that this element is emphasized in case the finite verb carries this exact accent: (2) Höhle’s (1992: 114) characterization: In the observed cases, the finite verb is associated with a semantic element verum such that accentuation of the verb makes this element stand out. [Translation by HL] For the data in (1e) (C-verum focus), (1f) (W-verum focus) and (1g) (R-verum focus), the characterization in (2) does not prove to be right, because the finite verb is not involved in the focus structure at all. Due to this circumstance, Höhle discusses several
292 Horst Lohnstein possibilities of theoretical reconstructions: in particular the illocution type operator analysis and the verum predicate analysis, which will be discussed in more detail in Section 15.2. It is rather difficult to localize the syntactic or semantic position of the underlying element verum in the respective structural components. One reason for this is that the element verum—as far as it exists at all—is phonetically silent and always appears with lexical elements which do not show verum properties when they are realized in other syntactic or semantic environments. However, it can be observed that verum is not used to emphasize truth at all. Instead it is the case that they are effective means to stop disputes about the verum focused issue. Consider the example in (3), uttered after the election of president Janukowitsch of Ukraine on 25 February 2010: (3) Die The
Wahlen elections
wurden were
korrekt correctly
durchgeführt. carried out
‘The elections were carried out correctly.’ Similar effects appear in questions and imperatives, too, as we will see in more detail in Section 15.5. The present chapter is organized as follows. The next section presents Höhle’s (1988, 1992) treatment of the phenomenon and his attempts to derive an analysis from a grammatical perspective. Subsequently, Section 15.3 provides a collection of several approaches using the verum-operator for the syntactic and semantic analysis of various typologically different languages. Usually, in these studies the verum element is assumed to be an invisible operator which is either always present or which is induced in case verum focusing takes place. Since sentence moods appear to play a crucial role in verum focus constructions, Section 15.4 concentrates on general properties of sentence moods. As an essential property of main clauses is their relatedness to the discourse, Section 15.5 focuses on the connection between sentence moods of main clauses and the structure of the context of discourse. Moving on, the examination of embedded clauses and their distributional possibilities of realizing verum focus is addressed in Section 15.6. In order to get an adequate understanding of what the proper meaning of verum can be, Section 15.7 discusses some theories of truth from the philosophical tradition and argues that the concept of verum as a verum predicate is not appropriate. Finally, Section 15.8 introduces a compositional theory of verum focus which derives its general properties from the regular grammatical means referring solely to the constitution of sentence mood and the principles of focus assignment. The line of reasoning to be pursued to derive an adequate understanding of what verum focus is, will follow the idea that verum focus not only depends on sentence moods, but—in fact—IS the sentence mood focus.
Verum Focus 293
15.2 Höhle’s theoretical reconstructions Höhle (1992) discusses two theoretical variants to capture the semantic properties of verum focus, whereas the second variant comes in two versions: (4) a. verum is an illocution type operator (IT-analysis) b. verum is a truth-predicate ranging over propositions As such it can be realized:
(i) segmentally or (ii) non-segmentally.
The following subsections present these analyses together with a critical review of their consequences.
15.2.1 Illocution type operator analysis The idea in reference to the analysis of verum focus as an illocution type operator (IT- operator) includes the advantage of accounting for verum as an independently founded semantic element. But—as Höhle argues—the IT-explanation fails, mainly for two reasons: First, since embedded clauses allow for verum focus, they surely do not contain an illocution type operator. Secondly, the IT-analysis fails—as Höhle argues—for reasons of scope. Due to these observations Höhle concludes that verum focus should not be analysed as an IT-operator. Instead, he proposes an analysis which treats verum as a truth predicate. Later on, it will be argued that the IT-analysis is basically correct if one carries out some slight modifications. But before turning to these issues, let us first look at Höhle’s second variant.
15.2.2 verum as a truth predicate Because—for Höhle—the IT-operator analysis of verum focus fails, he suggests another approach which makes use of a verum predicate. Generally, two versions are available to make this proposal work: (5) a. a segmental localization of verum b. a non-segmental localization of verum
294 Horst Lohnstein
15.2.2.1 Segmental localization of verum The segmental localization of verum assumes a syntactic position (in the left periphery of German clauses) which bears a syntactic feature [+ver]. Agreeing with this line of reasoning, Höhle (1992: 131f) assumes a functional projection ϕ with the following properties: (6) [+ver] in ϕ a. In the left periphery of German clauses there is a functional projection ϕ. ϕ always combines with a constituent Π and projects a X-bar-structure. b. ϕ is unifiable with feature specifications of complementizers. c. ϕ is unifiable with feature specifications of finite verbs binding a trace. d. The head features of all X-bar-levels of ϕ are unifiable with the free head features of ϕ if ϕ is either filled by a complementizer or by a finite verb. e. A feature M of an expression α is ‘free’ in the sense of (d), if α does not bind a trace bearing feature M. f. It is possible for ϕ to have the feature specification [+ver]. These assumptions lead to an X-bar-projection ϕP in which the feature [+ver] can be assigned to the head position ϕ0, that is, [+ver] is segmentally localized: (7) Segmental localization of verum: ϕP Spϕ
ϕ ϕ0
FinP
{[+ver]}
...
c/f-verum
Looking at R/W-verum focus, Höhle (1992: 134f.) suspects that the segmental analysis is insufficient, because beside the realization of verum focus in position ϕ° an accent in the position Spϕ delivers a verum focus, too. This can be seen in examples (8b) and (9b) with the respective contexts in (8a) and (9a): (8) a. Da stehen die Leute, die du nicht getroffen hast. There stand the people who you not met have ‘There are the people who you have not met.’ b. Aber But
dort there
stehen stand
die the
Leute, people
die du getroffen who you met
‘But there are the people who you did have met.’
hast. have
Verum Focus 295 (9) a. Du hast mir You have me
erzählt, wen du nicht getroffen hast. told who you not met have
‘You have told me who you have not met.’ b. Jetzt möche ich wissen, wen du getroffen hast. Now want I know who you met have ‘Now I want to know who you did meet.’ Because of the empirical shortcomings with respect to these data, Höhle (cf. 1992: 134f.) discusses a variant he calls the non-segmental localization of verum.
15.2.2.2 Non-segmental localization of verum The following analysis proposes replacing a syntactic representation with a semantic one. Moreover, this idea involves the introduction of verum into the semantic structure in the course of the translation process of the syntactic structure into a semantic form. Example (10a) delivers an explication of this translation, where Kj can be given by the elements in (10b) (cf. Höhle 1992: 138): (10) a. Non-segmental localization of verum: Syntax: Kj
Ki
−→ Kk
Semantics: B(Ki) B(Kj)
b. Kj can be: a. a finite verb, b. a complementizer, c. a relative pronoun, d. a wh-pronoun in an embedded clause.
verum
B(Kk)
B(K) stands for the meaning of K. verum is in a position that takes scope over the pro positional core B(Kk), from which—for independent reasons—a constituent may be extracted. verum on the semantic level becomes a predicate over propositions as one may expect. Later on in this chapter, it will be shown that this analysis is not adequate either and that verum cannot be treated as a predicate over propositions. The main issue being presented in this contribution consists in a theory of the verum focus phenomenon which combines various aspects of Höhle’s analysis and relates it to the concept of sentence mood together with a theory of focus assignment. From the interaction of these two grammatical components the phenomenon of verum focus will be derived in a compositional manner. While Höhle’s account postulates the structure and the assumptions represented in (11a), the approach presented here will merely
296 Horst Lohnstein consist of a mood phrase MoodP and the assignment of a focus feature [+F] to the head M0 of MoodP as is illustrated in (11b): (11) a. Höhle (1992):
b. Lohnstein (2012):
ϕP
MoodP
Spϕ
SpMood
ϕ
Mood
ϕ0
...
Mood 0
FinP
c/f-verum
...
[+Fokus]
...
r/w-verum
Before turning to considerations concerning these points, the next section presents an overview of various approaches proposed in the literature which make crucial use of Höhle’s verum-element.
15.3 Verum focus in linguistic research Although Höhle (1988, 1992) coined the term verum focus, the phenomenon was observed much earlier, for instance as a polarity focus in Halliday (1967: 24) or Watters (1979). Watters (1979)—in a study about Aghem, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon—distinguishes six types of focus, where two types in particular relate directly to verum focus: ‘polar focus’ and ‘counter-assertive polar focus’. In his understanding, focus is—as proposed by Jackendoff (1972)—‘that information in the sentence that the speaker believes, assumes or knows the hearer does not share with him or her’ (cf. Watters 1979: 137). He observes that ‘polar focus’ and ‘counter-assertive polar focus’ are suitable for emphasizing the truth of a proposition that the hearer assumes to be false, or vice versa. Watters (1979: 177) characterizes these two types of focus as follows [Watters’ numbering]: (6) Types of focus:
a. Polar focus (PF): the truth value ‘true’ or ‘false’ which the speaker asserts or counter-asserts concerning a proposition. […] Example: it is true/the case that Inah gave fufu to his friends = Inah did give fufu to his friends.
b. Counter-assertive polar focus (CAPF): the truth value ‘true’ or ‘false’ which the speaker asserts, contradicting the hearer’s previous utterance concerning the truth value of the sentence […]. Example: it is too the case/true [contrary to your denial] that Inah gave fufu to his friends = Inah did too give fufu to his friends.
In line with Watters observations, Dik et al. (1981)—under the perspective of Functional Grammar—characterize polar focus as focusing on the truth value of the assertion:
Verum Focus 297 If the predication is presented as an assertion, then the focus will fall on the truth value of the assertion, as in:
(5) John went to the market (6) John DID GO to the market (5) can be taken as a focus-neutral assertion of a certain fact. In (6) the focus is on the truth value of the predication as a whole. This construction could be used in a context in which the issue was whether or not it was the case that John went to the market, it is emphatically asserted that John went to the market. (Dik et al. 1981: 44)
With similar terminology, Gussenhoven (1984: 49) describes polarity focus as a sub- class of minimal focus. Polarity focus—as Gussenhoven assumes—looks for semanti cally empty small words it can go to, as for instance in example (107-B) [Gussenhoven’s numbering]. In this example, the focus is underlined and the nucleus is carried by the preposition ON. ‘On’ in this case, is called the nucleus carrier (NC) by Gussenhoven (in newer approaches it is called the ‘focus exponent’) which takes the italicized part as focus domain: (107) A (soccer fan): I want you to sprinkle my ashes all over the pitch B: Well, you know spectators aren’t really allowed onto the pitch The focus on ‘onto’ is assumed to be ambiguous, with one reading contrasting alternative prepositions and the other leading to the polarity effect. In connecting finiteness and assertion, Klein (1998) discusses verum focus data and relates them to a linguistic level of logical description. On this level, the assertive component ASS of a declarative clause is associated with the finite part FIN of the finite verb. Promoting the concept of ‘topic time’ (the time at which the assertion holds), Klein uses verum focus data as evidence for the strict relatedness between finiteness and assertion. Trying to analyse Ladd’s (1981) p-/¬p-ambiguity, Romero and Han (2002, 2004) use a conversational operator verum to derive this ambiguity. It appears in negative yes/no- questions with preposed negation: (12) Isn’t there a vegetarian restaurant around here? In one reading the questioner asks for confirmation of something he believes to be true. The other reading shows up in such a case where the questioner assumed the truth of the proposition previously, but—by some evidence—has inferred that this pro position is actually false, and he wants to check this new inference (see Ladd 1981). As Ladd (1981: 165f) demonstrates, ‘there is a genuine syntactic/semantic ambiguity here, involving a difference in scope of negation’. Romero and Han (2004) try to explain this ambiguity by making the suggestion that verum focus is obligatorily realized in yes/ no-questions with preposed negation. Furthermore, they presume that verum focus signals the presence of an epistemic implicature. Verum focus interacts with negation
298 Horst Lohnstein in terms of a scopal ambiguity as already proposed by Ladd. In order to deduce this ambiguity, they assume that verum is a conversational epistemic operator, rather than a purely epistemic operator. Therefore, the semantics of verum should not imply that the speaker is entirely certain about the truth of p, but rather that p should be added to the Common Ground. The semantics of verum can then be related to the semantics of the epistemic adverb really, which leads to the following formal definition (cf. Romero and Han 2004: 627): (13) VERUM g , x /i = really g , x /i = i i = λp 〈s,t 〉 λ w .∀ w ′ ∈Ep i x (w )[∀w ′′ ∈Conv x (w ′)[p ∈CG w ′′ ]] = = FOR -SURE-CG x
where Epix(w) is the set of worlds that conform to x’s knowledge in w, Convx(x) is the set of worlds where all conversational goals of x in w′ are fulfilled, and CGw″ is the Common Ground (in the sense of Stalnaker 1978) which contains all propositions the speakers in w″ assume to be true. Translated into English the formula expresses the intuition that the speaker is certain that proposition p should be added to the Common Ground. Büring (2006) regards clauses with verum focus as the opposite of all-new-clauses. Since the proposition of verum focused clauses must be given in the discourse situation, the only new part of the clause is the assertive component. Because even this part is not new, Büring concludes that the focus on the finite verb serves the proposition as ‘context linking’. Context linking is to be understood in a similar way as Schwarzschild’s (1999) notion of ‘givenness’. That means that at least one element of the alternatives denoted by the focused element is present in the context of discourse. Gutzmann (2012) distinguishes two generally different approaches to verum focus, which he classifies into two theoretical conceptions: (14) Focus Accent Thesis (FAT) verum is a silent operator which can get focused. Focus on this covert element is assumed to be an ordinary focus (cf. Büring 2006; Zimmermann and Hole 2008) (15) Lexical Operator Thesis (LOT) verum is a conversational operator (cf. Gutzmann and Castroviejo Miró 2011; Romero and Han 2004). It is present if verum focus is realized otherwise it is not. For FAT to be properly defined, verum has to be present in any clause without the need for verum focus to have taken place. From LOT, it follows that verum has morphemic status in that it is an idiosyncratic lexicalized combination of an intonational structure together with a specific meaning. Lai (2011) argues that verum focus on a proposition induces an updating process of p in the situation of discourse. Rejecting accounts such as Romero and Han’s (2004) requesting additions to the common ground or Gutzmann and Castroviejo Miró’s (2011) approach,
Verum Focus 299 which downdates the question under discussion (QUD) through a conventional implicature, Lai proposes that verum(p) signals an update of p from the conversational background. Using characterizations of contrastiveness from Rooth (1992) and Lang and Umbach (2002), Stommel (2011) argues that the functional effect of verum focus can be boiled down to that of a contrastive focus. Generalizing about this function, she subsumes verum effects in the left periphery of a sentence, verum effects on modal particles and verum effects on light verbs in the right periphery under a single semantic notion. Observing that some aspects of sentence meaning escape truth conditional characterization—as for instance in the case of (16) which does not allow for a paraphrase with being true (16a), but rather with being a fact (16b), Blühdorn (2012) and Blühdorn and Lohnstein (2012) distinguish different semantic objects (17a). The core ideas of this distinction can be traced back to Sweetser (1990) and Lyons (1977), and even slightly earlier to Hare (1971): (16) Dass That
es it
nicht not
regnet, rains
ist is
schlecht bad
für for
die the
Landwirtschaft agriculture
‘That it does not rain, is bad for agriculture.’ a. * That it is true, that it does not rain, is bad for agriculture. b. That it is a fact, that it does not rain, is bad for agriculture. The different semantic objects in (17a) correspond to the respective syntactic projections in the clausal structure in (17b): (17) a.
level (i). factive (ii) epistemic (iii) volitive
b.
semantic s-object e-object m-object
syntactic vP FinP MoodP
Hare’s terms Tropic Phrastic Neustic
MoodP (m-object) SpMood
Mood Mood 0
FinP(e-object) SpFin
Fin ν P(s-object)
Fin0
...
Lohnstein (2012) presents the ‘sentence mood theory of verum focus’, which has to be carefully scrutinized and will be addressed separately in Section 15.8 (cf. also Lohnstein and Stommel 2009). Typologically, there seem to be a variety of grammatical devices to mark verum focus in main clauses. As can be seen from the example in (18a), German uses a pitch accent on
300 Horst Lohnstein the fronted finite verb; English realizes verum focus by (affirmative) do-support together with an accent on ‘do’ (18b); Spanish inserts the particle ‘sí’ (18c) from Gutzmann (2012: 73); while Dutch needs the particle ‘wel’ as exemplified in (18d) from Sudhoff (2012: 109): (18) a. Karl Carl
hat has
das the
Buch book
gelesen. read.
(German)
‘Carl did read the book.’ b. Carl did finish his book. c. Carlos Carl
sí si
acabó finished
su his
(English) libro. book.
(Spanish)
‘Carl did finish his book.’ d. Ik I
heb have
het the
boek book
wel gelezen. wel read.
(Dutch)
‘I did read the book.’ Looking at Norwegian, Hetland (1992a, 1992b) observes that verum focus can be realized in position C0, but also in I0 or V0. These options—she claims—are not available in German or English. Furthermore, there appear to be constructional variants with focus accents on two distinct positions in a clause which lead to verum effects: (19) Jeg må tilstå AT jef dessverre ikke HAR sluttet. I must confess THAT I unfortunately not HAVE stopped (Norwegian) ‘I have to confess that, unfortunately, I did not stop.’ In Bura, a Chadic language, focus is marked by various strategies. While focused subjects are obligatorily marked with the particle ‘án’, focused non-subjects are marked by another device. But in the case of verum focus the particle ‘ku’ is used (cf. Hartmann et al. 2008: 75): (20) A: Náha yesterday
Pindár Pindar
sá drink
mbal. beer
(Bura)
‘Yesterday P. drank beer.’ B: A’á, Yes
Pindár P.
(ku) verum
sá drink
mbal beer
‘Yes, Pindar did drink beer yesterday.’
náha. yesterday
(Bura)
Verum Focus 301 In South Marghi, another Chadic language, focus is marked by two different, but co- occuring devices: fronting of the focused constituent and the immediate follow up of the focus particle ‘ŋa’. Verum focus, however, is realized by another device: fronting of the finite verb. As can be seen from the examples in (21) (from Gutzmann 2012: 76; Hartmann 2011) the SOV order in (21) changes to VSO order in the verum focused reaction in (21-B): (21) A: Nagai 2SG.S.NEG
shil come
o to
ki-ɗa house-1sg.poss
mai. neg
(South Margi)
‘You did not come to my house.’ B: It’s not true
A aux
shil-y come-lSG.S
o to
ki-ŋ-au. (South Margi) house-2.SG.POSS-FV
‘I did come to your house.’ Gutzmann and Hartmann (2012) try to dissociate ‘verum’ from ‘focus’. While FAT may be plausible for German or English—as the authors claim—this does not hold for typologically more diverse languages like Bura or South Margi, which give rise to the lexical operator thesis (LOT). While FAT assumes a verum operator to be present in every (finite) sentence, LOT takes verum as a conversational operator similar to the conception proposed by Romero and Han (2004) or Gutzmann and Castroviejo Miró (2011). LOT claims that the accent inducing verum focus has a lexicalized intonational meaning. Verum focus, therefore, does not count as a regular focus at all, but is morphemic in nature. As Gutzmann and Hartmann (2012) and Hartmann (2013) point out for Chadic languages, LOT seems to be the more adequate thesis referring to the verum pheno menon than FAT. Closing this section, we now move on to German again and examine the left-peripheral positions of clausal structure and their interpretation with respect to intentional meaning.
15.4 Sentential force and sentence mood This section outlines general properties of sentence moods in the languages of the world (cf. Stenius 1967; Lewis 1970; Bierwisch 1980; Zaefferer 1979; Searle and Vanderveken 1985; Altmann 1987, 1993; Brandt et al. 1992; Lohnstein 2000; Truckenbrodt 2006a, 2006b) and in particular, declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives which appear to exist in all languages of the world, as Sadock and Zwicky (1985) have already illustrated.
302 Horst Lohnstein Before characterizing sentence moods, let us return briefly to Höhle’s idea in order to theoretically reconstruct the phenomenon. Three aspects appear to be of special relevance: (22) a. The IT-analysis provides an independent motivation for a sentential subcomponent which is responsible for verum focus. b. The approach of a segmental localization provides an x-bar-structure with a head position in which the relevant [+ver]-feature can be positioned. c. The approach of a non-segmental localization is independent of the syntactic distribution, in that the semantic element verum enters the semantic structure throughout the translation process. The following considerations maintain (22a), but need to transfer the concept of ‘illocution type operator’ to the concept of ‘sentence mood’. Because verum focus is possible in embedded clauses which do not bear an illocution type operator, but rather a sentence mood, the transfer of this category appears to be necessary. To capture the syntactic regularities of verum focus assignment, (22b) has to be maintained too. But a slight change has to be made, because there is no need for a feature [+ver], as will be touched upon in due course. Aspect (22c) is of no relevance at all. The relation between a proposition and its truth does not have to be reconstructed as a relation between a predicate and its argument. Rather, as Frege (2001: 88) illustrates, it is the relation between ‘sense’ and ‘reference’. This means that a proposition is an intensional function from possible situations (worlds) into truth values. For this reason, a verum predicate appears to be superfluous. Replacing the traditional CP-notation by a mood phrase MoodP, which selects a finiteness phrase FinP, a structural configuration results similar to Höhle’s ‘segmental localization of verum’-approach in (7) in which MoodP replaces ϕ P and the landing sites for possible syntactic movement processes (or lexical insertions) are complemented:1 (23)
MoodP SpMood [+ w] − X P [− w] − X P
Mood Mood0 Comp Vfin
FinP SpFin
Fin νP
Fin0
...
[± finite]
A-movement
head movement
1 Concerning the semantic content, MoodP may be similar to what Rizzi (1996) labelled ForceP, but in contrast to Rizzi’s (and his follow-up) proposal(s), which assume some version of a holistic
Verum Focus 303 Mood0 is the head of the mood phrase MoodP. SpMood is its specifier position, the landing site for Ā-movement. Mood0 is the position of complementizers in embedded clauses or the landing site for fronting the finite verb in main clauses via head movement. This position is lexically empty in the case of embedded wh- interrogatives and relative clauses. Note, that R/W-verum focus is possible only in these two sentence types, because only in these cases the Mood0-position is phonetically empty. The following passage gives an explication of the syntactic and semantic structure building and their relation to each other. A thought—Frege’s notion of what is called a proposition today—induces a bipartitioned set of possible states of affairs. Frege identifies the grasping of a thought with a yes/no-question: (24) Frege (1919/1956: 293f.)
We expect to hear ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The answer ‘yes’ means the same as an indicative sentence, for in it the thought that was already completely contained in the interrogative sentence is laid down as true […] Consequently we may distinguish: the apprehension of thought the recognition of the truth of the thought the manifestation of this judgement
– – –
thinking judgement assertion
We perform the first act when we form a sentence-question.
Accordingly, a bipartition consists of one class of states of affairs described correctly by the proposition, and a second class, which contains the states of affairs described correctly by its negation: (25) a. b.
i. ii.
λs[p(s)]
λs[¬p(s)]
λs[p(s)](@) λs[¬p(s)](@)
= ¬p(@) = true
= →
p(@) = p(@) =
true false
A judgement results if the bipartition is reduced to the class of situations the proposition describes correctly; as Frege put it: the affirmation of the truth of the thought (‘die Anerkennung der Wahrheit des Gedankens’). The syntactic correlate corresponding to the semantic operation of judging can be considered to be Ā-movement of a [-wh]-XP to the SpMood-position. This leads to a declarative clause through the following semantic operations: force operator, the MoodP approach derives sentential force compositionally, which means that the ingredients of syntactic structure and their systematic interaction account for the intentional side of sentence meaning, namely sentential force or sentence mood.
304 Horst Lohnstein (26) Declarative clause: Carl kicked the cat.
Application of an intensional function to the actual situation (world) @ leads to a reduction of the bipartition to the class of situations the propo sition characterizes correctly. The result of this operation leads to the denotation of a proposition as the set of situations the proposition characterizes to be true:
a. λs[kick(s, Carl, ix[cat(x)]](@) = true b.
¬(Carl kick the cat)
Carl kick the cat
@
In the case of yes/no-interrogatives, the position SpMood remains empty. As a consequence, the bipartition remains unmodified, and a yes/no-question results: (27) yes/no-interrogative: Did Carl kick the cat? Bipartition remains unmodified: a. b.
λ@λi[ kick(@, Carl, ιx[cat(x)]) = kick(i, Carl, ιx[cat(x)]) ] Carl kick the cat
¬(Carl kick the cat)
@
The semantic properties of Ā-moved wh-phrases lead to further differentiation of the bipartition by the sortal restrictions of the wh-phrase in the case of wh- interrogatives. Assuming that wh-phrases denote sets of entities (cf. Hamblin 1974), the cartesian product of this set with the two cells in the propositionally induced bipartition allows for the construction of the complete space of possible answers, as proposed by the concept of an ‘index dependent proposition’ by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1982) or Higginbotham (1986). Starting with an index dependent proposition in (28a), using functional application for denotation sets in (28b), via the construction of the Boolean lattice in (28c) to the complete space of possible answers in (28d):
Verum Focus 305 (28) wh-interrogative: Who kicked the cat? Bipartition undergoes differentiation (cf. Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982; Lohnstein 2007): a. λ λi[ λx[kick( , x, ι x[cat(x)])] = λx[kick(i, x, ι x[cat(x)])] ] b. Carl, Carl, λ s[λ x[p(s)(x)]
M ary, Jack
]
λ s[λ x[¬ p(s)(x)]
M ary, Jack
]
c. Boolean lattice of possible answers: {Carl, Mary, Jack} {Carl, Mary} {Carl}
{Carl, Jack} {Mary}
{Mary, Jack} {Jack}
d. Space of possible answers: Carl, M ary, Jack Carl, M ary (not Jack) Carl, Jack (not M ary) M ary, Jack (not Carl) M ary (not Jack, not Carl) Carl (not Jack, not M ary) Jack (not M ary, not Carl) N obody
kicked the cat.
Summarizing the facts about the occupation of SpMood in German, we get the following correlations between the syntactic distributions of [±wh]-phrases and the semantic objects they lead to: (29)
SpM
[–wh]-XP [+wh]-XP
M0
semantic object
sentence mood
unmodified bipartition reduced bipartition differentiated bipartition
(yes/no-interrogative) (declarative) (wh-interrogative)
The distribution of complementizers and finite verbs in the Mood0-position leads to the general distinction between clauses that are evaluated in correspondence to the context of discourse—roughly speaking: main clauses—and those which are evaluated with respect to their grammatical environment—the various types of argument and relative clauses as well as embbeded wh-interrogatives. The following table captures these properties:
306 Horst Lohnstein (30) SpM
M0 Fin0 Conj,
location of evaluation context of discourse grammatical context
Thus, a picture emerges that extends Frege’s analysis of the assertion to a general view on sentence moods including indicative sentences as a special case: The filling of the SpMood- position determines a semantic object (cf. (29)), while the filling of the Mood0-position specifies the domain of evaluation for this very semantic object (cf. (30)). In the case of main clauses, one can think of this domain as the ‘table’ in the sense of Farkas and Bruce (2010). If the finite verb is fronted in German, the clause is put on the table; otherwise the clause is related to some element or construction in the grammatical environment. From these considerations the functions of sentence moods can—roughly—be characterized along the following lines: (31) Functional characterization: sentence mood:
function:
declarative yes/no-interrogative wh-interrogative imperative
believe p give a true answer (out of a 2-fold partition) give a true answer (out of an n-fold partition) make p a fact in @
We will see in the course on what follows that verum focus interrelates directly with these functions of sentence moods.
15.5 Verum focus in discourse situations Moving on to the analysis of the realization of these sentence mood functions in discourse situations, it can be observed that verum focused clauses are—first of all—not appropriate as out-of-the-blue utterances. The propositions expressed by these clauses need to be ‘given’ in some way in the discourse situation: (32) Situation: Peter returns from holidays and enters the room. No telephone call concerning the cat has taken place: Peter: # John DID kick the cat. Without a controverse discussion (or known disputed positions) of the topic, verum focused clauses are inappropriate in a discourse. Even if those opposing propositions do
Verum Focus 307 not explicitly exist, it seems to be necessary to accommodate them together with some dispute about their acceptance. Next, it is noticeable that utterances containing verum focused clauses are a useful way to not tell the truth at all. Consider the example in (3) again repeated here as (33): (33) Die The
Wahlen elections
wurden were
korrekt correctly
durchgeführt. carried out
‘The elections were carried out correctly.’ Obviously, verum focus here is an effective means to not tell the truth at all, but rather to stop arguments and discussions to the contrary. There are only two alternatives on the side of the addressee referring to performing the election: first, he believes that it was correct, or second, he does not. Yet (33) depicts the intention to minimize all opinions different from the speaker’s one about the election by verum focusing the sentence mood ‘declarative’. Thus, the verum focused ‘declarative’ imposes a strong tendency on the addressee not to behave otherwise than believing the proposition expressed. Verum focus on this view, is a focus on the mood component with the effect that alternatives to the expressed mood function are obliterated in the situation of discourse. Likewise, the function of yes/no-interrogatives is to get a true answer out of the binary space of possible answers (cf. Hamblin 1974; Karttunen 1977; Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982 among others). In this case, the speaker is not able to judge the truth or falsity of the proposition expressed. If the yes/no-interrogative is provided with verum focus, the corresponding utterance is suitable for demanding that the addressees do not discuss several possibilities in the space of a two-fold partition. Instead, it intends for the true answer be extracted from the addressee—which means again: fulfil the sentence mood of the yes/no-interrogative (cf. (31)): (34) Speaker A:
Karl Carl
hat has
die the
Katze cat
getreten. kicked
‘Carl kicked the cat.’ Speaker B:
Karl Carl
hat has
die the
Katze cat
nicht not
getreten. kicked
‘Carl did not kick the cat.’ Speaker C:
hat has
er he
die the
Katze cat
getreten? kicked
‘did he kick the cat.’ What C demands from A or B is the true answer from A or B by reducing the alternatives A and B to the function of the yes/no-interrogative.
308 Horst Lohnstein Similarly, the same mechanism appears to be at work in the case of wh-interrogatives with the special condition that wh-interrogatives have an n-fold differentiated space of possible answers, while the space of possible answers in the case of yes/no-interrogatives is two-fold only. In order for a verum focused wh-interrogative to be adequate in a discourse situation, several positions concerning the target of the verum focused question need to receive some attention: (35) Speaker A: Karl Carl
hat has
die the
Katze cat
getreten. kicked
‘Carl kicked the cat.’ Speaker B: Nein, No,
das that
war was
Fritz Fritz
‘No, Fritz did it.’ Speaker C: Das That muss must
kann can es it
nicht not
sein, be,
gewesen been
Fritz Fritz
war was
im in
Kino, Otto cinema, Otto
sein. be
‘That can not be the case, because Fritz was in the cinema. So Otto must have done it.’ Speaker D: Wer Who
hat has
die the
Katze cat
(denn nun) (then now)
getreten? kicked
‘Who actually did kick the cat?’ What D tries to evoke through the verum focused wh-question, is to boil down the alternatives to the function of the wh-interrogative, which means not discussing the topic any further, but rather giving a true answer from the n-fold space, which means: fulfil the sentence mood function of the wh-interrogative. Moving on with imperatives, their prominent function is to make the addressee do what the proposition expresses. Note, that imperatives do not allow for the assignment of a truth value at all. What appears to be happening is—again—that the speaker using a verum focused imperative tries to diminish the alternatives of the addressee’s behaviour to the function of the imperative clause. Consider the following setting in (36) together with the verum focused imperative given by speaker A: (36) B walks throughout the room hesitating to take a chair. Speaker A:
Jetzt Now
nimm take
dir you
‘take a chair after all!’
(endlich) (after all)
einen a
Stuhl! chair.
Verum Focus 309 The verum focused imperative requires no verbal behaviour on the side of the addressee, due to the properties of the imperative verbal mood which directs the proposition’s evaluation to the factive domain. It suffices that the addressee behaves in a way that is an alternative to what the verum focused imperative clause expresses. From these con siderations together with the interpretation of focus as a reduction of the alternatives, it follows that verum focus on the imperative component tries to put an end to the addressee’s hesitation and wants him to fulfil the demanded act which is expressed by the imperative sentence mood, and this means again: fulfil the sentence mood function of the verum focused clause. As it appears, verum focus seems to be a suitable grammatical tool to reduce alternatives which belong to the class of (verbal) behaviour characterized by the functions of the respective sentence moods. The diminution of alternatives in the discourse situation is a regular function of focus, as Krifka (2008) elaborated. These observations suggest that in verum focus constructions the regular properties of sentence moods are strongly related to regular principles of focus interpretation. Seen from this point of view, verum focus is a result of the regular interaction of independently motivated properties of grammatical structure building.
15.6 Verum focus in embedded clauses In addition to F-verum focus on fronted finite verbs in German, a complementizer can carry the accent or, in the case of indirect wh-questions and respective relative clauses, the phrase in the Spec-Position. In these embedded cases, only a pure true/false contrast seems to be possible. Consider the following examples: (37) a. Maria Mary
glaubt, believes
dass that
Paul Paul
das the
Buch book
gelesen read
hat. has
‘Mary believes that Paul read the book.’ b. Aber Clara glaubt, dass er das But Clara believes that he the
Buch nicht gelesen book not read
hat. has
‘But Clara believes that he did not read the book.’ (38) a. Du You
hast have
mir me
erzählt, told
wen who
Du you
eingeladen invited
du you
nicht not
hast. have
‘You have told me who you invited.’ b. Jetzt Now
will want
ich I
wissen, know
wen who
‘Now, I want to know who you did not invite.’
eingeladen invited
hast have
310 Horst Lohnstein (39) a. Das These
sind are
die the
Bücher, books,
die which
Paul Paul
gelesen read
hat. has
‘These are the books Paul has read.’ b. Und And
das sind these are
die Bücher, the books,
die er nicht which he not
gelesen read
hat has
‘And these are the books he has not read.’ Furthermore, R/W-verum focus is possible only if the head of the mood phrase is phonetically silent. This can be seen in the examples in (1e)–(1g). Peculiarly, the non- embedded variants in (40a) and (40b) which correspond to the embedded clauses in (1f) and (1g) do not show a verum effect, if the accent is assigned to the wh-or the relative pronoun while the finite verb is fronted: (40) a. wen who
hat has
Karl Carl
eingeladen? invited
‘who did Carl invite?’ b. den that
hat one
Karl has
eingeladen. Carl invited
‘that one Carl did invite.’ Similarly, the R-and W-verum effects disappear in embedded clauses if the C-position is lexically filled as is possible in some German dialects, for instance Bavarian (41a) and (41b), or in V/2-relative clauses (41c) (cf. Gärtner 2001): (41) a. (Ich I
weiß nicht,) know not
wen who
dass that
Karl Carl
eingeladen invited
hat has
‘I don’t know who Carl did invite’ b. (Dort (There
steht stands
der the
Mann,) man)
der who
wo where
kommt. comes
‘(There is the man) who does come.’ c. (Das (The
Buch book
hat has
eine a
Seite,) page)
die which
ist is
ganz entirely
schwarz. black
‘(The book has a page) which is entirely black.’ These data suggest that the accent inducing verum focus is situated in the head position of the left-peripheral phrase only. If this position is phonetically empty, it seems to be the case that the accent shifts to the string adjacent to the specifier position in the same
Verum Focus 311 syntactic projection. Thus, R/W-verum focus appears to be a pure PF-phenomenon restricting verum focus exclusively to the head position of the mood projection.
15.7 Deriving the intuition about ‘truth’ The conception of ‘truth’ has been discussed throughout centuries in the philosophical tradition. Four theories seem to be rather prominent and are worth examining in the context of verum focus. The ‘redundancy theory of truth’ was inter alia proposed by Frege: The sense of the word true does not provide a relevant contribution to the thought. If I claim ‘it is true that seawater is salty’, I claim the same as if I assert ‘seawater is salty’ […] Therefore, one can suspect that the word ‘true’ does not have a sense. But then, a clause containing the word ‘true’ as a predicate would not have a sense. One can only say: the word ‘true’ has a sense which does not contribute anything to the sense of the clause in which it appears. [Translation of Frege 1976: 271 by HL]
This remark suggests that there is no difference respecting the meaning between a clause introduced by It is true that … and the corresponding (declarative) clause itself. The predicate ‘to be true’, thus, does not contribute a relevant meaning component to the whole clause. The ‘correspondence theory of truth’ takes a proposition to be true iff the conditions expressed by the proposition correspond to the facts in (a model of) the world. The tradition of this theory reaches back to Aristoteles: To claim that existing things do not exist, or that not-existing things exist is false. But to claim that the existing things exist, and the not-existing things do not exist is true. Therefore, someone who claims that something exists or does not exist, says the truth or the falsity. [Translation of Aristoteles: Metaphysik, Book 4, Section 15.7, Paragraph 1011b, 26–9 by HL]
Its use in modern logic and semantics can be traced back to Tarski’s (1944) prominent definition of ‘truth’ as the fulfilment of a formula of the object language. The missing link between objects of language and situations in the world lead to the ‘coherence theory of truth’ (cf. Hempel 1935; Davidson 2000 among many others). This theory states that a proposition is true iff it is compatible with a set of other propositions given by some theory or the epistemic system of an individual, for instance. In terms of possible world semantics, the intersection of the set of worlds denoted by proposition p with the set of worlds denoted by the set P of propositions must not be empty: (42) P ∩ p ≠ ∅
312 Horst Lohnstein This definition is in a sense independent of the way the world actually is. Nevertheless, neither of these theories captures the effects induced by verum focus. As it appears, the only possibility of deriving them seems to be by way of the ‘consensus theory of truth’: “Truth”, we call the assertive claim we connect with constative speech acts. A statement is true if the assertive claim of the speech acts with which we use the clauses claiming that statement is justified. [Translation of Habermas 1973: 218 by HL]
According to this theory a constative speech act holds to be true if its truth is accepted by the participants of a principally infinite and violence free discourse. Verum focus—under this perspective—appears to be a means to put an end to a discourse (often in an authoritarian fashion). Because the infinite discourse together with the various argumental positions is reduced to the function of the expressed sentence mood by verum focusing, the intuition of truth results as a consequence in the closing statement in the discourse situation.
15.8 The sentence mood theory of verum focus Recapitulating all parts from the preceding sections, the following syntactic configuration together with the semantics of sentence moods allow for a compositional derivation of the verum focus phenomenon: (43) Syntactic structure:
MoodP SpMood
Mood Mood 0
FinP
[+Focus]
...
The [+Focus]-feature has its usual interpretation in the sense of Krifka (2008) as inducing alternatives to (the functions of) the respective sentence moods, cf. (31), leading to an alternative set along the following lines: (44) Focus assignment: Let mood be a sentence mood with structure (43) and f(mood) its function from (31), and let ⟦ ⟧A be the alternative meaning. Then, (43) has the interpretation: [ [ + Focus] f(mood )] A = ALT (f (mood )), where ALT is the function mapping f(mood) onto the set of alternatives to f(mood).
Verum Focus 313 Conflating sentence mood constitution and focus assignment, we attain the ‘sentence mood theory of verum focus’. In informal terms, it can be stated as follows: (45) Sentence mood theory of verum focus: The main syntactic, semantic and discourse pragmatic properties connected with the phenomenon called ‘verum focus’ are derivable from the properties of sentence moods together with the regular function of focusing as reduction of alternatives given in the context of discourse. This theory brings together the various aspects mentioned in this contribution: (46) a. The syntactic distribution of the assigment of [+F] in the case of verum focus in German is restricted to the head position of the functional category Mood0. The theory, thereby, answers the question which element is the focus exponent in verum focus constructions. b. The theory maintains the relevant advantages of Höhle’s IT- analysis, but omits their failure with respect to embedded sentences at the same time: embedded as well as main clauses bear a sentence mood. c. The sentence mood analysis avoids the disadvantages of the verum predicate analysis, because sentence moods are reconstructed as intensional functions which can be applied to actual states of affairs. d. The theory assumes verum focus not to be a distinct focus phenomenon with idiosyncratic properties, but, instead, interprets the phenomenon as a regular focus construction. Its properties are derived by the regular means of sentence mood constitution together with the regular properties of focus assignment. Proposing this theory does not mean that there are no other grammatical ways to get verum effects. As Gussenhoven (1984) has illustrated, it is often the case that semantically empty (or light) elements allow for verum effects if they bear an accent. So, for instance in German, semantically light verbs allow for verum effects, even if they are in the final position. The reason for this is based on the fact that focus assignment involves the construction of alternatives (cf. Krifka 2008). This need, together with semantic lightness, leads to a binary contrast between ‘affirmation’ vs ‘negation’ as elements of the set of alternatives (cf. also Repp, this volume, Zimmermann, this volume). Modal particles, as analysed for instance by Gutzmann (2010), can carry accents inducing verum effects, too. But these cases are different from verum focus on the mood component, because lexical properties of modal particles account for these effects (cf. also Grosz, this volume). Hence, the phenomenon designated as verum focus—viewed under the perspective of this theory—should better be labelled as focus on sentence mood.
Chapter 16
Predicat e fo c u s Malte Zimmermann
This chapter discusses a grammatically defined sub-class of focus, namely the focus on verbal predicates and on functional elements in the extended verbal projection. Section 16.1 introduces the phenomena falling under the label of predicate focus, and Section 16.2 shows that predicate focus is, in principle, interpretable on a par with argument or term focus on DPs and PPs. Still, a unified structured-meaning approach that treats focus as the psychological predicate of the clause allows for singling out DP-terms and transitive verbs as categories in need of explicit marking when focused. Section 16.3 provides a cross-linguistic overview of the grammatical strategies available for marking predicate focus, focusing on asymmetries in the realization of predicate as opposed to term focus in terms of obligatory marking, grammatical strategy, and complexity. Section 16.4 discusses the information-structural and grammatical factors behind such focus asymmetries, and it concludes with some tentative universals concerning the explicit marking of information-structural categories on verbal predicates.
16.1 Predicate focus The term predicate focus refers to all instances of focus on lexical verbal predicates, such as V and VP, cf. (1a,b), and on functional elements in the extended verbal projection, like tense, aspect, and mood (TAM-focus), cf. (2a–c). Throughout, we control for focus by placing a wh-question and/or an assertion in need of correction in the preceding context (C); cf. for example Rooth (1992), Krifka (2008), and chapters 2 and 14 (this volume). Focus is marked by pitch accent on the focused constituent in intonation languages such as English; see chapter 9 (this volume). (1) a. C: What did Peter do to the cat? /Peter kicked the cat. (No,) Peter PETtedF the cat. b. C: What did Peter do? /Peter stayed away from the animals. (No,) Peter [petted the CAT]F .
[V-focus] [VP-focus]
Predicate focus 315 (2) a. C: Peter is petting the cat. No, Peter WASF petting the cat (before the food arrived).
[T-focus]
b. C: Peter is petting the cat. No, he [HAS petted]F the cat (but he’s done now).
[A-focus]
c. C: Peter petted the cat. No, he [WOULD have]F petted the cat (if his mom had let him).
[M-focus]
This characterization of predicate focus excludes focus on nominal arguments or adjuncts (term focus), as well as verum focus on the truth value of a given proposition. By excluding instances of verum focus (Höhle 1992 and chapter 15 this volume), the notion of predicate focus is more constrained than Güldemann’s (1996, 2003) predication focus and Hyman and Watters’ (1984) auxiliary focus, but, at the same time, it is less constrained by including instances of lexical focus on V and VP. By including instances of TAM-focus, the present notion of predicate focus is also less constrained than that of Lambrecht (2000) and van Valin (2005), which is restricted to the VP-comment and its subparts in sentences with topical subjects. Arguably, instances of thetic all-new focus fall under the notion of predicate focus as well. Following Erteschik-Shir (1997), one may analyse the entire vP in (3), including the indefinite subject (Diesing 1992), as predicating over an overt or covert situation argument: (3) C: What’s going on over there? There are [vP people singing karaOKE]F . /[Some people are singing karaOKE]F .
16.2 Semantic interpretation of predicate focus This section shows that predicate focus on verbal or TAM-categories can be semantically interpreted in full parallel to term focus on nominal categories, both in alternative semantics (Rooth 1992 and Chapter 2, this volume) and in the structured meaning approach (e.g. Jacobs 1983; von Stechow 1990), the two major frameworks for representing the semantic contribution of focus. In addition, it is shown that the structured- meaning approach, together with the conception of focus as the psychological predicate of the clause, singles out DP-terms and (di)transitive verbs as categories in need of (special) grammatical focus-marking.
16.2.1 Alternative semantics In alternative semantics, the semantic focus value of the focused constituent contains comparable alternatives of the same semantic type. Projecting to the sentence level, the resulting alternative propositions will differ only in the position of the focused constituent, while
316 Malte Zimmermann sharing the background part of the information. Examples (4a–c) illustrate the parallel interpretation of object term focus (4a) and predicate focus on V (4b) and T (4c), respectively: (4) a. [[Peter petted [the CAT]F]]F = {λs. Peter petted the cat in s, λs. Peter petted the dog in s, …} b. [[Peter PETtedF the cat]]F = {λs. Peter petted the cat in s, λs. Peter kicked the cat in s, …}
(cf. 1a)
c. [[Peter WASF petting the cat]]F = (cf. 2a) {λs. Peter was petting the cat in s, λs. Peter is petting the cat in s, λs. Peter will be petting the cat in s, …}
16.2.2 Structured meaning In the structured-meaning approach, the propositional meaning p of a clause is factored into a pair of focus (F) and background (BG) meaning, such that functional application of BG to F, or vice versa, gives back the original meaning p. The background meaning is arrived at by λ-abstracting over the focused part of the clause. The structured propositions in (5a–c), in which BG and F are represented as the pair , show again that this procedure applies to instances of term focus and predicate focus alike. (5) a. [[Peter petted [the CAT]F]] = b. [[Peter PETtedF the cat]] = c. [[Peter WASF petting the cat]] =
Example (5c) shows that there is no principled problem with factoring out the meaning of functional operators, such as tense, which is here analysed in terms of existential quantification over times (Prior 1967). In (5c), the background part is analysed as a higher-order predicate over the propositional tense operator in keeping with the function–argument structure of term and V-focus in (5ab). Alternatively, the function–argument structure can be reversed by simplifying the background to the proposition λt. Peter pet-the cat at t, which then serves as argument for the tense operator in (5c). This alternative representation transparently reflects the semantic nature of tense as predicating over propositions.
16.2.3 Thetic sentences and focus on the progressive aspect Thetic all-new sentences are interpreted in full parallel. The background part of such sentences typically contains a temporally located situation (6a), but sometimes the tense component can also make up part of the focus. In such cases, the background will only contain
Predicate focus 317 an untensed situation (6b), which is plausibly construed as contextually bound: the background situation s1 in (6b) functions as the argument for the focused proposition. (6) a. C: What’s going on over there? There are [people singing karaOKE]F.
b. C: How are you doing in the family? (s1 = situation comprising the family activities) (Fine!), I am working on my new book, Mary has passed her exam, and …
Finally, observe that—from a focus-semantic perspective—there is nothing special about the (focus) semantics of the progressive or imperfective aspect, which locates the reference time tR inside the running time of the situation described by the verbal predicate (Klein 1994). Just like tense operators (5c), aspectual operators can be focused, in which case they take a proposition as their background argument. Sentence (7a) could be a reply to ‘Has Peter petted the cat already?’ (7) a. [[(No,) Peter IS petting the cat (now)]] =
This observation is relevant in connection with Güldemann’s claim (1996, 2003) that progressive/imperfective aspect and predication focus are inherently connected. This is meant to account for the fact that focus-marking on terms is often impossible in progressive sentences in African languages (see also Hyman 1999 and Chapter 39, this volume). Whatever the reason behind this gap in the focus paradigm, it cannot be focus-semantic in nature, as there is nothing in the meaning of the progressive in (7a) that would make it inherently predicative. A more promising possibility—to be investigated in future research—would be that the difficulties with realizing term focus in progressive sentences follow from conceptual problems with the backgrounding of temporally unbounded situations, which form a characteristic part of the progressive meaning, cf. (7b). b.
16.2.4 Association with focus The observed parallelism in semantic interpretation between term and predicate focus carries over to instances of association with focus-sensitive operators (Chapter 12, this volume), as illustrated in (8a,b) for object and VP-focus, respectively. (8) a. Which animal did Peter pet? b. What did Peter do?
Peter only petted [the CAT]F . Peter only [petted the CAT]F .
318 Malte Zimmermann On the earlier alternative semantics account of Rooth (1985) and on the structured- meaning account, the meaning of the focus particle only quantifies over focus- alternatives and over different entities with the background property, respectively. In Rooth’s (1992) generalized treatment of focus semantics and association with focus, the quantificational domain of only is contextually specified, but is still constrained by the focus alternatives; see Chapter 12 (this volume) for details. The structured-meaning analysis for (8a,b) is shown in (9a,b), for simplicity leaving out the intensional meaning layer required by instances of VP-focus; see Krifka (2006). (9) a. For all x, such that Peter petted x, x = the_cat′ b. For all P, such that Peter Ped, P = λx. x pets the cat
16.2.5 Unified analysis and conclusion From a formal focus-semantic perspective, there are no principled differences between predicate focus and term focus. This semantic parallelism has led some researchers (see e.g. Löbner 1990; Wedgwood 2006; É. Kiss 2010) to treat all kinds of focus, including term foci, as instances of predicate focus semantically; see von Stechow (1991) for explicit discussion. The unified predicative analysis of focus implicitly takes up Paul’s (1880) characterization of focus as the psychological predicate of the clause. It tries to capture the intuition that the focused part of an utterance constitutes the new or relevant information that is predicated of an already established discourse entity—the psychological subject. Notice that the conception of focus as inherently predicative necessitates a reanalysis of focused DP-arguments as predicates. A Löbner-style (1990) reanalysis of object term focus in (5a) is shown in (10). (10) petted x, λx. x = the_cat′> a. q (33) For any two propositions a and b, a > b iff (a ∩ {w: circumstances are normal in w}) ⊆ b Relational discourse particles classify as anaphoric presupposition triggers (cf. Beck 2006; Egg and Zimmermann 2012) in that their q argument must be salient in the conversation. Since (32a–c) involve such a contextually given alternative proposition q, one way in which focus may interact with the interpretation of discourse particles may be in restricting the choice of q. For example, we may ask whether q has to be a focus alternative of p. In the remainder of Section 17.3, I focus on doch, since this particle has received most attention concerning its interactions with focus; however, the same considerations apply to any type of relational discourse particle, including schon, auch, and possibly halt / eben. To begin with, consider a concrete implementation of (32a), in (34); (34) is treated as presuppositional content, that is, doch is a semantically vacuous presupposition trigger. (34) ⟦doch⟧(p)(q) iff p > ¬q is part of the Common Ground and p cannot be debated by the hearer (Egg and Zimmermann 2012: 227)
13 As always, we are concerned with their discourse particle uses only, and not with their non- discourse-particle homonyms; however, it may be more than coincidence that two of the three particles have a focus particle counterpart, auch ‘also, too’ and schon ‘already’. Other relational discourse particles may include eben and halt (cf. Karagjosova 2004). 14 The idea that a subset of discourse particles conveys relations between two propositions based on ‘defeasible entailments’ is also present in Karagjosova (2004).
352 Patrick G. Grosz An illustration is given in (35). In (35a) (adapted from Egg 2012: 325), B conveys that A’s statement is unexpected. This is due to the information conveyed in (35d). (35) a. A: Peter Peter
kommt. comes
‘Peter is coming.’
–
B: Er he
ist is
doch doch
krank. ill
‘But he is ill.’
b. q = {w: Peter is coming in w} c. p = {w: Peter is ill in w} d. doch triggers the following presuppositions (via (34)): i. it is in the Common Ground that p = {w: Peter is ill in w} > ¬q = {w: Peter is not coming in w} ii. and p cannot be debated by the hearer. One possible way for doch to be focus sensitive would be if it were part of the lexical entry of doch that q must be a focus alternative of p. To see what this means, let us assume that the entire predicate krank ist ‘is sick’ (with the copula in its base position) is in focus, cf. (36a). Standard views of focus (e.g. Rooth 1992) hold that (36a) has the ordinary semantic value in (36b) (excluding doch, which presumably scopes over the entire proposition) and the focus semantic value in (36c) (cf. Beck, this volume; Rooth, this volume). (36) a. Er1 ist2 doch t1 [krank t2]Focus. b. ⟦(36a)⟧o = λw. Peter is ill in w c. ⟦(36a)⟧f = {λw. P(Peter)(w) | P ∈ D} = {{w: Peter is coming in w}, {w: Peter is working in w}, …} For present purposes, the question arises: should it be a part of (34) that the salient proposition q must be a focus alternative of p? Or is q not constrained in this sense? Note that (35) would satisfy this constraint, since the q in (35b) is a member of (36c).
17.3.2 Focus-sensitive discourse particles? If we compare doch to elements that are uncontroversially focus-sensitive, the closest counterparts would be other truth-conditionally vacuous particles, like the additive particle auch ‘also, too’, in (37).15 15 Note
that examples like (23)–(25) do not challenge the focus-sensitivity of discourse particles, since uncontroversial focus- particles like auch ‘also, too’ can follow focused elements in similar configurations, cf. Beaver and Clark (2008: 175); see also Reis and Rosengren (1997).
Information Structure and Discourse Particles 353 (37) a. Heute today
fährt drives
auch also
[Leo]F Leo
nach to
Wien Vienna
‘Today, [Leo]F is driving to Vienna, too.’ ⤳ There is some other salient person who is driving to Vienna today. b. Heute today
fährt drives
Leo Leo
auch also
nach to
[Wien]F Vienna
‘Today, Leo is driving to [Vienna]F , too.’ ⤳ There is some other salient place such that Leo is driving there today. (based on Beaver and Clark’s 2008: 72 adaptation of Kripke’s 2009:373 example) What we observe in (38) is that doch mirrors the behaviour of auch ‘too’ in that the information that is challenged (underlined) is determined by the focus. This indicates that, at the very least, focus can help identify the relevant q that doch operates on (see also Repp 2013). (38) a. Heute today
fährt drives
doch doch
[Leo]F Leo
nach to
Wien Vienna
‘Today, [Leo]F is doch driving to Vienna.’ ⤳ It is salient that someone else may be driving to Vienna today, which the speaker intends to question with this statement. b. Heute today
fährt drives
Leo Leo
doch doch
nach to
[Wien]F Vienna
‘Today, Leo is doch driving to [Vienna]F .’ ⤳ It is salient that there is some other place such that Leo may be driving there today, which the speaker intends to question with this statement. However, the observations in (38) may simply reflect question–answer congruence to an implicit question under discussion (cf. Roberts 2004), independent from the presence of doch (cf. Velleman and Beaver, this volume). In terms of Beaver and Clark (2008: 73), we thus need to determine whether doch mirrors auch ‘too’ in that it comments on the status of the modified proposition with respect to the current question under discussion (cf. Rojas-Esponda 2014 for a related approach to doch). Section 17.3.3 briefly reviews preliminary evidence for focus sensitivity and a challenge for such a view.
354 Patrick G. Grosz
17.3.3 Discourse particles and conventional focus association Having raised the question of whether relational discourse particles operate on focus alternatives, we may look for positive evidence in favour of such a view. In the sense of Beaver and Clark (2008), we can differentiate between conventional vs non-conventional focus association. The former, but not the latter, concerns elements that operate on focus alternatives as part of their lexical entry (e.g. focus particles). Beaver and Clark’s tests for conventional focus association include leaners (e.g. clitics). As shown in (39a) vs (39b), non-conventional focus association (with always) can seemingly target leaners such as ’im, (39a), which is impossible in the case of conventional focus association (with only), (39b). (39) You can see Bush, but do you see Cheney? non-conventional focus association conventional focus association
a. Yes, I always {see him /see’im}. b. Yes, I only {see him / #see’im}.
intended: ‘Whenever I see someone from the salient set of alternatives, it is Cheney.’ (Beaver and Clark 2008: 158, slightly adapted) To argue that doch is focus-sensitive, Grosz (2014) proposes that an effect identical to (39b) occurs in (40b) vs (40c). The proposition p that doch modifies amounts to the proposition p = {w: Hugo meets Connie in w}, expressed by the that-clause complement of wissen ‘know’. In (40b,c), the intended q such that p defeasibly entails that q is false (via doch, (34)) would be q = {w: Hugo meets Harry in w}. The argument for focus-sensitivity is as follows: in both (40b) and (40c), the intended q is salient, since its negation is introduced in (40a); but q is only a focus alternative of p in (40b) (via focus on sie ‘her’). Crucially, if doch could retrieve any contextually salient q, then doch should be acceptable in (40c); by contrast, if doch selects q from focus alternatives, it should be unacceptable. The unacceptability of doch in (40c) thus indicates that doch exhibits conventional focus association. (40) Every Tuesday evening, Hugo, who is a double agent employed by the secret service, meets up either with Harry or with Connie, but never with both of them. a. Heute today
dürfte might
er he
wohl wohl
nicht not
[Harry]F Harry
treffen, meet
‘Today, it appears as if he’s not meeting Harry, …’ b. weil wir von [Connie]F wissen, dass er doch [sie]F trifft since we from Connie know that he doch her meets ‘since we know from Connie that he’s meeting her’
Information Structure and Discourse Particles 355
c. weil wir von [ Connie]F wissen, dass er’s (*doch) since we from Connie know that he=her doch
trifft16 meets
‘since we know from Connie that he’s meeting her’ The main challenge for the view that discourse particles are focus sensitive stems from word order (Jacobs 1991: 159–160): German focus particles, such as additive auch ‘also, too’, must be adjacent to the largest constituent at clausal level that contains the focus exponent (Büring and Hartmann 2001), (41). (41) A: What else did Karl give to the child? B: Karl hat {*auch} dem Kind {OK auch} [das Buch]F geschenkt.
‘Karl gave [the book]F to the child, too.’
Notably, relational discourse particles do not exhibit such an adjacency requirement. Meibauer (1994) judges both positions of doch in (42) to be equally acceptable. (42) A: What did Karl give to the child? B: Karl hat {OK doch} dem Kind {OK doch} [das Buch]F geschenkt.
‘Karl gave doch [the book]F to the child.’ (Meibauer 1994: 87, adapted)
However, conclusions based on the contrast in (41) vs (42) may be premature, since we know that discourse particles differ from focus particles in their syntactic behaviour; for example focus particles can be conjoined, as in auch und gerade in Berlin ‘also and especially in Berlin’, while discourse particles can never be conjoined.
17.3.4 Stressed discourse particles and (verum) focus Investigating the interactions of discourse particles with focus can shed new light on the nature of stressed discourse particles (e.g. DOCH, SCHON, WOHL, Meibauer 1994: 20). While Thurmair (1989) argues that it is a defining property of discourse particles that they cannot be stressed, Meibauer (1994) pursues a systematic connection between stressed and unstressed variants. In recent research, Egg and Zimmermann (2012: 237) (based on Gutzmann 2010) argue for a generalization along the lines of (43) (my rendering of their core idea). 16
Note that ’s as a feminine singular clitic meaning ‘she, her’ is restricted to certain regional varieties of German, predominantly Southern and Austrian German. Northern German dialects use the reduced variant se ‘she, her’ (e.g. in hatse ‘has she’) instead of ‘s ‘she, her’ (Kai von Fintel, p.c.).
356 Patrick G. Grosz (43) Stressed particle generalization A discourse particle prt can carry the nuclear pitch accent when there is no other element in the same clause that can carry the pitch accent. While this is intended to be a more general pattern, Egg and Zimmermann particularly emphasize the role of verum focus (cf. Höhle 1992; Repp 2013; Lohnstein, this volume). Verum focus is often described as a focus on the truth value of the modified proposition (e.g. He DID dance. ≈ ‘It is TRUE that he danced.’), but Egg and Zimmermann analyse verum focus as the result of backgrounding the entire proposition. For examples like (44), the core intuition is that the variant with stressed DOCH (where no other element carries stress) and the variant without DOCH (where hat ‘has’ carries verum focus) are roughly equivalent. Egg and Zimmermann argue that stressed DOCH has the same meaning as unstressed doch, namely (34), that is, the modified p defeasibly entails the negation of a salient q. In (44), stressed DOCH is due to a combination of unstressed doch and verum vocus. By virtue of verum focus, q must be identified with ¬p, rendering the entailment of DOCH tautological, p > ¬(¬p). (44) Peter Peter
wollte wanted
DOCH} doch
erst first
nicht not
tanzen, dance
aber but
er he
{HAT / hat hasVF has
getanzt danced
‘In the beginning, Peter did not want to dance, but he DID dance (after all).’ It is currently an open question to what extent the view in (43) can be extended to other stressed discourse particles (cf. Egg 2012: 326–329 for discussion of SCHON).
17.4 Beyond German While the topic of discourse particles has been explored in some detail cross- linguistically, matters of information structure (e.g. givenness, topic, focus) are rarely addressed. One exception is Stoel’s (2005) description of Manado Malay; however, Stoel adopts a surface-oriented perspective, pursuing the idea that a focus-marking discourse particle is a particle that always follows the focus constituent. In comparing five particles (no, sto, to, kata, and kwaʔ) Stoel (2005: 164) posits that this property of ‘following focus’ can be observed for no (glossed as ‘definitely’ and analysed as a background marker), but not for the other four particles. The finding that the five elements do not behave uniformly is in line with the insight that discourse particles form a heterogeneous class, defying a uniform analysis (see Zimmermann 2011).
Information Structure and Discourse Particles 357 In many other languages, interactions between particles and information structure are even more difficult to establish. For instance, Finnish discourse particles largely behave as first position clitics; their interaction with information structure is thus limited to information-structure-related variation in word order. To illustrate, consider the example in (45) (from Karlsson 2008, quoted from Schardl 2011), which contains the discourse particle han. The choice between (45a) and (45b) is clearly information- structurally conditioned. However, the respective information-structural processes are independent from the presence of a particle, which simply cliticizes to the first prosodic phrase of the clause. (45) a. Rakastan-han love.1sg-han
minä I.nom
sinua you.part
Finnish
‘Of course I love you.’ b. Sinua-han you.part-han
minä I.nom
rakastan love.1sg
‘You are the one I love.’ By analogy, discourse particles in East Asian languages such as Japanese and Mandarin Chinese tend to be rigidly sentence-final (e.g. Zimmermann 2011); this also voids any direct interaction they could have with the marking of information structure.
17.5 Conclusion We have seen that German discourse particles interact with information structure, but do so in a way that requires a deeper understanding of information-structural concepts and how they interact. After a brief introduction to the topic (in Section 17.1), Section 17.2 explored the traditional idea of discourse particles as watershed elements between thematic and rhematic information. On the one hand, evidence was presented that unfocused elements to the left of discourse particles (in the middle field) must be aboutness topics, while aboutness topics can also follow discourse particles. On the other hand, there is evidence that focus exponents must follow discourse particles—modulo a set of systematic counterexamples. Overall, the idea of discourse particles as watershed elements has been partly corroborated but also partly challenged, opening up questions for future research. Section 17.3 investigated potential interactions between discourse particles and focus, and the question of whether there may be focus-sensitive discourse particles. Section 17.4 briefly compared German to other languages, such as Finnish. One question that could not be addressed in the scope of this chapter concerns the heterogeneity of the class of
358 Patrick G. Grosz discourse particles. For instance, while ja and doch share many semantic properties (cf. Lindner 1991; Grosz 2014), it is plausible that doch is relational (in the sense of Section 17.3.1), whereas ja is not. Once we move on from closely related particles like ja and doch to a wider range (e.g. comparing ja and the structurally lower ruhig), it is plausible that differences increase exponentially.
Chapter 18
El l ipsis and In format i on Stru ct u re Susanne Winkler
This chapter surveys elliptical phenomena and their interrelatedness to central information-structural notions.1 The term ellipsis most generally refers to the omission of linguistic material, structure, and/or sound. The ellipsis site is crucially connected to the notion of givenness of the unpronounced or deleted string. The remnants of the ellipsis site, which occur to the left or right of the omitted material, are frequently connected to the notion of contrastive topic and focus. The core question of modern linguistic theory is how syntactic and information-structural theories interact in accounting for the licensing of the different types of elliptical phenomena. The discussion shows that information structure and discourse factors influence the form and the interpretation of ellipsis.
18.1 Introduction The term ellipsis, derived from the Greek élleipsis (to fall short), most generally refers to the omission of linguistic material, structure, and/or sound. Ellipses occur in different types of discourse, as is shown in (1) for German and (2) and (3) for English. The omitted material is marked by an underscore, and pitch accents (PAs) by small capitals. (1) Am Ende hatte at the end had _seine his
United das Spiel verloren. United the game lost
Und Sir Alex ferguson And Sir Alex Ferguson
sprache _. speech
‘At the end, United had lost the game. And Sir Alex Ferguson his speech.’ (Spiegel online, 6 March 2013) 1 This chapter has benefited from the valuable comments of the editors of the OUPHIS, Caroline Féry and Shin Ishihara, and the two anonymous reviewers. I am grateful also to Peter Culicover, Andreas Konietzko, Jason Merchant, Valéria Molnár and Michael Rochemont for comments, fruitful discussions and feedback.
360 Susanne Winkler (2) Here comes Torres! Villa comes off! I’d have left him on, wouldn’t you _? (Lewandowski 2012:71) (3) She was married to _and divorced from a guy who works for her father. (Parker 2008: 138) Example (1), which stems from a written sports commentary, constitutes an instance of gapping. The gaps occur in the second of two coordinated clauses and target the auxiliary and the main verb. Although these relevant parts are omitted, the reader can add the missing information seemingly without effort. On the basis of the first conjunct (FC) the meaning can be reconstructed: at the end, United had lost the game and Sir Alex Ferguson had lost his speech. The prosody supports this interpretation since the PAs on the remaining NPs (Ferguson, his speech) highlight the new information and background those parts that are given or redundant. The construction as used here has a rhetorical function recognized as word play, often referred to as zeugma (Bußmann 2008: 808). Example (2) comes from spoken sports commentary. The question wouldn’t you involves an omission of the verb phrase have left him on, which can readily be filled in by the hearer. The construction is known as VP-ellipsis, or post-auxiliary ellipsis (Sag 1976; Miller and Pullum 2013). In (3), the ellipsis occurs at the end of the FC immediately following the highlighted preposition. The interpretation of the omitted structure cannot happen until the deleted DP a guy who works for her father is encountered in the second conjunct (SC). This construction is what Postal (1974) first called right node raising (RNR), assuming that the DP is raised out of both conjuncts to a higher node. Prosodic licensing of the ellipsis is vital in this case. The constructions in (1) and (2), called forward ellipses, share a set of similar features: (i) they occur in coordinate structures; (ii) the SC contains a gap or a silent site, therefore it is referred to as the elliptical clause; (iii) at the same time, the SC contains a means of picking up the missing material from the FC, often referred to as the antecedent or correlate clause; (iv) the missing material or antecedent property is interpreted in the ellipsis site at the level of semantic interpretation; and (v) the SC contains elements that remain, so-called remnants. RNR in (3) contains the ellipsis in the FC and the antecedent in the SC, therefore it is often referred to as backward ellipsis. The central question with respect to ellipsis and information structure (IS) is given in (4a). (4b) highlights the notion of givenness (Rochemont, this volume) and (4c) the notions of contrastive topic (CT) (cf. Büring, this volume) and contrastive focus (CF) (cf. Rooth, this volume; Repp, this volume). (4) a. What role does information structure play in the derivation and interpretation of ellipsis? b. What is the function of givenness in the deaccentuation and deletion process? c. How do contrastive topic/focus and prosodic phrasing contribute to the licensing of ellipsis? The answers to these questions are theory dependent and will be discussed with respect to different grammatical accounts.
Ellipsis and Information Structure 361 The chapter is structured as follows: Section 18.2 investigates the grammar and IS of the different types of ellipses. Section 18.3 discusses the licensing properties of givenness marking ellipses, and Section 18.4 the licensing mechanisms of contrastive ellipsis. Section 18.5 concludes.
18.2 Types of ellipses Ellipsis in modern linguistic theory is understood as an interface phenomenon which can only be explained on the basis of the complex interaction between syntax, semantics, and IS (cf., e.g., Tancredi 1992; Schwabe and Winkler 2003; Féry and Hartmann 2005; Winkler 2005; Johnson 2008a). The different syntactic and semantic approaches form the basis of the IS analysis. Within the current theory of grammar two prevailing research paradigms can be isolated, the deletion accounts (cf. Johnson 2001; van Craenenbroeck and Merchant 2013; Merchant to appear) and the nondeletion accounts (cf. Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, 2012). Each of these approaches makes different predictions with respect to the following three questions: (i) How is ellipsis represented? (ii) How is ellipsis interpreted? (iii) How can the relationship between the ellipsis and its antecedent be described? These questions address the syntax and semantics of ellipsis and form the basis of any IS account. In particular, these approaches differ in their assumptions about the role of syntax in ellipsis. The deletion approaches comprise the syntactic deletion vs the PF-deletion approaches, in essence, a historical distinction which reflects the paradigm change within the generative theory (see Winkler and Schwabe 2003 for an overview of early approaches). The nondeletion approaches comprise interpretive accounts and syntactic movement accounts. The different approaches are listed schematically in (5): (5 )
Recent Approaches to Ellipsis
Deletion Approaches
(PF-)Deletion e.g. Ross (1969) Merchant (2001) Hartmann (2000) Tancredi (1992)
Nondeletion Approaches
Proform/Reconstr. Theory e.g. Chung et al. (1995) Lobeck (1995) Williams (1977) Hardt (1993)
Direct Interpretation Accounts e.g. Culicover & Jackendoff (2005) Ginzburg & Sag (2000) Sag & Nykiel (2011) Stainton (2006)
362 Susanne Winkler The deletion approaches assume that there is structure in the ellipsis site while nondeletion approaches assume that there is no structure in ellipsis. Recent deletion approaches follow Chomsky and Lasnik (1993) and Tancredi (1992) in assuming that the deletion process occurs at PF (e.g. Lasnik 2001; Merchant 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008a, 2010, 2013a, to appear) while nondeletion approaches split up into pro-form plus reconstruction approaches, which assume an empty pro-form in the ellipsis site (e.g. Williams 1977; Chung et al. 1995; Lobeck 1995; Chung 2013), and approaches that do not assume empty structure (e.g. Ginzburg and Sag 2000; Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, 2012; Stainton 2006; Sag and Nykiel 2011). The former group argues that Chomsky and Lasnik’s original PF-deletion account can be generalized to all elliptical cases. The latter group posits that ellipsis behaves like an anaphoric expression which is characterized by prosodic deaccentuation and is resolved by rules similar to those of anaphora resolution. The core IS notion connected to the ellipsis site is givenness of the elided string, as in (6). (6) a. Anna promised to play the piano but she didn’t _. b. Someone’s playing the piano but I don't know who _. c. First he played a solo with one hand and then with two _.
(VP-Ellipsis) (Sluicing/TPE) (NP-Ellipsis)
In (6a), the verb phrase after the auxiliary is absent, forming a case of VP-ellipsis (VPE). In (6b), the sentence following the interrogative wh-phrase who is missing and is recovered from the antecedent conjunct; this is known as sluicing or TP-ellipsis (TPE). Sentence (6c) combines NP-ellipsis (NPE) after the numeral two with gapping (cf. (8a) below). In each case, the functional element preceding the ellipsis site is focused. Other elements may be optionally accented, depending on the discourse context. The notion of givenness plays a central role in the explanation of these types of ellipses (see Halliday 1967: 206 and Kuno 1975, 1976a, 1982a for their observations on deletability). An initial working definition which defines the ellipsis site as given is provided in (7) (cf. also Féry and Ishihare (this volume), Rochemont 1986, this volume). (7) Givenness A referent or part of a sentence is given if it is anaphoric to a constituent mentioned previously in the discourse, or if it is entailed by the previous discourse. While (7) applies straightforwardly to the complement of the functional head in VPE, TPE and NPE in (6a–c), it is not intuitively clear that givenness can license the gaps in (8) since they do not elide a givenness-marked complement of the head but what appear to be nonconstituents. At the same time, the remnants are required to occur in a contrastive relationship with their correlates (cf. Molnár and Winkler 2010; Repp, this volume). (8) a. manny plays the piano and anna _the flute. (Gapping) b. manny plays the piano and anna _, too. (Stripping)
Ellipsis and Information Structure 363
c. Manny plays _and Anna tunes the piano. (RNR) d. They play the piano better than they do _the flute. (Pseudogapping) e. anna played much faster than could have manny _. ( C o mp a r at i v e Inversion)
Example (8a) is an instance of gapping. Here the verbal head plays is gapped. The remnants Anna and the flute are CFs with respect to their correlates as first observed by Kuno (1976a) and discussed in detail by Repp (2009a). In (8b) the complete clause is elided except for Anna and the focus particle too; this phenomenon is called Stripping (cf. Hankamer and Sag 1976). Both remaining constituents are mandatorily assigned a PA (cf. Konietzko and Winkler 2010). Example (8c) is an instance of RNR. Here the predicate plays and the predicate tunes are assigned PAs since they occur in a contrastive relationship (cf. Selkirk 2002; Féry and Hartmann 2005; Ha 2008a, 2008b, 2008c). Sentence (8d) is known as pseudogapping (cf. Kuno 1975; Levin 1978, 1986; Lasnik 1999; Gengel 2013). It is parallel to gapping, since the verb play is missing, but it also bears some features of VPE since the missing string occurs after an auxiliary, which in (8d) bears a PA. The complement of the missing verb flute is overt and contrastively focused in relation to its correlate piano. Example (8e) is an instance of Comparative Inversion (cf. Merchant 2003). A strong PA is realized on the subject Manny at the right edge of the SC (cf. Gergel et al. 2007; Culicover and Winkler 2008; Gergel 2009 for a focus analysis). Thus, the example set in (8) is characterized by the fact that the remnants and their correlates occur in a contrastive relationship. In English and German, the focus feature F is generally realized as a PA on the stressed syllable of a word within a focus constituent and is defined by Krifka (2008:247) and Féry and Ishihara (this volume) as in (9): (9) Focus indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions. The two sets of constructions in (6) and (8) form two different classes of ellipses, as first noted by Chao (1988). The first group in (6), which preserves the licensing head and elides constituents, is referred to in the syntactic literature as constituent ellipsis, while the second group in (8), which elides apparent nonconstituents including the head, is often referred to as nonconstituent ellipsis. Long-standing research on the IS of ellipsis (Kuno 1976a; Sag 1976; Pesetsky 1982; Klein 1993; Kim 1997; Hartmann 2000, 2003; Winkler 2006a, 2006b, 2012a; Kertz 2013) shows that there are two syntax–IS mapping processes, namely givenness marking and contrast marking, as stated in the hypotheses in (10) and (11) (for (10) see also Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006): (10) Givenness Marking Hypothesis Given material is deaccented or deleted at Phonological Form.
364 Susanne Winkler (11) Contrastive Remnant Hypothesis Given or redundant information licenses a contrastive interpretation of the remnant(s) with respect to their correlate(s). The Givenness Marking Hypothesis in (10) states that syntactically derived material is deaccented or deleted at PF if the material is either given or redundant (cf. Tancredi 1992; Chomsky and Lasnik 1993; Klein 1993). The Contrastive Remnant Hypothesis in (11) suggests that the function of given material is to assign a contrastive interpretation to the remnants. There is ample evidence that the hypothesis in (10) holds for constituent ellipsis (e.g. Chao 1988; Hankamer and Sag 1976; Lobeck 1995). In these so-called givenness marking ellipses (GMEs), which comprise VPE, TPE, and NPE, the functional head, which often but not always carries a PA, licenses the deletion of the complement. Johnson (2008b: 14) refers to this type of ellipsis as true ellipsis and states: ‘These ellipses have many of the properties of pronominal anaphora or deaccentuation; they are a kind of discourse anaphora.’ The remnants in GMEs are free to assume context-dependent discourse functions. That is, the accents on the remaining material are assigned according to the focus structure of the clause. There has been little systematic work on the IS function of the remnants (but see Rooth 1992a; López 1995; Tomioka 1997; Romero 1998, 2003; López and Winkler 2000; Winkler 2005). Only recently has it been observed that in cases where extraction out of VPE occurs, the remnant must be contrastively focused (cf. Schuyler 2001; Johnson 2008b; Merchant 2008a; Winkler 2013). Hypothesis (11) applies to the different cases of nonconstituent ellipsis. Kuno (1976a, 1979) first observed that IS plays a crucial role in the discourse appropriateness of gapping. Similar observations have been made with respect to the IS function of stripping (cf., e.g., Depiante 2000; López and Winkler 2000; Konietzko and Winkler 2010, among others) and RNR (cf. Wilder 1997; Hartmann 2000; Féry and Hartmann 2005). Hypothesis (11) states that the remnants in gapping, stripping, and RNR must be contrastively focused. Therefore, these constructions are referred to as contrastive ellipsis (CE). CEs occur in coordinate constructions and are subject to the parallelism condition (PC) in (12) (cf. Sag 1976; Rooth 1992a, 1992b; Williams 1997; Fox 1999; Lang 2004; Takahashi and Fox 2005; Hartman 2011). (12) Parallelism Condition A constituent satisfies the parallelism condition if it is semantically identical to another constituent, modulo focus-marked constituents. (adapted from Takahashi & Fox 2005) The PC is an IS requirement on the discourse appropriateness of CE (but not of all types of GME).2 Applied to (8a) it states that gapping is licensed if the SC and ANNA the FLUTE receives the same semantic and IS interpretation as MANNY plays the PIANO except for the highlighted entities. The contrasts are realized on the remnants, 2
The notion of F(ocus)-marking is discussed by Arregi (this volume).
Ellipsis and Information Structure 365 answering the implicit multiple wh-question Who plays what? in a pair-wise fashion. Question–answer congruence of this type will be used as a heuristic test for IS appropriateness throughout (cf. Klein and von Stutterheim 1987).
18.3 Givenness marking ellipses This section investigates the questions posed in (4a,b) concentrating on the role of IS in the licensing of elliptical structures. I will first discuss the external syntax of GMEs, then I will turn to the e-givenness and the indirect licensing accounts.
18.3.1 External syntax of VP-ellipsis, TP-ellipsis, and NP-ellipsis There is agreement with respect to the external syntax of GMEs. On a descriptive level, the generalizing observation is that in each of the three examples in (6a–c) the complement to a functional head is missing. A rough sketch of the external syntax is provided for VPE in (6a) as in (13), for TPE in (6b) as in (14), and for NPE in (6c) as in (15): (13) VP-Ellipsis Anna promised to play the piano, but TP DP
T'
she T [DIDN'T]F
< VP >
TP-target of ellipsis
[_]
In recent publications on ellipsis and IS, the two types of controversial theories mentioned in (5), PF-deletion accounts and nondeletion accounts, have also been applied to GMEs. Strong proponents of the first type are PF-deletion theories which were first developed with respect to VPE (such as Tancredi 1992; Merchant 2001, 2004, to appear, but see Winkler 1997 for a critical review) and later applied to the other GMEs (cf. Aelbrecht 2010). Sluicing has been extensively investigated in the literature (cf. Ross 1969; Levin 1982; Chao 1988; Chung et al. 1995; Lobeck 1995; Romero 1998; Lasnik 2001;
366 Susanne Winkler (14) TP-Ellipsis Someone's playing the piano, but I don't know CP
XP[wh]
C'
[WHO]F C0[wh, Q]
< TP >
TP-target of ellipsis
[_]
(15) NP-Ellipsis First he played a solo with one hand and then with DP spec,DP
D' D
NumP Num' Num0 [TWO]F
< NP >
TP-target of ellipsis
[_]
Merchant 2001) that builds on former deletion approaches (Ross 1967; Sag 1976; Wasow 1979; Tancredi 1992; among others). The PF-deletion theory has also been applied to NP-ellipsis (cf. Corver and van Koppen 2009, 2011). The direct interpretation account is pursued by proponents of the pro-form account (e.g. Hardt 1993; Lobeck 1995) and the proponents of the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) accounts (cf. Simpler Syntax by Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, 2012). The different theories of ellipses provide different answers with respect to the role of IS in the licensing process of GME.
Ellipsis and Information Structure 367
18.3.2 Licensing of VP-ellipsis, TP-ellipsis, and NP- ellipsis: e-givenness and focus A comprehensive theory of ellipsis is essentially connected to the notions of givenness and focus. The central licensing account is the e-givenness account first introduced by Merchant (2001). It is based on Tancredi (1992), Rooth (1992a), and Schwarzschild (1999) and defines the requirements for deaccentuation and deletion of the VP-, NP- , or TP-constituent at PF. It is based on a theory of semantic identity as a licensing condition for VPE, NPE, and TPE. E-givenness is defined in terms of a mutual entailment relation between the antecedent clause and the elliptical clause. It thus avoids the structural isomorphism or identity problems of previous proposals that could not cope with the fact that different types of mismatches can occur between the antecedent and the ellipsis (cf., e.g., Fiengo and May 1992, 1994; Rooth 1992a; van Craenenbroeck and Merchant 2013 for an overview). More specifically, Merchant (2001) implements the mutual entailment relation into Schwarzschild’s (1999) original formulation of the givenness condition. The relevant definitions for licensing GME are provided in (16) to (18). Example (16) states the licensing condition for VPE: (16) A VP α can be deleted only if α is e-GIVEN.
(Merchant 2001: 26)
The condition in (16) states that a VP can be deleted if it qualifies as e-given as defined in (17). (17) e-GIVENness: An expression E counts as e-GIVEN iff E has a salient antecedent A and, modulo ∃-type shifting,
(i) A entails F-closure (E), and (ii) E entails F-closure (A).
(Merchant 2001: 26)
The notion of F-closure is defined with reference to Schwarzschild (1999: 150), as in (18): (18) The F-closure of α, written (F-clo(α)), is the result of replacing all F-marked parts of α with ∃-bound variables of the appropriate type (modulo ∃-type shifting). (Merchant 2001: 14) The licensing condition in (16) states that a VP can be deleted if it qualifies as e-given, where e-givenness requires a mutual entailment relation to hold between the antecedent (A) and the elided VP (E) constituent, as defined in (17). Consider the contrast in (19a, b) from Merchant (2001: 27) where strikethrough symbolizes the deletion of VP. (19) a. abby called Chuck an idiot after ben did call Chuck an idiot. b. *abby called Chuck an idiot after ben did insult Chuck.
368 Susanne Winkler VPE is licensed in (19a) because e-givenness is satisfied, but not in (19b). The evaluation procedure in (20a, b) shows that the deleted VP in (19a) is e-given, and (21a, b) shows that the deleted VP in (19b) does not satisfy e-givenness. The subjects in each conjunct are treated as CFs which are replaced by an existentially bound variable, according to (18). Mutual entailment holds between the antecedent (A) and the ellipsis (E) in (20), but not in (21). (20) abby called Chuck an idiot after ben did call Chuck an idiot.
a. F-clo(A) = ∃x [x called Chuck an idiot] b. F-clo(E) = ∃x [x called Chuck an idiot]
(21) *abby called Chuck an idiot after ben did insult Chuck.
a. F-clo(A) = ∃x [x called Chuck an idiot] b. F-clo(E) = ∃x [x insulted Chuck]
Implementing e-givenness into the grammar of ellipsis, Merchant (2001, 2004, 2008a) proposes a syntactic E-feature on heads that licenses ellipsis. E has the meaning in (22). (22) [[E]] = λ p: p is e-given. p
(Merchant 2008a: 134)
In example (19a), the E-feature on T licenses the deletion of the VP, as represented in (23). (23) ABBY called Chuck an idiot after TP
DP
T'
BEN
T[E]
did
VP call Chuck an idiot.
The semantics of the feature E is conceptualized as a partial identity function over propositions that needs an appropriate semantic antecedent, which is defined in terms of e- givenness in (17). The E-feature also has a phonological function. It instructs phonology not to pronounce its complement. The phonological rule which specifies that the VP in (23) must not be pronounced is given in (24): (24) [ΔVP] →ΔE___
Ellipsis and Information Structure 369 The e-givenness account has been applied to NPE (Corver and van Koppen 2009; Ntelitheos 2004; Eguren 2010; but see Alexiadou and Gengel 2012 for a different view), to fragments and to sluicing/TPE (cf. Merchant 2001, 2004; van Craenenbroeck and Lipták 2006, 2013; Vicente 2006; Toosarvandani 2008; van Craenenbroeck 2010), on which we will focus here.3 The standard assumption of the PF-deletion account (cf. Lasnik 2001; Merchant 2001) is that sluicing involves extraction of a wh-phrase out of a sentential complement followed by PF-deletion of that node, namely the TP, as in (25). (25) Someone is playing the piano, but I don't know [CP who [C[wh, Q, E] [TP is playing the piano]]] The licensing mechanism of e-givenness applied to (25) is given in (26): (26) a. F-clo(A) = ∃x[x is playing the piano] b. F-clo(E) = ∃x[x is playing the piano] Sluicing is licensed because it fulfils the e-givenness requirement in (17) above. The PF- deletion account contrasts with the direct interpretation approaches (Ginzburg and Sag 2000; Culicover and Jackendoff 2005; Sag and Nykiel 2011), which hold that there is no deleted or reconstructed structure in sluicing. The only element present in the syntactic representation is the base-generated wh-remnant, which functions as an anaphor that needs to find an accessible antecedent in the discourse. With respect to sluicing it has been shown that the notion of e-givenness is also relevant for the characterization of the focus status of the remnants. Consider (27) from Merchant (2001: 35), which is ambiguous between a subject and object reading if focus marking is absent: (27) Abby called Ben an idiot, but I don’t know who else.
a. … but I don’t know who else called Ben an idiot. b. … but I don’t know who else Abby called an idiot.
Note that the givenness definition in (17) requires that the remnants be symmetrically focused, as in (28a,b) (cf. Merchant 2001: 35). (28) a. abbyF called Ben an idiot, but I don’t know who else. b. Abby called BenF an idiot, but I don't know who else.
3 For
a comparative discussion of NPE, see Lobeck (1995, 2006), Barbiers (2005), Corver and van Koppen (2010), Cornilescu and Nicolae (2012), Günther (2012), and Merchant (2014).
370 Susanne Winkler The F-closure of the antecedent and the elliptical clause in (28a,b) entail each other and account for the symmetric interpretation, as seen in (29) and (30). (29) a. F-clo(A) = ∃x [x called Ben an idiot] b. F-clo(E) = ∃x [x called Ben an idiot] (30) a. F-clo(A) = ∃x [Abby called x an idiot] b. F-clo(E) = ∃x [Abby called x an idiot] Merchant (2001) proposes that focus marking in (28a, b) resolves the ambiguity. In the literature on ellipsis, there seems to be a preference for symmetric focus interpretation (cf. Rooth 1992a, 1992b), which is usually expressed by a parallelism requirement such as (12). However, there is ample evidence that the focus structure of the antecedent clause in GME does not match the focus structure of the elliptical clause, which has been referred to as asymmetric F-marking (cf. Hartmann 2000: 139). These focus-givenness mismatches constitute a problem for the e-givenness account since focus is freely distributed in GME depending on the discourse context. Consider example (31), where the PA is realized on idiot. Instances of asymmetric focus marking cause problems for the mutual entailment relation, as in (32): (31) She called him an idiotF , but I don't know who else. (32) a. F-clo(A) = ∃x [she called him an x] b. F-clo(E) = ∃x [she called x an idiot] b'. F-clo(E) = ∃x [x called him an idiot] The F-closure of the antecedent clause in (32a) she called him an x does not coincide with the F-closure of the elliptical clause, which is ambiguous between she called x an idiot (32b) and x called him an idiot (32b′) (see also Merchant 2001: 37, fn 17). To conclude, the investigation of the core questions in (4a, b) has shown that IS plays an essential role in licensing GME. In particular, the notion of e-givenness as defined by Merchant (2001) for VPE has been shown to also apply to NPE and sluicing. However, asymmetric focus marking is a challenge, showing that more work on the IS status of the remnants in GME is needed.
18.4 Contrastive ellipses Many studies on nonconstituent ellipsis have proposed that the characteristic feature of CEs like gapping, stripping, and RNR is that the remaining elements are focused (e.g. Kuno 1976a; Rooth 1992b; Klein 1993; Johnson 1996/2004, 2001, 2006; Kim 1997; Depiante 2000; Hartmann 2000; Merchant 2004, Féry and Hartmann 2005; Repp
Ellipsis and Information Structure 371 2009a, 2009b; Reich 2010; Konietzko 2014). There has also been the complementary observation that CE involves background deletion (e.g. Kuno 1976a; Klein 1993; Wilder 1997; Hartmann 2000; Féry and Hartmann 2005). Some studies have proposed that the prosodic realization of the contrastively focused remnants is part of the licensing mechanism of CE (Hartmann 2000; Féry and Hartmann 2005; Konietzko and Winkler 2010). This section concentrates on the leading question (4c): How do contrastive topic/focus and prosodic phrasing contribute to the licensing of ellipsis? Here, I will focus on the prosodic and discourse properties of the core cases of CE, and concentrate on those studies that have investigated the syntax–IS mapping of CE.
18.4.1 Gapping The phenomenon of gapping refers to a construction in which the main verb (and possibly other material) is omitted, while two accented constituents are left overt, one of which is typically the subject of the clause. Gapping obeys the PC in (12) straightforwardly; see (33). (33)
Context question: Who read which book by Henry James? a. leon read daisy miller and manny read The Turn of the screw. Context question: Who didn't read which book by Henry James? b. leon didn't read daisy miller or manny read The Turn of the screw.
There are three competing analyses of the gapping phenomenon: (i) the deletion approach, (ii) the movement account, and (iii) the direct interpretation approach. Each of them comes in various guises. For expository purposes, I compare Ross’s (1970) original deletion proposal and Johnson’s (1996/2004) Across The Board (ATB)-movement approach. The interpretive approach by Culicover and Jackendoff (2005, 2012) will be discussed with respect to stripping in Section 18.4.2. The deletion and the ATB-approach differ with respect to three questions: (i) What conjuncts are coordinated? (ii) What is the target of the gapping operation? (iii) What exactly is the role of parallel structure, givenness, and CF in the licensing of gapping? In Ross’s account, a sentence with a gap in the SC, as in (34a), is derived from the coordination of two full clauses, where the shared main verb is generated twice, as in (34b). (34) a. Tom has a pistol and Dick a sword. b. [[S/TP Tom has a pistol] and [S/TP Dick has a sword]].
(Ross 1970: 250)
Thus, the conjunction and conjoins clauses in (34b) and allows, under a condition of structural parallelism (cf. 12), the main verb to be deleted (cf. also Coppock 2001). In examples where the deletion of the main verb is accompanied by a complement, the rule of gapping seems to target a nonmaximal constituent as in (35a) or nonconstituents as in (35b, c):
372 Susanne Winkler (35) a. bob insulted the guests during dinner and sam insulted the guests during the dance. b. john gave albums to his spouse, and bill gave tapes to his spouse. c. john watered the tulips flat, and Bill watered the lilies flat. In Johnson’s (1996/2004) account, smaller conjuncts are conjoined: VPs in (34a) and (35). The shared constituent is generated once. No deletion is involved. Instead, for (34a) he proposes ATB-movement of the main verb to T. Incorporating the VP-internal subject hypothesis, he assumes that both subjects are generated VP-internally and that only the subject of the FC raises to spec,TP. Under such an analysis a sentence like (34a) would receive the parse in (36): (36) [TP Tomi hasj [VP ti tj a pistol] and [VP Dick tj a sword]]. Adhering to the standard assumption that grammatical operations must target constituents, Johnson proposes an analysis of examples like (35) that provides the basis of an explanation of the focus requirement on the remnants in gapping. Sentence (35a) has the parse in (37) (details omitted). (37)
TP DP Bob1
XP VPx
VP
insulted the guests VP DP
and VP
DP
VP
Sam3
t1 PP during dinner2
VP
VPx
PP
VPx
during the dance4
t1[insulted the guests] t2
t3[insulted the guests] t4
In (35a) the accented remnants (Sam, during the dance) in the SC move to a VP- adjoined position, and the contrastive correlates in the FC also move out of VP before the vacated VPx is moved via ATB-movement to a VP-adjoined position. The IS function of gapping is to isolate contrastively accented remnants. A prototypical pitch extraction contour for (35a) is provided in Fig. 18.1:
Ellipsis and Information Structure 373
Figure 18.1 Gapping prosody used in an auditory disambiguation experiment. (From Carlson 2001).
Fig. 18.1 exhibits a rise on the subject Bob and a fall–rise on the prepositional object dinner in the FC. In the SC a rise is realized on the subject Sam and a fall on dance. Carlson (2001) showed in an auditory disambiguation task that the gapping prosody of (35a) differs from the nongapping prosody in (38). (38) Bob insulted the guests during dinner and Bob insulted sam during the dance. The nongapping reading was favoured when the PAs were realized on the objects (guests, Sam) and the prepositional objects, while the subject of the FC was not contrastively focused, as seen in (38) (also Bryant 2006; Hoeks and various colleagues 2006, 2007, 2009). It has frequently been observed in the literature on gapping that the deleted constituents must be contextually given and that the remnants must occur in a contrastive relation to their correlates (e.g. Kuno 1976a: 309, 1981; Sag 1976, Pesetsky 1982: 640ff.; Kim 1997; Hartmann 2000). This contrastivity requirement on gapping is informally stated in (39): (39) Contrastive Remnant Principle In gapping, the remnants must occur in a contrastive relation to their correlates. The deleted elements must be given. Principle (39) accounts for the discourse appropriateness of the answers in (40a, b): (40) Context question: Who bought what? a. john bought apples, and mary bought bananas. b. john bought apples, and mary bought bananas.
374 Susanne Winkler There is a long tradition of correlating the syntax and IS of multiple wh-questions and gapping answers (e.g. Sag 1976; Neijt 1979; Pesetsky 1982: 640ff.; Hartmann 2000; Reich 2003, 2006, 2007, 2010; Repp 2009a, 2009b). In Kuno’s early publications he suggested that gapping is an elliptical variant of a pair-list answer to a multiple wh-question that has an exhaustive topic–focus structure, as given in the Sorting Key Hypothesis (Kuno 1982b) in (41): (41) Sorting Key Hypothesis: In a multiple wh-word question, the fronted wh-word represents the key for sorting relevant pieces of information in the answer. (Kuno 1982b: 141) Applying (41) to gapping, the first gapping remnant receives a CT (sorting key) interpretation and the second remnant a CF interpretation. The Contrastive Remnant Principle in (39) is replaced by the more precise IS principle in (42), which correlates the different remnants in gapping with specific IS roles. (42) Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus Remnants In gapping, the first remnant is a contrastive topic, the second remnant a contrastive focus. The gapped elements must be given. The principle in (42) has been used as a testing tool in IS studies. Gapping is only felicitous if a multiple wh-question can be constructed which it can answer (cf. Velleman and Beaver, this volume). Thus, (42) accounts for the ungrammaticality of (43a, b). (43) a. *John bought apples, and John bananas. b. *John bought apples, and Mary apples. Neither utterance in (43a, b) can occur as an answer to a multiple wh-question like Who bought what?, thus both violate the contrastivity requirement of pair-list answers. Principle (42) also accounts for so-called voice mismatches, which are extensively discussed in Merchant (2008b, 2013b) and analysed from an IS perspective in Kertz (2013).
18.4.2 Stripping Hankamer and Sag (1976: 409) coined the term stripping and provided the definition in (44): (44) Stripping is a rule that deletes everything under identity with corresponding parts of a preceding clause except for one constituent (and sometimes a clause initial adverb or negative). Stripping, also referred to as bare argument ellipsis (BAE), is not a uniform phenomenon syntactically. Konietzko (2014) distinguishes coordinate BAE as in (45) (cf.
Ellipsis and Information Structure 375 Depiante 2000; Kolokonte 2008) from fragments (46) (cf. Merchant 2004; Culicover and Jackendoff 2005). The fact that BAE can occur in subordinate constructions is observed with respect to German subordinate ob (whether) clauses, as in (47) (cf. Konietzko 2014; Winkler 2012b). (45) a. john gave chocolates to Mary, and fred too. b. John gave chocolates to Mary, and flowers too. c. Someone gave chocolates to mary, but not to jeff. (46) a. A: John is drinking again. B: Yeah, scotch. b. *John is drinking again and (yeah) scotch. (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005) (47) In europa in Europe
hat has
sich himself
David Cameron mit seinem David Cameron with his
Veto isoliert. veto isolated.
Ob er sich mit seinem Veto auch in seinem Land isoliert hat, if he himself with his veto also in his country isolated has darüber wurde in London im Parlament gestritten. this was in London in parliament discussed (Tagesthemen, 12.12.2011) BAE encodes specific IS functions. It strips away the given material and isolates a contrastively highlighted argument in the SC. In (45a), the subjects of the two conjuncts occur in a contrastive relation, in (45b), the direct objects contrast, and in (45c), CF is placed on the prepositional objects. The response of B in (46a), yeah scotch, contrasts with other drinks which John could be drinking. Example (46b) does not allow the reader to construct this type of contrast and is therefore marked as ungrammatical by Culicover and Jackendoff (2005). Thus, BAE is only licensed if the remnant receives a contrastive interpretation with respect to an explicitly or implicitly mentioned set of alternatives. Rule (44) states that the BAE remnant in coordinate constructions is usually accompanied by a sentential adverb or negative. Konietzko (2014) proposes for German that focus-sensitive particles such as auch (too) and negation play a crucial role in licensing BAE (cf. Kolokonte 2008 for Greek). The relevant paradigm is given for the negative nicht (not) in German, which can either follow, as in (48a), or precede the remnant, as in (48b). (48) a. Manuela hat Manuela has harald Harald
im in-the
nicht. not
Allgäu Allgäu-Alps
oft often
Bilder pictures
gemacht, taken,
aber but
376 Susanne Winkler
b. Manuela hat Manuela has nicht not
im in-the
Allgäu Allgäu-Alps
oft often
Bilder pictures
gemacht, taken,
aber but
harald. Harald
Sentence (48a) answers a question such as Did your siblings also take pictures while they were in the Allgäu Alps? while (48b) typically occurs as a response to a tag-question such as I heard that Harald took quite a few pictures in the Allgäu Alps, didn’t he? Konietzko and Winkler (2010) distinguish two types of remnants: in (48a) the remnant functions as a CT, and moves to a left-peripheral position as in (49a), and in (48b) the remnant functions as a CF and moves to a position which has all the characteristics of a focus position below the sentential adverb, as in (49b). (49) a. [CPTOP harald [Neg nicht [vPFOC [VP]]]] (remnant, CT) b. [[Neg nicht [vPFOC harald [VP]]]] (remnant, CF) Examples (49a,b) correspond to the specific intonational patterns provided in Fig. 18.2 and Fig. 18.3. Fig. 18.2 shows a CT contour where the subject precedes the negation in the SC. In the FC, there is a PA on Manuela and an accent on Bilder (pictures) ending in a high boundary tone (continuation rise). In the SC there is a PA on the subject remnant Harald with a focus related fall on the negation particle nicht (not) ending in a low boundary tone. The prosody of this construction differs from the CF contour in Fig. 18.3. The CF contour typically shows a PA (H*) on the subject of the FC and one on the subject of the SC. The negation precedes the focused remnant Harald and is typically 350 300
Pitch (Hz)
250 200 160 L+H∗ Manuela
L∗+H
H− hat im
Allgäu
oft
Bilder
gemacht
aber
Harald
H∗ L−L% nicht
16-a-a 0.3
Time (s)
Figure 18.2 Contrastive topic contour where the subject precedes negation in the SC.
3.76
Ellipsis and Information Structure 377 350 300
Pitch (Hz)
250 200 160 L−
H∗ Manuela
hat im
Allgäu
oft Bilder gemacht
H∗ aber
nicht
L−L%
Harald
16-b-b 0.27
Time (s)
3.7
Figure 18.3 Contrastive focus contour where the subject follows negation in the SC.
unaccented (cf. König 1991; Dimroth and Klein 1996; Reis and Rosengren 1997; Dimroth 2002; Kwon 2005). The IS generalizations with respect to the two types of BAE in German are given in (50) and (51). (50) In CT-BAE, the argument remnant is a CT if followed by an accented focus- sensitive particle or negation. The deleted elements must be given. (51) In CF-BAE, the remnant is a CF if preceded by a focus-sensitive particle or negation. The deleted elements must be given. In English, the adverbs tend to precede the remnant. The remnant is typically accented and is generally interpreted as CF with respect to its correlate in the FC.
18.4.3 RNR The phenomenon of RNR refers to a coordinate construction in which parts of the FC are omitted, but are spelled out at the right periphery of the SC, as in (52): (52) John bought ║ an expensive Chinese vase and Mary broke ║ an expensive Chinese vase. (Abels 2004: 45) RNR is characterized by a specific prosodic pattern where the capitalized verbs in (52) receive a distinct PA. The PA, usually a rise, is followed by a clearly distinguishable intonational break, signalled by two vertical lines║.
378 Susanne Winkler The obvious difference between RNR and gapping/stripping is that deletion proceeds backwards in the former and forward in the latter (Wilder 1997: 84). Thus, the RNR antecedent follows the omitted material, as is the case in other cataphoric relations. In (52), the antecedent, which is often referred to as the overt target, is the DP an expensive Chinese vase. The element preceding the omitted material, here the verb bought, is accented and must receive a CF interpretation in relation to its correlate, broke. For RNR, as for gapping/stripping, there have been roughly two major proposals, the movement and the nonmovement accounts. The most prominent movement analysis is the raising analysis. It assumes that the target in (52), an expensive Chinese vase, is moved ATB out of both conjuncts into a higher dominating position in the syntactic representation, leaving behind traces in each conjunct (see Ross 1967; Bresnan 1974; Postal 1974, 1998; Sabbagh 2003, 2007). The nonmovement analysis comprises two different types of accounts, the multiple dominance analysis and the ellipsis analysis, both of which assume that the overt target of RNR occurs at the right periphery of the SC. The movement analysis is given in (53) and the ellipsis analysis in (54) (from Abels 2004: 45): (53) Movement Analysis
Target … t Target
Conj
… tTarget
(54) Ellipsis Analysis
Target
Conj …Target
The multiple dominance analysis (McCawley 1982; Wilder 1997, 2008; Bachrach and Katzir 2006) assumes a three-dimensional model and merges one target to both conjuncts in a parallel fashion. The SVO word order is achieved by linearization. There are two different versions of the ellipsis analysis of (52) above. The first is a phonological reduction account by Hartmann (2000) and Féry and Hartmann (2005). They propose that the redundant target in the FC is phonologically reduced by ‘radical deaccentuation’ (Féry and Hartmann 2005: 69). The second is an E-feature account, provided by Ha (2008a, 2008b). Ha proposes that RNR is licensed by a contrastively focused element which bears an E-feature as originally proposed by Merchant (2001) for VPE and
Ellipsis and Information Structure 379 sluicing. According to Ha, the E-feature in RNR ‘instructs PF to leave the RNRed element unpronounced’ (Ha 2008a: 150). Although both accounts share major assumptions about RNR, they differ in how exactly the analyses are spelled out. Both analyses will be considered in more detail because they are central to the IS analysis of RNR. Féry and Hartmann (2005) offer a phonological deletion account for RNR and gapping in German which is based on an extensive production study. The central observation is that RNR and gapping are characterized by specific IS and prosodic phrasing properties which interact with syntactic and semantic licensing requirements, as stated in (55): (55) Condition on ellipsis in RNR and gapping
1. The conjuncts must exhibit a parallel syntactic and focus structure. 2. The focus constituents in the two conjuncts must allow for a contrastive interpretation. (Féry & Hartmann 2005: 75)
The conditions in (55) are illustrated for RNR in (56) with the pitch extraction contour in Fig. 18.4. (56) Context question: What did Hanna and Erika do with the melody? Hanna summte (eine Melodie) und Erika sang eine Melodie. Hanna hummed and Erika sang a melodie RNR in (56) occurs in parallel coordinate structures which are characterized by parallel focus structures as required by (55) and the PC in (12). Féry and Hartmann argue that 400 300
Pitch (Hz)
200 100 50 L∗ H
L∗
L∗ H H∗
HHpH1
Lp L1
L
Was machen Hanna and Erika mlt der Melodie? Hanna 0
summte
and
Erika Time (s)
sang
edne
Melodie 2.9959
Figure 18.4 Hanna summte und Erika sang eine Melodie in response to the context question What did Hanna and Erika do with the melody?. (From Féry and Hartmann 2005: 100).
380 Susanne Winkler RNR is ‘determined by syntax, semantics and pragmatics’ (2005: 70) and is characterized by specific prosodic properties which are best described with respect to the prosodic contour in Fig. 18.4. Typically the constituent preceding the covert RNR target is contrastively focused. Therefore, in response to the context question What did Hanna and Erika do with the melody? the verbs summte (hummed) amd sang (sang) in (56) receive a CF accent. Proceeding from left to right, the FC corresponds to an intonational phrase (IP) which ends in a rising tone (L + H*) with a high boundary tone (H per cent) followed by a pause (break index 3 or 4). A central observation of their empirical study is that speakers typically upstep this medial boundary. The second IP starts lower (downstep). The overt target is not assigned a PA since it is given by the context question. The SC ends with a low boundary tone. If (56) occurs as a response to the question Who did what?, a focus accent is realized on each of the contrasting agents, Hanna and Erika, in addition to the contrasting verbs, which are also assigned PAs, as illustrated in (57): (57)
IP (LI)
IP (HI)
IP (LI)
PhP (TP)
PhP (TP)
PhP (TP)
PhP (TP)
T*
T*
T*
T*
hannaF
summteF
und
ErikaF
sangF eine Melodie
Hanna
hummed
and
Erika
sang
a
melody
(Féry & Hartmann 2005: 93) Féry and Hartmann observe that the prosodic phrasing in RNR generally seems to follow the same pattern: there is a high boundary tone preceding the covert target, which is followed by a pause. In addition, there is register scaling, which is defined as the relationship between tones within the FC and between the FC and SC. The characteristic features are downstep within the first IP, a prominent upstep at the end of the first IP and a reset at the beginning of the second IP. Empirical evidence has confirmed their claim that this specific prosodic RNR pattern at the end of the FC ‘signals not only the incompleteness of the utterance at this stage, as well as the concomitant intention of the speaker to continue the sentence, but also the fact that some material is missing. In other words, part of the upstep could be motivated by the incompleteness of the utterance and part of it by the ellipsis’ (Féry and Hartmann 2005: 102–3).4 4 See
also Kentner et al. (2008) for a follow- up study and Ágel and Kehrein (2013) for an alternative view.
Ellipsis and Information Structure 381 Ha (2008a, 2008b) challenges Féry and Hartmann’s approach and claims that an E- feature approach fares better with respect to empirical coverage. The syntax, phonology, and semantics of the E-feature in RNR (ERNR) are given in (58): (58) a. Syntax: The ERNR enters the derivation with the contrastively focused pre- RNR constituent in the first conjunct. b. Phonology: QP → Ø/ERNR a b c where deletion begins with c to a. c. Semantics: E- givenness must be observed in RNR. (adapted from Ha 2008a: 194) Ha (2008a: 141) identifies an overgeneration problem, claiming that Féry and Hartmann cannot account for the contrast in grammaticality between (59a) and (59b) and would wrongly predict that both are ungrammatical. (59) a. *cathy met ║ , but Mary didn’t meet ║ [her husband at the train station]. b. cathy met ║ , but mary didn’t║ [meet her husband at the train station]. While (59a) is correctly excluded, according to Ha, because the main predicates do not meet the CF requirement (cf. (58a)), (59b) is saved by accenting the auxiliary didn’t, and this despite the fact that the FC and the SC do not entail each other, as seen in (60). (60) F-closure of 1st conjunct: ∃x ∃R [x R-ed her husband at the train station]. F-closure of 2nd conjunct: ∃x [x {did not} meet her husband at the train station]. Ha proposes that (59b) is grammatical and suggests that the two conjuncts differ with respect to polarity. Ha’s semantic analysis of (59b) assumes that there is an entailment relation between the antecedent clause and the RNR clause, as in (60). However, the analysis overlooks that English usually uses auxiliaries to express a contrast in polarity. Most speakers find that (59b) is degraded and not fully acceptable. There are two acceptable versions of (59b) given in (61a, b). In (61a) the deaccented main verb belongs to the same prosodic phrase as the accented auxiliary and precedes the intonational break in the SC: (61) Context a: Who did what with respect to her husband at the train station?
a. cathy met ║ , but mary didn’t meet ║ [her husband at the train station].
Context b: Did each woman meet her husband at the train station?
b. cathy did ║ , but mary didn’t ║ [meet her husband at the train station].
382 Susanne Winkler Both accounts share major assumptions about RNR. They agree that RNR is a PF- deletion process in which the covert target is licensed by the cataphoric string at the right periphery of the SC. They argue that CF and prosodic highlighting on the element preceding the overt or covert target are essential licensing factors for the deletion process in the FC. They differ, however, with respect to the technical details of how PF- deletion is implemented.
18.5 Conclusion The discussion has shown that ellipsis is an interface phenomenon where syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology interact. As Johnson (2008b: 3) states ‘there will be no solution to the problems ellipsis presents that comes from just one area of linguistic theory’. The discussion has been guided by the core questions in (4) and has shown that IS plays a major role in the licensing of ellipsis in English and German. In particular, the IS notions of (e-)givenness, defined in terms of mutual entailment, and contrastiveness, defined over sets of alternatives, have been shown to have an immediate effect on ellipsis-specific prosody. PF-deletion of the given material, intonational highlighting of the contrastive remnants, and ellipsis-specific prosodic phrasing support the hypothesis that there exist two different types of ellipses which differ in their syntax–prosody–IS mapping. These are givenness marking ellipsis, which deletes constituents as shown for VPE, NPE, and TPE, and contrastive ellipsis, which deletes apparent nonconstituents in parallel syntactic structures, such as gapping, stripping, and RNR.
Chapter 19
Word Orde r a nd Inf ormation St ru c t u re Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot
19.1 Introduction Free word order phenomena have long been a problem in generative approaches to syntax, given the widespread assumption that linguistic representations are subject to some kind of economy. A common solution is based on the idea that the optionality is only apparent and that alternations are in fact regulated by information-structural (IS) constraints. That is to say, alternate word orders map onto distinct IS-representations. Indeed there is very strong evidence from constructions in various languages that mappings of this type exist. The general problem of how structures map onto interpretations is very complex, however, and it is therefore not surprising that an overarching theory of possible mappings is currently lacking. The complexity of the problem has two sources. First, word order variations are not generated by a single syntactic process. There are several potential syntactic competitors, such as active vs passive structures, structures with and without A-scrambling, structures with and without A′-scrambling, structures with and without clitic doubling, and so on. Along this syntactic dimension there is a problem of demarcation. For example, although active vs passive might be directly relevant to IS, many languages feature optional movement to the subject position in passive structures, and hence the real contrast relevant to IS might be between A-movement and lack thereof. A second source of complexity has to do with the dimension of information structure. What is the range of relevant interpretations and how are these connected to each other? There seems to be general agreement that a distinction must be made between topic and focus. However, some authors believe that an additional distinction must be made between contrastive topic and focus on the one hand and plain topic and focus on the other. A different analytical tradition treats contrastive topics as topics containing a focus, potentially leaving no space for the notion of contrastive focus.
384 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot Work on the interface between syntax and information structure requires that we make decisions not only on these matters but also on the nature of the mapping system itself. Do we require that there is a one-to-one mapping between interpretations and syntactic configurations, do we allow one-to-many or many-to-one mappings from syntax to IS, or do we permit both of these options, resulting in many-to-many mappings? Progress with the overall project requires two types of work. On the one hand, detailed empirical studies are necessary. For these one wants to acknowledge as many distinctions as possible on both the syntax and IS dimensions. On the other hand, bold theoretical work is required that aims to test restrictive hypotheses about available syntactic operations, available IS-primitives, and their mapping. Space does not permit us to undertake a full overview of known data. What we will do instead is evaluate some initial cross-cutting generalizations on the basis of a rough classification of syntactic operations and IS-primitives. Operations will be divided into those that are A-related, those that are A′-related, those that involve doubling with a pronoun or clitic, and finally those that involve extraposition. The IS-primitives we assume are topic, focus, contrast, and givenness. We are well aware of the limitations of this exercise.
19.2 A-related phenomena Since the early 1990s a consensus has developed that certain scrambling phenomena involve A-positions. Early research on scrambling argued for a uniform A′-movement analysis (Bennis and Hoekstra 1984; Hoji 1985; Saito 1985), but further empirical discoveries (see, for instance, Webelhuth 1989; Ueyama 1994) provided evidence for A-related scrambling, analysed in terms of movement (Vanden Wyngaerd 1989; Fanselow 1990; Mahajan 1990), base generation (Bayer and Kornfilt 1994; Neeleman 1994; Fanselow 2001), or a combination of the two (Zwart 1993). There are three rough classes of potential analyses of the IS effects of A-scrambling. The first account assumes that A-scrambling takes place in order to generate an intonational pattern that matches the requirement that given material is destressed, or the requirement that focus attracts stress (Costa 1998; Cruz-Ferreira 1998; Neeleman and Reinhart 1998; Zubizarreta 1998; Frascarelli 2000; İşsever 2003; Samek-Lodovici 2005). The second account takes IS features to be syntactic triggers for movement (Mahajan 1990; De Hoop 1992; Adger 1994; Runner 1995; Frey 2004; Broekhuis 2008). Finally, there are approaches that treat scrambling as an optimization for Logical Form (LF). On this view, scrambling is either base-generated or a syntactically optional movement (possibly triggered by an optional edge feature) (Müller 1998; Haider and Rosengren 2003; Neeleman and van de Koot 2008). We will not evaluate these alternatives here, but concentrate on the interpretive effects of A-scrambling. In all cases of word order alternation, it is necessary to distinguish the neutral order from any marked orders. From the perspective of syntactic theory, neutral word order can be said to obtain if (i) arguments are merged in a minimal structure and in accordance with the thematic hierarchy and (ii) no phrasal movements take place other than
Word Order and Information Structure 385 those required to license the thematic and case properties of arguments. Of course, the fact that the syntactic analysis of neutral word order is straightforward does not imply that it is a simple matter to find out the neutral order of a given structure in a given language (see, for example, Haider and Rosengren 2003 on German and Titov 2012 on Russian). In those cases where it has been possible to uncover the neutral order, it appears that interpretive effects associated with word order alternations typically result from a rule that refers to the marked order. Any interpretive effects associated with the neutral order are due to blocking: the neutral order cannot always have the special interpretation of the marked order, but otherwise its interpretation is free. When A-related order alternations appear to be triggered by IS considerations, they conform to the empirical generalization in (1). This generalization goes back to Hermann Paul and work in the Prague School and has since been endorsed by a range of authors (Clark and Clark 1977; Clark and Haviland 1977; Gundel 1988; Skopeteas and Fanselow 2010; amongst others). (1) Generalization 1 (Given-before-New) If a language uses word order alternations to mark givenness, then in the marked order the given material precedes the new material. Notice that this generalization mentions word order alternation; it is therefore silent about givenness marking through clitic doubling. We will return to clitic doubling and clitic right-dislocation in Section 19.4. Generalization 1 is supported by considerable cross-linguistic evidence. The effect is typically related to a local reordering, usually referred to as scrambling. Dutch, for example, allows inversion of arguments and adjuncts. As example (2) shows, this inversion can be motivated by givenness (see Neeleman and van de Koot 2008): (2) Hoe zit het met je review van dat boek van Haegeman? ‘How are you progressing with your review of that book by Haegeman?’ a. #Nou, Well,
ik denk dat I think that
ga go
lezen. read
b. Nou, Well,
ik I
ga go
lezen. read
ik eerst zorgvuldig I first carefully
denk dat ik think that I
eerst first
het boek van Haegeman the book by Haegeman
het boek van Haegeman the book by Haegeman
‘Well, I think that I will first carefully read Haegeman’s book.’ The generalization extends to subjects and to indirect objects (not shown here).
zorgvuldig carefully
386 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot Czech allows reordering of subjects and objects motivated by givenness. Thus, the neutral SVO order can be used in all circumstances, except when the object is given and the subject is new. Kucerova (2007) gives the following examples to demonstrate this: 3 ( ) a. Chlapec boy.nom
našel found
lízátko. lollipop.acc
new > new given > new given > given #new > given b. Lízátko lollipop.acc
našel found
chlapec. boy.nom
given > new The same pattern is found in Russian (Titov 2012), which—like Czech—requires a given object to scramble across a new subject: (4) Kto poceloval Katju? ‘Who kissed Catherine?’ a. #Anja Anja
pocelovala kissed
b. Katju Katju.acc
Katju. Katju.acc
pocelovala kissed
Anja. Anja
‘Anja kissed Catherine.’ While in Czech and Russian givenness marking seems obligatory where possible, this is less clear for Dutch, where obligatoriness depends on the choice of adverbial. In particular, scrambling across a manner adverbial like zorgvulding ‘carefully’ appears to be obligatory, while scrambling across higher-level adverbs seems optional. In (2b) the DP surfaces below eerst ‘first’, but it may also scramble across the second adverbial (for many speakers this is true whether the manner adverb is present or not): (5) Hoe zit het met je review van dat boek van Haegeman? ‘How are you progressing with your review of that book by Haegeman?’ Nou, Well, ga go
ik I lezen. read
denk think
dat that
ik I
het boek van Haegeman the book by Haegeman
eerst first
zorgvuldig carefully
Word Order and Information Structure 387 One potential explanation for this difference is that scrambling is domain-bounded, with manner adverbials obligatorily merged inside this domain, whereas higher-level adverbials are optionally merged outside it. In the languages discussed so far, then, there is evidence for obligatory givenness marking through scrambling: where the neutral order would place new information before given information, a local inversion must take place. The literature suggests that this is not a universal property of givenness marking through word order, however. Lenerz (1977) shows that scrambling in German double-object constructions is possible but not obligatory in cases where new information precedes given material in the base. Thus, examples like the following are both fully grammatical: (6) Wem wollte der Richter den Jungen entziehen? Ich denke …’
‘From whom did the judge want to take the boy away? I think …’ a. dass that
er he
dem the.dat
Vater father
den the.acc
Jungen boy
entziehen take.away
wollte. wanted
b. dass that
er he
den the.acc
Jungen boy
dem the.dat
Vater father
entziehen take.away
wollte. wanted
However, it is not possible for scrambling to create an order in which new information precedes given material: (7) Wen wollte der Richter dem Vater entziehen? Ich denke …’
‘Who did the judge want to take away from the father? I think …’ a. dass that b. #dass that
er he er he
dem the.dat den the.acc
Vater father
den the.acc
Jungen boy
Jungen boy
dem the.dat
Vater father
entziehen take.away entziehen take.away
wollte. wanted wollte. wanted
It is not clear to us whether all native speakers fully share Lenerz’s judgements. While the contrast in (7) is robust, not all speakers consulted by us find (6a) completely felicitous on a neutral intonation. The example is generally accepted if dem Vater receives contrastive stress. This makes it difficult to say with absolute certainty whether A-related scrambling in German is indeed optional. One analytical possibility that suggests itself is that it is in fact obligatory and that the order in (6a) is derived from the A-scrambling structure in (6b) through subsequent A′-scrambling of dem Vater. If we accept the standard description of the data based on Lenerz, German can be said to have optional marking of givenness. An alternative description, endorsed by Lenerz himself, is that narrowly focused constituents resist scrambling. Notice,
388 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot however, that constituents that are part of a larger focus, and that are therefore neither narrowly focused nor given, cannot be scrambled either (unless contrastive). This supports the view that the operation is motivated by givenness. (8) Was wollte der Richter tun? Ich denke …’ ‘What did the judge want to do? I think …’ a. dass that b. #dass that
er he
dem the.dat
er he
Vater father
den the.acc
den the.acc
Jungen boy
dem the.dat
Jungen boy Vater father
entziehen take.away entziehen take.away
wollte. wanted wollte. wanted
Korean manifests a very similar pattern of givenness marking not only for direct and indirect objects, but also for object and subject (Choi 2008, 2009; Hwang Jackson 2008). Whereas the canonical word order SOV is acceptable in both contexts below, the scrambled OSV order is contextually appropriate only when the object is given. (9) Maryga muettsseul haesseo? ‘What did Mary do?’
a. Maryga Mary-nom
chaegeul book-acc
b. #Chaegeul book-acc
Maryga Mary-nom
ilgutsseo read-past ilgutsseo read-past
‘Mary read a book.’ (10) Nuga chaegeul ilgutsseo? ‘Who read the book?’
a. Maryga Mary-nom
guchaegeul book-acc
ilgutsseo read-past
b. Guchaegeul book-acc
Maryga Mary-nom
ilgutsseo read-past
‘Mary read the book.’ Implicit in the above discussion is the assumption that scrambling operations relevant to givenness marking target an A-position: (11) Generalization 2 (A-Relatedness) If a language uses word order alternations to mark givenness, then in the marked order the given material appears in an A-position.
Word Order and Information Structure 389 Further motivation for this generalization comes from the fact that in some languages, passive can be used to mark givenness. For extensive discussion of this observation, as well as references and experimental studies supporting it across a range of languages, see Skopeteas and Fanselow (2010). One empirical domain that can be used to test the generalization in (11) concerns the first position in V2 languages. This position can be targeted by movement of an object and is generally taken to be an A′-position. One would therefore expect that the first position could not be used for givenness marking. For Dutch this is clearly the correct prediction. For German it appears to be correct as well. Skopeteas and Fanselow (2010) report that in an elicitation study their German participants consistently failed to produce object-first structures when the object is given and the subject new. However, an anonymous reviewer suggests that the reply in the following dialogue is grammatical:
(12) Shin:
Wer hat Who has
den the
Artikel article
von Ad und Hans rezensiert? by Ad and Hans reviewed
‘Who has reviewed the article by Ad and Hans?’ Caroline: Den Artikel von Ad und Hans hat Chomsky rezensiert. the article by Ad and Hans has Chomsky reviewed ‘Chomsky has reviewed the article by Ad and Hans.’ Given the generalization in (11), it must either be the case that the first position in a V2 clause can be an A-position or that the fronting operation in (12) is not motivated by givenness, but by some other property of the object (such as contrast or topic-hood; see Fanselow, this volume, for relevant discussion). A final remark about A-scrambling is in order. The above should not be read as suggesting that the only possible motivation for this operation is givenness. Rather givenness is one possible motivation for local reordering. In addition, A-scrambling can take place to mark scope (Ruys 2001) or to allow relations of binding and secondary predication. In addition, there are effects of the Silverstein Hierarchy (Silverstein 1976). The picture that emerges is one in which A-scrambling can be motivated by a range of interacting factors, one of which is givenness. For elaborate discussion of the system that regulates the interplay of these factors in Russian, see Titov (2012). We conclude this section with a brief discussion of an apparent counterexample to Generalizations 1 and 2. In a variety of languages, extraposition of constituents is possible. As far as we know, extraposition does not have a fixed IS effect. Dutch PP extraposition, for example, can be used if the PP is focused, but also if it is given. English heavy-NP shift, on the other hand, requires some kind of presentational focus. These are of course syntactically divergent operations, and it is conceivable that once a detailed syntax of extraposition is available, a systematic mapping to Information Structure will reveal itself. Be that as it may, these constructions do not seem to present a threat to the generalizations introduced above, as neither involves marking of given material.
390 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot There are, however, extraposition phenomena in specific languages that are problematic. The worst case we are aware of is provided by extraposition in Turkish. Kornfilt (2005) shows that this operation displays strong connectivity effects, incompatible with A-movement and probably compatible with A′-movement. Furthermore, Kornfilt notes that extraposition in Turkish is restricted to given material, a conclusion previously reached in İşsever (2003). If the operation indeed marks givenness, it seems to go against Generalization 1 (because it is rightward) and Generalization 2 (because it targets an A′-position). We do not know how to solve this issue, but there are several potential lines of analysis that could be explored. First, it is possible that the marking effect is only apparent, and results from other factors that conspire to make extraposition unavailable for foci and topics. A second option is that the marking effect of A-scrambling is restricted to a particular domain that excludes the position of extraposed material in Turkish. A third possibility, suggested by Kornfilt, is that the operation takes place in Phonological Form (PF). If so, Generalizations 1 and 2 could be saved by stipulating that they pertain to surface syntax. Finally, one could explore the relationship between extraposition in Turkish and right dislocation (given that Turkish is a radical pro-drop language). There are two reasons why this looks promising. As we will see in Section 19.4, right dislocation is associated with givenness for independent reasons. Moreover, right dislocation displays connectivity effects (see Ott and De Vries 2015). These seem to us interesting issues for further research.
19.3 A′-related phenomena In a variety of languages A′-movement applies to contrastive variants of topics and foci, either optionally or obligatorily. This has led many researchers to conclude that topic, focus, and contrast are autonomous notions of information structure that interact in systematic ways in syntax (see Vallduví 1992; Rizzi 1997; Vallduví and Vilkuna 1998; Aboh 2004; and Frey 2004; amongst others). On this view, (aboutness) topic and (new information) focus are basic notions of information structure that can be enriched to yield a contrastive interpretation (see Vallduví and Vilkuna 1998; Molnár 2002; McCoy 2003; Giusti 2006; Neeleman et al. 2009; and Neeleman and Vermeulen 2012; amongst others). We adopt the following operational definitions for topic, focus, and contrast. Focus is defined as in Rooth (1992). It involves the choice among a set of alternative propositions that vary only in one position. Topic is defined in terms of aboutness (see Reinhart 1981). Again, we assume that it involves choice among a set of alternatives, but in this case the alternatives are alternative utterances that share the same proposition (Krifka 2007; Tomioka 2010). Contrast adds to these basic interpretations the information that one of the alternatives is not valid. In the case of contrastive focus this means that an alternative proposition is untrue; in the case of contrastive topic, this means that an alternative utterance cannot be used, either because the proposition it contains is untrue or because the speaker does not want to take responsibility for its truth value. These notions are discussed in more detail in chapter 1 of Neeleman and Vermeulen (2012).
Word Order and Information Structure 391 Linguistic topics should be distinguished from expressions in the utterance that merely index the current topic of discourse (also known as ‘familiar topics’). Consider the following discourse (double underlining marks topics): (13) a. Maxine was introduced to the queen on her birthday. b. She was wearing a special dress for the occasion. In (13a), Maxine is a linguistic topic: it introduces a new topic of discourse. The initial comment about Maxine is that she was introduced to the queen on her birthday. The pronoun her in this comment is not a linguistic topic, but a category that indexes the topic. We take the same to be true of she in the continuation in (13b) (see Vallduví 1992; Lambrecht 1994; and Vallduví and Engdahl 1996 for discussion). With this in place, the key generalization governing the distribution of topics and foci can be formulated as in (14).1 (14) Generalization 3 (No Derived Topic–Focus Mismatch) A contrastive focus may not undergo contrast-related movement out of a constituent containing a topic. The pattern covered by Generalization 3 may be summarized as follows (restricting ourselves to crossing movements).2 In a structure without movement, the relative order of topic and focus is expected to be free (see (15)). If only one moves, a topic can cross an in- situ focus, but not vice versa (see (16)). If both topic and focus move, the topic invariably lands in a position higher than the focus (see (17)). (15) a. [ ... Topic ... [ ... Focus ...]] b. [... Focus ... [... Topic ... ]] (16) a. [Topic [ ... Focus ... [ ... tTopic ...]]] b. *[Focus [ ... Topic ... [ ... tFocus ...]]] (17) a. [Topic [Focus [... tFocus ... tTopic ...]]] b. *[Focus [Topic [... tFocus ... tTopic ...]]]
1 We abstract away from structures in which the topic belongs to an embedded clause while the moved focus is a constituent of a superordinate clause. 2 A further contrast can be observed with movements that land below an IS category. A moved focus can land below an in situ topic but not vice versa. For reasons of space, we cannot discuss this pattern here, but arguably it follows from the account of the generalization in (14) outlined in Section 19.5.
392 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot An illustration of the pattern in (15) through (17) can be provided using Dutch, a language with optional movement of contrastive categories. In Dutch, contrastive foci carry an A-accent and contrastive topics a B-accent (Jackendoff 1972; Büring 2003; Van Hoof 2003). In addition, a hat contour can be used if the topic precedes the focus (Gussenhoven 1984). Following standard practice, we assume that in the answer to a wh-question, the constituent that corresponds to the wh-operator is a focus. If interpreted contrastively, it qualifies as a contrastive focus. Thus, de bonen ‘the beans’ in (18a,b) should be classified as such. One circumstance in which a contrastive topic is used is when a participant in a conversation answers a question about an entity different from the entity the original question was about. Therefore, Wim (‘Bill’) in (18a,b) is a contrastive topic. The unacceptability of (18b) shows that a focus may not move across a topic. (As before, small caps indicates focus. Italics indicates contrast.) (18) Hoe zit het met Fred? Wat heeft hij gegeten? ‘What about Fred? What did he eat?’ Nou, dat weet ik niet, maar ik geloof ‘Well, I don’t know, but I believe’ a. dat that vorig last
Wim Bill
van from
de the
bonen beans
meer more
gegeten eaten
heeft has
dan than
jaar. year
‘that Bill has eaten more from the beans than last year.’ b. #dat [ that vorig last
van from
de the
bonen]1 beans
Wim t1 Bill
meer more
gegeten eaten
heeft has
dan than
jaar. year
The data in (19) show that, by contrast, a topic may follow an in situ focus or move across it. (19) Hoe zit het met de soep? Wie heeft die gegeten? ‘What about the soup? Who ate that?’ Nou, dat weet ik niet, maar ik geloof ... ‘Well, I don’t know, but I believe ...’ a. dat Wim van that Bill from vorig jaar. last year
de bonen the beans
meer more
gegeten eaten
heeft has
dan than
Word Order and Information Structure 393 b. dat [PP that vorig last
van from
de bonen] the beans
Wim tPP Bill
meer more
gegeten eaten
heeft has
dan than
jaar. year
‘that Bill has eaten more from the beans than last year.’ Finally, the example in (20) shows that the illicit configuration created by movement of a focus across a topic can be repaired by subsequent movement of the topic, giving rise to the configuration in (17a). (20) Hoe zit het met Jan z’n ouders? Welk boek heeft hij hen gegeven? ‘What about John’s parents? Which book has he given to them?’ Nou dat weet ik niet. Maar ik denk … ‘Well, I don’t know. But I think…’ dat [ z’n kinderen]1 [ that his children
dit this
boek]2 book
Jan t1 John
zeker t2 niet certainly not
zal geven. will give
‘that John will certainly not give his children this book.’ The opposite order of movement, which instantiates (17b), results in unacceptability: (21) #dat [ that
dit boek]2 [ this book
z’n kinderen]1 his children
Jan t1 John
zeker t2 niet certainly not
zal geven. will give
‘that John will certainly not give his children this book.’ Generalization 3 is further supported by observations from a variety of other languages. Shen (2010) shows that the pattern illustrated in Dutch can be replicated in Mandarin, which also has optional A′-movement. Vermeulen (2013) discusses Japanese topic–focus interaction. There is a requirement in this language that topics appear in the left periphery of the clause. This makes it impossible to test the behaviour of in situ topics. However, as expected, contrastive foci cannot move across a topic, either locally or to the left periphery higher clause. This instantiates the pattern in (15) and (16). In Hungarian, as in Japanese, topics must appear in the left periphery. In addition, exhaustive foci must move leftward. Crucially, there are no structures in which an exhaustive focus moves across a topic (Brody 1990; É. Kiss 1998). As a final illustration, consider Italian. As is well-known, this language allows clitic- doubled constituents to appear in the left periphery, both above and below moved foci. Significantly, the low clitic-doubled constituents cannot be interpreted as topics but
394 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot must be discourse-anaphoric (they can, of course, be anaphoric to the current topic of discourse). Thus, we find the same pattern as in Dutch if the clitic-doubled constituent is interpreted as a genuine topic. Example (22) from Torregrossa (2012) illustrates this (see also Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007): (22) Il nonna ha lasciato la scacchiera ai suoi nipoti? ‘Did grandfather leave the chess board to his grandsons?’ a. #Non not l’ha it-has b. Non not l’ha it-has
lo it
so, know.1sg,
ma but
ai to
suoi his
fratelli brothers
l’orologio the-clock
lasciato. left lo it
so, know.1sg,
ma but
l’orologio the-clock
ai to
suoi his
fratelli brothers
lasciato. left
‘I don’t know, but he has left the clock to his brothers.’ What is interesting about the pattern in (15) to (17) is that it shows an interaction between topic and focus not just when they appear in derived positions, but also when one is in a derived position and the other has moved. This imposes important restrictions on the kind of analysis that can be used to account for the generalization in (14). One way of explaining this pattern could be based on the widely accepted IS constraint in (23) that requires topics to be interpreted externally to foci. The background for this constraint was already hinted at above, when following Krifka (2007) and Tomioka (2010) we defined topics as related to the utterance and foci as related to the proposition. (23) Topic Peripherality Topics are external to foci in information structure. What Generalization 3 seems to amount to is a ban on A′-scrambling operations that transform an underlying structure in which the c-command relation between topic and focus matches their relative positions at LF into one that creates a mismatch. In other words, A′-movement may not lead to a violation of shape preservation in the sense of Williams (2003). There are a number of ways in which an analysis along these lines can be developed (see Neeleman and van de Koot 2008, 2012; Bobaljik and Wurmbrand 2012; amongst others).
Word Order and Information Structure 395
19.4 Linking to a preceding pronominal category Natural language allows several constructions in which a DP is linked to a coreferential pronominal. In this section we will look at a subset of these constructions in which the pronoun precedes the associated DP. Structures with the reverse order will be considered in the next section. The structures in which a DP is linked to a preceding pronominal are syntactically heterogeneous. In one type, clitic doubling, the DP appears to be located in a regular argument position. The pronoun is located in a c-commanding position and, as we will see, it seems to represent the DP it doubles in certain respects. In the other type, right dislocation, the pronoun may appear in a regular argument position or may have undergone some independently motivated shift, while the associated DP does not seem to be part of the core sentence. Nonetheless, these two types of structure seem to share the requirement that the DP can be construed as given. We will argue, however, that only clitic doubling truly marks givenness. The effect found with right dislocation has a different source also evident in other structures. Clitic doubling has both syntactic and interpretational similarities with A-scrambling (see Sportiche 1992, 1996; Anagnostopoulou 1994; and Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1997). Starting with the syntactic similarities, first, like scrambling, clitic doubling can repair weak crossover violations. Second, a pronoun contained in a category that A-scrambles across a c-commanding quantifier cannot be a bound variable. Clitic- doubling of the category containing the pronominal has exactly the same effect. Third, Principle C effects are ameliorated by A-scrambling of the category containing the R- expression across the c-commanding pronoun. Again, doubling of the relevant category has much the same effect. Fourth, like A-scrambling, clitic doubling can license floating quantifiers. Fifth, both A-scrambled and clitic-doubled phrases permit subextraction, indicating that they occupy an A-position. Finally, clitic doubling and A-scrambling are both very local (see particularly Sportiche 1996 for detailed discussion of the locality properties of clitic doubling). The above syntactic similarities could be expressed through a theory that assumes movement in both types of structure. Sportiche (1992, 1996), for example, suggests that A-scrambling targets the specifier of a phonologically null agreement head, while in doubling constructions, the relevant head is realized as a clitic, with the doubled DP moving to its specifier in covert syntax. An alternative way of stating the same insight is to analyse the clitic as a special spell-out of the head of a movement chain. The moved category could either be a functional head in the double (Uriagereka 1988, 1995; Papangeli 2000) or the entire associated DP (Anagnostopoulou 2003; Harizanov 2014; see also Kechagias 2011). Anagnostopoulou (1994) provides further arguments for a unified approach to doubling and A-scrambling by considering their interpretational similarities. First of all, just
396 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot like A-scrambling, clitic doubling is typically associated with givenness marking. In fact, Anagnostopoulou argues that both scrambling and clitic doubling obey Heim’s (1982) Prominence Condition, so that the referent of the scrambled/doubled DP must already be present in the context/discourse; mere accommodation of a new DP as familiar does not license either scrambling or doubling. Furthermore, Anagnostopoulou shows that those DP types that cannot undergo scrambling for givenness cannot be doubled either, and that these exceptions are predicted by the Prominence Condition. They include so- called novel definites and definite objects of idioms that do not have independent reference. The empirical picture is complicated by the fact that scrambling can be motivated by factors other than givenness, such as scope. This has the consequence that there are cases of A-scrambling that do not have a parallel in clitic doubling. For example, universals can scramble for scope, but cannot be clitic doubled. Given that the analyses of clitic doubling on the market either treat the phenomenon in terms of movement (Sportiche 1992, 1996; Anagnostopoulou 2003; Harizanov 2014; see also Kechagias 2011) or in terms of agreement (see Borer 1984 for an early proposal), there is no anaphoric dependency between the clitic and its double. This is a good thing, because if there were such a dependency, clitic doubling would violate Principle C (on the assumption that the clitic c-commands its double) as well as Williams’s (1997) Generalized Principle of Anaphoric Dependence (GPAD), which forbids a pronoun from entering into an anaphoric relation with a following DP, unless the pronoun is contained in an embedded clause. Let us now turn to right dislocation. There is considerable evidence to support the conclusion that syntactically the phrase in right dislocation is an adjunct (Strozer 1976; Jaeggli 1982, 1986; Borer 1984). For example, unlike a clitic-doubled argument, a right-dislocated phrase is an island. In many languages clitic-doubled arguments and right-dislocated constituents can also be distinguished through word order, with clitic- doubled arguments showing a closer affiliation with the verb than right-dislocated material (see for example Vallduví 1992 for Catalan). Furthermore, right-dislocated material is optionally preceded by a clear prosodic break not found with clitic doubling, with the intonation peak of the sentence falling on some element preceding the right- dislocated phrase (Vallduví 1992; Zubizarreta 1998). At first sight, the interpretive effect associated with right-dislocation also seems to be one of givenness marking. The example in (24) is inappropriate in answer to the question ‘Would you like a drink?’, but fine in answer to ‘Would you like a glass of this 12-year old Glenlivet?’ (24) Nou, well
ik I
vind find
het it
altijd always
wel rather
lekker, zo’n nice such-a
single malt. single malt
‘Well, I always quite enjoy it, a single malt.’ This establishes that the element in right dislocation must be given when apparently associated with a pronoun. However, this does not imply that the right-dislocation
Word Order and Information Structure 397 structure itself is linked to givenness by rule. On the contrary, there are cases of right dislocation where givenness is clearly not a factor, namely when the associated category is an indefinite: (25) I met a famous person last night: Keith Jarrett. The right-dislocated material in this example is linked to a discourse-new argument and provides additional information about the referent of that argument. Why should this difference between (24) and (25) exist? In both (24) and (25), GPAD forbids an anaphoric dependency between the object and the right-dislocated category. There is independent reason to think that there is no anaphoric dependence in right-dislocation structures. Example (25) contains an indefinite and a proper name, neither of which can be used as an anaphoric category: (26) a. #John1 entered the bar. [A man]1 was wearing a hat. b. #[A man]1 entered the bar. John1 was wearing a hat. It therefore follows that there is no anaphoric dependence in (25). Indeed, the interpretive effect of this example is best captured by a paraphrase that is specificational in nature: (27) I met a famous person last night. It was Keith Jarrett. It can be shown that there is no anaphoric relation in (24) either. If there was one, the pronoun would have to be the anaphoric category. However, referring back to zo’n single malt ‘such a single malt’ requires the use of a weak masculine pronoun rather than the neuter pronoun het ‘it’. (28) Jan John op on
bood offered
me me
zo’n such.a
single malt single malt
aan. prt
Hij He
zette put
’m/*’t him/it
tafel. table
‘John offered me one of those single malts. He put it on the table.’ However, the neuter pronoun is the one used in specificational copula constructions (cf. Het was zo’n single malt. ‘It was one of those single malts.’). Given that there is no anaphoric dependency between the pronoun and the right- dislocated category in (24), the pronoun must be linked to an antecedent in discourse. This in turn explains why right dislocation with a pronoun requires givenness. This analysis makes it conceivable that the function of right dislocation has nothing to do with givenness, but is always to provide additional information about the referent of a preceding argument. This can be done for dramatic effect, as in (25), where postponing
398 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot crucial information introduces an element of suspense that is resolved by the right- dislocated phrase. However, in the cases where the right dislocated phrase is linked to a pronominal element, the specification might be necessary because the speaker has made an anaphoric commitment that is too strong. This fits well with the traditional idea of right-dislocated elements as ‘afterthoughts’. We conclude this section by briefly returning to Generalizations 1 and 2. Neither clitic doubling nor clitic right dislocation seems to go against these generalizations. Clitic doubling is arguably a structure used for givenness marking, but on at least some analyses it involves leftward A-movement. Clitic right dislocation is clearly not a leftward A-movement, but, as we have just seen, it is unlikely to be a structure used to mark givenness.
19.5 Linking to a following pronominal category In this section we will look at constructions in which a pronoun follows an associated DP. Structures with the relevant order come in different types. The literature usually distinguishes between clitic left dislocation (CLLD), contrastive left dislocation (CLD), and hanging topic left dislocation (HTLD). (29) a. Afton this.acc b. Die that
ton the.acc
man man
die that
andra man.acc
dhen not
ken know
niet. not
c. This man, I don’t know him.
ik I
to ’m.acc
ksero. know.1sg
CLLD CLD HTLD
The examples in (29a) and (29c) are from Grohmann (2002), while the example in (29b) is a Dutch translation of a German example given by this author. CLLD, CLD, and HTLD are structurally different from each other. HTLD does not involve movement and as a result the construction lacks connectivity effects and does not exhibit island sensitivity. CLD is at the other end of the spectrum with respect to these two diagnostics: it shows both connectivity and island effects. The standard analysis treats the construction as resulting from operator movement of the d-pronoun (which must occur in the left periphery; Koster 1978a, 1978b). Another possible analysis might assume movement of the left-dislocated category across the d-pronoun, which itself may or may not have moved (see Van Hoof 1997 for a related proposal). A third option would be to treat the d- pronoun as the spell-out of an intermediate trace left behind by the dislocated category (Grohmann 2000). The status of CLLD is much less clear. On the one hand, it shows connectivity effects and sensitivity to some islands. On the other, it violates certain
Word Order and Information Structure 399 other island conditions (Cinque 1990). This situation has led to two types of analysis. Grohmann (2000) argues that CLLD involves A′-movement of the left-dislocated category, while Cinque (1990) and Anagnostopoulou (1994) argue that the left-dislocated category is base-generated in its surface position and linked to the clitic by a general process of chain formation. Despite this heterogeneous syntactic characterization, the structures in (29) share a certain interpretive core. To begin with, in none of the three structures is the left- dislocated category subject to a requirement of givenness, as opposed to what we previously observed for right-dislocated categories (associated with a pronoun) and clitic-doubled categories. Lambrecht (1994) cites the French examples in (30) as evidence of this contrast, but the data have been replicated in various other languages. (30) Husband and wife at dinner table; husband looks at food on his plate: H: Ça n’a pas de gout, ce poulet. that neg-has not of taste this chicken ‘It has no taste, this chicken.’ W: Le the
veau, veal
c’est it-is
pire. worse
‘Veal is worse.’ Lambrecht notes that it is felicitous to have ce poulet ‘this chicken’ in right dislocation in the husband’s remark, because of its prominence in the situational context. This suffices to establish it as a given topic. In contrast, le veau ‘veal’ in the wife’s reply is in left dislocation, a structure used to introduce new discourse topics. Lambrecht explicitly remarks that it would be highly infelicitous for the wife to use right dislocation, exactly because le veau is not contextually given. The above does not imply that left-dislocated material cannot be given. CLLD in Italian can be used to mark so-called ‘familiar topics’ (see Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007), which are indeed given. Similarly, CLD can be used if the left-dislocated item is already the current topic of discourse: (31) A: Ken je die kerel aan de bar? ‘Do you know that guy at the bar?’ B: Nee, no
die that
man man
die that
ken know
ik I
niet. not
‘No, that man I don’t know.’ A natural explanation for the interpretive difference between left and right dislocation is provided by GPAD. Recall that the order ‘pronoun… DP’ in a local domain does not
400 Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot permit an anaphoric dependency between pronoun and DP. Therefore, the pronoun must be linked to an antecedent already established in discourse, resulting in an apparent givenness effect. By contrast, the order ‘DP… pronoun’ allows a direct dependency and therefore does not impose any interpretive requirement on the DP, allowing it to be either given or new. It seems to us that the only requirement that does hold of a category in left dislocation is that it cannot be interpreted as a focus: (32) Generalization 4 (No Focus Resumption) A category in left dislocation cannot be interpreted as a focus. The validity of this generalization in Italian is clear as foci are never doubled, while topics and given material can appear in left dislocation (see Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007). The situation in Dutch is somewhat complicated and at first sight seems to go against Generalization 4. In the exchange below, it would seem that die nieuwe CD van Dylan ‘that new CD by Dylan’ provides the answer to the wh-question. (33) A: Zeg, Carel, wat heb je in de stad uiteindelijk gekocht? ‘Hey, Charles, what did you end up buying in town?’ B: Nou, Well, maar but
die that
nieuwe new
CD CD
van by
Dylan Dylan
die heb that have
ik I
aangeschaft. bought
‘Well, I bought that new CD by Dylan.’ However, the answer provided by speaker B requires a context in which speakers A and B have previously discussed potential CDs for future acquisition and the Dylan CD was among these. The answer remains neutral regarding other potential acquisitions and therefore does not involve a contrastive focus. Rather it has the interpretive properties of a contrastive topic, with the focus on the verb aangeschaft ‘bought’. Generalization 4 is also supported by data from Japanese. Both topics and foci in this language can occur in a left-peripheral position. In the case of topics, this is obligatory. However, there is an important difference between contrastive and non-contrastive topics, discussed in some detail by Vermeulen (2013). If the topic is contrastive, its relation with the empty category is island-sensitive. This suggests that a contrastive topic in Japanese ends up in the left periphery as a result of movement. No island effects are observed with non-contrastive topics, suggesting that such topics are linked to a null pronoun. Indeed, this pronoun can be overtly realized in the right kind of context. Fronted foci, however, are always island-sensitive and can never be linked to an overt pronoun, confirming that foci have no access to left dislocation. In the same vein, Warlpiri allows topics but not foci to be linked to a following pronominal category (see Legate 2002 for relevant discussion).
Word Order and Information Structure 401
19.6 Conclusion This chapter has explored the relation between word order and information structure. While much work remains to be done, we have argued that the following four generalizations give a good first approximation of the cross-linguistic data: (34) Generalization 1 (Given-before-New) If a language uses word order alternations to mark givenness, then in the marked order the given material precedes the new material. (35) Generalization 2 (A-Relatedness) If a language uses word order alternations to mark givenness, then in the marked order the given material appears in an A-position. (36) Generalization 3 (No Derived Topic-Focus Mismatch) A contrastive focus may not undergo contrast-related movement out of a constituent containing a topic. (37) Generalization 4 (No Focus Resumption) A category in left dislocation cannot be interpreted as a focus. Of course, these generalizations should emerge as effects of deeper properties of the language faculty or human psychology. In some cases, plausible explanations seem to be available. Generalization 1 might ultimately be an effect of a general cognitive principle according to which integration of new information is easier if framed within old information (see Clark and Haviland 1977). Relevant experiments showing that the effect goes beyond language can be found in Clifton and Slowiaczek (1981). This explanation of Generalization 1 may also shed some light on Generalization 2. If the early presentation of old information facilitates the integration of new information, it makes no sense to move the old information far away from the material to be integrated. Such non-local shifts would undo much of the beneficial effect of the reordering, as the intervening material might itself not be relevant to integration of the new information. Local shifts tend to be brought about by A-movement, rather than A′-movement. Generalization 3, we have suggested, is an effect of the interpretive properties of topic (an utterance-level notion) and focus (a proposition-level notion), in conjunction with general restrictions on the mapping between syntax and semantics (see Neeleman and Vermeulen 2012 for discussion). The theoretical basis for understanding Generalization 4 remains elusive.
Chapter 20
Disl o cati ons a nd In f orm ation St ru c t u re Luis López
20.1 Introduction The Catalan example (1a) is a regular canonical sentence, with the Direct Object to the right of the verb as a constituent of the VP.1 Example (1b) exemplifies dislocation: the Direct Object appears displaced to the left periphery. Sentence (1b) also features another ingredient absent from (1a): a clitic pronoun that reproduces (a subset of) the grammatical features of the dislocated constituent. This clitic pronoun is traditionally referred to as a resumptive pronoun—although recently the more theory-neutral term correlate is also used. The indicates the place where one would normally expect to find the displaced constituent if it were not dislocated. (1) a. Jo I
no neg
he have.1sg
vist seen
les pomes. the apples
‘I haven’t seen the apples.’ b. Les pomes, the apples
jo I
no neg
les them
he have.1sg
vist . seen
Dislocations are present in many languages of the world and we have thorough analyses of at least some of them. A short list includes the following references: Romance (Cinque 1 I would
like to thank Ingo Feldhausen, Xavier Villalba, and two anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press for detailed comments on an earlier version of this chapter. I would also like to thank the volume editors for useful advice in terms of content and organization. Finally I would like to thank the language consultants, whether or not the data they provided me made it to the final cut: Anastasia Giannakidou, Kay González-Vilbazo, Dalina Kalluli, Inga Kolhof, Evalina Leivada, Lena Papadopoulous, Natalia Pavlou, Athina Sioupi, Volker Struckmeier, Greg Ward. None of them should be held responsible for any inaccuracies of the data presented here.
Dislocations and Information Structure 403 1977, 1983/1997, 1990; Rivero 1980; Dobrovie-Sorin 1994; Lambrecht 1994; Rizzi 1997; Frascarelli 2000; Villalba 2000, 2009; Delais-Roussaire et al. 2004; -Samek-Lodovici 2005, 2006; De Cat 2007a, 2007b), Greek (Anagnostopoulou 1994, 1997), Lebanese Arabic (Aoun and Benmamoun 1998), Germanic (Vat 1981/1997, Zaenen 1997; Van Riemsdjik and Zwarts 1997; Grohmann, 2003; Frey 2005; Ott to appear), Bantu (Bresnan and Mchombo 1987; Baker 2003), Mohawk (Baker 1996), and Czech (Sturgeon 2006). As is usually the case in the study of comparative syntax, we find broad similarities and fine-grained contrasts between languages, most of which are still lacking an analysis. Likewise, we sometimes find that two constructions that look alike in two different languages turn out to have different information structure (henceforth IS) functions. We should start by drawing a typological classification: polysynthetic vs non- polysynthetic languages. As argued by Baker (1996), in polysynthetic languages all the apparent arguments of the predicate are obligatorily adjoined to the clausal periphery— in effect, all arguments are always pro and the constituents that appear to be arguments are actually dislocated. Since dislocation is obligatory, there is no IS function connected to dislocation in a polysynthetic language. In non-polysynthetic languages arguments may be dislocated but they do not have to be, as in the Catalan example in (1a,b). This optionality is what gives rise to the possibility of utilizing dislocations for IS functions. In the following, I focus exclusively on non-polysynthetic languages.2 Other related topics that unfortunately I cannot discuss in these pages are clitic-doubled wh-movement and clitic doubling without dislocation. For classic references on these topics, see Dobrovie-Sorin (1994) and Suñer (1988). In the remainder of this chapter I discuss the grammatical properties of dislocations (Section 20.2) and their information structure (Section 20.3).
20.2 Grammar of dislocations Sections 20.2.1 and 20.2.2 discuss the morphosyntax of dislocations. I show that some dislocations are clausal constituents while others seem to be quite independent (Section 20.2.2) and then I discuss the similarities and differences between right-and leftward dislocations (Section 20.2.3). Section 20.2.4 discusses the phonology of dislocations.
20.2.1 H-type dislocations and D-type dislocations Structurally, dislocations can be classified in two types depending on the sort of connection that the dislocated constituent holds with the core clause. Some dislocated constituents seem to have a very weak connection, of the kind that is only resolved during
2 There exist mixed systems. Baker (2003) argues that in Kinande all subjects are obligatorily dislocated (and therefore dislocated subjects bear no particular IS function) while objects are optionally dislocated.
404 Luis López sentence interpretation without involving a syntactic dependency. They are sometimes referred to as Hanging Topic Left Dislocations or simply as Left Dislocations (although, in fact, they can also be oriented rightward, at least in some languages). Let’s call them H-type dislocations. Other dislocated constituents form a syntactic dependency with a head in the core clause structure. Common terms are Clitic Left/Right Dislocation or Contrastive Left Dislocation. I will refer to this latter group as D-type dislocations (the D/H-type distinction ultimately originates in Ross 1967 and Cinque 1983/1997 and there is an extensive body of work that builds on their insights). In the generative tradition, the D/H-type distinction is analysed as in (2). Example (2a) represents an H-type dislocation structure, which includes the dislocated constituent and a resumptive element. I include an empty pro-form in the position of in parenthesis because it is not certain that we need to assume an empty category in H-type constructions. Example (2b) represents a D-type structure, with a full copy of the dislocated constituent. This full copy is shown in brackets: (2) a. XP(H) […Res… (pro)] b. XP(D) […Res… ] There are two types of empirical motivation for the distinction between D-type and H- type dislocations. (i) reconstruction effects, such as quantifier-variable relations and Binding Theory violations; and (ii) island effects. D-type dislocations show reconstruction and island effects.3 For instance, consider the following Spanish example: (3) Al acc.the lo him
árbitro, referee
el the
muy very
tonto silly
dice says
que that
el the
jugador player
no neg
vio . saw
‘The referee, that idiot, says that the player didn’t see (him).’ López 2009a: 220 In sentence (3), the dislocated constituent al árbitro is doubled by the clitic pronoun lo. The interesting point about this example is that ‘the referee’ cannot be co-referential with the epithet el muy tonto ‘that idiot’. This can be accounted for as a violation of Condition C of Binding Theory if the dislocated constituent has a copy in position , where it is c-commanded by the epithet. The type of evidence shown in (3) leads to the conclusion that D-type dislocations form a syntactic dependency with a position in the main clause—a dependency that can be formalized in terms of copy, among other possibilities.
3
For reasons of space, I only discuss reconstruction effects in this chapter. For a discussion of islands in dislocations, see López (2009a: 212–39).
Dislocations and Information Structure 405 H-type dislocations show no reconstruction or island effects. Consider the following French example: (4) Tes your
sales dirty
petites little
apprécierait appreciate.cond
remarques remarks
sûrement surely
sur on
Léon, Léon
il he
ne neg
les them
pas . neg
‘Léon would surely not appreciate your dirty little remarks about him.’ De Cat 2007b: 495 As De Cat points out, Léon and the pronoun il can be co-referent. This is not expected if there is a copy of the dislocated constituent in the position because it would give rise to a Condition-C violation. Rather, one has to conclude that we have a structure like that in (2a). H-type and D-type dislocations can also be teased apart by their morphological connectedness with the resumptive. H-type dislocations generally agree in gender, number, and person with the resumptive element, but not in case. In fact, H-type dislocations appear in a default case. D-type dislocates additionally exhibit the case form that corresponds to the grammatical function of . Consider now the following Spanish example: (5) El the lo him
árbitro, referee
el the
muy very
tonto silly
dice says
que that
el the
jugador player
no neg
vio . saw
‘The referee, that idiot, says that the player didn’t see him.’ López 2009a: 220 The only visible difference between (3) and (5) is that the dislocated constituent does not bear a mark of accusative case in (5)—although is the direct object of vio and the corresponding resumptive, the clitic lo, appears in accusative case. This absence of case marking tells us that we are facing an H-type dislocation. As an H-type dislocation, el árbitro does not have a copy in . If that is the case, el árbitro and el muy tonto should be able to co-refer without triggering a Condition-C violation. In fact, that is the case. Thus, H-type dislocations seem disconnected from the core clause: they do not receive a θ-role from a predicate or establish any other form of syntactic dependency. This has led Shaer (2009) to propose that they are orphans (see Haegeman 1991/2009 for the first formulation of this concept). Orphans are phrases that do not integrate into a sentence but instead form discourse constituents directly. Alternatively, cartographic approaches locate H-type dislocates in a very high position within the CP-field (see Benincà and Poletto 2004).
406 Luis López
20.2.2 Resumption Any sort of constituent can be a double for an H-type dislocation: agreement morphemes, clitics, weak pronouns, strong pronouns, even epithets. Since D-type dislocations include a copy within the core clause structure, it is traditionally understood that the list of potential resumptives is short: it has to consist of feature bundles that do not occupy an argument position or we would violate the θ-criterion: agreement morphemes, clitics (or at least, certain types of clitics), or weak pronouns (or at least certain types of weak pronouns). The southern Romance languages (see Bocci and Poletto this volume), Greek (see Skopeteas this volume) and Lebanese Arabic (see Aoun and Benmamoun 1998) are some of the languages in which D-type dislocates have a pronominal clitic as a resumptive. I have discussed some examples or Romance dislocations above. The following is a Greek example: (6) a. I the.nom
mitera mother
tu, his
kathenas everyone
tin her
b. Tin the.acc
mitera mother
tu, his
kathenas everyone
tin her
agapai. loves agapai loves
‘His mother, everybody loves (her).’ Anagnostopoulou 1997: 155 Notice that in (6a) the determiner is in nominative case while in (6b) it is in accusative case, matching the accusative case of the resumptive. As Anagnostopoulou argues, this morphological difference correlates with a difference in interpretation: in (6a) the variable tu cannot be bound by the quantifier kathenas while in (6b) this binding is possible. This parallels what we see in Romance and leads to the conclusion that (6a) exemplifies H-type dislocation while (6b) exemplifies D-type dislocation. Additionally, these languages also allow for subject dislocation without a clitic. It is generally assumed that subject agreement is the resumptive in these cases. Consider the Spanish example (7). Notice that the lack of agreement between estos chicos ‘these guys’ and parece ‘seems’ indicates that there is no Raising to Subject: (7) Estos These
chicos guys
parece seem.3sg
que that
no neg
saben know.3pl
lo que what
quieren. want.3pl
‘These guys, it seems they do not know what they want.’ Different languages have different clitic repertoires: for instance, Catalan and Italian have clitics for locative arguments and non-specific indefinite objects while Spanish and Portuguese do not. This gives rise to almost minimal pairs such as the following:
Dislocations and Information Structure 407 (8) a. A Barcelona, to Barcelona
jo I
no neg
hi loc
he have.1sg
b. A Barcelona, to Barcelona
yo I
no neg
he have.1sg
ido. gone
anat. gone
Catalan Spanish
‘I haven’t been to Barcelona.’ Example (8a) is a bona fide Clitic Left Dislocation, with a locative clitic. What about (8b)? We could take the overt presence of the clitic to be crucial to define a D-type dislocation, and therefore (8b) would be analysed as a third type of construction, distinct from D-type or H-type dislocation. Alternatively, we could take the overt presence of the clitic as coincidental and regard the syntactic behaviour as fundamental. Since (8b) behaves exactly like (8a) with respect to island sensitivity and reconstruction effects, I take it that the label D-type dislocation can be used fruitfully to embrace dislocations without an overt resumptive such as (8b). Along these lines, post-verbal objects in otherwise SOV languages without clitic pronouns such as Japanese and Turkish could also be regarded as D-type dislocates (see Lambrecht’s 2001 discussion). In the light of this discussion, consider the following English examples: (9) a. This guy, Mary doesn’t like him. b. This guy, Mary doesn’t like. Left Dislocation in English exemplified in (9a), is a form of H-type dislocation. Topicalization, exemplified in (9b), is the closest thing that we have in this language to a D-type dislocation (see Ross 1967; Rodman 1997; Birner and Ward 1998; Prince 1998; Shaer 2009, among many others). English Topicalization is sensitive to islands and exhibits reconstruction effects (see Rochemont 1989), while Left Dislocation is not and does not. If we agree that the presence or absence of an overt resumptive is not crucial for the definition of a D-type dislocation, then we can place English Topicalization in the same group as Romance, Lebanese, and Greek CLLD. Finally, we can use German as an example of a language in which the resumptive of the D-type dislocated constituent is a weak pronoun (see Vat 1981/1997; Anagnostopoulou 1997; Van Riemsdijk and Zwarts 1997; Zaenen 1997 ; Grohmann 2003; Frey 2005, among many others). These languages have a set of pronouns, referred to as d-pronouns, that can be weak and a set of pronouns that can only be strong. Dislocated constituents doubled by a strong pronoun are H-type (Hanging Topics in many articles) while those doubled by a weak pronoun are D-type (referred to in the German tradition as Contrastive Left Dislocation (CLD) or Left Dislocation). The distinction is revealed by the regular reconstruction and island tests (see for instance Grohmann 2003; Frey 2005). Consider the German examples in (10). Sentence (10a), with the weak pronoun den and the dislocated constituent exhibiting accusative case on the determiner exemplifies CLD. Example (10b), with the strong pronoun ihn and a dislocate in default nominative exemplifies a
408 Luis López Hanging Topic. Additionally, the dislocated constituent agrees in case with a weak pronoun but not with a strong pronoun. (10) a. Den The.acc
Hans, Hans
den him
mag likes
b. Der The.nom
Hans, Hans
jeder everyone
jeder. everyone mag likes
ihn. him
‘Everybody likes Hans.’ Germanic d-pronouns are very close to Romance and Greek clitics but they are not identical in one crucial respect. Romance and Greek clitics are heads attached to another head. Germanic d-pronouns occupy what seem to be spec positions—for instance, the Vorfeld right before the V2 position, in (10a). If the d-pronoun is indeed an argument of the verb, the D-type dislocated constituent would seem to violate the θ-criterion. This has led to an analysis of German (and Romance) dislocations in which the pronoun and the dislocate start out as co-constituents of a big DP, which would account for the connectivity properties as well as the sharing of the semantic role (see Cecchetto 2000; Grewendorf 2008; see also Ott 2014 for a new perspective on dislocations in German). All the above languages have both H-type and D-type dislocations. However, some languages seem to have only H-type dislocations. This is the case of Tzotzil and Jakaltek, as argued by Aissen (1992) using prosodic structure as empirical evidence. Likewise, De Cat (2007a, 2007b) argues that French has only H-type dislocations. To get a taste of her argumentation, consider the following example: (11) Un One
de of
ses his
disciples, disciples
chaque every
maître master
l’ him
a has
renvoyé . dismissed
‘Each master dismissed one of his disciples.’ De Cat 2007b: 494 De Cat reports that the quantifier chaque cannot bind the variable ses. If French dislocations could avail themselves of a D-type strategy, the dislocated constituent would reconstruct to the position and the quantifier would c-command, and hence bind, the variable.4 4 I follow De Cat (2007a, 2007b) in my discussion, who reports on a survey carried out on native speakers of various nationalities. Delais-Roussaire et al. (2004) argue that French has CLLD, although they find no interpretive or phonetic difference between HTLD and CLLD. The clearest cases of CLLD in French involve dislocated PPs in a subordinate clause. In corpora such examples are very rare, which suggests a diachronic process in which CLLD is yielding all territory to HTLD.
Dislocations and Information Structure 409 There are many other languages and language groups that I had to leave out of this discussion of the syntax of dislocations. See Lambrecht (2001) for a detailed typology of dislocation constructions.
20.2.3 Left-and rightward dislocations Dislocations can also be classified according to their surface position: they can be oriented toward the left or toward the right. This yields a four-way typology: Right H-type, Left H-type, Right D-type, Left D-type. The following Spanish example instantiates a D-type rightward dislocation: (12) El The
muy very
tonto silly
dice says
que that
no neg
lo him
vio, saw
al acc.the
árbitro. referee
‘The stupid guy says he didn’t see the referee.’ D-type right dislocations in Italian, Catalan, and Spanish have received some attention lately. Most researchers have reached the conclusion that syntactically D-type right dislocation is very different from D-type left dislocation (see Cecchetto 1999; Villalba 2000, 2009; Cardinaletti 2001, 2002; Belletti 2004; López 2009a, 2009b; Feldhausen 2010; for dissenting opinions see Frascarelli 2000, 2004; Samek-Lodovici 2006 and for an entirely different perspective with basis in Germanic see Ott and de Vries 2015). Left dislocation is outside the main clause—the Tense Phrase (TP)—c-commanding all the constituents located in canonical positions: (13) XP(D) [TP Subj T [PredPhrase V …]] Rightward D-type dislocated objects are in a mid-position. They c-command the constituents within the basic predicate structure but not a pre-verbal subject: (14) [TP Subj T XP(D) [PredPhrase V …]] (Subjects can also be D-type rightward dislocates, but their configuration is hard to pin- point, as explained in López 2009a). Given the configuration in (14), one should rightfully wonder how XP(D) ends up in the right periphery of the clause. Most analyses have opted for remnant movement of the predicate phrase (Cecchetto 1999; Villalba 2000, 2009; Belletti 2004). Alternatively, López (2009b) argues that the right-peripheral position of D-type right dislocations does not arise in syntax. Rather, he argues it is a specific linearization option made obligatory by prosodic requirements.
410 Luis López Rightward H-type dislocations are understudied, but De Cat (2007a, 2007b) provides a discussion and a number of examples in French. The following French example includes two dislocated constituents, moi and sa fille. Sa fille is separated from its clause by an adjunct island. As mentioned, this independence from islands reveals that we are dealing with a Right H-type dislocation: (15) Je connais l’homme qui l’ a emmenée, moi, I know the man who her has taken-away me
sa fille. his daughter
‘I know the man that took his daughter away.’ De Cat 2007b: 513 I also leave out what we could refer to as ‘medial dislocations’, dislocated constituents that do not show up on the clausal periphery. There is very little work on this area. I refer the reader to Delais-Roussarie et al. (2004) for some discussion.
20.2.4 The prosody of dislocations In recent years we have seen a growth of interest in the prosody of D-type dislocations. Within the Romance family, we have detailed analyses for Spanish (Zubizarreta 1998; Feldhausen 2012), Catalan (Astruc 2005; Feldhausen 2010), Italian (Frascarelli 2000) and French (Delais-Roussarie et al. 2004). For concreteness, let us assume a theory of prosodic structure in which prosodic words are dominated by phonological phrases and the latter by intonation phrases (Selkirk 1984; Nespor and Vogel 1986 are the classic references). These prosodic units are built by aligning their boundaries with syntactic boundaries, although they are not necessarily co- extensive (see Truckenbrodt, this volume, for details). Consider the following example: (16) The young man kicked the ball. Syntactic structure [TP [DP The [AP young] man] [VP kicked [DP the ball]]] Prosodic structure (IP (PP (w the young) (w man) (PP (w kicked) (w the ball)))) The lowest relevant prosodic level is the prosodic word (w). It is structured around a lexical item that bears primary stress. Notice that a syntactic word like ‘the’ does not bear stress, and so it is cliticized to a word with stress to form a prosodic word. The next level up is the prosodic phrase (or an intermediate phrase, the difference is not important for our purposes). A prosodic phrase (PP) groups one or more prosodic words into a bigger constituent with a pitch accent. Notice that in example (16) the PP ‘kicked the ball’ includes two syntactic phrases, the VP and the DP. Finally, an intonation phrase (IP) embraces one or several PPs and can be circumscribed by pauses on each edge. The IP coincides with a (simple) clause but a non-restrictive relative clause or a parenthetical can also be intonation phrases. The careful argumentations in Aissen (1992), Frascarelli (2000), Astruc (2005), and Feldhausen (2010) show that in a variety of languages dislocations are separated from
Dislocations and Information Structure 411 the rest of the clause by an IP boundary. The following exemplifies left dislocation in Catalan: (17) a. Les the
taules, tables
les them
vaig past.3sg
portar bring
al to.the
pis. flat
‘I took the tables to the flat.’ b. (IP les taules) (IP les vaig portar al pis) Feldhausen 2010: 158 The following exemplifies right dislocation in Spanish: (18) a. La it
lavó washed.3sg
mamá, mom
la the
mamadera. bottle
‘Mom washed the bottle.’ b. (IP la lavó mamá) (IP la mamadera) Zubizarreta 1998: 154–6 When a sentence includes several dislocated constituents, each of them constitutes a separate intonational phrase. This is shown in the following Spanish example: (19) a. Le her
envió sent.3sg
un a
regalo, gift
María, Maria
a dat
mamá mom
‘María sent mom a gift.’ b. (IP le envió un regalo) (IP María) (IP a mamá) Zubizarreta 1998: 157 Additionally, Frascarelli (2000) shows that left dislocations in Italian (at least D-type left dislocations) that consist of only one prosodic phrase may adjoin to the following intonation phrase:5 (20) a. Questo this
libro, book
conosco know.1sg
l’autore the author
che that
l’ha it has
scritto. written
‘I know the author who wrote this book.’ b. (IP (PP Questo libro)) (IP (PP conosco) (PP l’autore) (PP che l’ha scritto)) → (IP (PP Questo libro) (PP conosco) (PP l’autore) (PP che l’ha scritto)) Frascarelli 2000: 48 5 Frascarelli (2000) uses a reading task to elucidate the prosodic structure of dislocations in Italian. The adjunction effect is obtained when subjects are requested to read at an accelerated, but still natural, speed.
412 Luis López Feldhausen (2010) extends his database to left dislocations in subordinate clauses in Catalan. He shows that left dislocations erect an intonation phrase boundary to their right while they phrase with the matrix clause to the left. The following is an example: (21) a. La the
Maria va dir que les taules Maria past.3sg say that the tables
les them
va past.3sg
portar bring
al pis. to.the apartment ‘Maria said she took the tables to the apartment.’ b. (IP La Maria va dir que les taules) (IP les va portar al pis). Based on Feldhausen 2010: 159–63 As for the internal structure, right dislocations are deaccented and their melody tends to mimic the contour of the matrix clause: if the matrix clause is a declarative clause that ends in a low tone, the right dislocation follows the same pattern but if the matrix clause is a question that ends in a high tone, the right dislocated constituent also ends in a high tone (Astruc 2005; Feldhausen 2010). Left dislocations can end in a monotonal rise or low tone, but also in a bitonal low- rise—as revealed especially in Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl’s (2006) corpus study of Italian dislocations. Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl additionally argue that the different tonal structures map onto different IS values. It has independently been argued (see Büring, this volume, Bocci and Poletto, this volume) that the notion Topic is a cover term for several types of entitities: aboutness topic, contrastive topic, and familiarity topic, each of which leads to dislocation. If we assume this state of affairs to hold, it would be desirable to investigate whether the types of edge tones and the types of topics that dislocations can express match one-to-one. Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl’s (2006) develop an analysis of this possibility with a database consisting of Italian dislocations.
20.3 Information structure properties Recall that in polysynthetic languages dislocated arguments are not connected to any particular IS function. That being the case, it follows that we should not expect that a particular pragmatic function p would be uniformly connected to a grammatical construction g across every language that we look at (as pointed out by Cinque 1983/1997). In fact, fine-grained comparative analyses yield subtle differences (see Frey 2005 for such an analysis of leftward constituents in English and German). It may even the case that, as Barbosa (2009) argues, the information structure function of a dislocated subject is not the same as that of a dislocated object in the same language. Finally, recall that some languages have both H-type and D-type dislocations while some other languages only have H-type dislocations. It would not be surprising if H-type dislocations in the
Dislocations and Information Structure 413 latter group of languages played a wider set of roles than in the former. Despite these caveats, it seems to me that we do find some cross-linguistic generalizations, features that we find often and features that we do not seem to find at all. In particular, it seems to me that languages that have both H-type and D-type dislocations divide the pragmatic cake similarly. In Sections 20.3.1 and 20.3.2 I discuss the IS roles of H-type and D-type dislocations in languages that have both. For reasons of space, I focus on English and Romance. In Section 20.3.3 I discuss French, a language that only has H-type dislocations.
20.3.1 H-type dislocations There are detailed analyses of the IS properties of left H-type dislocations in Italian (Cinque 1983/1997), Catalan (Villalba 2000, 2009), English (Prince 1998; Gregory and Michaelis 2001; Frey 2005), and German (Frey 2005), among others. A concept that reappears in these analyses is Topic Promotion. The idea is that H-type left dislocations are used to introduce a new referent to the discourse and make it salient enough that a following stretch of discourse—a sentence or several sentences—will be about this referent. (22) […] because you and I, we have work schedules, we can be called at work, we have social security numbers, they can trace us down, we have telephones, then we have checkbooks. Gregory and Michaelis 2001: 1681 In this example, ‘you and I’ is an H-type dislocated constituent. As such, it sets up the topic for the following sentences, all of which are about ‘you and I’. H-type dislocations do indeed seem to reject anaphoric relations and prefer to engage a new topic: (23) -You should run for a local school board position. -# That I’m not so sure about it. Gregory and Michaelis 2001: 1668 Arguably, the infelicity of (23) comes about because ‘that’ is an H-type dislocate (resumed by ‘it’) that is forced to be anaphoric to the antecedent ‘run for a school board position’. We may take the aboutness relation in a strict sense: the topic is relevant for the proposition in the main clause, the proposition in the main clause must expand our knowledge of the H-type dislocate (De Cat 2007a: 70). As De Cat argues, the following example (which originally was brought forward by Tanya Reinhart) suggests that this interpretation of the aboutness relation is the correct one: (24) # Marilyn Monroe, I’ve lost a book about her. De Cat 2007a: 70
414 Luis López This dislocation is infelicitous because my losing a book does not expand what we know about Marilyn Monroe. H-type right dislocations have not received much scholarly attention. In fact, judging from the literature available to me, only spoken French seems to use them productively (see in particular De Cat 2007a: 217–42). For the other languages, it seems to me that so-called Afterthoughts (Grosz and Ziv 1998; Villalba 2000, 2009: 116–22) qualify as an instance of rightward H-type dislocations. The following is an example (adapted from Villalba 2009: 120): (25) [Do you remember that funny couple, Pat and Chris?] The last story he told was very funny, Chris, I mean. In an afterthought, the dislocated constituent is used to clarify the referent of an earlier pronoun. In this case, ‘Chris’ clarifies who ‘he’ refers to. Thus, afterthoughts can also be regarded as topic promotion devices. Unlike H-type left dislocations, H-type right dislocations cannot be entirely new to the discourse. In (26), the dislocated constituent clarifies the referent of the pronoun ‘it’, but since there is no mention of ‘stories’ in the previous discourse, the resulting discourse is infelicitous. (26) [Do you remember that funny couple, Pat and Chris?] # It was very funny, the last story they told us, I mean. However, it is uncertain whether afterthoughts are indeed H-type dislocations. On the one hand, notice that the resumptive pronoun in (25) is within a relative clause, which precludes a movement analysis and suggests that regarding them as H-type dislocations is correct. However, they—afterthoughts, I mean—can appear as parentheticals in the middle of a sentence and they obligatorily agree in case with the resumptive (Villalba 2000, 2009). Both of these properties are unexpected of H-type dislocates.
20.3.2 D-type dislocations D-type dislocations, both left and right, are always Given (see Rochemont, this volume, for a discussion of this notion).6 A dislocated constituent refers back to an antecedent in 6
An anonymous reviewer argues that German CLD is not necessarily given. She provides the following discourse, in which the CLDed constituent and the resumptive together carry contrastive focus: (i) -Hat die Maria nicht neulich den Hans geküsst? ‘Hasn’t Mary kissed Hans recently?’ -Nein, den PETER, DEN hat die Maria geküsst! No the.acc Peter him has the Maria kissed ‘No, she has kissed PETER.’ This sort of example gives us more reason to think that Germanic CLD and Romance/Greek CLLD are more different than conventionally thought.
Dislocations and Information Structure 415 the common ground. We need to discuss what an ‘antecedent’ is and what the expression ‘the common ground’ means. I start by defining antecedents for dislocations. As pointed out by Villalba (2000, 2009), rightward and leftward dislocations bear a different relation to their antecedents. Leftward dislocations can refer to a subset of a referent in the common ground, or can be a member of a set or even a superset. In the following Spanish example the dislocated constituents are subsets of the antecedent (‘knives’ and ‘forks’ are subsets of the set ‘silverware’). (27) [So, where is the silverware?] Los cuchillos the knives
ya already
Los tenedores the forks
los them
los them dejé left
puse put.1sg en in
el the
sobre on
la the
mesa. table.
armario. cupboard
‘I already put the knives on the table. I left the forks in the cupboard.’ In the following example, the dislocated constituent is a superset of the antecedent: (28) [Context: So, where are the forks?] Los the
cubiertos ya silverware already
los them
he have.1sg
puesto put
sobre la on the
mesa. table
‘I put the silverware on the table already.’ Thus, D-linked dislocated constituents evoke a set of alternatives. The property of ‘evoking a set of alternatives’ is used here following the insights of Rooth’s (1985) study of focus as well as Büring’s (1999) analysis of CLD in German and Vallduví and Vilkuna’s (1998) generalization of the notion contrast (see also Büring, this volume and Repp, this volume). Let’s call this property contrast and claim that D-type dislocations are contrastive. Since dislocations are also given, the set of alternatives evoked by the dislocate must be found in the common ground rather than constituting a new referent. It is possible for a D-type left dislocation to be identical to the antecedent: (29) [Context: So, where are the forks?] Los the
tenedores forks
ya already
los them
he have.1sg
puesto put
sobre on
la the
mesa. table
‘I put the forks on the table already.’ This does not contradict that idea that D-type left dislocations are contrastive. The choice of a left dislocation (rather than a right dislocation) does open a set or sets of alternatives (i.e. dislocating ‘forks’ evokes sets such as ‘silverware’, ‘objects that should be
416 Luis López laid on the table’, ‘objects that should be stored in this cupboard’ … ). Example (27) can thus be continued as in (30): (30) … en cambio, in change
las the
cucharas spoons
no neg
sé know.1sg
por by
dónde where
paran. stay
‘the spoons, on the other hand, I don’t know where they are.’ D-type right dislocations must refer directly to a referent in the common ground. Examples (31) and (32) are Catalan. Example (31) is infelicitous because ‘the knives’, which is right dislocated, cannot take ‘silverware’ as antecedent. Sentence (31) contrasts with (32): (31) [Context: So, where is the silverware?] # Ja already
els them
vaig past.1sg
les them
vaig past.1sg
deixar leave
posar put a in
l’ the
sobre on
la the
taula, table
armari, cupboard
les the
els ganivets. the knives forquilles forks
‘I put the knives on the table. I left the forks in the cupboard.’ (32) [Context: So, where is the silverware?] Els them
vaig past.1sg
deixar leave
a in
l’ the
armari, cupboard
els the
coberts. silverware
‘I left the silverware in the cupboard.’ In (33) I provide a mid-way summary of what we have learned about the IS functions of D/H-type dislocations so far. The reader should keep in mind at least two caveats: (i) what I say here about H-type right dislocations is provisional, since there is little precious literature on the topic, (ii) this discussion only holds of those languages where the H/D-type distinction holds (for a different type of language, see Section 20.3.3). (33)
H-type
D-type
L
R
L
R
Topic promotion
Afterthought
Given+contrast
Given
Let’s turn now to the notion of ‘common ground’ (see Krifka 2008 for a useful definition as well as Rochemont, this volume). Common ground could include three
Dislocations and Information Structure 417 different types of objects, which I list here from (i) to (iii), from more to less circumscribed: (i) entities and events explicitly mentioned in the previous discourse or deictically obvious; (ii) entities and events made salient by the current communicative exchange even if not explicitly mentioned or deictically obvious; (iii) the knowledge base shared by the speakers in the communicative exchange (see Prince 1981 for a similar partition). We find that (iii) is not sufficient to license dislocation, but (ii) is. The Catalan exchange in (34) exemplifies (iii): (34) Context: Speaker A and Speaker B have just met at a social event. They have exchanged a few remarks on their job, family status, city where they live (Speaker A in Vic, Speaker B in Figueres). Then Speaker A says: Speaker A(1): # Però but
en in
viure=hi, a live=loc in Speaker A(2):
realitat fact
a dat
mi m’ me me
agradaria like.cond
Barcelona. Barcelona
Però en realitat a mí m’agradaria viure a Barcelona. ‘But actually I would rather live in Barcelona.’
Dislocation of a Barcelona is infelicitous, although it is to be expected that two Catalan speakers are very much familiar with Barcelona—it is part of their shared knowledge base. Only a regular presentational sentence will work because no mention of the city— or some other referent that includes or is included by Barcelona, such as ‘big cities’, ‘Gràcia neighborhood’ etc.—has been made or is somehow salient. Crucially, having mentioned other Catalan towns does not suffice. The reader can compare (34) with (35), (36), and (37), which work perfectly. Examples (35) and (36) exemplify (i). In (35), ‘Barcelona’ has been mentioned in the previous discourse, and therefore dislocating it is no problem: (35) Context: Speaker A and Speaker B have just met at a social event. They have exchanged a few remarks on their job, family status, city where they live. Speaker B expresses her satisfaction for living in Vic rather than Barcelona. Then Speaker A says: Speaker A(1): Doncs a mí a Barcelona m’ agradaria viure=hi. actually dat me in Barcelona me like.cond live=loc ‘Actually I would rather live in Barcelona.’ In (36), Speaker B mentions ‘a big city’, a set of entities that includes a big town like Barcelona. It is another example of (i). Consequently, dislocation is again possible:
418 Luis López (36) Context: Speaker A and Speaker B have just met at a social event. They have exchanged a few remarks on their job, family status, city where they live. Speaker B expresses her satisfaction for living in a small town rather than a big city. Then Speaker A says: Speaker A(1): Doncs Actually
a dat
mí me
a in
Barcelona Barcelona
m’ me
agradaria, like.cond
viure=hi. live=loc ‘Actually I would rather live in Barcelona.’ Let’s now explore an example of (ii). In the following Spanish example, Speaker A receives two alternative responses from Speaker B: (37) Speaker A: Speaker B(1):
Hace tiempo que no veo a ninguno de los Gómez. ‘I haven’t seen any of the Gómez’s for quite a while.’ Sí, yes
claro indeed
el the
otro other
que that
sí: a yes acc
Juan Juan
lo him
vimos saw.1pl
día en misa. day in mass
‘But you did: we saw Juan the other day at church.’ Speaker B(2):
Yo me
tampoco. neither
he have.1sg
visto seen
En in
cambio a change acc
Juan sí Juan indeed
lo him
en misa. in mass
‘Me neither. On the other hand, I have seen Juan at church’ Take Speaker B(1) first. Having dislocated a Juan in that context, a Juan is a member of the Gómez family, and Speaker B(1)’s dislocation is an example of (i). But now consider Speaker B(2). The response ‘me neither’ precludes Juan from being a member of the Gómez family. But we can still dislocate a Juan. Its dislocated status signals that it is linked to an antecedent that stands in the common ground of Speaker A and Speaker B(2). Given the sentence uttered by Speaker A, we can take the antecedent of the dislocate to consist of the set of people s that are likely to be encountered by speaker A and speaker B as they stroll around their village. This set s has become salient because of Speaker A’s utterance, although it is not explicitly mentioned or pointed at. The Gómez family is a subset of s and Juan is a member of s. Thus, the dislocation in Speaker B(2)’s exemplifies (ii). Let us finish this section with what D-type dislocations are not. The information structure label that is most commonly applied to dislocations is that of aboutness topic (see Alexiadou 2006, among many others). However, it is clear that D-type dislocations cannot be defined as aboutness topics cross-linguistically. This can be seen in the following Catalan examples:
Dislocations and Information Structure 419 (38) [Context: Chris has many talents] Però But
intel.ligent intelligent
no neg
ho it
és. is
‘But he is not intelligent’ or ‘ But intelligent, he is not’. (39) [Context: There is no furniture here, right?] Cadires chairs
si indeed
n’ some
hi loc
han have.1pl
‘There are chairs.’ Or ‘There ARE chairs.’ In (38), the dislocated constituent is a predicate adjective, which is given because the common ground includes the referent ‘Chris’ talents’. It can hardly be said that the sentence is about a predicate such as ‘intelligent’—rather, the sentence is about the referent of the null subject, the individual named ‘Chris’. Example (39) is an existential sentence. The dislocation of cadires is licensed because the common ground includes reference to ‘furniture’. But existential sentences are supposed to be the model examples of thetic propositions, which are defined by the property of not having an aboutness topic (or, alternatively, their aboutness topic is some space/time coordinates, see Erteschik-Shir 2006; Krifka 2008). Examples similar to (38) and (39) can be constructed in other languages, although not many of them have an indefinite non-specific clitic (like Catalan en) or a clitic for predicate adjective phrases (like Catalan ho). In those languages, a D-type dislocation without a clitic can be constructed. The following is in Greek: (40) Alla but
eksipnos, intelligent
den not
ine. is
‘But he/she is not intelligent.’ Or ‘But intelligent, he is not.’ The reader who does not approve of dumping may want to argue that the absence of a clitic makes (40) substantively different from the Catalan examples. Note that I do not argue that we cannot construct D-type dislocation examples in which the dislocated constituent can be claimed to be an aboutness topic. You plainly can. The question is whether this aboutness feature defines D-type dislocations as a distinct class of constructions and it seems the answer is no.
20.3.3 French: H-type dislocations take over Colloquial French uses H-type dislocations very frequently, while D-type dislocations are extremely rare (see footnote 4). The literature on French dislocations agrees that H- type dislocations are aboutness topics (Lambrecht 1981; Barnes 1985; De Cat 2007a). De
420 Luis López Cat (2007a) goes one step further and argues that if a constituent is a topic, it has to be dislocated. Consider the following contrast: (41) a. Le the
malais, Malay
c’ it
est is
difficile. difficult
‘Malay is difficult.’ b. # Le malais est difficile (42) Le the
directeur director
est là. is there
De Cat 2007a: 77 Thus, with certain types of predicates, dislocation in colloquial French is obligatory, as shown in (41b). Not by chance, the predicates that require dislocation are individual level (IL) predicates like difficult, while stage-level (SL) predicates like be there do not require dislocation (the distinction between stage-level and individual-level predicates was first established in Carlson 1977). It has been argued that IL predicates form categorical propositions, with a subject (or topic) and a predicate (or comment) (see Kuroda 1972; Ladusaw 1994). SL predicates, on the other hand, form categorical or thetic judgements. De Cat’s proposal is that the reason why (41b) is infelicitous is because an IL requires a topic and a topic, in French, must be dislocated. A survey of the literature leads me to the conclusion that French dislocates play IS roles that in other languages are split between D-type and H-type dislocations. French dislocates routinely introduce a new topic: (43) Context: [Talking about the speaker’s job in a cooking school] Enfin finally
c’était it was
en euh, (fillers)
Nancy, Nancy
elle she
aimerait love.cond
beaucoup much
ça. that
‘In the end, it was, well…, Nancy would love that.’ Barnes 1985: 19, translation mine Nancy, the dislocated constituent, has not been mentioned before and cannot be related to an antecedent. Its pragmatic function seems to be Topic Promotion, just as the regular H-type dislocates of English and Southern Romance that were discussed in Section 20.3.1. However, French dislocations can also be given and contrastive. In the following, the kitchen is an element of the set of rooms of the house, thus playing the role that in other languages would be played by a D-type dislocation:
Dislocations and Information Structure 421 (44) Context: [Talking about the rooms in the house] Moi me plus most
je I
trouve find
important important
que that d’ of
la the
cuisine kitchen
une a
maison. house
c’est it is
l’ the
endroit place
le the
‘As for myself, I think the kitchen is the most important place in the home.’ Barnes 1985: 16, translation mine Recall that, in languages where the D/H-type distinction is robust, examples of Given H-type dislocations sound infelicitous (compare (23) and (44)). The following example confirms that, unlike typical H-type dislocations, French dislocations can be given. Ça ‘this’ refers to something in the magazine the speaker is looking at: (45) Context: [Looking at a picture in a National Wildlife magazine] Ça that
c’est it is
rigolo. funny
‘That’s funny.’ Barnes 1985: 29, translation mine Thus, I conclude that French dislocations are grammatically of the H-type (as argued by De Cat 2007a, 2007b). French H-type dislocations exhibit a range of IS functions— Topic Promotion, Given, Contrastive—that in other languages are distributed among D-type and H-type dislocations.
20.4 Conclusions Dislocations seem to be pervasive in the languages of the world. Following numerous precedents, I have shown that it is descriptively productive to tease apart H-type and D- type dislocations as well as right and left dislocations. The differences between the different types of dislocations concern both their syntactic and their IS properties. I have also presented a brief description of their prosodic properties.
Chapter 21
Disc ou rse - c onfigu rat i ona l i t y Balázs Surányi
21.1 Introduction It is commonly recognized in the study of natural language syntax that a variety of sentential word order alternations can be described in terms of Information Structure (IS).1 Languages differ, nonetheless, with regard to the degree of systematicity in their IS-related word order regularities, as well as with respect to which notions of IS they syntacticalize. In a commonly adopted sense of the term, languages in which a particular phrase structure configuration is systematically and exclusively associated with some Information Structural category falling under the notions of Topic and Focus are referred to as discourse-configurational.2 While the term is due to Vilkuna (1989), the concept has gained wider currency especially due to the work of É. Kiss (1987, 1995a, 1995b).3 Hungarian is a well-known example of a discourse-configurational language. It marks Topics by fronting them to a left-peripheral position of the sentence, from which the 1 I thank the anonymous reviewers, and especially, the volume editors for their helpful comments and valuable suggestions. The support of a grant of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (#NF- 84217) and the Momentum grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (#2011-013) is gratefully acknowledged. 2 For the notions of Topic and Focus, see Krifka (2008). For reasons of space, here I will not treat syntactic effects of other notions of Information Structure, like Givenness; these could possibly fall under a broader concept of discourse-configurationality. For Givenness, see Neeleman and van de Koot (2008, this volume), Kučerová (2012), Rochemont (this volume). 3 É. Kiss (1995a: 6) limits the notion of discourse-configurationality with regard to Focus to identificational Focus, which is defined as a Focus associated with a quantificational operator expressing exhaustive identification (É. Kiss 1998, this volume; Horváth 2007, 2010).
Discourse-configurationality 423 verb can be separated by other phrases. In case the verb is a particle verb, it appears in the unmarked particle > verb order (1a). Focus surfaces in a different, though also fronted, position: unlike the Topic, it cannot be separated from the verb by other phrases, and in the case of a particle verb, the verb and the particle appear in an inverted verb > particle order (1b). (1) a. [Topic Jánost ] John.acc
tegnap yesterday
ki out
rúgta kicked
a főnök. the boss.nom
ki out
a főnök. the boss.nom
‘John was fired by the boss yesterday.’ b. Tegnap yesterday
[FocusJÁNOST ] John.acc
rúgta kicked
‘It is JOHN who the boss fired yesterday.’
(Hungarian)
A language in which some phrase structure configuration is mapped to Topic status can be referred to as topic-configurational. In a focus-configurational language, by analogy, some phrase structure configuration is associated with Focus status.4 Some languages, Hungarian included, are doubly discourse-configurational in that they are both topic- configurational and focus-configurational. Cross-linguistically the two properties are independent of each other. Although up to the 1980s it was mostly viewed as peripheral, in recent decades the complex mapping between syntax and IS has been a central research topic in generative linguistic theory. The special interest of discourse-configurationality to the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach to grammar is due to some of the key assumptions of this research paradigm. The first of these is the attribution of a fundamental role to hierarchical phrase structure in the explanation of syntactic phenomena. The second one concerns syntactic variation across languages, which P&P takes to be highly restricted, and parametric in nature. The third assumption is the Autonomy of Syntax hypothesis. Section 21.2 considers discourse-configurationality from the perspective of the first of these assumptions. It situates the notion in a wider context by clarifying its relation to (non-)configurationality, and by distinguishing it from the more inclusive concept of discourse-prominence. Section 21.3 provides an overview of major parameters of variation in discourse-configurationality. Section 21.4 turns to the relevance of the Autonomy of Syntax hypothesis in modeling discourse-configurationality. It outlines several prominent theoretical alternatives, concentrating on issues of grammatical architecture. Finally, Section 21.5 concludes with a summary of the pressing major issues at the forefront of current research.
4
The term ‘phrase structure configuration’ in principle denotes any kind of syntactic position that is defined in terms of phrase structure. See Section 21.4 for relevant discussion.
424 Balázs Surányi
21.2 The notion of discourse-configurationality 21.2.1 Discourse-configurationality and (non-)configurationality The notion of discourse-configurationality is modelled upon the notion of configurationality. Although the two properties are conceptually related, each one is subject to independent parametric variation. Configurationality is ordinarily regarded as a property of languages in which grammatical functions like subject and object are correlated with particular phrase structural positions. Having dedicated canonical positions both for the subject and for the object, English unambiguously qualifies as a configurational language. A crucial phrase structural distinction between subject and object is that the object forms a constituent together with the verb (=VP), which excludes the subject. Using pre-functional projections terminology, subject can be defined as an NP immediately contained in S, and sister to VP; while object can be equated with an NP immediately contained in VP, and sister to V (Chomsky 1965). (2) [S [NP John]
[VP [V loves]
[NP Mary]]]
On the assumption that subject and object occupy different, hierarchically asymmetrical positions, a number of subject/object asymmetries can be made to follow, without treating subject and object as theoretical primitives. These include differences in the distribution of anaphors and personal pronouns, asymmetries in word order, in quantifier scope, in negative polarity licensing, and in the availability of various displacements, to name a few examples (e.g. Chomsky 1981, 1986).5 In a wide variety of languages, which have come to be referred to as non- configurational, many, or possibly even most, of these linear and structural subject/ object asymmetries appear to be absent. Significant from our present perspective is the fact that non-configurational languages tend to have free word order as far as grammatical functions are concerned, since the phrases that overtly express the verb’s arguments are not linked to a particular phrase structure position in the sentence (see Baker 1996, 2001).6 The surface phrase structure of sentences can, instead, encode the 5 See also Hale and Keyser’s (1993, 2002) configurational approach to thematic relations, according to which theta roles are emergent (syncategorematic) properties of constituents that appear in particular syntactic configurations in the phrase structure of ‘lexical’ phrases. 6 Baker (1996, 2001) adopts Jelinek’s (1984) Pronominal Argument Hyptothesis, according to which in non-configurational languages the true arguments are pronominal elements. For Baker, these pronominals are null pro pronouns, generated in a fully configurational structure.
Discourse-configurationality 425 Information Structural status of sentence elements, among them their Topic and/or Focus role. Accordingly, a number of non-configurational languages have been shown to be discourse-configurational. For instance, East Cree has been described as syntactically marking (contrastive) Focus (Junker 2004), while the syntax of Warlpiri, a classic example of non-configurational languages, has been shown to encode both Topic and Focus (Legate 2002). In fact, the configurationality of grammatical roles and the configurationality of Topic or Focus discourse functions have even been approached as two alternative values along the same typological dimension, or in other words, as ‘two different types of configurationality’ (É. Kiss 1987: 250; Vilkuna 1989: 17–18; cf. also Sasse 1995: 1072–1074). Yet, (non-)configurationality and discourse-configurationality are mutually independent properties. On the one hand, sentence structure, and hence constituent order, in non-configurational languages is not necessarily affected by Topic or Focus status, but it can be governed by other pragmatic factors instead. These include the Person/Animacy Scale (as in Fijian, see Aranovich 2013), evidentiality (as in Quechua, see Muysken 1995), relative degrees of newsworthiness (as in Coos, Cayuga, and Ngandi, see Mithun 1987), or givenness (see Siewierska 1993), among others. Thus, non-configurationality does not implicate discourse-configurationality. On the other hand, discourse- configurationality does not entail non- configurationality either (pace Abraham et al. 1986: 4–5; see É. Kiss 1995a): systematically encoding Topic or Focus status in its sentence structure does not prevent a language from also distinguishing phrases with different grammatical functions phrase structurally. This is the case, for instance, in languages like Japanese or Korean (Li and Thompson 1976; Saito 1985). Having said that, in a language in which configurationality and discourse-configurationality co-occur, configurationality is at least partly masked in word order. This is because the phrase structure configurations associated with grammatical roles, such as those in (2), are routinely superseded in the syntactic derivation by other phrase structure configurations arising from the syntactic displacements of Topic and/or Focus constituents, such as those illustrated in (1).
21.2.2 Discourse-configurationality and discourse-prominence While the nature of the phrase structure configurations involved in discourse- configurationality has been subject to debate (for which see Section 21.4), by definition the configurations themselves must be identified in terms of syntactic phrase structure (see note 4). In this respect discourse-configurationality should be differentiated from the notion of discourse-prominence. A language is discourse-prominent (or discourse- oriented) if its sentential word order favours a grammatical description that attributes a key role to Information Structural categories, including Topic and Focus (for
426 Balázs Surányi topic-prominence, see Li and Thompson 1976: 459; for focus-prominence, see Abraham and de Meij 1986). Although the two terms are oftentimes used interchangeably, discourse-prominence is a less restrictive notion than discourse-configurationality: it requires the relevant IS categories to be systematically associated neither to particular phrase structure configurations, nor even to any phrase structure configurations to begin with. I illustrate each of the latter two options in turns. Aghem is a Focus-prominent Bantu language, having a designated post-verbal Focus position (the so-called ‘immediately after verb’ or IAV position; see Watters 1979; Horváth 1995; Downing and Hyman, this volume). Polinsky and Hyman (2010), who provide a purely syntactic account of the Aghem IAV position, argue that what on the surface appears to be a designated immediately post-verbal locus for Focus, in fact corresponds to a set of syntactically restricted, but structurally different (base-generated) positions in the verb phrase. If there is no particular phrase structure configuration in which Focus systematically appears, then although Aghem can still be categorized as focus-prominent, it is not focus-configurational. In many languages the sentence-final Focus position has also been described as being structurally non-uniform. The Focus position at issue is sentence-final because what linearly ends up at the right edge of the sentence is mapped in these languages (by default) to the highest sentence-level prominence at the level of prosodic representation, viz. the Nuclear Stress (NS). Zubizarreta (1998) describes the Spanish and Italian sentence-final Focus position in these general terms (see also Vallduví 1992; Samek-Lodovici 2005). According to her account, if in a transitive sentence the subject is the Focus, then the object will undergo displacement in order to allow the subject Focus to end up in a linearly sentence-final position, where it will receive the NS in a default prosodic representation. I illustrate this with the VSO/VOS alternation in (3), analysing the VOS order for ease of exposition as derived by object-scrambling to the left of the subject (as argued by Ordóñez 1998). (3) a. Todos los días every the day
compraV buys
[VP Juan [V′ tV Juan
el diario ]]. the newspaper
b. Who buys the newspaper every day? Todos los días
compraV
el diarioOBJ [VP Juan [V′ tV
‘Juan buys the newspaper every day.’
tOBJ
]]. (Spanish)
In non-contrastive contexts, (3a) can be interpreted either as a broad focus sentence or with focus on the object, while (3b) only has a subject-focus interpretation. Both the object-focus in (3a) and the subject-focus in (3b) are sentence-final, receiving the default nuclear prominence of the sentence, nevertheless they are in two different phrase structural positions: the Subject is in a specifier of VP, while the Object is in a complement position. More generally, although this is to be determined on a case-by-case basis, sentence-final Focus positions in languages with sentence-final NS are susceptible to an
Discourse-configurationality 427 account in terms of prosodic requirements of Focus. The Focus needs to appear in a particular position at the level of prosodic representation, rather than at the level of phrase structure.7 In the same way, the favoured position for Focus in verb-final languages, namely the immediately pre-verbal position (Gunned 1988), is arguably also non-uniform structurally, and for the same reasons: the fact that it is linearly pre-verbal has been described as resulting from a general NS-Focus correspondence requirement (e.g. Neeleman and Reinhart 1998; Costa 1998 for Dutch; Ishihara 2001 for Japanese).8 To sum up the foregoing discussion, in some languages the phrase structural configuration in which Focus appears is variable; it is uniform only at the level of prosodic representation. From a syntactic perspective, in such languages the uniform sentence-final or verb-adjacent linear position of Focus is merely an epiphenomenon, falling outside the scope of discourse-configurationality. At the same time, as these positions are grammatically defined by the notion of Focus, they will come under the more general rubric of discourse-prominence.
21.3 Variation in discourse-configurationality 21.3.1 The nature of the variation Discourse-configurationality, similarly to (non-)configurationality, has been viewed variously as a macro-parametric feature (Methuen 1987; É. Kiss 1995a; Ritter and Rosen 2005) or as a property of languages regulated by a small number of interacting parameters (see Miyagawa 2010). Alongside discrete parametric options, it has also been suggested that the extent to which different languages grammaticalize different discourse roles varies along a continuum (Sasse 1995; Öhl 2010). In this section, we survey the main dimensions of variation in discourse-configurationality, both within and across its two main manifestations: namely topic-configurationality and focus-configurationality. This includes variation in terms of the syntactic positions (Section 21.3.2) and the IS categories involved (Section 21.3.3), and in terms of the uniqueness vs non-uniqueness in the mapping between IS categories and syntactic positions (Section 21.3.4). For a more
7 For different prosodic accounts of Focus-related marked word orders, some of which assume the T-model coupled with a syntactic focus-feature (cf. section 21.4.1), while others posit a direct interface between prosody and meaning, see Truckenbrodt (this volume), Zubizarreta (this volume), and Samek-Lodovici (this volume). 8 The IAV Focus position in Bantu has also been analysed in prosodic, rather than syntactic, terms; see Costa and Kula (2008) for Bemba. For a prosodic account of the pre-verbal Focus position in Hungarian, see Szendrői (2003).
428 Balázs Surányi comprehensive discussion of word order effects of Topic and Focus, see Neeleman and van de Koot (this volume); and for an extensive review of data drawn from different languages, see the studies in Part IV of this handbook.
21.3.2 Syntactic configurations Discourse-configurational languages, at least on the surface, differ with regard to the phrase structure position with which they associate a particular IS category of Topic or Focus. Beginning with topic-configurationality, a Topic typically occupies a left- peripheral position of the sentence (Halliday 1967–68; Li and Thompson 1976: 465; Gundel 1988). The term left periphery refers to the region outside and to the left of the nucleus of the clause containing all the arguments in their canonical positions (see Rizzi 1997). A basic distinction is usually made between Topics that are syntactically part of the clause itself, and those that are syntactically (and prosodically) detached from it. Topics in Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD) are of the latter kind: they are attached externally to a syntactically complete sentence.9 Hanging Topics usually show no connectivity into the host clause, such as case-matching with a connected element inside it; they appear in a default case form (e.g. van Riemsdijk 1997; Frey 2004a), see (4). In this respect HTLD differs from Contrastive Topic Left Dislocation (CLD), in which the Topic is connected to a resumptive pronominal element inside the sentence. In CLD the Topic exhibits (some) connectivity effects, such as case-connectivity, in relation to the clause-internal element, see (5). This has been taken as evidence that the Topic in CLD is syntactically part of the clause containing the resumptive (for an overview, see Alexiadou 2006; for an account that challenges this view, see Ott 2014). In Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) (6), the resumptive correlate takes the form of a clitic pronoun (as in Greek, or Romance languages like Italian or Catalan); see Cinque (1990). (4) Dieser Professor, wo hat den die Studenten kennengelernt? this.nom professor where has dpron.acc the students got. acquainted ‘This professor, where did the students get acquainted with him?’ (HTLD, German) (5) Az the
édes sweet
süteményeket, cakes.acc
azokat those.acc
szereti. likes
‘The sweet cakes, he likes.’ (6) To Yani the Yani. acc
*(ton) he. acc
‘Yanis, I met at the Party.’ 9 Topics
(CLD, Hungarian) idha saw.1sg
sto at.the
party party (CLLD, Greek)
in HTLD constructions are also referred to as external Topics, following Aissen’s (1992) analysis of Mayan languages.
Discourse-configurationality 429 As opposed to Left Dislocation constructions, plain Topicalization is a simple instance of syntactic movement in which the topicalized element is related to an unfilled gap (trace) inside the clause, as in (1a) above. While designated Topic positions tend to occur at the left periphery of sentences, Topic status may also be associated with other positions. In one major type of Right Dislocation (RD), exemplified by She’s very nice, your Mum, the right-dislocated element is also apparently topical. Although it is discourse-anaphoric (Given), it is not clear that it has the status of an aboutness Topic (López 2009).10 Sentence-medial (or ‘low’) Topic positions have also been identified. For instance, Chinese has a unique Topic position below the subject (Paul 2002). Frey (2004b) argues that German is topic-configurational with regard to a sentence-medial aboutness Topic position that is located above the base position of sentence adverbials. Moving on to focus-configurationality, cross-linguistically the syntactic strategies of focus-marking characteristically belong to one of two main types. The position that Focus occupies may be sentence-peripheral or adjacent to the verb. The former may be in the sentence left periphery, as in Greek (Tsimpli 1995; see Skopeteas, this volume), Finnish (Vilkuna 1995), and Somali (Lecarme 1999), or in the right-periphery, as in American Sign Language (Wilbur 1994; see Kimmelman and Pfau, this volume). Some languages make use of both peripheries (such as Somali, where Focus is normally left-peripheral, but it is right-peripheral in the presence of a left-peripheral focus expletive, Lecarme 1999), although the interpretations in the two positions may differ (often in terms of contrastiveness, as in Russian, see Neeleman and Titov 2009). The focus position aligned with the verb may be a right-adjacent position, as in Aghem (Bantu, Watters 1979; see Downing and Hyman, this volume) or Western Bade (Chadic, Tuller 1992), or left-adjacent, as in Basque (Ortiz de Urbina 1989; see Arregi, this volume), Hungarian (Finno-Ugric, Horváth 1986; see É. Kiss, this volume), or Malayalam (Jayeselaan 2001). A Focus position may be both sentence-peripheral and verb-adjacent at the same time, as is the case in languages like Basque, Hungarian, Spanish, and Romanian, in which both the Focus and the right-adjacent verb are raised to the left periphery. The two types of positions may also co-exist within a language, as in Western Bade (Schuh 1982; Tuller 1992), and in Ngizim and Tangale (where right-adjacency to the verb is slightly less strict, Tuller 1992). Although they constitute the predominant cross- linguistic options, sentence- peripheral and verb-adjacent Focus positions are not the only two possibilities. For instance, dedicated non-verb-adjacent sentence-medial focus positions have been argued for German by Frey (2004b) and Grewendorf (2005), and for Dutch by Neeleman and van de Koot (2008), in their analysis of scrambling in the middle field. In a different type of case, a normally right-aligned Focus position may end up non-sentence- final if it is followed by a right-dislocated element. In such a scenario an intonational 10
For an overview of both left and right dislocation constructions, see Cecchetto (1999) and López (this volume).
430 Balázs Surányi break following it may nonetheless allow the Focus to occupy a right-edge position with regard to the intonation phrase in which it is contained (for Italian, see Samek-Lodovici 2006; cf. also the discussion of sentence-final Focus in Section 21.2.2). This is of course only a glimpse at the range of typological variation in the syntactic marking of Topic and Focus (from which we have excluded the issue of morphological marking).11 In the face of this apparent variation, it has been a central objective in the study of discourse-configurationality to uncover universals in the syntactic configurations that may underlie the positioning of Topic and Focus (under the proviso that some of the positions involved may turn out to be defined not syntactically but prosodically, see Section 21.2.2). We return to the nature of these phrase structure configurations as part of a discussion of the grammatical modelling of discourse-configurationality in Section 21.4.
21.3.3 IS categories As it is apparent from the foregoing discussion, discourse-configurationality manifests itself in heterogeneous ways across languages. Accordingly, several prominent types of discourse-configurationality are worth differentiating from a descriptive perspective, both according to the IS categories involved, which is the topic of this subsection, and according to the (non-)uniqueness in the mapping between IS categories and syntactic positions, to which we turn in Section 21.3.4. As defined in the Introduction, the property of discourse-configurationality holds of languages in which there is at least one phrase structure position such that all elements in that position are exclusively mapped to a unique information structural category that falls under the notions of Topic and Focus.12 Two apsects of this definition are to be emphasized. First, it does not admit languages with a syntactic position that is loosely associated with (some type of) Topic or/and Focus status, albeit in a non-exclusive way. For instance, in German a wide range of elements are associated with a contrastive Focus interpretation if they appear in the left-peripheral pre-V2 position. That, however, does not render German discourse-configurational, because the same pre-V2 position can also host phrases that are not interpreted as a contrastive Focus, including subjects, sentence adverbials, contrastive Topics, and non-contrastive Topics originating in the local clause (see Fanselow 2002).13 A second aspect of the above notion of discourse-configurationality that is worth highlighting is that it does not necessarily require a language to map the designated 11 This
chapter concentrates on discourse-configurationality at the clausal level. For discourse- configurationality in the nominal phrase, see Giusti (2006), Bernstein (2001), Haegeman (2004), and Aboh (2010, this volume). 12 Wh-phrases occupying a dedicated Focus position are put aside, noting that they are commonly assumed to function as a Focus (Rochemont 1986; Horváth 1986). 13 This is so if the conservative assumption is adopted that all elements immediately preceding the Verb Second position occupy the same phrase structural position (for an alternative, see Frey 2006).
Discourse-configurationality 431 position at issue to an unqualified, broad notion of Topic or Focus, but also allows their information structural sub-categories to serve as values of the mapping function. Accordingly, Spanish, for instance, is deemed discourse-configurational on account of the fact that the elements in its left-peripheral ‘CLLD position’ are obligatorily interpreted as a contrastive Topic (Arregi 2003).14 As for Focus status, it is in fact doubtful whether any language demonstrates discourse-configurationality with respect to the general notion of Focus in the Roothian sense, which is based broadly on the relevance of alternatives and includes many different uses (including highlighting parallels in interpretation, as in so-called farmer-sentences like An AMErican farmer met a CaNAdian farmer, see Rooth 1992; Krifka 2008; see also Rooth, this volume). Instead, focus-configurational languages typically encode specific information structural sub- categories of Focus in their phrase structure, such as contrastive Focus, identificational Focus, and information Focus.15 Discourse-configurationality can be restricted in a language to a particular information structural sub-category of Focus or Topic in a way that cuts across these two IS notions. For instance, in Finnish a contrastive Topic must be fronted to a left-peripheral position, as in (7a). The same position, however, may alternatively be occupied by a contrastive Focus. Thus, (7a) is felicitous both in the context of (7b) and in the context of (7c). This left-peripheral position is unavailable to non-contrastive Topics or non- contrastive Foci (see Vilkuna 1995; Vallduví and Vilkuna 1998). From this perspective, then, Finnish is discourse-configurational with respect to the IS category of Contrast.16 (7) a. Tukholmaan Stockholm.to
Pekka Pekka
lensi flew
Finnairilla. Finnair.with
‘To Stockholm, Pekka flew with Finnair.’ / ‘It is Stockholm that Pekka flew to with Finnair.’
(Finnish)
b. Which airlines did Pekka fly with to which city? c. Did Pekka fly with Finnair to Coppenhagen? In brief, a second aspect of variation in discourse-configurationality concerns which IS category it involves. 14 The ‘CLLD position’ in Spanish is a Topic position, unaccompanied by verb inversion. A phrase in this position, depending on its syntactic and semantic nature, may or may not be associated with a resumptive clitic pronoun (Arregi 2003; cf. also López, this volume). 15 The latter IS notions overlap with one another; languages may also display discourse- configurationality with regard to their various intersections (e.g. É. Kiss 1998). Information Focus is taken to be a Focus that corresponds to the information gap in the current, possibly implicit information question being addressed (Roberts 1998). This IS category is orthogonal to ‘new information’ (Selkirk 2008; Rochemont 2013, this volume). 16 Contrast is assumed here to be a dependent property for which Topic or Focus status is a prerequisite (see Neeleman and Vermeulen 2012). For different notions of Contrast, see Repp (this volume).
432 Balázs Surányi
21.3.4 Uniqueness Typically, discourse-configurational languages are characterized by a lax form of discourse-configurationality, which can be termed weak discourse-configurationality. In addition to having at least one phrase structural position that is mapped to a unique IS category, a weakly discourse-configurational language also has at least one other position that hosts elements that may (but need not) be associated with the same IS category. In other words, in weakly discourse-configurational languages the unambiguous syntactic marking of a particular IS category is optional. For instance, English and Hungarian are weakly discourse-configurational with respect to Contrast—although they employ two different syntactic constructions to mark it. In English, a fronted, left-peripheral position, unaccompanied by subject– auxiliary inversion or resumption, is mapped to either contrastive Topic or contrastive Focus status (Culicover 1991). In Hungarian, it is the CLD construction that maps the left-peripheral phrase exclusively to contrastive Topic or contrastive Focus status; see (6) above for an example.17 Crucially, in both of these languages, a contrastive (Topic or Focus) interpretation is available in at least one other position. Of particular relevance to the notion of weak discourse-configurationality is the syntactic behaviour of contrastive Focus in a remarkably wide range of languages. It is a cross-linguistically recurrent scenario that preposing a Focus to a left-peripheral position is associated with some special pragmatic import, not infrequently: Contrast (cf. Drubig 2003). Characteristically, such languages make available the same pragmatically marked interpretation outside the fronted position as well, rendering them only weakly configurational with respect to contrastive Focus (e.g. Italian, Rizzi 1997; Belletti 2004; Bianchi and Bocci 2012; Spanish, Zubizarreta 1998; Korean, Vermeulen 2009; Finnish, Molnár and Järventausta 2003; Russian, Neeleman and Titov 2009; for a similar distribution of corrective Focus in Basque, see Ortiz de Urbina 2002; for Georgian, see Skopeteas and Fanselow 2010). Optionality in focus-fronting to a dedicated Focus position, hence weak discourse-configurationality, is not necessarily limited to contrastive Foci. For instance, in Sicilian (Cruschina 2012) and Greek (Gryllia 2008, Skopetas, this volume), both contrastive and information Foci are fronted only optionally. Allowing Foci to appear in more than one position may create the illusion in a language that syntactic focus-marking is optional, hence the language at issue is only weakly discourse-configurational. For instance, in addition to applying Focus fronting as in (1b), Hungarian also permits a Focus to remain in situ. However, the ex situ and the in situ Foci systematically differ in their interpretation, therefore there is no genuine optionality in fronting. All and only identificational Foci must be fronted to a dedicated left-peripheral pre-verbal position, and all and only plain information Foci must remain in situ (É. Kiss 1998, this volume; Horváth 2007, 2010). In other words, identificational Focus status is 17 For Italian CLLD, see Benincà and Poletto (2004). In many languages, CLD is narrowly limited to contrastive Topics (see Neeleman and van de Koot, this volume). While there is cross-linguistic variation with regard to C(L)LD, HTLD is universally associated with Topic status.
Discourse-configurationality 433 mandatory to be unambiguously marked in the syntax of Hungarian.18 Languages in which the mapping between a particular syntactic position and an information structural category of Topic or/and Focus is bi-unique can be termed strongly discourse-configurational. With regard to Focus, strong discourse-configurationality is in fact rather rare to find cross-linguistically (if it exists at all, see note 18). The same pattern is less exceptional for contrastive Topic status, for which both strong and weak discourse-configurationality is attested.19 For instance, contrastive Topics are obligatorily fronted to a dedicated left-peripheral position in Japanese (Vermeulen 2013) and Hungarian (see Lipták 2011), while they also can appear outside their dedicated left-peripheral position in Korean (Vermeulen 2009; for Dutch, see Neeleman and van de Koot 2008). Strong and weak discourse- configurationality are complementary notions that divide the space of variation into two main types. Yet, further types may also be serviceable as descriptive categories. One special subtype that appears to be attested cross-linguistically differs only minimally from strong discourse-configurationality, as defined above. It is comprised by languages which must unambiguously mark an IS category in one of several distinct phrase structure positions, each of which is dedicated to that particular IS status. For instance, Aboh (2007) argues that Gungbe and Zulu are characterized by obligatory Focus-movement to either one of two Focus positions, associated with the same IS category of Focus. While the higher one of these two Focus positions is in the clausal left periphery, the lower one is above the verb phrase.20 It is reasonable to subsume such scenarios under a broader notion of strong discourse- configurationality: in this broad sense strong discourse-configurationality is characterized by a bi-unique mapping between phrase structure and IS, albeit not necessarily with regard to a single position, but—disjunctively—with regard to a set of positions.
21.4 Modelling discourse-configurationality 21.4.1 Autonomy of Syntax and syntactic IS-features In this last part of the chapter, we turn to some outstanding theoretical issues in the modelling of discourse-configurationality, outlining various current approaches. The 18
Notwithstanding this generalization (to which certain systematic exceptions exist, Surányi 2004), it is questionable whether identificational Focus is in fact an IS category in its own right (see Horváth 2007, 2010). 19 The issue of optionality in fronting to a Topic position is more involved in the case of non- contrastive Topics, mainly due to difficulties in reliably identifying them (Portner and Yabushita 1998, Roberts 2011; see also Büring, this volume). 20 Compare Tuller (1992), Jayeselaan (2001), and Belletti (2004). In phase theory (Chomsky 2000, 2001), the Focus positions at the periphery of the clause and the verb phrase may be subsumed under a single notion of phase-peripheral Focus position.
434 Balázs Surányi section considers the various roles that narrow syntactic IS-features play in recent models couched in transformational grammar (Section 21.4.1), discusses two challenges that the syntactic marking of Topic and Focus pose with particular regard to the Minimalist framework (Section 21.4.2), and outlines a cartographic and a non-cartographic syncategorematic approach to Topic and Focus interpretation (Section 21.4.3). As is the case more generally, differences between alternative accounts are in no small part a function of fundamental assumptions regarding the architecture of grammar. In the case of discourse-configurationality, these differences are mostly related to the assumption of the Autonomy of Syntax and its implementation. The term Autonomy of Syntax covers a variety of distinct concepts (see Newmeyer 1998). For the present purposes, the autonomy thesis imposes the restriction that syntactic rules and principles can make no reference to notions of meaning, including Information Structure, and any mapping relating syntax and IS goes unidirectionally from syntax to IS (semantics/pragmatics plays an ‘interpretive’ role). No such IS-to- syntax mapping rules as ‘Topic must be clause-initial’ and ‘Focus must be clause-final’ are available. The autonomy hypothesis is a restrictive meta-principle of grammar that has by and large been adhered to in Chomskyan models, which constitute the theoretical purview of the present chapter.21 Competing Chomskyan approaches to discourse-configurationality differ significantly in the way they implement the autonomy hypothesis. Consider the grammatical architecture of the (inverted) T-model (aka Y-model), which has been the standard grammatical architecture for most of the history of transformational grammar. In this model both IS (a part of sentence ‘meaning’) and the phonological component are interpretive of syntax, and there is no direct interface between IS and phonological form. In order to account for the systematic relations between distinct information structural interpretations and their corresponding prosodic expression, the conditions triggering different IS representations must be syntactically represented. This has been a key role of discourse-related formal (syntactic) features like the [focus] feature, postulated by Jackendoff (1972). A [focus] feature establishes the needed link between focus interpretation and focus prosody.22 Importantly, the postulation of an IS-feature in syntax is not in itself a compromise to the Autonomy thesis, as long as no syntactic rules make reference to that feature. For instance, in Rooth’s (1992) influential theory of focus interpretation the [focus] feature enters the computation of meaning and prosodic form, but is otherwise syntactically inert (the same holds for Jackendoff 1972).23 Paradoxically, a model in which syntax 21 Approaches grounded in the functionalist tradition, which reject the autonomy thesis, are beyond the scope of this chapter (e.g. van Valin 2005; Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008; see also Primus 1993). 22 From the perspective of compositionality of meaning, narrow syntactic IS-features have another function: they furnish an appropriate formal object as input to the semantic derivation of the correlated IS interpretations (see Rooth 1992, this volume; Büring, this volume). 23 Although it does not enter transformational rules, Selkirk’s (1984, 1995) [focus] feature (F-marking) is not fully inert in narrow syntax, as it partakes in a syntactic mechanism of [focus] feature projection that is crucially sensitive to syntactic structure. For a critique of Selkrik’s (1984, 1995) theory of focus projection, see Büring (2006) and Arregi (this volume).
Discourse-configurationality 435 itself does not make any reference to a particular IS-feature lacks any syntax-internal motivation to postulate it as a formal syntactic feature to begin with, which renders that IS-feature altogether different from other narrow syntactic features. The alternative is to assume formal IS-features to be involved in conditioning syntactic rules, among them, movement operations. This is the basis of many narrow syntactic accounts of the word order effects of Topic and Focus across languages, reviewed in Section 21.3. A prevailing strategy to derive the positional restrictions involving Topic and Focus has been to posit corresponding IS-features on syntactic heads (distinct from Topic and Focus consitutents), with which a Topic or Focus is required to establish a local syntactic relation, by movement or base-generation. Horváth (1981, 1986) proposed that the [focus] feature is assigned by a syntactic head under government and adjacency in ways analogous to the assignment of structural Case. She applied this account to the obligatory displacement of the Focus as well as its adjacency to the verb in various languages; see Section 21.3.2. Brody (1990), on the other hand, assimilated the behaviour of Focus in Hungarian to that of interrogative wh-phrases by postulating a Focus Criterion, as a counterpart to Rizzi’s (1990) Wh-Criterion. Concurrently, Brody also proposed a dedicated functional projection, commonly labelled FocP, to house a fronted Focus. A criterion-based account requires a phrase (here: the Focus) bearing some feature [F](here: the [focus] feature) to be in a specifier-head relation with a functional head that bears the same feature [F] (Rizzi 1990).24 (8) is a partial analysis of (1b), with the fronted object NP appearing in the specifier of FocP (and the raised verb incorporated into the Foc head). (8) …
[FocP [NP John.acc][focus] [Foc´ [Foc [V fired] Foc[focus]] … tV … tNP …]]
The syntactic licensing of Case-and agreement-features as well as the Wh-/N eg-/Focus- criterion are unified and subsumed under the notion of feature checking in Minimalism (Chomsky 1993, 1995). Feature checking is the licensing of an uninterpretable feature by some matching interpretable feature, which takes place provided that the two enter a sufficiently local syntactic configuration. In (8) the [focus] feature is taken to be uninterpretable on the Foc functional head, and is in need of licensing (checking). As the [focus] feature is interpreted on the NP John, it can license the [focus] feature on Foc. Ultimately, this is what triggers the movement of the Focus NP to the specifier of FocP (Brody 1995).25 Models that posit IS-features as properties of heads of functional projections are able to account both for the distributional properties of Topic and Focus in a language and for 24
Brody (1990) conceptualized the [focus] feature on the Foc head as a categorial feature; see Rizzi (1997) for a generalized Focus Criterion. For early syntactic analyses of Topic-fronting relying on a formal feature [topic], see for instance Kim (1988) and Lasnik and Saito (1992). See Mallen (1992) and Rizzi (1997) for an analogous Topic Criterion. 25 A great deal of minimalist work assumes that [focus] and [topic] features enter feature checking, though Chomsky himself has never explicitly adopted such a view (Chomsky 1993 et seq; see also Section 4.2).
436 Balázs Surányi the relevant intra-and cross-linguistic variation in a uniform way, by postulating (quasi- )lexical differences in the syntactic properties of the relevant functional heads. Among others, these differences include their location in the structural hierarchy (e.g. a high and a low FocP, Jayeselaan 2001; Belletti 2004) and their ability to recur or to host multiple specifiers (e.g. Serbo-Croatian allows multiple Focus fronting, Stjepanović 2003; Hungarian does not, Surányi 2004). Given that analogous syntactic parameters govern the distribution of syntactic elements more generally (see Chomsky 1995), no dedicated grammatical mechanism is invoked to account for the syntax of Topic and Focus. Reference to IS-features in syntactic processes makes the syntactic reflections of IS modellable within narrow syntax without making direct reference to IS notions. There is no denying the fact, however, that such a use of IS-features voids the Autonomy of Syntax hypothesis of much of its empirical content: through formal IS-features syntax is empowered to refer to notions of meaning, contravening the spirit, although not the letter, of autonomy.26
21.4.2 Discourse-configurationality and Minimalism In relation to the syntactic marking of Topic and Focus, several issues are outstanding in the specific context of the minimalist research programme. One of these is related to Chomsky’s (1995: 228) restrictive principle of Inclusiveness. This principle states that a complex syntactic object can only come to have a syntactic property if it is a property of some lexical item that it contains. Assuming Inclusiveness, the Focus constituent can come to bear the [focus] feature only if [focus] is a feature of one of the lexical items contained in it. The problem is that features like [focus], [topic], or [contrast] are, plainly, not features of lexical items; thus Inclusiveness is violated (Zubizarreta 1998: 30; see also Kidwai 1999; Szendrői 2004; see Neeleman and Szendrői 2004; Horváth 2010 for further discussion).27 A second minimalist principle of key relevance to the syntactic marking of Topic and Focus is the economy of movement, according to which no movement takes place unless it serves the licensing of an uninterpretable feature (Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2001, 2004). As unlicensed uninterpretable features result in an ungrammatical derivation, movements are generally obligatory. As discussed in Section 21.3.4, however, a range of IS-related movements appear to be genuinely optional. This is an apparent problem for the principle of economy, which predicts that optional movements do not exist. Not all cases of positional optionality involve optionality in movement, however. Recall from Section 21.3.4 the optional fronting of certain types of Foci in Italian, 26 For further arguments against narrow syntactic IS- features, see Fanselow (2006, 2008, 2012), Zimmermann (2008), Horváth (2010), and Fanselow and Lenertová (2011). 27 One possible response to this quandary is to limit IS- related features to categorial features of dedicated functional heads, see Section 4.3. Another alternative is to treat all Foci/Topics as elements combining with a possibly null focus-/topic-particle that can bear the IS-feature as a lexical property. Such particles would be relatively unselective with regard to the syntactic category of their host (Bayer 1996; Horváth 2007; Cable 2010; cf. also Rooth 1985: ch. 3).
Discourse-configurationality 437 Basque, Sicilian, and Greek. In these languages non-fronted foci must appear sentence- finally. This particular type of optionality may be analysed as involving obligatory movement to either one of two distinct possible landing sites, rather than a free choice between movement and no movement. Alternatively, the Focus constituent may turn out to target the very same structurally left-peripheral Focus position in both cases, with the surface word order difference deriving from the IS status of the remaining part of the sentence. In particular, sentences with a final Focus may differ from those with a left- peripheral Focus only in that in the former case the non-focus (background) part of the sentence has Topic status, and as such it has moved to a Topic position to the left of the left-peripheral Focus (9) (for empirical arguments in favour of this account of Basque, see Ortiz de Urbina 2002; for the same derivation of sentence-final contrastive Focus in Italian, see Belletti 2004: 29; cf. also Samek-Lodovici 2006). As both movements are obligatory on the associated IS interpretation, no problem arises for the economy of movement. (9) [Topic Ardoa wine
ekarri
diot ] [Focus Andoniri ]
brought
AUX
‘I brought the wine to ANDONI.’
Andoni.to (Basque)
Among purported cases of optional IS-related movement a great many can be convincingly analysed as being only apparent. Those that defy such a characterization pose a genuine challenge to the minimalist principle of economy of syntactic derivation. Feature-checking based models of IS-related movements also face an issue of a different nature. Namely, the checking of discourse-features is unlike feature- checking as known from A-movements. In A-movements triggered by feature- checking needs, features receive one of several different values (e.g. values for number and person) and checking between the moved element (Goal) and the functional head (Probe) is mutual (e.g. the subject NP checks person and number features on finite T, while the latter checks the Case feature on the former; Chomsky 2000, 2001, Pesetsky and Torrego 2004). Partly for these reasons and partly because of the apparent threat posed to the autonomy thesis, Chomsky (2000 et seq) rejects the idea that the checking of dedicated features is involved in the domain of discourse-related movements. These movements are still triggered to perform feature-checking, nevertheless: namely, the checking of Edge-features (a generalized type of EPP-features) on the relevant Probe functional heads. Whether or not an Edge-feature is assigned to a functional head before it is Merged in the derivation is regulated by a general economy condition on optional rules (Chomsky 2000, 2001; see Reinhart 2006): (10) Interface Effect Condition An optional rule can apply only when needed to yield a new outcome [at the interface with semantics/discourse].
438 Balázs Surányi In this implementation too, the movement operation itself does not look to semantic/ pragmatic interpretation for its licensing. Nevertheless, syntax must consult the interpretive component to assess whether the assignment of the Edge-feature satisfies the economy condition in (10). Thus the fact that the syntactic operation of Edge-feature assignment is contingent on interpretation, specifically, on a comparison of two interpretations, remains a compromise to the autonomy thesis.
21.4.3 From cartography to syncategorematic rules of interpretation In the general approach to the syntax of Topic and Focus in terms of functional projections, the Focus or Topic constituent must ordinarily appear in a specifier position of a functional head that bears a corresponding formal feature, as in (8) above. Particular accounts may differ with regard to whether the functional heads hosting the [focus] or [topic] features are heads with an independent existence, such as T(ense) (as in Aissen 1992; Horváth 1995; Miyagawa 2010; Surányi 2012), or whether they are dedicated to hosting Focus or Topic, such as Foc and Top (as in Brody 1990, 1995; Rizzi 1997). This latter type of account is characteristic of the so-called cartographic approach to syntax. The cartographic approach draws up a detailed functional map of sentence structure in terms of an ordered set of functional projections, many of which are dedicated to specific information structural roles, especially—though not exclusively—in the left periphery (Rizzi 1997, 2001; Belletti 2004; Benincà and Poletto 2004). To illustrate, drawing on Rizzi’s (2001) hierarchy, Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007) propose the cartography of this clausal periphery in (11) below. The specifier of ShiftP is the position of shifted (‘new’) aboutness Topics, which is above the location of contrastive Topics. These are higher than the position of left-peripheral Focus, which is in turn followed in the hierarchy by (possibly recursive) familiar aboutness Topics. (11) [ForceP [ShiftP [ContrP [IntP [FocP [FamP* [FinP [IP … The cartographic approach has contributed a great deal of detailed, comparative knowledge regarding the distribution of constituents with different discourse functions in a variety of languages (for an overview of alternative cartographic accounts, see Aboh, this volume). The cartographic approach has been both criticized and defended from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review and assess the arguments here (see van Craenenbroeck 2009; Cinque and Rizzi 2010). I restrict myself to merely pointing out one conceptual problem for variants of the model that assume both a [focus]/[topic] feature on the Focus/Topic constituent and a dedicated FocP/TopP projection. In such models there is a degree of unappealing redundancy with regard to the mapping from syntax to Focus/Topic interpretation: the Focus/Topic
Discourse-configurationality 439 status of a constituent is encoded both by the IS-feature it bears and by the IS-related categorial feature of the dedicated functional projection that houses it in a specifier position (FocP/TopP). The redundancy is only aggravated if the dedicated functional heads themselves are also associated with [focus]/[topic] features, in addition to their corresponding categorial feature. This argument from redundancy favours a variant of the cartographic model that encodes IS-features only in the syntactic category of the dedicated functional projection and does not concurrently postulate IS-features on Focus and Topic constituents. A constituent that is associated (at some stage of the syntactic derivation) with a FocP or TopP position will receive a Focus or Topic interpretation as a function of the syntactic category of its host functional projection FocP/TopP. In other words, in this type of model, Focus/Topic interpretation is the result of syncategorematic mapping rules; it is a configurational, rather than a featural, property of the syntactic constituents occupying the relevant positions (cf. also note 5). Syncategorematic rules of interpretation do not necessarily rely on categorial [focus]/ [topic] features in the local context of Focus/Topic constituents, that is, on dedicated functional projections. Neeleman and van de Koot (2008) propose discourse templates, which are syncategorematic rules of interpretation that make no reference in their input to IS-features in any form, not even in the guise of dedicated projections. The particular mapping rules they postulate are (12b,c), which apply to the configuration in (12a). (12) a. [N1 XP [N2 … ]], with XP A-bar moved out of, and adjoined to, node N b. If XP is interpreted as a (contrastive) Topic, then interpret N2 as Comment. c. If XP is interpreted as a (contrastive) Focus, then interpret N2 as Background. Neeleman and van de Koot (2008) demonstrate that these mapping rules can explain both the basic flexibility in the range of (in situ and derived) positions in which contrastive Topic and Focus interpretations are available in Dutch, and the complex set of restrictions that apply to syntactic scenarios in which more than one phrase is interpreted as a contrastive Topic or Focus. Both of these are cumbersome to derive for the cartographic approach, either in its IS-feature-based or in its syncategorematic implementation (for an extension of this account to Korean, see Vermeulen 2009). There is a price to pay, however, for the lack of IS-features in syntax. In particular, in order to capture prosody–meaning correspondences, the grammatical architecture needs to be enriched with a direct interface between IS and prosody (cf. note 7). With such an interface added to the T-model, one key task is to minimize the redundancy in empirical coverage between the prosody–IS mapping and the syntax–IS mapping, which requires a systematic investigation of the division of labour between the two interface subsystems. The issue is central to the current research agenda (for relevant discussion, see Zubizarreta, this volume, Samek-Lodovici, this volume, and Truckenbrodt, this volume); most of the work still lies ahead.
440 Balázs Surányi
21.5 Conclusion The addition of the notion of discourse-configurationality to the configurational/ non-configurational typology was motivated by the recognition that the InformationStructural notions of Topic and Focus may be just as systematically associated with particular phrase structure positions in some languages as the grammatical roles of argument phrases are in overtly configurational languages. This recognition has been driving an ever-expanding body of research into the formal syntactic underpinnings of Information Structure, and into parameters of variation in this domain. Key questions at the forefront of this research concern the division of labour between prosody and syntax in capturing word order regularities in the expression of IS, the status of formal IS-features in narrow syntax (if any), and the nature and role of the syntactic configurations involved in the mapping between syntax and IS.
Chapter 22
On the Expression of Focus in the Metrical Grid and in THE Prosodic Hierarchy Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad
22.1 Introduction In this chapter, we study the phonological correlates of information structural focus (as defined in Krifka 2008), in the metrical grid and the prosodic hierarchy. Our aim is to show how these two phonological structures cooperate to express focus in simple cases, but conflict in more complex cases. We compare two Germanic languages, English and Swedish, which are currently analysed as prosodically rather different. Where Swedish exhibits two separate prominence levels of accent (word accent, focus accent, Bruce 19771), English is taken to have only one (Pierrehumbert 1980). We show that this difference of analysis entails different predictions for so-called nested foci and Second Occurrence Focus (SOF), respectively, which have direct implications for typology and the understanding of how the metrical grid and the prosodic hierarchy interact in phonology. Specifically, Swedish seems to make less use of a purely relational notion of prominence for expressing focus (i.e. a prominence notion that refers solely to the strength of immediately surrounding prominences), than English. After the introduction, where the metrical grid and the prosodic hierarchy are presented, we turn to a short description of Swedish intonation in Section 22.2. Thereafter we discuss nested foci in Section 22.3, and SOF in Section 22.4.
22.1.1 The metrical grid The metrical grid represents linguistic rhythm, where rhythm refers to prominence patterns. In (1), the variation in prominence is represented as variable height of columns. 1
Bruce’s (1977) original term for the focus accent was ‘sentence accent’.
442 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad (1) Metrical grid (example from Hogg and McCully 1987: 138 ) x x x x x x x x x x x x the waste remains and kills The grid indicates both rhythmic alternation (relative height of adjacent columns) and the hierarchical relation between prominences (relative column height within the whole expression). Example (1) is typical for Germanic rhythm, exhibiting an alternating weak/strong pattern of adjacent columns, while prominence builds towards the right edge. The earliest versions of the metrical grid were constructed as binary branching trees (2), with nodes marked weak (w) or strong (s) (Liberman 1975; Liberman and Prince 1977). The numbers in the grid and the tree together specify the degree of prominence on linguistic units. (2) Tree and early grid (Liberman & Prince 1977: 317) 8 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 Montana cowboy w s w s s
w s
w R The metrical tree creates phonological domains which express grouping. However, this property was later taken to be at least partly superfluous.2 Prince (1983) and Selkirk (1984) argued that the location of the primary prominence (i.e. the one terminal strong node, which is dominated by the highest strong node in the tree) could be derived via reference to the edge of the domain under analysis, be it a word or a phrase. The weak/ strong distinction could be derived from general conditions on rhythmic alternation. The term eurhythm denotes rhythmic structures that fulfil these conditions. Languages 2
Ladd (2008) and Calhoun (2010) use a type of binary metrical tree representation with strong and weak nodes, which resembles the metrical trees of Liberman (1975).
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 443 often exhibit rules that serve to achieve eurhythm where illformed configurations arise, that is, when prominences are too close to each other (stress clash), or too far apart (stress lapse), at some level of the grid. The main arena for these processes in Germanic languages is phrasal phonology, cf. (3) and (4), from Hayes (1984: 46–8). (3) Clash resolution in phrases (a.k.a. the rhythm rule, or iambic reversal) x x x x x x x x x x x x Mississippi Mabel
x x x x x x x x x x x x > Mississippi Mabel
(4) Lapse resolution in phrases (a.k.a. beat addition, Hayes 1984: 46–48) x x x x x x x x x x x x x x xx x x x x x x Farrah Fawcett Majors > Farrah Fawcett Majors In (3) the clash is resolved by shifting the prominence on sipp to miss. The lapse in (4) is constituted by two equal word stresses, and better rhythm is achieved by adding a beat to Farrah.3 Note that this modification also leads to the addition of a beat on the last stressed syllable of the phrase, a measure driven by metrical culminativity (Hayes 1995: 24).
22.1.2 Focus in the grid In the Germanic languages, focus is typically realized as increased prominence in terms of duration, pitch, and intensity. In a grid-based analysis, focus is registered together with other types of prominences, as increased column height relative to the surrounding environment. A number of researchers have assumed various formulations of constraints called StressFocus or Focus Prominence to account for the effect of focus in the metrical grid (e.g. Truckenbrodt 1995; Schwarzschild 1999; Samek-Lodovici 2005; Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006; Selkirk 2007; Büring 2010; Rooth 2010). In these accounts a focus must contain the most prominent element in the domain of that focus. Truckenbrodt’s (1995: 160) formulation of this constraint is given in (5) (though he calls it Focus).4 3
4
The corresponding rhythmic adjustment can also be applied in (1). See also Truckenbrodt (this volume).
444 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad (5) StressFocus: If F is a focus and DF is its domain, then the highest prominence in DF will be within F. The reference to focus domain in (5) should be understood in relation to Rooth’s (1992) insight that the semantic scope of a focus is not always the entire sentence in which that focus occurs. Instead, a sentence may contain multiple foci and multiple scopes. Truckenbrodt argues that the semantic scope of a focus (in Rooth’s sense) is also the phonological domain of that focus, the focus domain, within which the focus carries the strongest prominence. We return to some predictions of this claim below. It should be noted that in a typological view beyond the Germanic languages, StressFocus is not valid in any obvious way (although cf. Büring 2010 for an attempt to increase the validity of StressFocus via an extended notion of prominence). Across languages, focus is marked in several ways, for example by the insertion of a boundary after the focused constituent (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988) or by lengthening of a syllable (Downing 2008). Drawing on evidence from several languages, Féry (2013), argues that alignment with a phonological edge is more valid than prominence for a universal definition of the phonology of focus.
22.1.3 Bracketed grids The grid has proven suitable for expressing most word stress systems, as these are typically alternating, with primary prominence located at, or close to, one edge, according to rules like (3) and (4) (for an overview, see Kager 1995). Phrasal rhythm shares some of these properties, given the rhythm rule (3) and the typical edge-orientation of phrasal prominence (e.g. the English nuclear stress rule, cf. Zubizarreta, this volume). However, there are challenges to expressing prominence related phenomena in a grid-only representation. Many phonological and morphological processes in natural languages are bounded by prosodic domains or relate to specific types of prominences (e.g. Selkirk 1984; McCarthy and Prince 1986). The grid will not be helpful in describing, say, segmental phenomena that are related to stressed and unstressed syllables in particular positions of words. Nor will it serve to express the different quantitative behaviours of prominent syllables in so-called iambic and trochaic stress systems, where a stressed syllable may lengthen or shorten depending on whether it is grouped with an adjacent syllable to the left or to the right (Kager 1993). In response to these things, the notion of bracketing was introduced in the metrical grid (Halle and Vergnaud 1987). Bracketed grids, as in (6), express domains over which conditions can be stated and rules delimited. In the area of word stress, alternating rhythm has come to be modelled in terms of binary, headed feet, leading to a constrained typology of stress systems (Hayes 1995; Kager 2007). While we leave word stress systems aside here, the question of bracketing of the grid is relevant in that it moves away from a purely rhythmic representation (Prince 1983) and formalizes the
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 445 relationship between rhythm and the categories of the prosodic hierarchy (Selkirk 1984).5 (6) Bracketed grid (Halle and Vergnaud 1987; Hayes 1995: 38) x (x x) (x x ) (x) (x x)(x x) (x) Mississippi mud
22.1.4 The prosodic hierarchy When bracketing is introduced in the grid there are a couple of ways to go. One is to use brackets to express computations made in the grid, to locate prominences in it, or to express other operations. Exponents for this tradition are Idsardi (1992) and Fabb and Halle (2008), the latter being an analysis of poetic metre. This approach to bracketing does not connect with prosodic domains in any basic way, and we will not develop the consequences of such bracketing for information structure. Another use of brackets is to formally connect the grid with the domains of the prosodic hierarchy. This view has become influential in works on prosody and information structure (cf. Truckenbrodt 1995). Arguments for the existence of a prosodic hierarchy as such were developed in the 1980s (e.g. Selkirk 1984; Nespor and Vogel 1986; Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988). The prosodic hierarchy is a set of hierarchically ordered phonological domains, for example foot, word, phrase, and intonation phrase, created in part by alignment with syntactic and morphological edges. Phonological processes apply strictly within phonological domains, and can make direct reference neither to syntactic nor morphological structure (this principle was dubbed the indirect reference hypothesis by Inkelas 1989). Nespor and Vogel (1986) and other researchers have assumed the set of phonological domains in the hierarchy to be universal (although no strong consensus has, as of yet, been reached about the identity of these domains), whereas the phonological processes that apply in each domain have been assumed to be language specific. Already in the early prosodic hierarchies of Selkirk and Nespor and Vogel, each phonological domain was assumed to have a head, realized as some type of linguistic
5 A connection between prosodic categories and levels of the grid was actually also assumed by Prince (1983), who argued that prominences of foot structure should correspond to specific lines in the metrical grid (Prince 1983: 27). However, the relational property of his grid led to the proliferation of levels, undermining the correspondence between prosodic categories and the grid.
446 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad prominence. Selkirk (1984: 26, 146) as well as Nespor and Vogel (1986: 71) assumed that heads of phonological domains corresponded to marks in a metrical grid, so that each row in the grid corresponds directly to some category of the prosodic hierarchy (e.g. foot, word, phrase, or intonation phrase). This double structure is illustrated in (7), from Nespor and Vogel (1989: 71).6 Correspondence of grid and prosodic tree.
(7)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x xx x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x Carolina legge, come vedi, molti libri ogni giorno σ s ws w s w s w s w s w s w s w s w Σ
w s
s
s
s
s
s
s
s
ω
s
s
w
s
w
s
w
s
φ
w
s
ι
w
s w
w
s s
U Root ‘Carolina reads, as you see, many books every day’ According to Truckenbrodt (1995: 176) most researchers working on prosody and information structure have subsequently accepted that metrical grid marks are heads of the prosodic hierarchy. The formulation in (8) is due to Truckenbrodt (1995: 12, also 37), and we refer to it here as the one-mark-one-head principle. (8) One-mark-one-head principle: Each grid-mark in the metrical representation of prominence is the unique head of a constituent in the prosodic representation. Other works where this correlation is explicitly assumed include Féry and Samek- Lodovici (2006), Féry (2010), and Büring (2010). As we will see in the next section, the one-mark-one-head principle has a constraining effect on the metrical grid, limiting column height, as a matter of principle, to the assumptions made for the prosodic hierarchy. 6 In Nespor and Vogel (1986), the symbols U, I, φ, ω, Σ, and σ denote respectively the phonological domain types Phonological Utterance, Intonation Phrase, Phonological Phrase, Phonological Word, Foot, and Syllable.
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 447
22.1.5 Recursion The grids and prosodic hierarchies of Selkirk (1984) and Nespor and Vogel (1986, 1989) are characterized by a strictly limited height of their columns, as opposed to the original grids proposed by Liberman (1975). This is because they share two important assumptions. First they adhere to the idea that the number of grid marks in a column corresponds to a limited number of phonological domain types. Second, they both adhere to the so-called Strict Layer Hypothesis (SLH). According to this hypothesis, each domain type occurs exactly once in phonological structures like (7). There is no recursion of any domain type, and there is no skipping of domain types. The SLH was originally formulated by Selkirk (1984: 26). The general contention of the SLH is given in (9), from Ladd (2008: 291). (9) [T]here is a hierarchy of prosodic domain types such that, in a prosodic tree, any domain at a given level of the hierarchy consists exclusively of domains at the next lower level of the hierarchy. More recently, an increasing number of researchers have argued that there is evidence for recursion as well as level skipping in phonology, and that the SLH is too restrictive (e.g. Ladd 1986, 1992; McCarthy and Prince 1993; Selkirk 1995; Itô and Mester 2006, 2007). This view has been accepted by many researchers today (among others Wagner 2005, 2010; Ladd 2008; Kabak and Revithiadou 2009; Selkirk 2009, 2011; Féry 2010; Itô and Mester 2011). The introduction of recursion into the prosodic hierarchy complicates the question of the relationship between the grid and the prosodic hierarchy, specifically with regard to the one-mark-one-head principle (8). If recursion is allowed in phonological representations, the number of layers increases, and if each layer of phonological structure corresponds to one grid mark in the column of a grid, then the number of grid marks also increases. This is pointed out by Féry (2010), who provides the illustration in (10) where a single domain type, P, is responsible for up to four grid marks in one column (for similar structures see Ladd 1986; Féry and Truckenbrodt 2005; Wagner 2005, 2010; Kentner and Féry 2013).7 (10) Effects of recursion in the grid x x x x x x x x x x x x x (((Lena and Arno)P and Bill)P ((and Tom and Anny)P (and Sam)P)P)P
7 The
proliferation of levels is in fact foreseen already in Prince (1983: 27), who acknowledges the possibility of bands of grid levels, corresponding to a given prosodic category.
448 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad Structures like (10) also illustrate the fact that the connection between the prosodic hierarchy and the grid entails a link to syntax, as the prosodic domains are aligned or matched with syntactic categories (e.g. Ladd 1986; Selkirk 1986, 1995, 2009, 2011; Itô and Mester 2011). Several researchers have derived the rightward tendency of prominences from syntactic embedding, so that the column which corresponds to the deepest embedded syntactic constituent is higher than other columns (Zubizarreta, this volume).
22.1.6 Focus in the prosodic hierarchy In sentences with only one focus, the focus correlates with the highest grid mark, which is the strongest prominence in the sentence. This prominence is referred to as the nuclear accent (Jackendoff 1972; Selkirk 1984, see Zubizarreta, this volume). If metrical grid marks are heads of constituents in the prosodic hierarchy, as according to the one-mark- one-head principle, then the highest grid mark, that is, the nuclear accent, must be connected to the highest domain in the prosodic hierarchy. This would be the Intonation Phrase, or the Utterance (depending on model specific definitions of the domains in the prosodic hierarchy). In simple cases with only one focus per sentence, then, we can say that there is harmony between the requirements of StressFocus (5) and the one-mark- one-head principle (8). However, there is nothing inherent in the formulation of StressFocus that calls for a focus to correspond to a specific height of a metrical grid column. As long as no other prominence in the focus domain has more grid marks, it is immaterial whether a focus has three grid marks or five from the point of view of StressFocus. In the prosodic hierarchy this means that it does not matter if a focus is the head of a Prosodic Phrase or an Utterance, as long as no other head in the same focus domain belongs to a higher category. StressFocus, then, refers to the strength of prominences surrounding a focus, but does not refer to any absolute notion of prominence. In this sense StressFocus is an entirely relational definition of focus prominence. In the literature, the relation between the metrical grid and the prosodic hierarchy is often not made fully explicit beyond the harmonic state of affairs observed in simple sentences with one focus. Rather, researchers tend to pay more attention to either the metrical grid or the prosodic hierarchy for the understanding of some phenomenon at hand. However, there are areas where the relation between the two structures is complicated or challenged. In the remainder of this chapter, we address two such cases, namely embedded foci and second occurrence focus (SOF). In both cases we compare English with (less well-studied) Swedish. The interest of looking at Swedish here is that this language has pitch accents of two different prominence degrees, so that the perceived degree of prominence is largely determined by the shape of the pitch accent contour (in addition to correlates such as duration and intensity, e.g. Bruce 1977; Heldner 2001). In this respect, Swedish differs from English. Although in English there are also several options for the shape of a pitch
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 449 accent, these shapes are not strongly correlated with the perceived degree of prominence. Rather, the size of pitch excursions and the position within the phrase determine the degree of perceived prominence in English (Pierrehumbert 1980; Ladd 2008). Given the typological closeness of these languages, the intuition is nonetheless that the two languages should be given minimally different analyses (cf. also discussion in Ambrazaitis 2009: 64–65).
22.2 Intonational prominence in Swedish Swedish belongs to the North Germanic languages. It shares some of the basic properties of the intonation systems of the better-described West Germanic languages, such as the marking of focus with intonational prominence, and the marking of edges with tonal movements (boundary tones). However, Swedish also has (at least) two properties that set it apart from West Germanic. First, it has a binary lexical accent distinction between lexical accents 1 and 2. Words have either one of these lexical accents, depending on factors relating both to the lexical marking of morphemes and the phonological structure of the word (Riad 2009, 2012; Wetterlin 2010). Second, Swedish tonal prominences are divided into two categorically different prominence levels: focal accents and word accents.8 Here, our main concern is with the latter distinction between the two levels of prominence, as they regiment the realization of focus in Swedish, and thereby have implications for the relation between the metrical grid and the prosodic hierarchy. The lexical distinction between accents 1 and 2 is entirely orthogonal to the prominence distinction. In Stockholm Swedish, focal accents always contain a rise, whereas word accents contain a fall.9 Each accent type has two realizations: one for accent 1 and another for accent 2, cf. Table 22.1.10 A sentence has at least one focal accent. It appears on a narrow focus, otherwise on the sentence-final word (with some syntactically triggered exceptions that have direct parallels in the West Germanic languages, cf. Myrberg 2010). Sentences also frequently contain several focal accents, which may serve to phrase individual syntactic constituents or contrastive topics (Myrberg 2010, 2013). Most words which are not assigned focal accents carry word accents. These are generally perceptually less prominent than focal accents (e.g. Heldner 2001; Fant and 8
In Myrberg and Riad (2015) these are referred to as big and small accents, respectively. differences in the realization of tonal prominences are discussed in Meyer (1937, 1954), Bruce and Gårding (1978), Fintoft et al. (1978), Riad (1998), Bruce (2007). 10 Below the tonal prominence levels, syllables divide into stressed and unstressed. This distinction is lexically determined, and phonologically distinguished in terms of syllable weight (Kristoffersen 2000; Riad 2014). The stressed–unstressed distinction is not immediately relevant to information structure, and we leave it aside here. 9 Dialectal
450 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad Table 22.1 The realization of focal accents and word accents, together with the lexical accents in Stockholm Swedish word accent
focal accent
lexical accent 1
HL*
L*H
lexical accent 2
H*L
H*LH (in compounds: H*L*H)
Note: The representations assumed here are based on Bruce (1998, see also 2005, 2007). However, for the focal accent 1 contour, and for the compound focal accent, we follow Riad (1998, 2006).
Kruckenberg 2008).11 Word accents appear before and after the focal accent in a sentence, and between focal accents if there are more than one. Whereas focal accents are avoided on given material (especially following a focus), word accents are retained independently of information status. To account for the distribution of the accent types in terms of prosodic structure, we assume, following for example Itô and Mester (2011), and Selkirk (2009, 2011), three structurally different levels of phrasing above the syllable: the prosodic word (ω), the phonological phrase (φ) (other names for similar phrase types include prosodic phrase, p-phrase, and intermediate phrase), and the intonation phrase (ɩ). We follow Myrberg (2010, 2013), Myrberg and Riad (2013, 2015), Riad (2014) in assuming that the focal accent is head of φ, and that the word accent is head of ω. We thus assume one φ for every focal accent, and one focal accent for every φ in a sentence. Likewise, we assume one ω for every word accent and one (word or focal) accent for every ω.12 As the difference between the focal accent and the word accent is a categorical one, and the two prominence types have very different distributions, we assume that they must be heads of two different categories in the prosodic hierarchy. This assumption will be crucial for the discussion in Sections 22.3 and 22.4. It will, however, not be crucial which two categories the two prominence levels belong to. (Thus, the hypothetical claim that the focal accent is head of ɩ instead of φ would not substantially affect our claims in this paper. For discussion, see Section 22.3.2 and Myrberg 2010, 2013). The ɩ is defined by having edge marking tones. At the right edge there is a boundary tone, and at the left edge there is a so-called initiality accent, which has a contour that is phonologically similar to the focal accent, but which is functionally similar to a boundary tone (Roll et al. 2009; Myrberg 2010, 2013). 11 Word accents fail to appear on some verbs (auxiliaries in particular), some pronouns (which we consider lexically unstressed) and in lexicalized phrases (Myrberg and Riad 2013). 12 The ω canonically correlates with a morphological word. The presence of both stress (non-tonal) and word accents (tonal) warrants a sometimes more complex internal structure. This is not immediately relevant here, and we refer to Riad (2012, 2014) and Myrberg and Riad (2013, 2015) for detailed discussion.
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 451 Sentences can be phrased as one ɩ, containing one or more φ; thus with one set of edge markers at the left and right, and one or more focal accents. However, sentences can also be phrased as multiple ɩ; with multiple focal accents and multiple sets of edge markers (cf. Myrberg 2010, 2013). In Sections 22.3 and 22.4, we contrast Swedish phrasing with that observed in English. In these comparisons, the notions nuclear accent, and pre- and postnuclear accent will be relevant (cf. Zubizarreta, this volume). These terms refer to positions within the ɩ, and will be helpful in comparing accents in different positions between Swedish and English. We define the nuclear accent as the head of an ɩ, and we assume that this is the last focal accent (i.e. the last φ-head) in an ɩ. When we use the term ‘nuclear accent’ for Swedish, then, we always refer to a focal accent (although not all focal accents are nuclear accents). The area before the nuclear accent is the prenuclear area. This area can contain both focal accents and word accents in Swedish. The area following the nuclear accent is the postnuclear area. In all-new sentences, this area is usually very short, as a nuclear focal accent must appear toward the end of all-new sentences. In sentences with early narrow focus, the postfocal area is longer. The postnuclear area then contains material which is given and/or background to the focus. Such areas are often described as deaccented in the West Germanic languages (e.g. Ladd 2008: 102, 231). This is true in Swedish, too, insofar as there are no focal accents in the postnuclear area. However, word accents are retained on postnuclear material. In summary, we can distinguish prenuclear accents (either word accents, in which case they are ω-heads, or focal accents, in which case they are φ-heads), nuclear accents (focal accents and ɩ-heads) and postnuclear accents (word accents and ω-heads).
22.3 Relational and absolute prominence in nested foci In this section we show that the categorical distinction between word accents and focal accents in Swedish is incompatible with a relational notion of focus, such as that expressed by StressFocus (5). To that end, we review an analysis of sentences containing nested foci in English (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006). This analysis works well for English (Section 22.3.1), but makes the wrong predictions for Swedish (Section 22.3.2).
22.3.1 Nested foci in English Féry and Samek-Lodovici (2006) present their analysis of prosodic phrasing and pitch accent distribution as a set of interacting constraints within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The StressFocus constraint (cf. (5) above) calls
452 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad for focused material to have the highest prominence within the focus domain (11). The constraint DestressGiven requires that given material be non-prominent (12) (Schwarzschild 1999). In addition, there are constraints that call for prominences in prosodic structure to be aligned with the right edges of phonological phrases (13) and intonation phrases (14), and for each XP in syntax to have a prosodic prominence (15) (Truckenbrodt 1995). The constraints in (13)–(15) have been slightly reformulated, for the sake of exposition).13 (11) StressFocus: A focused phrase has the highest prosodic prominence in its focus domain. (12) DestressGiven: A given phrase is prosodically nonprominent. (13) AlignHead Right, φ: Align the right boundary of every Phonological phrase (φ) with its head. (14) AlignHead Right, ɩ: Align the right boundary of every Intonation phrase (ɩ) with its head. (15) StressXP: Each lexically headed XP in syntax must contain a phrasal stress (where ‘phrasal stress’ refers to the head of a φ). With (11)–(15), Féry and Samek-Lodovici generate the prosodic output structures for sentences which contain so-called nested foci, that is, where one or more foci are contained within a larger focus, as illustrated in (16) (originally discussed by Rooth 1992) and (17) (originally discussed by Neeleman and Szendrői 2004). Foci are marked with square brackets. (16) [An [American]F2 farmer was talking to a [Canadian]F3 farmerG]F1. (17) Father: What happened? Mother: You know how I think our children should read decent books. Well, when I came home, rather than doing his homework, [Johnny [was reading [Superman]F3 to some kid]F2]F1. In (16) American and Canadian are both focused on account of being contrasted with each other. Simultaneously, the whole sentence is focused, by virtue of being all-new. Within the sentence, however, the second instance of farmer is given. In (17), the whole clause Johnny was reading Superman to some kid is focused on account of being the answer to the father’s question What happened?. At the same time, the VP was reading
13
(12)–(14) together amount to the Nuclear Stress Rule (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006: 134).
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 453 Superman to some kid is focused on account of being contrasted with rather than doing his homework. Finally Superman is focused because it is contrasted with decent books. Tableau (18) illustrates how the constraints in (11)–(15) derive the prosodic structure of (16). The winning candidate a has one grid mark, corresponding to a φ-head, on American, and two grid marks, one corresponding to a φ-head and one corresponding to an ɩ-head, on Canadian. The φ-head on American satisfies StressFocus with respect to the focus on this word (note that there is no requirement that American has the highest prominence in the sentence, only in its focus domain, in this case the NP an American farmer). The ɩ-head on Canadian simultaneously satisfies StressFocus with respect to the focus on Canadian, and the focus on the whole sentence.
a ( x ) ɩ ( x ) ( x ) φ An AmericanF2 farmer was talking to a CanadianF3 farmerG
AlignHead Right, ɩ
AlignHead Right, φ
Stress XP
DestressGiven
[An AmericanF2 farmer was talking to a CanadianF3 farmerG]F1
StressFocus
(18) Tableau from Féry & Samek-Lodovici (2006: 140).
* * * *
b
( x ) ɩ ( x ) ( x ) φ An AmericanF2 farmer was talking to a CanadianF3 farmerG
c
( x ) ɩ ( x ) ( x ) φ An AmericanF2 farmer was talking to a CanadianF3 farmerG
*!
d
( x ) ɩ ( x ) ( x ) φ An AmericanF2 farmer was talking to a CanadianF3 farmerG
*! * * * *
* * * * * *
*!
*
Tableau (19) provides an analysis of the Superman- sentence from (17). Here, StressFocus is satisfied with respect to all three foci in the sentence via the single grid mark corresponding to the ɩ-head in candidate a. This grid mark provides the deepest embedded focus, F3, with an ɩ-level grid mark, which makes F3 the most prominent constituent within its focus domain. As F3 is embedded in F2 as well as F1, the grid mark in F3 simultaneously provides F2 and F1 with an ɩ-level grid mark, thus satisfying StressFocus for all foci. In addition to the ɩ-level mark on Superman, StressXP forces the insertion of a φ-head on each of the XPs Johnny and to some kid.
454 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad
a ( x ) ɩ (x ) ( x )( x ) φ Johnny was [reading SupermanF3 to some kid]F2 b
( x ) ɩ (x ) ( x )( x ) φ Johnny was [reading SupermanF3 to some kid]F2
AlignHead Right, ɩ
AlignHead Right, φ
StressXP
[…Johnny was [reading SupermanF3 to some kid]F2 ]F1
Stress Focus
(19) Tableau from Féry & Samek-Lodovici (2006: 142).
*
*!
*
In the analyses in (18) and (19), respectively, StressFocus is satisfied by metrical grid marks corresponding to heads of two different categories in the prosodic hierarchy. On American StressFocus is satisfied by a φ-head. On Canadian and Superman, however, StressFocus is satisfied by ɩ-heads. This results from the interaction between StressFocus and the constraints in (12)–(15). It is possible because StressFocus is formulated in entirely relational terms. It is precisely this prediction, that the realization of focus can vary between φ-heads and ɩ-heads, which is interesting in relation to the categorical difference between focal accents and word accents in Swedish.
22.3.2 Nested foci in Swedish When we turn to nested foci in Swedish, the analysis must heed the categorical distinction between word accent and focus accent, and the entailed requirement that they belong to different categories of the prosodic hierarchy (as argued in Section 2). We consider first how Féry and Samek-Lodovici’s analysis would fare under the assumption that focal accents are φ-heads, as we assumed in Section 2. Under this assumption, the analysis provided in Tableau (18) makes correct predictions for Swedish farmer-sentences, as illustrated in (20). American and Canadian are φ-heads and get focal accents (marked with ‘fa’). Words which are ω-heads are predicted to have word accents (marked with ‘wa’). This follows from our assumptions that word accents are ω-heads and that most content words form ω (Riad 2012; Myrberg and Riad 2013, 2015).
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 455 (20) Correct focal accent distribution in a Swedish farmer-sentence (assumption: φ-heads are focal accents) ( ) ɩ ( xfa )( xfa ) φ ( x )( xwa )( xwa )( x )( xwa ) ω En amerikansk bonde pratade med en kanadensisk bonde. an American farmer spoke with a Canadian farmer However, the analysis makes wrong predictions with regard to the Superman-sentence in (19), as seen in (21). (21) Faulty focal accent distribution in a Swedish Superman-sentence (assumption: φ-heads are focal accents) *( x (xfa )( xfa )( (x )( x )( Johan läste Stålmannen för John read Superman to
nån some
xfa x unge. kid
) ) )
ɩ φ ω
The empirically correct output structure should have only one focal accent, on Stålmannen, while Johan and unge should have word accents. However, StressXP forces one φ-head on every syntactic XP in the tableau in (19), resulting in three φs in the sentence, which is an erroneous prediction. To derive the correct output for Swedish Superman-sentences, one might be tempted to assume that only heads of ɩ have focal accents, and not heads of φ. Under that assumption, only one focal accent would be predicted, on Stålmannen, yielding the empirically correct result in (22), cf. Tableau (19).14 (22) Correct focal accent distribution in a Swedish Superman-sentence (assumption: ι-heads are focal accents) ( (x )( (xwa )( Johan läste John read
xfa x )( x )( Stålmannen för nån Superman to some
x xwa unge. kid
) ɩ ) φ ) ω
14 While yielding the empirically correct prediction, this analysis leaves the φ- prominences with a structurally unclear status, being higher than ω-heads but lower than focal accents. There is no experimental evidence that word accents are distinguished in accordance with the metrical structure in (22), and our native speaker intuition does not indicate that this should be the case. We consider the divergence between the presence of metrical grid marks and the absence of phonetic prominence as additional evidence against the analysis in (22).
456 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad However, the assumption that only ɩ-heads are focal accents makes erroneous predictions for the farmer-sentences, as it would predict only one focal accent in farmer- sentences, cf. (23). (23) Faulty focal accent distribution in a Swedish farmer-sentence (assumption: ɩ-heads are focal accents) * ( xfa )ɩ ( x )( x )φ ( xwa )( xwa )( xwa )( x )( xwa) ω En amerikansk bonde pratade med en kanadensisk bonde. an American farmer spoke with a Canadian farmer In a correct analysis of Swedish farmer-sentences, amerikansk must get a focal accent. Thus, in order for Féry and Samek-Lodovici’s analysis to work for Swedish, φ-heads must sometimes be focal accents (farmer-sentences), and sometimes be word accents (Superman-sentences). This is unreasonable as there is no independent evidence for such a state of affairs, and it would push the analysis towards the circular. The null hypothesis, given the categorical distinction between focal accent and word accent (Table 22.1), must be that focal accents are the realization of a single constituent type, be it ɩ or φ. We favour the analysis where the φ-head is the focal accent, and therefore propose that the correct output structure for a Swedish Superman-sentence is the one given in (24), where the whole sentence is phrased into a single φ.15 (24) Correct focal accent distribution in a Swedish Superman-sentence (assumption: φ-heads are focal accents) ( x ) ɩ ( xfa ) φ (xwa )( x )( xwa ) ω Johan läste Stålmannen för nån unge. John read Superman to some kid In conclusion, Féry and Samek-Lodovici’s analysis works well for English sentences with nested foci, where a relational notion of focus prominence suffices, but fails to account for corresponding sentences in Swedish. For Swedish, focus is not only required to have a phonetically stronger prominence than a non-focus (increased duration and pitch excursion), but is also ‘locked’ to a specific constituent in the prosodic hierarchy, arguably the phonological phrase (φ). The prosodic hierarchy thus more clearly determines the expression of focus in 15 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss further modifications of Féry and Samek-Lodovici’s analysis in order to make it work for Swedish.
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 457 Swedish, than it does in English. Whether this is a real typological difference between two closely related languages, or a result of analytical tradition, remains an open question.
22.4 Second Occurrence Focus (SOF) If the prosodic hierarchy plays a more important role for expressing focus in Swedish than in English, the question is raised whether a relational notion of focus prominence has any role to play in the analysis of Swedish. In this section we show that it does. Multiple foci also occur in so-called Second Occurrence Focus (SOF) sentences (Baumann, this volume). A SOF occurs together with another focus, the First Occurrence Focus (FOF), within the same sentence. SOF-sentences are different from those in Section 3, in that a SOF is contextually given and is embedded in the focus domain of the FOF (but not embedded in the focus itself). It has been observed that this causes the SOF to be prosodically less prominent than the FOF (Partee 1999; Beaver et al. 2007; Büring 2008; Féry and Ishihara 2009). Whereas the FOF receives a canonical focus realization with the strongest (nuclear) prominence in the sentence, the SOF receives a lower degree of prominence, which does not correlate with nuclear prominence. In this section, we show that for SOF-sentences, the relational notion of focus does seem to be important in Swedish, and our proposal will be that a mismatch between the grid and the prosodic hierarchy obtains precisely in SOF-sentences. This mismatch allows for both the SOF and the FOF to be represented as grid marks in metrical structure, in accordance with StressFocus, while simultaneously allowing the SOF to have less prominence than the FOF. An often cited SOF-sentence is given in (25) (Partee 1999: 215–16). Here, the SOF appears after the FOF, and we will refer to this position of SOF as postnuclear. There are also prenuclear SOFs, which hence appear before the FOF, as in (26) (Rooth 1996; cf. also Féry and Ishihara 2009). (25) Postnuclear SOF
a Everyone already knew that Mary only eats [vegetables]FOF b If even [Paul]FOF knew that Mary only eats [vegetables]SOF then he should have suggested a different restaurant.
(26) Prenuclear SOF
a Only [Manny]FOF likes John. b Only [Manny]SOF likes even [Anna]FOF
In English and German, postnuclear SOF is usually marked with increased duration and in German also with increased pitch height as compared to non-focused words.
458 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad Prenuclear SOF frequently receives a pitch accent (Rooth 1996; Beaver et al. 2007; Féry and Ishihara 2009; Baumann, this volume). In an experiment with Swedish data (Myrberg submitted), postnuclear SOF usually carried a word accent, but appeared with a focal accent 27 per cent of the time, (27b). Word- accented postnuclear SOF-words were shown to have longer duration than word-accented postnuclear non-focused words. Prenuclear SOF was shown to typically carry a focal accent, but appeared with word accents 16 per cent of the time, (28b). Prenuclear focally accented SOF-words had longer duration than prenuclear focally accented non-focused words.16 (27) Postnuclear SOF in Swedish a Anna’s kids usually wish for lots of things for Christmas. But this year they only wished for teddy bears. b Till och med even bara only
det the
[nallar]SOF teddy bears
[minsta]FOF youngest i for
barnet child
önskade wished
sig REFL
julklapp. Christmas.
‘Even the youngest child only wished for teddy bears for Christmas.’ (28) Prenuclear SOF in Swedish a Both Lina and Anna thought that they would get the highest grade for maths. But the teacher gave only Lina the highest grade. b Eftersom läraren bara since teacher-the only
gav gave
[Lina]SOF högsta Lina highest
betyg, grade
tyckte thought
till och med [rektorn]FOF att even headmaster-the that
var was
för too
sträng. strict
han he
‘Because the teacher only gave Lina the highest grade, even the headmaster thought that he was too strict.’ The prominence on SOF in relation to non-focused items has been interpreted as the realization of metrical grid marks on SOF (e.g. Beaver et al. 2007). Thus, even though 16 Recall from Section 2 that longer sentences frequently contain multiple focal accents, independently of semantic focus. It should be noted in this connection, that the focal accents on SOF in the prefocal condition are not (merely) due to the length of the target sentences (which differs between the English and the Swedish experiment). Sentences of corresponding length as in (27) and (28), but lacking SOF, were tested for comparison, and exhibited much fewer prenuclear focal accents. See Myrberg (submitted) for further details.
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 459 SOF does not receive nuclear prominence, the assumed grid marks are taken to show that SOF-structures conform to the generalization expressed by StressFocus, that is, that all foci correspond to grid marks in metrical structure (Beaver et al. 2007; Rooth 2010; Baumann, this volume). A metrical grid which would accurately reflect SOF prominence in Swedish compels at least one grid level for focal accents, and one grid level for word accents. We might also want to mark the final focal accent, a nuclear accent, as more prominent than other focal accents, requiring a third grid level. Moreover, SOF-prominences would motivate a fourth level, higher than any other non-nuclear accent. This is rather more than we have grounds for in the prosodic hierarchy. We have identified categories in the prosodic hierarchy where nuclear focal accents, non-nuclear focal accents, and word accents have canonical realizations in Swedish (Section 2). Nuclear focal accents are ɩ-heads, non-nuclear focal accents are φ-heads, and word accents are ω-heads.17 However, there are reasons to believe that SOF- prominences have no canonical match in any of the categories of the prosodic hierarchy. The cues which distinguish SOF prominences vary (within and across) speakers, and look different in the pre-vs the postnuclear area of a phrase. No single, stable correlate of SOF could therefore be used as a defining criterion for a separate prosodic category where SOF is realized. In addition, SOF is a marginal phenomenon, and its realization appears to be determined by two conflicting interests: the pressure for high prominence on focused material, and the request for low prominence on given material. It seems unreasonable to postulate a domain in the prosodic hierarchy for the sole purpose of expressing SOF. Instead of assuming a new prosodic category, we might consider the possibility that recursion of some domain is responsible for the extra grid mark on the SOF constituent, much as recursion is responsible for several levels in the grid in (10). Recursion of this type could in principle allow a grid mark on the SOF, which would be the head of a prosodic domain as required by the one-mark-one-head principle. In our view, such a solution is implausible, however. The problem is partially illustrated by the tree structure in (29). This tree shows a postfocal area containing an SOF (nallar). In order for this SOF to have one more grid mark than the other postnuclear ω-prominences (without projecting to the φ-level where it would receive a focal accent), the ω containing the SOF must project to a higher level of ω. In (29), only the single word which contains the focus prominence can project. If more than one ω would project, that would trigger compound accent, which is not correct here (cf. Riad 2012; Myrberg and Riad 2013, 2015).
In principle, the discussion here is applicable also if only ɩ-heads are assumed to be focal accents, leaving φ-heads as word accents. In order to make the discussion easier to follow, however, we consider only the option that φ-heads (and by inheritance also ɩ-heads) are focal accents. 17
460 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad (29) Recursion to account for the grid mark on SOF ι φ ω
…
(
ω bara only
) ω ((
ω
ω
)ω )ω ( )ω [nallar]SOF i julklapp teddy bears for Christmas present
However, the projection of the single word which receives the SOF prominence in (29) is difficult to derive non-circularly. It cannot be independently motivated, for example by the pressure for alignment with syntactic structure or, say, with the whole focus domain that contains the SOF. We therefore abandon the idea that recursion of a category in the prosodic hierarchy would be the source of the grid mark on SOF. Instead of assuming an accommodating structure like (29), we propose that SOF- structures violate the one-mark-one-head-principle (8). The violation results from the simultaneous and conflicting pressures for low and high prominence on SOF. In response to this conflict, the grammar creates a metrical structure which is deeper than that available within the prosodic hierarchy, in order to allow an expression of SOF which is equal neither to focused (highly prominent), nor to given (non-prominent) material. Under this view, the prosodic realization of SOF is a result of the mismatch between the deeper metrical structure and the more shallow prosodic hierarchy. The SOF sentences from (27) and (28) are given with prosodic representations in (30) and (31). The a-examples provide the representation with a focal accent on both the FOF and the SOF. This pattern was attested in 27 per cent of the postnuclear SOF, and 84 per cent of the prenuclear SOF (Myrberg submitted). The b-examples provide the representations with a word accent on the SOF and a focal accent on the FOF. The b-pattern was attested in 16 per cent of the prenuclear SOF, and in 73 per cent of the postnuclear SOF. (30) Postnuclear SOF a {
x x ( xfa ) ( xwa ) ( x ) ( xwa) Till och med… [minsta]FOF barnet…
b { (
x ( xfa ( xwa) ( x ) ( xwa bara [nallar]SOF i julklapp
x } xfa ) x x ( xwa ) ( x ) ( xwa) ( xwa) ( xwa ) ( xwa ) Till och med… [minsta]FOF barnet… bara [nallar]SOF i julklapp
} ɩ --- ) φ ) ω
ɩ φ --ω
ON THE PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF FOCUS 461 (31) Prenuclear SOF a {
x xfa ) ( (x ) ( xwa) ( xwa Eftersom… [Lina]SOF … betyg, tyckte (
b { (
x (xwa ) ( xwa) Eftersom… [Lina]SOF … betyg,
x } ɩ x --- xfa ) φ ) ( x ) (xwa ) ω … [rektorn]FOF … sträng
x } xfa ) x ( xwa )( x ) (xwa ) tyckte … [rektorn]FOF … sträng
ɩ φ --- ω
The mismatch between the prosodic hierarchy and the metrical structure raises several questions, which cannot be addressed here. We will however mention that mismatches as such are commonly noted in syntax–prosody alignment, as well as in form–meaning relationships in morphology.
22.5 Summary and conclusion This chapter has discussed some predictions for Swedish of the constraint StressFocus, which holds that a focus must contain the highest metrical grid mark in the domain of that focus. Researchers seem to agree that focus prominence should somehow be reflected in metrical structure, although the role of the prosodic hierarchy in this matter remains unclear. StressFocus refers to an entirely relational notion of focus prominence, expressed solely in terms of the column height in a metrical grid. A correlation between metrical grid marks and heads of the prosodic hierarchy is usually assumed, but StressFocus does not specify what this correlation should be in the case of focus. In theory, this constraint allows for focus to be expressed by any prosodic category. The two categorically different pitch accent types in Swedish—focal accent and word accent—are (partly) used to distinguish focused from non-focused information. We have shown that the categorical distinction between them poses a challenge to the relational notion of focus prominence implied by StressFocus. Féry and Samek-Lodovici’s (2006) analysis of nested foci, applied to Swedish, provided an illuminating example of this challenge. We concluded that the prosodic hierarchy plays a more important role for the expression of focus in Swedish, than it does for English. We have also shown that focus expression in Swedish cannot make do with just reference to the categories of the prosodic hierarchy. SOF structures provide a situation where the pressure for focus to correlate with a focal accent in Swedish is overridden. In the absence of a focal accent on the SOF, a relational notion of focus is in evidence. Thus, in spite of the general importance of the absolute notion of focus prominence that
462 Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad can be observed in the distribution of focal accents in Swedish, a relational type of focus prominence is employed, whenever the absolute type of focus expression has been put out of the running.18 Any analysis of focus prominence is likely to be influenced by the language studied, even when the aim is to arrive at a universalist account. No doubt, the theory of focus phonology is primarily based on observations made in English and some other Germanic languages (e.g. Jackendoff 1972; Reinhart 1995; Truckenbrodt 1995; Zubizarreta 1998; Gussenhoven 2008; Büring 2010). Looking at Swedish, we have found a number of points of divergence with analyses of English, leading us to assume, provisionally, that there may be fundamental differences in how the two languages establish focus prominence. For Swedish, at least, we have argued that the categories of the prosodic hierarchy play an important role in the expression of focus, although a relational notion of focus prominence does seem to exist alongside it. In general terms, focus appears to be expressed in a more categorical fashion in Swedish than in English.
18 One could explore other solutions to this situation than a phonological mismatch. Féry and Ishihara (2009) suggest that there may be phonetic factors that affect the realization of particular prosodic prominences, possibly without implications for the prosodic hierarchy or the metrical grid.
Chapter 23
F o cus, Intonat i on, and Tonal H e i g h t Hubert Truckenbrodt
23.1 Introduction This chapter discusses the effects of F-marking (focus) on intonation and, in more detail, on the tonal height in intonation. The discussion concentrates on German and Mandarin Chinese, with some remarks about Japanese and English. The view defended here is that focus affects stress and stress affects tonal height. Working this out leads to improvements of our understanding of how stress affects tonal height. Section 23.2 addresses the role of stress in the sentence melody and shows how focus leads to changes in the stress pattern that affect the sentence melody. Section 23.3 discusses effects of focus on tonal height and argues that they are really effects of stress on tonal height, triggered because focus attracts stress. Section 23.4 addresses an upsteptriggering effect of focus in German reported by Féry and Kügler (2008).
23.2 Stress and focus in the sentence melody This section illustrates how the prosodic structure, including stress, carries the sentence melody, and how focus typically changes the prosodic structure, and thereby changes the sentence melody. The role of the syntactic structure in stress assignment and its interaction with focus have been analysed in terms of the syntax defining a cycle on which one or more stress assignment rules operate in Chomsky and Halle (1968) and Cinque (1993), in terms of focus feature percolation along syntactic lines by Selkirk (1984, 1995a), in terms of the
464 Hubert Truckenbrodt syntax giving rise to prosodic constituents that in turn are domains of stress assignment (Nespor and Vogel 1986), in terms of the syntax putting demands on both prosodic constituents and on their prosodic heads in Truckenbrodt (1995, 2006), in terms of a link of cyclic phases to a prosodic domain in them as the locus of stress assignment in Kratzer and Selkirk (2007), and in terms of stress assignment in recursive prosodic structures that result from the identification of syntactic constituents with prosodic ones in Féry (2011). Different approaches are discussed in the current volume in the chapters by Arregi, Myrberg and Riad, Samek-Lodovici, and Zubizarreta. Focus feature percolation apart, the approaches all share, or are compatible with, the point of departure adopted here. This is that there is a default-pattern of prosody and stress that is defined relative to the syntax and without reference to focus. The contributions of the focus to the sentence melody are analysed relative to this default. An account of the stress default is introduced in the following Section 23.2.1, along with an example of how it plays a role in shaping the sentence melody. The role of the focus is discussed in Sections 23.2.2 and 23.2.3.
23.2.1 Default stress and the sentence melody The sentence in (1), in a default rendition in which its content is new and nothing is highlighted, contains a number of beats of stress. The last one of these is felt to be the strongest stress of the sentence. The notions i-phrase (intonation phrase, I) and p-phrase (phonological phrase, P) are employed here for the two prosodic levels. (1) ( Die [NP the
x ) I i-phrase x x x x p-phrase Lena] will der [NP Lola] im [NP Januar] [VP ein [NP Lama] malen] Lena wants the Lola in January a llama paint
‘Lena wants to paint a llama for Lola in January.’ If the final object is pronominal, the verb will receive the last and strongest stress, as in (2). (2) (
x ) I i-phrase x x x x p-phrase Die [NP Lena] will der [NP Lola] im [NP Januar] [VP etwas malen] the Lena wants the Lola in January something paint ‘Lena wants to paint something for Lola in January.’
The lower level of stress is here accounted for in terms of the simple requirement Stress- XP in (3) from Truckenbrodt (1995, 2006, 2007a). The suggestion builds on earlier
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 465 accounts including Gussenhoven (1983, 1992), Jacobs (1988, 1993), Uhmann (1991), and integrates the reference to XPs in the prosody of other languages from Selkirk (1986, 1995b), Chen (1987), and others in prosodic phonology.1 The notion p-stress is employed here in the sense of ‘stress on the level of the p-phrase’. The notion i-stress will later also be employed in the sense of ‘stress on the level of the i-phrase’. (3) Stress-XP: Each lexical XP must carry a grid-mark of p-stress. While this was suggested as part of a non-cyclic account in optimality theory, it is here discussed as though applying to each XP from the bottom up (cyclically, if you will) and adding the required grid-mark if it is not already present from lower XPs. The constraint in (3) will ensure that each lexical NP in (1) and (2) will receive a beat of p-stress, that is [Lena], [Lola], [Januar], and [Lama]. The VP in (1) will not require additional p-stress since it contains p-stress on [Lama]. The VP in (2) does not contain a lexical NP that is independently stressed. Stress-XP requires p-stress in this VP, which is assigned to the verb (the pronoun being stress rejecting, see Kratzer and Selkirk (2007: 110)). The upper level of stress is assigned by the rule of rightmost strengthening in (4). The rule is adapted from Uhmann (1991), who builds on Gussenhoven (1983). It strengthens the rightmost p-stress to the strongest one of the intonation phrase. (4) Strengthen the rightmost p-stress in the intonation phrase to i-stress. It thus strengthens Lama in (1) and malen in (2), as required. The prosodic structure provides the anchor points for the sentence melody. This combination also does not require reference to focus. Many speakers from the South of Germany and parts of Austria would employ a default melody for the sentence in (1) that is similar to the one shown in Figure 23.1. Here each non-final p-stress triggers a clear rise in the sentence melody. The final p-stress (and i-stress) is realized with a final fall. The sentence melody is analysed in terms of phonological H(igh) and L(ow) tones in autosegmental-metrical analyses (Pierrehumbert (1980), Gussenhoven (2004), Ladd (2008); for the intonation pattern in Figure 23.1, see Truckenbrodt (2002, 2004, 2007b)). The H and L tones are shown below the prosodic structure in Figure 23.1. The non-final rising movements are analysed as L*+H. The L* tone defines a low point that lies in the stressed syllable and the +H tone defines a high point that follows shortly after the low point. The final falling accent is analysed as H+L*, again a low point on the stressed 1 Another
current suggestion, due to Kratzer and Selkirk (2007), who build on Kahnemuyipour (2004), is that the highest XP in each phase is made into a major phrase (comparable to the current p- phrases) and that phrasal stress is located in this major phrase. The more complex rule is designed to capture that a class of preverbal locative and directional PPs do not need to carry phrasal stress. The current account must assume that the special prosody of these cases comes from a special syntactic structure of these elements.
466 Hubert Truckenbrodt
140 120 100 80
[ (
x
)(
x
)(
x
)(
x x
]I )p
L*+H L*+H L*+H H+L* Le-na will dem Wer-ner im Ja-nuar ein La-ma malen. Lena wants the Werner in.the January a llama paint ‘Lena wants to paint a llama for Werner in January.’
i-stress and i-phrases p-stress and p-phrases tones (pitch accents)
Die the
Figure 23.1 Pitch-track and analysis of a German recording. The solid lines mark word boundaries, the dashed lines additionally delimit syllables with p-stress. (Adapted from Truckenbrodt (2007b: 353)).
syllable, but this time preceded by an H point. Each phonological tone, associated directly or indirectly with a stressed syllable, thus defines a phonetic point of the sentence melody in this account. The actual melody is obtained by linear interpolation, that is, by connecting the phonetic points. Tonal patterns like L*+H or H+L* that associate with stressed syllables are called pitch accents. In Section 23.3, we will also see examples of edge tones that associate with the edge of prosodic constituents. Note also that Northern and Standard German may employ the non-final rising L*+H accents from Figure 23.1 as well, but more typical in these varieties is an H* accent on new elements (Grice et al. 2005; Peters 2009). It can also be seen in Figure 23.1 that each non-final rise is lower than the preceding one. This will be discussed in Section 23.3.2.
23.2.2 Focus attracts the strongest stress The effects of focus on the sentence melody can be described relative to the default that was introduced in the preceding section. Effects of focus on the prosodic structure are discussed in the following sections 23.2.2 and 23.2.3. Effects of focus on tonal height are discussed in sections 23.3 and 23.4. Early accounts of focus in its relation to stress are due to Chomsky (1970) and Jackendoff (1972). The prosodic effect of focus, when stated separately, is formulated in (5). (5) Prosodic effect of F The focus of a sentence must carry the strongest stress in the sentence. In this formulation, the effect must be taken to override the default. For example, given the default in (6), assignment of narrow focus to the first object as in (7) will lead to retraction of the strongest stress as shown there.
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 467 (6) [A: What were people talking about after the class? B: Nothing special. …] (
x )I x x x Eine [NP Kollegin] hat einem [NP Studenten] [VP ein [NP Buch] empfohlen]. a colleague has a student a book recommended ‘A colleague recommended a book to a student.’ (7) [A: Who did a colleague recommend a book to?] (
x )I (x) x Eine [NP Kollegin] hat [F einem [NP Studenten]] [VP ein [NP Buch] empfohlen]. a colleague has a student a book recommended ‘A colleague recommended a book to a student.’ The assignment of narrow focus will often entail other adjustments in the prosodic structure. In (7) stress retraction to the focus is not the only effect. In addition, the last beat of stress on Buch is no longer assigned and the initial beat on Kollegin is optional. This reduction of stress in the non-focused parts of the sentence is addressed in the following section.
23.2.3 Focus leads to destressing in non-focused parts of the sentence Two sources of stress reduction on the elements outside of a narrow focus have been discussed. For one thing, it has been argued on independent grounds that next to the prosodic effects of F, the grammar must include an additional factor by which contextually given constituents reject stress (Ladd 1983). While Schwarzschild (1999) tried to unify these two effects, Féry and Samek-Lodovici (2006) argued that next to F-marking the grammar includes G-marking for contextually given constituents, with the prosodic effect of stress rejection. This perspective is adopted by (Selkirk 2008) and others. Now, in all typical cases, focus assignment will go hand in hand with the contextual givenness of the elements surrounding the focus. This was realized early on by Jacobs (1991) who referred to the material surrounding the focus as ‘old information’. In (7), for example, a colleague having recommended a book is old information in the focused answer since it is contextually given by the context question that triggers the focus. If, therefore, the constituents surrounding the focus are all G-marked, this will have the effect that they
468 Hubert Truckenbrodt reject stress because of the G-feature. This assumption is employed in the analysis of Féry and Samek-Lodovici (2006). This line of analysis is strengthened by the results of Katz and Selkirk (2011), which suggest that it may be possible to have non-given constituents outside of a narrow focus, and that these will then not show the destressing effect of givenness. Katz and Selkirk argue that these new elements can still be prosodically distinguished from narrowly focused constituents that have explicit contextual alternatives (Rooth 1992). Another conceivable source for destressing in the environment of focus was introduced by Uhmann (1991) and is explored in Truckenbrodt (1995), Büring (2009), and Katz and Selkirk (2011). It concerns the constituents following the focus. If the rule of rightmost strengthening in (4) is formulated as a surface constraint, it takes the form that the rightmost p-stress must be the strongest stress. This will now interact with stress retraction due to focus. To discuss the effect, let us assume that an element after the focus would retain its p-stress, like the word Buch in (8). This would violate the requirement that the rightmost stress is the strongest. (8) (
x )I (x) x x Eine [NP Kollegin] hat [F einem [NP Studenten] ] [VP ein [NP Buch] empfohlen].
The actual stress pattern in (7) does not assign this rightmost stress. It is therefore not only compatible with stress attraction by focus, but also with the rightmost stress requirement. The stress on the focused element Studenten is also the rightmost p-stress if later p-stresses are deleted. Thus, satisfaction of the rightmost stress requirement is a conceivable motivation for not assigning stress after the focus. The attraction of sentence stress by focus can change the sentence melody and the accompanying deletion of stressed beats will normally affect the sentence melody. Consider the two schematic English contours in (9), based on similar recordings in Beckman and Elam (1993). Example (9a) is a possible all-new rendition of this sentence (e.g. in answer to a question like ‘What happened while I was out?’). By Stress-XP the subject and the object obtain p-stress; by rightmost strengthening the object is strengthened. A simple assertive sentence melody in English will employ H* pitch accents followed by final L-and LI edge tones, as shown.2 Example (9b) shows the same sentence with narrow focus on the subject (e.g. in answer to the question ‘Who made the marmalade?’). There is no p-stress on the object any more, therefore no H* tone on the object, and the sentence melody therefore shows a different shape. 2 The subscript ‘I’ is used here for edge tones of the intonation phrase. For discussion of intonational meanings of the elements of English intonation contours, see Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990), Truckenbrodt (2012), and references there.
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 469 (9) a.
(
[F
H*
H*
L-L I x )I x x Marianna made the marmalade ]
b.
H*
LLI x )I x [F Marianna] made the marmalade
(
Thus, destressing around the focus, whether be it as an effect of givenness or as a secondary prosodic effect of stress retraction, will also change the sentence melody in cases of typical assignment of narrow focus. In summary, a default prosodic pattern is derived from the syntactic structure. It includes stress and constitutes the ‘frame’ on which the tones are assigned that constitute the sentence melody. Narrow focus attracts stress and often leads to destressing of elements outside of the focus. These changes in stress often change the sentence melody.
23.3 Focus and tonal height Section 23.3.1 introduces cross-linguistic effects of focus on tonal height. It is argued that these are connected to the stress that the focus attracts. This perspective is strengthened in Section 23.3.2 with evidence that downstep in German is due to the same stress effect, which is not connected to focus. Section 23.3.3 provides a further argument that the height-effects of focus are stress related.
23.3.1 Focus affects the tonal height Xu (1999) studied in detail the effects of focus on tonal height in the tone language Mandarin Chinese. Xu shows for different tonal combinations that the phonetic consequences of non-final focus are raising of the F0 range in the focused element and lowering and compression of the F0 range following the focused element. The results are illustrated with a plot of the results for the all-H-tone sentence in Figure 23.2. In the figure caption and in later Mandarin sentences, the macrons above the vowels are pinyin transcription of the H tones. In the absence of narrow focus, the five H-toned syllables lead to a nearly horizontal plateau across the utterance (thin solid line). Narrow focus on the subject (thick dotted line) raises the F0 in the focused subject and lowers and compresses it after the subject. Narrow focus on the verb (thick solid line) has a comparable effect. Notice also that focus on the final verb does not lead to a similarly clear effect of raising on the verb.
470 Hubert Truckenbrodt [
subject
H
][ v e r b
H
H
][
object
H
]
H
Figure 23.2 Plot from Xu (1999: 64) with structure added at the top. Sentence māomī mō māomī, ‘Kitty touches kitty’, with five lexical H tones. The conditions are: no narrow focus (thin solid line), narrow focus on the subject (thick dotted line), narrow focus on the verb (thick solid line), and narrow focus on the object (thin dotted line). (The plot is reproduced with permission from Elsevier.)
It seems that raising and lowering/compression are tied to each other: Where there is nothing to lower/compress, the focused constituent does not show a clear rise. The ‘target’ of the F0-effect thus seems to be a height difference between the focused (stressed) F0-height and the following F0-height. The investigation of this focus effect on other lexical tones in Xu (1999) shows that the effect is one that manipulates the tonal range: lexical tonal distinctions are intact both in the boosted area and in the lowered/compressed area, although the height of the realization of the tones varies in the direction that can be seen in the all-H-tone cases in Figure 23.2. In a reasonable approximation, the H-tone lines in Figure 23.2 trace the upper bound of the tonal space into which the tones are mapped. Similar effects of focus (and wh-phrases with focus prosody) are reported for Japanese in Ishihara (2003, 2007) and Féry and Ishihara (2010). Renewed height of a focused constituent in Japanese is also shown in Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) and attributed there to the insertion of a major phrase boundary to the left of the focus. Ishihara (2007) develops the analysis further and argues on the basis of his experimental findings that the raising in the focus is independent of major phrase boundaries. He formulates a rule that expands the pitch register of the focused phrase and another rule that compresses the pitch register of the post-focal material (Ishihara 2007: 157). Katz and Selkirk (2011), in their study of English, seek to distinguish focus that has contextual alternatives from new constituents. Here the former is taken to be focus in the sense used here. In these terms Katz and Selkirk observe an effect of raising of the F0-height in focus and compression of the F0-height following focus. Xu (1999), Ishihara (2007), and Féry and Ishihara (2010) follow a descriptive standard practice and formulate these F0-height-effects as effects of focus. On the other hand, Katz and Selkirk (2011) as well as Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) raise the issue of whether it is the syntactic feature F that triggers these F0-effects or whether the
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 471 phonological grid-marks of prominence (which focus attracts by (5)) trigger these F0-effects. Katz and Selkirk (2011) point out that their data does not distinguish these possibilities. However, they attribute the effect to the grid-marks, that is, the stress that the F-feature attracts. They argue for this on principled grounds: Attributing F0-effects to the syntactic F-feature would fail to draw a connection between these phonetic effects that would be attributed to F and the phonetic effects attributed to the stress that the focus attracts. Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) provide an empirical argument for attributing the effects to grid-marks rather than to the F-feature. This relates to a follow-up experiment in Mandarin Chinese that they conducted. It is reviewed in Section 23.3.3. Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) also argue for this on principled grounds, and the argument is essentially parallel to a further argument given by Katz and Selkirk (2011): the indirect reference hypothesis (Inkelas 1989) has served as a useful guide in prosodic phonology. It maintains that phonological rules (or, later, constraints) do not make reference to syntactic structure, though they may of course make reference to prosodic structure. It would be odd if phonetics could ‘skip’ the phonology entirely and have the powers to refer to the syntax (here: the syntactic feature F) if this is not allowed to phonology. Kabagema- Bilan et al. (2011) formulate the extended indirect reference hypothesis, which includes syntactic features such as F and possible reference-points for phonetics. The ideas are the same in the discussion of Katz and Selkirk (2011) and so the model is here credited to both papers. The lines in (10) show possible direct connections by rules/constraints of grammar or rules/constraints of phonetic implementation/perceptual recovery under this model. (10) The extended indirect reference hypothesis Katz and Selkirk (2011) and Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) XPs, F, G syntax including info. str.
( x ) prosody
segmental phonology phonetics
It can be seen that the model does not allow a rule or constraint that connects the syntactic F-feature to phonetic height effects or other phonetic effects. However, F may attract stress as in (5) and stress may in turn have phonetic consequences on F0-height. The remainder of section 23.3 provides two arguments for this view and a more specific formulation of the F0-height effects of stress.
23.3.2 Independent motivation for a similar effect based on stress without focus In the German recording in Figure 23.1 each rise is lower than the preceding rise. This is analysed as downstep, that is, successive lowering of the register in which the tones
472 Hubert Truckenbrodt are realized. See also Liberman and Pierrehumbert (1984) on downstep in English, Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) on downstep in Japanese, Prieto (1998) on downstep in Spanish and Grabe (1998) on downstep in German. Downstep in German was also studied in Truckenbrodt (2004). The case is interesting for the current discussion because the F0-effects that we see for Mandarin focus in Figure 23.2 appear in a configuration in which they can be connected to stress, but cannot be connected to focus. However, the shape in which these effects are visible is superficially different, since it occurs in a sequence of downstepping tones. Consider the plots in Figure 23.3. These show the peak height of downstepping sequences as in Figure 23.1. The sentences in which these peaks were measured included a further, upstepped, pitch accent in the same intonation phrase. This upstepped peak is not plotted in Figure 23.3. (The phenomenon of upstep will be illustrated further in section 23.4.2.) The different series (a), (b), (c), and (d) in Figure 23.3 show measurements of the peaks in a sequence of rises of different length. The important result is that at points H1, H2, and H3, the value that represents the end of a sequence is lower than the other points. For example, at point H1, series (a), which has only this one value, has a lower point than the other series at point H1. Descriptively, the point in series (a) is not followed by downstep and it is thus lower than the points of the other series, which are followed by downstep after H1. Similarly at point H2: the value of series (b), which is not followed by further downstep, is lower than the values in the other series (c) and (d), which are followed by downstep. At point H3, the value for series (c), not followed by downstep, is lower than the value of series (d), which is followed by downstep. 1.5
Normalized f0
1.0
.5
a b
0.0
c –.5 N=
72 72 72 72 H1 series a.
72 72 72
69 72
70
H2
H3
H4
series b.
series c.
series d.
Figure 23.3 Averages and 95 per cent confidence intervals for pitch peaks in sequences with different numbers of pitch accents, each followed by an upstepped pitch accent that is not plotted. The plot is based on the data of the four recorded speakers that showed upstep on the nuclear pitch accent. (Reproduced from Truckenbrodt (2004: 330) with permission from Elsevier.)
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 473 The analysis suggested in Truckenbrodt (2004) is that downstep is coupled with a boosting effect on the F0-value that precedes downstep. For example, at point H1, the height of series (a) represents the height one obtains without this boosting effect. The values of the other series at point H1 are boosted relative to this height because they are followed by downstep. Similarly at later points: All non-final values in all series are boosted because they are followed by downstep. It is important that the effect is found in a non-final position of an intonation phrase. It could otherwise also be analysed as final lowering in the sense of Liberman and Pierrehumbert (1984): an effect of lowering the last member of a sequence of downstepping accents in a position that is final in some domain. However, in the German case, the chains plotted in Figure 23.3 do not end at the end of a larger prosodic or syntactic constituent in which they are final and that could serve as a trigger for such an effect of lowering. Truckenbrodt (2007b) suggests that boosting and following downstep in the cases plotted in Figure 23.3 are effects of stress. To illustrate, the plot and the structure of Figure 23.1 are repeated here as Figure 23.4. Additional lines in Figure 23.4 illustrate the analysis and the parallel to the focus effects that were seen in Mandarin Chinese. The dashed horizontal line is an estimated default for the height of the first peak. It corresponds to the height of the point of series (a) at H1 in Figure 23.3. Relative to this height, the first peak in Figure 23.4 is raised and the following tonal space is lowered and compressed. The second peak is therefore downstepped. The second peak is nevertheless itself raised a bit and it further lowers the following tonal space, since it is itself also associated with stress. (The raising is seen at point H2 in Figure 23.3 in the difference between (b) and the other series. The lowering/compression, as in the first step, is the downstep among the pitch accents.) While the case looks different on the surface, it provides a model for the height effects associated with focus in Mandarin Chinese and in other languages: raising in the position of the stressed element and lowering/compression of the tonal height that follows. In the German case, these effects can be attributed to stress but not to focus, since there is no narrow focus in the renditions that were investigated. (They were elicited as
140 120 100 80
[ (
x L*+H
)(
x L*+H
)(
x L*+H
)(
x x H+L*
]I )P
i-stress and i-phrases p-stress and p-phrases tones (pitch accents)
Figure 23.4 Repetition of the structure and plot of the German recording in Figure 23.1. Lines are added to illustrate the analysis of downstep in terms of raising in the stressed position and following lowering/compression. (Adapted from Truckenbrodt (2007b: 353).)
474 Hubert Truckenbrodt answers to Was gibt’s Neues? ‘What’s new?’.) The German case thus provides evidence that stress, on its own, has the kind of F0-height-effect that is observed for focus in Mandarin Chinese and other languages.3
23.3.3 Support for an F0-effect of stress from multiple focus in Mandarin Chinese This section reviews the argument of Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) that the F0-effects observed in Mandarin by Xu (1999) are triggered by stress rather than by the F-feature. The argument is based on an experiment on multiple focus in Mandarin Chinese. If the F-feature had the effect of raising F0 in the focus and lowering/compressing F0 afterwards, a sentence with two foci as in (11) should show this effect twice, once for each focus. This expectation is indicated by the lines above the example. (11) [Who steals whose nest?]
or: [Does an eagle steal a magpie’s nest?]
H H H H H H [māomī]F tōu [w yā]F wō kitty steal raven nest ‘A kitty steals a raven’s nest.’
The prediction of the account in terms of stress depends on the stress assignment in cases of multiple foci. Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) and Truckenbrodt (2015) argue, following up on Schwarzschild (1999) and revising a helpful first step in Selkirk (2005),4 that it is sufficient for an utterance with two foci to carry a single beat of i-stress on the second focus. This is illustrated with the German example in (12). (12) [Who steals whose nest?] ( x ) x x Ein Kätzchen stiehlt des Raben Nest. a kitty steals a raven nest ‘A kitty steals a raven’s nest.’ 3 It
i-phrase p-phrase
is not impossible that the effect attributed to final lowering in a series of downstepped pitch accents in English in Liberman and Pierrehumbert (1984) are of the same kind. While final lowering has been postulated in other configurations as well (e.g. Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988), it never seems to be as abrupt as at the end of a series of downstepping tones. 4 According to Schwarzschild (1999) each of the foci requires a accent, which is comparable to the p-stress in the current paper. Selkirk (2005) suggested that each focus in a multiple focus construction requires i-stress. It is argued in Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) and in more detail in Truckenbrodt (2015) that this is true of Selkirk’s examples, but that they have a special status insofar as each focus is also a separate claim (speech act) in those examples.
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 475 To be sure, it is easily possible in longer utterances that the two foci introduce a tendency for the utterance to fall apart into two i-phrases, which would then each have a beat of i- stress on the focus: (A KITTYF)I(steals a RAVEN’SF nest)I. Nevertheless, the representation with a single i-stress seems to be at least possible. If, in Mandarin, F attracts i-stress in a similar fashion on the second of two foci, one expects that multiple focus shows only a single effect of F0-raising and subsequent lowering/compression, as shown in (13). (13) [Who steals whose nest?]
or: [Does an eagle steal a magpie’s nest?]
(
x ) H H H H H H [māom ]F tōu [w yā]F wō kitty steal raven nest ‘A kitty steals a raven’s nest.’
i-phrase
The results of Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) support the stress analysis of the F0-effect in (13). The results of two test sentences are shown in Figure 23.5.5 Each dot represents an average of ten measurements (normalized for speaker range) from two repetitions each by five speakers. The horizontal thick line with black plotting points is from a comparison condition with no narrow focus. The thin line with white plotting points is from a comparison condition with focus only on the subject. It shows an effect of F0-raising followed by strong F0-lowering. The results of the remaining three Sentence 1
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Figure 23.5 Plots from Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011: 1898). Normalized averaged measurements of recordings from the sentence in (11)/(13) (Sentence 1) and another example with a similar structure (Sentence 2: gūmā shāo dōngguā tāng ‘Aunt cooks wantermelon soup.’). The plotted measurements were taken at utterance-beginning and utterance-end as well as at the temporal mid-point of the vocalic part of each syllable. (Reproduced with permission from Elsevier.)
5
Two more sentences were recorded and reported on with the same conditions and procedure. These are not presented here for reasons of space. They included a neutral-tone syllable with an overlaid tonal effect, but the point at hand is also supported by these additional results.
476 Hubert Truckenbrodt conditions are virtually indistinguishable from each other. They show raising on the focus about two-thirds of the way into the utterance, and strong subsequent lowering. One of these three conditions (plotted with white plotting points, often hidden in the plots) employed a single focus on the object modifier. The other two of the three indistinguishable conditions (plotted with black plotting points) are from multiple focus on the subject and on the object modifier (once in an answer to a multiple-wh- question, once in a context with multiple contrast). Importantly, there is no significant F0-effect of the first focus in the multiple-focus conditions. This finding supports the stress analysis of the relation between focus and tonal height. If each F-feature would directly trigger F0-raising and later lowering, we would expect the F0 effect of the first focus to be comparable to the F0 effect of the second focus. On the other hand, an intervening prosodic structure leads to a natural account of these results, as was seen in connection with (13). In the experiment, we happened to come across supporting evidence for this conclusion. The focus effect occurred on the second syllable in wūyā ‘raven’ and on the first syllable in dōngguā ‘wintermelon’. The difference can plausibly be analysed in terms of different positions of the prosodic head within the different bisyllabic modifier words. The crucial grid-mark for i-stress would then be placed on top of this word-internal prosodic head. On the other hand, the modifiers must be assumed to be F-marked in their entirety in both cases. A direct phonetic effect of F would be expected to be independent of the internal make-up of the modifier. In summary, the experiment on multiple focus in Mandarin Chinese reported in Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) supports an indirect relation between the F-feature and the tonal height, mediated by a stress representation of abstract prominence (e.g. a grid-mark). It seems to be that i-stress is assigned to a narrowly focused element in Mandarin Chinese and that it triggers raising and later lowering and compression of the tonal range. In multiple focus, only the second F-marked constituent carries i-stress and triggers F0-raising with subsequent lowering and compression. The statement in (14) formulates what seems to be the effect of stress on tonal height, generalizing across stress due to focus and stress independent of focus. (14) Height-subordination by stress A grid-mark of prosodic level n will raise the tonal space for tones associated with the grid-mark and lower/compress the tonal space for following tones, provided that there is tonal material following the grid-mark that shows the effect of the lowering/compression. This defines raising in the stressed position and following lowering/compression as a phonetic F0-effects of grid-marks. Notice that the provision at the end of the formulation is important. In the Mandarin case in Figure 23.2 there is no clear raising of the focused final object in the absence of following material to show the effect of lowering/ compression. Similarly in the German case in Figure 23.3, there is no boosting effect on
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 477 the last pitch-accent in each series because there is no following pitch accent that would show the lowering/compressing effect. In both cases boosting crucially does not occur where lowering/compression cannot have a visible effect.
23.4 Focus and upstep in German In this section, the results of Féry and Kügler (2008) are discussed, which suggest that focus can have yet another height-effect in German, namely the cancellation of height- subordination that comes from stresses that precede the focus (‘upstep’). The discussion relates this to results from Truckenbrodt (2002, 2007b) concerning upstep. However, it will also be shown that this account is preliminary insofar as it cannot be clarified whether the different effects of focus on tonal height in Grice et al. (2009) are compatible with it.
23.4.1 Focus and tonal height in German: the results of Féry and Kügler (2008) Féry and Kügler (2008) report the results of a large experiment. Sentences were investigated in which a final verb was preceded by one, two, or three arguments. Two central conditions were an all-new condition and a condition with narrow focus. In the all-new condition, downstep among the accents on the arguments was the normal case. The nuclear (last) accent was downstepped in 46 per cent of the cases and upstepped in the other 54 per cent of the cases. As in Truckenbrodt (2002, 2007b), upstep is described as targeting a fairly constant height that does not depend on the preceding downstep. Generally speaking, it is in the vicinity of the utterance-initial height of all-new sentences. Furthermore, Féry and Kügler (2008) report that a narrowly focused argument or a narrowly focused verb consistently shows upstep. Their plots illustrating this are reproduced in Figure 23.6 below. Féry and Kügler (2008) show that the height of these focused peaks is not a function of the height that precedes them. These results suggest that focus may have yet another effect on tonal height, namely the cancellation of height-subordination (14) that comes from stressed elements that precede the focus. This hypothesis is developed in the following section.
23.4.2 Upstep Upstep with Southern German speakers is investigated in utterance-medial position in Truckenbrodt (2002, 2007b). Upstep at the end of the first i-phrase was
478 Hubert Truckenbrodt (c) 290
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Figure 23.6 Mean F0 of narrow focus on different constituents. (a) Narrow focus on the first argument. (b) Narrow focus on the second argument. (c) Narrow focus on the third argument. (d) Narrow focus on the verb. (Reproduced from Féry and Kügler (2008: 689) with permission from Elsevier.)
regularly found with eight speakers in a set of 72 recordings for each speaker. Each speaker showed the upstep either on the nuclear pitch accent of the first i-phrase or on the boundary tone at the end of the first i-phrase, or on both, as can be seen for speaker TL in Figure 23.7. The reader is referred to Truckenbrodt (2002, 2007a) for details. A typical pattern is illustrated in Figure 23.7. The full example, consisting of two intonation phrases, is given in (15). As in Figure 23.1, the initial sequence of pitch accents (here L*+H) in Figure 23.7 is downstepped. This downstep is now attributed to the successive lowering effects of the non-f inal p-stresses on the tonal height by rule (14). The breath-pause marks the division between the two i-phrases. At the end of the first i-phrase (circled) the nuclear pitch accent (L*+H) and a following HI boundary tone are upstepped: the tonal height returns to approximately the utterance-initial height. The suggestion developed in Truckenbrodt (2007b) for this and the other patterns of upstep is that upstep occurs before the end of the
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 479 Manieren beibringen Der Werner und die Lena 150 125
HI
wollen dem Lehrling
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und die Lola
breathpause [ ( [
x )P ( L∗+H SU
x x )P ( x L∗+H L∗+H
x )P ( L∗+H &
SU
V
IO
DO
]I )P
[ (
HI V
]
[
… x )P(… … L∗+H SU
…
Figure 23.7 Plot of a recording of the first part of example (15). Solid lines delimit accented words. Dashed lines additionally delimit accented syllables, which are marked by a star. Speaker TL. (Adapted from Truckenbrodt (2007b).)
intonation phrase on H tones related to the i-phrase. In Figure 23.7, the L*+H pitch accent is associated with the strongest stress of the i-phrase and thus upstepped. It is followed by a high boundary tone HI of the intonation phrase that is likewise upstepped. (15) [ (
x ]I x )( x )( x ) ( x )p L*+H L*+H L*+H L*+H Der Werner und die Lola wollen der Lehrerin Manieren beibringen, the Werner and the Lola want the teacher.fem manners teach ‘Werner and Lola want to teach manners to the teacher,’ [ (
x )( L*+H
x x )( x L*+H H+L*
]I )p
und die Lola will dem Manuel eine Warnung geben and the Lola wants the Manual a warning give ‘and Lola wants to give Manuel a warning. Let us then translate this suggestion to the current understanding of downstep as height- subordination due to p-stress:
480 Hubert Truckenbrodt (16) Hypothesis on the cancellation of the height-subordinating effect of stress in (14) Given an application of (14) at the prosodic level n, the lowering/compressing effect carries over to all later tones that are associated with the same prosodic level n or with lower prosodic levels; however, the lowering/compressing effect is cancelled when a tone that is associated with a higher prosodic level than n is encountered. The effect is then cancelled for this tone and for all following tones. In Figure 23.7, the height-subordinating effect visible in the initial steps of downstep is cancelled with the encounter of the (circled) L*+H pitch accent on the i-stress of the first intonation phrase. We may assume that the tonal height then employs the default that is also employed in assigning the utterance-initial height. Let us then see how hypothesis (16) carries over to the central results of Féry and Kügler (2008). A not unreasonable understanding of their results is that utterances without narrow focus are assigned i-stress optionally, as in (17a). A related suggestion, by which i-stress need not be assigned in the default case in English, is made by Katz and Selkirk (2011). Where i-stress is not assigned in the recordings of Féry and Kügler, downstep on the last accent results by (16). This is because the last accent is not associated to a higher prosodic level than the preceding accents, and it is therefore height- subordinated to the preceding accents. Where optional i-stress is assigned, the nuclear accent is associated to a higher prosodic level, and is therefore not height-subordinated but upstepped. This is a sensible way of representing the optionality of upstep in utterances without narrow focus. The focus cases can then be analysed as in (17b). By (5), the assignment of F requires that the F-marked constituent have greater prosodic height than preceding constituents. Its accent is then associated to a higher grid-column than preceding accents. It is therefore regularly upstepped, that is not height-subordinated by preceding stresses. (17) a. all-new sentences: downstep or upstep x x x x x H H H H
b. narrow focus: always upstep; higher grid-mark required by (5) x i-stress x x p-stress H H [ ]F
In summary, it seems to be plausible that the upstepping effect of focus in Féry and Kügler (2008) is also related to stress assignment: Since focus requires greater stress than preceding elements by (5), it may naturally lead to the cancellation of height- subordinating effects of preceding elements carrying p-stress by hypothesis (16).
Focus, Intonation, and Tonal Height 481
23.4.3 Focus and tonal height in German: the results of Grice et al. (2009) The preceding analysis is presented with some caution, since it is not currently clear whether it is compatible with the results of a focus experiment on German reported in Baumann et al. (2007) and Grice et al. (2009). The stimulus sentence is Marlene will eine Banane schälen ‘Marlene wants to peel a banana.’ There are crucial F0 peaks on the subject and on the object. A distinction was made between wide focus, regular narrow focus on the object and contrastive narrow focus on the object. Phonetically the results were classified in terms of lowering of the second peak (‘downstep’), a second peak of comparable height to the first (‘unmodified’), and a higher second peak than the first (‘upstep’). The assignment was perceptually based. Post-hoc analysis showed thresholds of about 1.5 semitones in both directions in the perceptual assignment. The authors obtained the distribution of the height-relations across the three conditions that is shown in the plot in Figure 23.8, reproduced from Grice et al. (2009). It can be seen that downstep is most frequent in broad focus, but that it also occurs in narrow focus and, still less frequently, with contrastive narrow focus. Of particular relevance here is that downstep, though less frequent with narrow focus, nevertheless occurs in about 50 per cent of the cases with narrow (non-contrastive) focus in this data. It seems to be conceivable to us that the experimental set-up of Grice et al. (2009) allowed the deployment of a downstepping pitch accent in which the downstep signifies inferential accessibility likewise described in Grice et al. (2009). The contexts that Grice et al. (2009) employed in their focus experiment do not encourage this, but they may be said to allow it. The source of the difference from the results from Féry and Kügler (2008) cannot be resolved here with any certainty. It seems, for now, that (16) 90 Nuclear pitch accent type (observed frequencies)
80 70 60 50 40
downstep (!H*) unmodified (H*) upstep (^H*)
30 20 10 0
broad
narrow
contrast
Figure 23.8 Height-relations among two accents depending on broad focus, narrow focus on the object and contrastive focus on the object. (Reproduced from Grice et al. (2009: 897) with permission from Elsevier.)
482 Hubert Truckenbrodt is a promising hypothesis, but that further research is required to clarify the empirical situation.
23.5 Summary Focus attracts stress. In addition, the assignment of focus will often also lead to the suppression of stress outside of the focus. Since stressed elements carry pitch accents, which shape the sentence melody, the assignment of focus will often change the sentence melody. Focus can also raise the tonal height of the focused elements and lower/compress the tonal height of following elements. It was argued that this seems to be a more general effect of stress and that it occurs with focus because focus attracts stress. German downstep between pitch accents is arguably another instance of this effect. Finally, focus in German led to obligatory upstep in the results of Féry and Kügler (2008). This may also be an effect of the stress attraction by focus. Modifying Truckenbrodt (2007), the hypothesis was formulated that upstep is the cancellation of preceding height-subordination which occurs due to the association of a tone with a higher prosodic level.
Chapter 24
Se c ond O c cu rre nc e Fo c u s Stefan Baumann
24.1 Introduction A whole range of slightly different but related structures have been discussed under the notion of ‘Second Occurrence Focus’ (SOF). Taking the traditional view as a point of departure, we may conceive SOF as a specific type of focus, which is indicated morpho- syntactically by a focus-sensitive operator (such as only or even), and which is at the same time contextually given—in contrast to ‘First Occurrence Focus’ (FOF), which is contextually new.1 An often cited example by Partee (1999: 215) is shown in (1), where vegetables occurs as an FOF element in (a) and as an overtly repeated SOF element in (b).2 (1) a. Everyone knew that Mary only eats [VEgetables]FOF . b. If even [PAUL]FOF knew that Mary only eats [vegetables]SOF , then he should have suggested a different restaurant. This combination of ‘focusedness’ on the one hand and ‘givenness’ on the other causes a problem in terms of the expected prosodic marking of SOF elements, which can be described as follows: According to (direct) ‘association with focus’ theories (e.g. Jackendoff 1972; Rooth 1985; von Stechow 1990; Krifka 1992), a focus-sensitive operator like only has to be associated with a focus in its syntactic constituent which is indicated by prosodic prominence. Note that ‘prosodic prominence’ has often been equated with the concept of ‘pitch accent’, in particular ‘nuclear pitch accent’, which is defined as the last and structurally strongest prominence in an intonation unit (cf. also Zubizarreta, 1 Throughout this chapter, we will indicate a focus associated with a focus-sensitive operator by FOF and SOF, and a free focus (which is not associated with a focus-sensitive operator) just by F (unless the conventions used by specific theories are reported). 2 Capital letters indicate the presence of a pitch accent.
484 Stefan Baumann this volume). We follow the view proposed in autosegmental-metrical approaches that the relevant prosodic domain for a nuclear accent is the intermediate phrase (ip; cf. Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986; Ladd 2008).3 In the present chapter, we will use prominence as a cover term for both (postlexical, i.e. actually realized) stress (also referred to as metrical stress later in the text), indicated by non-tonal phonetic features such as duration and intensity, and (pitch) accent, which additionally involves pitch movement. It has been claimed (e.g. by Partee 1991, 1999; Krifka 2004) that SOF—in contrast to FOF—is not marked by prosodic prominence (note the apparent deaccentuation of vegetables in (1b) above). The existence of such an ‘inaudible focus’ would violate association with focus theories, since it would imply either that focus (at least SOF) is not necessarily marked by prosodic prominence OR that operators like only do not always associate with focus. Many papers have discussed this problem from a semantics and pragmatics point of view, but more recently there has also been a growing interest in phonetic and phonological aspects of SOF, including the evidence found in empirical investigations. This evidence suggests that SOF is in fact prosodically marked but only by a secondary prominence without pitch movement. Since this specific prosodic marking is often regarded as the distinctive feature of SOF and other ‘second occurrence expressions’ (Krifka 2004), it is not an easy task to establish a conclusive definition of the phenomenon. The traditional definition given above is narrow in that it demands the occurrence of a focus particle and the literal repetition of a focused expression. In the following, we may also refer to this restrictive view as ‘proper SOF’ (Krifka 2004). However, in most of the more recent literature, a broader view has been advocated, suggesting that these conditions are neither sufficient nor necessary for a comprehensive account of SOF—including related second occurrence structures. Although it is agreed that SOF can not be distinguished from an ordinary focus by givenness alone (since an ordinary focus can be given as well; see next section), several studies insist that givenness in fact is a necessary precondition for SOF (which is the view of the so-called splitters, separating the effects of focus and givenness) while others consider only a division in focus and background necessary (view of lumpers, not separating the effects of focus and givenness). A final aspect of an ex negativo definition of SOF is that it is not just a second focus in the linear order of a clause or sentence (as may be suggested by (1))—rather, the focused phrase has to be derivable from the previous context (which implies that an SOF can also occur sentence-initially). The rest of the chapter is structured as follows: After a presentation of the main (semantic-pragmatic) accounts of SOF and their general models of focus and givenness, as well as empirical evidence for a prosodic manifestation of focus in SOF structures (Section 24.2), semantically and prosodically comparable configurations will be
3 The superordinate prosodic domain is the intonation phrase (IP), which consists of one or more intermediate phrases (cf. Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986). Each intermediate phrase contains one nuclear accent.
Second Occurrence Focus 485 discussed (Section 24.3) leading to an outlook on a possible unified approach of the phonological representation of second occurence expressions (Section 24.4).
24.2 Solutions to the SOF problem As a first step towards a solution to the SOF challenge it has to be noted that the lack of prominence on SOF items cannot simply be explained by their givenness in the discourse, since there are many instances in West Germanic languages in which contextually given constituents do receive focus prominence, as in examples (2)–(4), all adapted from Büring (2013: 2).4 (2) a. Who showed up last at John’s party? b. [JOHN]F (showed up last at his party). (3) a. Bob was completely drunk at John’s party. b. No, [JOHN]F was completely drunk at his party. In (2b), John is focused or F-marked (cf. Rooth, this volume) since it is the answer to the preceding question. The referential expression is necessarily marked by a (nuclear) pitch accent, despite its contextual givenness (John has been mentioned in (2a)). Similarly, in cases of overt contrast or correction as in (3b), focus prosody (here: nuclear accent due to the correction to John) overrides the prosody which would be expected on the basis of the information status of the discourse referents alone (here: deaccentuation due to the givenness of John). The example in (4) contains foci which are associated with focus-sensitive operators. It reveals that associated foci can be given as well and, notably, this does even apply to ‘First Occurrence Foci’, making the term somewhat problematic here.5 (4) a. Many people only drank juice at John’s party. b. Even [JOHN]FOF only drank [juice]SOF at his party. Actually, the referent in question, John, does not surface in the same syntactic position in (4a) and (4b), a fact that prevents deaccentuation according to findings by Terken and Hirschberg (1994). The authors could show that persistence of the same syntactic surface position facilitates deaccentuation, in particular if accompanied by a persistence 4
The semantic-pragmatic and prosodic analysis is restricted to the (b) sentences. fact, Büring (2013) suggests using the term ‘primary focus’ for focus expressions bearing the nuclear pitch accent, thus avoiding the potential inconsistency that a ‘First Occurrence Focus’ may contain a given element. However, defining a semantic-pragmatic category in terms of its prosodic realization runs the risk of circularity. 5 In
486 Stefan Baumann of grammatical function. In fact, this is the case with only drank juice in (4), which is a ‘proper SOF expression’ defined by Krifka (2004) as a verbatim repetition of a phrase. Let us describe the SOF challenge more closely from a semantic point of view. The traditional assumption in direct association with focus models is that focus-sensitive operators determine a domain which contains a semantic focus. This semantic focus is obligatorily marked by a syntactic F-feature which in turn contains at least one element which is marked by a phonological focus, usually realized as a pitch accent (as in [eats VEgetables] in (1a)). The phenomenon accounting for the observation that not every element in a syntactic phrase corresponding to the semantic focus is prosodically prominent but generally only one element (the focus exponent) whose prominence ‘stands for’ the whole phrase, is known as focus projection (cf. Gussenhoven 1983; Selkirk 1995; Truckenbrodt 1995; Arregi, this volume). Along these lines, the challenge with SOF structures as introduced by Partee (1999) is that we have a semantic focus (vegetables in (1b)) which cannot be F-marked since it is not made prominent by a pitch accent. In other words, SOF structures such as those in (1b) demand a dissociation between semantic focus and phonological focus which is a contradiction in terms for traditional accounts of focus sensitivity (for a more detailed line of argumentation see Beaver et al. 2007). Two general solutions to the SOF challenge (given the restricted view on SOF we have used so far) have been put forward: Pragmatic theories of focus (Section 24.2.1) and modified association with focus accounts (Section 24.2.2).
24.2.1 Pragmatic accounts of focus The first solution is provided by pragmatic theories of focus starting with Rooth (1992) who allow that a semantic focus is not necessarily F-marked and thus not necessarily marked by pitch prominence. Approaches like these (e.g. von Fintel 2002; Roberts 1996; Schwarzschild 1999; Krifka 2004), called ‘strong theories of focus sensitivity’ by Rooth (1992), propose that a discourse entity becomes associated with a focus-sensitive operator (or, rather, with its free variable) simply for contextual reasons. That is, as opposed to direct association with focus theories, also termed ‘weak theories of focus sensitivity’ by Rooth, the interaction between focus and meaning is not mediated by rules of grammar (in particular syntax) but has to be explained by general principles of pragmatics (cf. Velleman and Beaver, this volume), as for example in the anaphora account of focus by von Fintel (2002), also argued for by Krifka (2004). As an effect, there is no obligatory one-to-one relation between a focus—interpreted as a semantic focus of a quantificational or focus-sensitive operator—and its marking by a pitch accent any more. Instead, this relation is less direct and ‘reduced’ to an optional rule based on plausibility in the given context. In other words, some operators are claimed to be context-sensitive rather than focus-sensitive, in the same way as quantificational adverbials such as always in (5), whose domain can be restricted by context alone.
Second Occurrence Focus 487 (5) Mary always is late.
(Krifka 2004: 196)
Generally, an SOF phrase may thus be fully deaccented due to contextual givenness, that is, it does not require a phonological reflex of an F feature. An example with the operator only is (6b) (derived from Partee 1991) with the repeated phrase the poor students. (6) a. A: Eva only gave xerox copies to [the POOR students]FOF . b. B: No, [PETR]F only gave xerox copies to [the poor students]SOF . c. B′: No, [PETR]F only gave xerox copies to [those students]SOF . (Krifka 2004: 202) However, even proponents of pragmatic accounts concede that the realization of certain pronouns may challenge this approach. Von Fintel, for example, suggests that (6c) is only acceptable with a secondary prominence (indicated by small capitals) on the (non- contrastively used) pronoun those. One possible explanation for the alleged difference between (6b) and (6c) is based on the assumption that there are strong and weak varieties of pronouns, which are distinguished by a phonological feature [±stress]. The strong variety is used if the pronoun is in focus and thus surfaces with secondary prominence, that is [+stress] (see Krifka 2004: 205). Another explanation is that the operator only is directly sensitive to prosodic prominence after all, which would again be in line with an interpretation of only as being focus-sensitive (an assumption the association with focus accounts are based on; see the next section). There is evidence, though, that not all focus-sensitive operators have to be interpreted in the same way and that for some of them, for example always, a pragmatic interpretation may be more appropriate (see Beaver and Clark 2008: 154ff.).
24.2.2 Modified association with focus accounts The second solution is embodied in a number of models we may call ‘modified association with focus’ accounts. What they have in common is that they keep up the claim that SOF is in fact focused (or F-marked) and realized with prosodic prominence, but that this prominence is only secondary (i.e. non-nuclear). Among the advocates of these accounts there is some debate as to whether it is possible to find a uniform explanation for focusing and its prosodic realization or whether it is necessary to distinguish between two sources—namely contrast to alternatives and newness/givenness (with varying terminology)—that determine the assignment of prosodic prominence. Beaver and Velleman (2011) call the first group lumpers, advertising a one-factor account, and the second one splitters, favouring a two-factor account.
24.2.2.1 Lumpers The main proponents of the lumpers camp are Büring (2013) and Rooth (2010). They base their accounts of SOF to some extent on Schwarzschild (1999) who integrates the effects of focus into his definition of givenness (cf. Rochemont, this volume). Both
488 Stefan Baumann Büring and Rooth claim that the difference between FOF and SOF can be accounted for in terms of domain size: While the domain of an FOF is maximal, that is, a whole sentence, and is thus marked by a nuclear accent, the domain of an SOF is smaller and can at most receive a secondary prominence (to be defined in greater detail below). Büring (2013) formulates this basic principle under the heading of the Domain Theory of Primacy, in combination with the FocusProminence principle (adapted from Truckenbrodt 1995): (7) Domain Theory of Primacy Among two foci F1 and F2 in a sentence, F2 is secondary to F1 iff F1’s domain properly contains that of F2. Büring (2013: 3) (8) FocusProminence If P is the domain of a focus-sensitive operator O, the metrically strongest element in P is contained in a focus of O. Büring (2013: 6) Büring claims that all foci have to be ‘interpreted’ by an operator. An operator may either be focus-sensitive (like the particles only or even) leading to an ‘associated’ focus, or not (like ContextConnect (CC), being attached to the whole sentence) leaving the focus ‘free’. Primary foci (F1) are always free foci, occurring, for example, in question–answer pairs or in overtly contrastive focus structures. Thus, in a combination of a free focus and an associated focus as in (9), the first occurrence of faculty is primary and carries the nuclear accent, whereas the associated focus is embedded and thus secondary—both in terms of semantic interpretation and phonological marking, two levels which are closely related in this account. (9) CC1 [The FAcultyF1 [only2 quote the facultySOF2]]6 The combination of two associated foci, as in example (4) above, repeated here as (10), is a less clear case. Here, Büring claims that one of the associated foci additionally serves as a free, sentential focus which thus receives the nuclear accent. (10) (Many people only drank juice at John’s party.) CC1 [[Even2 [JOHN]FOF2]F1 only3 drank [juice]SOF3 at his party] The argument for choosing even John as the free focus is not its novelty in the discourse (since both candidates for the primary accent, John and juice, are contextually given) but the fact that even John fills the structural gap in the open proposition ‘x only drank juice at John’s party’, which can be interpreted as presupposed due to the indefinite expression 6 Secondarily prominent syllables are indicated by small capitals. The use of brackets and indices is taken from Büring (2013), with the exception of the convention introduced in footnote 1: associated foci are spelled out as FOF and SOF, free foci as F.
Second Occurrence Focus 489 many people. In other words, even John can be regarded as the answer to the contextually given question ‘Who only drank juice at John’s party?’ (cf. Roberts’ (1996) Question Under Discussion, or QUD) and is thus a legitimate free focus. Following the Domain Theory of Primacy, in combination with the FocusProminence principle, the free focus domain with John as focus exponent is maximal and contains the associated focus domain with juice as a secondarily prominent focus exponent. That is, juice only receives a postnuclear prominence. The structure in (10′) illustrates the relation of embeddedness more clearly than (10). (10′) [Even JOHN [only drank juice at his party]] Rooth (2010) summarizes this configuration of embeddedness of SOF in the scope of a primary focus and its phonological marking as follows: αF …[[… βF …] ~j]…] ~k] 7 ↓ ↓ ordinary F SOF phonology phonology
(11) [[…
In the schema, SOF phonology is supposed to be indicated by secondary, that is postnuclear, prominences. These are not equivalent to pitch accents but to metrical stresses which lack tonal movement. The main syllables of SOF items are made prominent in particular by increased duration and intensity in comparison with fully unaccented syllables. In contrast, ‘ordinary F phonology’ (which also holds for FOF as introduced above) is marked by fully-fledged (generally nuclear) pitch accents. We will come back to the phonetic realization of these prosodic prominences in detail in Section 24.2.3 below and in subsequent sections.
24.2.2.2 Splitters Being widely in accordance with the phonological analysis of SOF structures proposed by Büring and Rooth, advocates of the splitters camp (in particular Selkirk 2008 and Beaver and Velleman 2011) suggest a somewhat diverging semantic-syntactic-pragmatic model. As mentioned above, splitters argue for an independent role of newness/givenness from (contrastive) focus in the description of an element’s prosodic marking. Selkirk (2008) explains the phonology of SOF items by a combination of F(ocus)- marking and G(ivenness)-marking, the latter inhibiting the assignment of a fully- fledged pitch accent. She proposes that F-marking is always contrastive, following Rooth’s (1992) interpretation of focus in his theory of alternative semantics. At the heart of Selkirk’s account is the FocusProminence rule introduced in (8) (which Selkirk calls Contrastive Focus Prominence Rule) and the constraint Destress Given adopted from Féry and Samek-Lodovici (2006) which guarantees that a given constituent cannot be 7
The symbols ~j and ~k indicate focus interpretation operators of different domains.
490 Stefan Baumann marked by a primary (i.e. nuclear) accent. Selkirk (2008: 342) proposes four different possibilities, shown in (12) (with the predicted phonological markings added). (12) Standard contrastive focus: F-marked (nuclear accent) Second occurrence contrastive focus: F-marked, G-marked (secondary prominence, non-nuclear) Given, non-contrastive: G-marked (no prominence) Non-given, non-contrastive: — (nuclear accent) (‘informational focus’) Let us have a look at our SOF example (10). At first sight, it seems as if no primary accent could be assigned, since all relevant elements are discourse-given. However, Selkirk (2008: 341) adds a G-marking condition (13) by which she differentiates between two levels of potential givenness, the ordinary semantic value and the focus semantic value (following Rooth 1992). (13) The G-marking condition (i) An F-marked constituent α will be G-marked iff the phrasal scope ϕ of the focus ~ operator corresponding to it has an antecedent in the discourse for its focus semantic value [[ϕ]]f. (ii) Otherwise, a constituent α will be G-marked if it has an antecedent in the discourse for its ordinary semantic value [[α]]o. An element is given with respect to its ordinary semantic value simply if it has been mentioned before in the discourse. If an element is F-marked, however, it only counts as given if it has an antecedent for its focus semantic value. In the case of (10), this focus semantic value for juice is the alternatives set {drank beer, drank wine, drank water,…. }, which has been introduced in the context by the phrase only drank juice. Thus, juice is both F-marked (due to its association with the focus-sensitive operator only) and G- marked. In contrast, John is only F-marked since an alternatives set such as {even Bill, even Mary,…. } has not been introduced before. In Selkirk’s terms, John only has an ordinary semantic value which becomes irrelevant if the constituent is F-marked at the same time. A Selkirk-like analysis of (10) is given in (14). (14) (Many people only drank juice at John’s party.) [Even [JOHN]F only [ϕ[drankG juiceF,G at his partyG]ϕ ~] ~] A similar but more flexible approach has been proposed by Beaver and Velleman (2011) who replace Selkirk’s concept of focus by (pragmatic) importance and newness/ givenness by (un-)predictability. Importance is marked by the F-feature as in Rooth’s and Selkirk’s approaches, and unpredictability is indicated by an N-feature (for ‘New’), which is derived from Schwarzschild’s (1999) interpretation of F-marking. The authors
Second Occurrence Focus 491 show that predictability is different from givenness, and that it is (un-)predictability which is relevant for an element’s prosodic realisation. (15) a. Who does John’s mother love? b. She loves JOHNF,N In (15b), John is contextually given but is unpredictable as an answer to the question. Thus, it is indexed with N. At the same time, it is pragmatically important and thus F- marked. As a consequence, it receives a pitch accent, despite its givenness at word level. Note that Beaver and Velleman (2011: 1674) generally interpret association with focus in terms of answering a QUD (see above and Beaver and Clark 2008). That is, an expression that associates with a focus-sensitive operator (as in FOF and SOF structures) provides an answer to the QUD just as John answers the overt question in (15). Both types of answer count as ‘pragmatically important’. An important addition to this model is the constraint that contextually given referents are only unpredictable if they occur in a ‘new role’ as does John in (15b). In a parallel structure like the one in (16b), John would be predictable and thus not N-marked (see also Terken and Hirschberg (1994) and the effect of persistence of the same syntactic position discussed above). (16) a. John loves somebody. b. John loves MAryF,N Beaver and Velleman claim that both (un-)predictability and importance have an influence on the communicative significance of an expression, and relate this pragmatic significance to prosodic prominence in the following principle (Beaver and Velleman 2011: 1673): (17) Prominence Principle If one expression is more communicatively significant than another expression, then the first should be more surface prominent than the second. Together with the principle of competition for prominence (given in a slightly changed version in (18)), Beaver and Velleman suggest a pragmatic alternative to the FocusProminence rule in (8). (18) Competition for prominence (adjusted terminology in brackets) Primary (nuclear) accent can appear only once in an English intonation (intermediate) phrase (ip). From this and the prominence principle plus the concepts of predictability and importance, it follows that expressions within an ip will have to compete for primary (nuclear) accent. This competition is what determines how informationally complex material will be realized within an ip.
492 Stefan Baumann In order to determine the most prominent element in an ip, the degree of communicative significance can be weighted in a cumulative manner. Unpredictability (N-marking) and importance (F-marking) can be thought of as contributing one point each to an element’s prominence. This results in the following four possibilities: (19) Important and unpredictable information (contrastive focus or FOF): F-marked, N-marked (two points) Important and predictable information (SOF): F-marked (one point) Unimportant and unpredictable information (unfocused, new): N-marked (one point) Unimportant and predictable information (unfocused, given): --- (no point) An element with two points will usually be realized as a (primary) nuclear pitch accent. If more than one element in an ip gets two points, the rightmost is primary, the others secondary (i.e. prenuclear). The prominence assigned to an element with one point can only be non-nuclear/secondary, that is, either prenuclear (generally realized as a pitch accent) or postnuclear (non-tonal prominence).8 If only one-point prominences are available in an ip, the rightmost one will be ‘upgraded’ and receive the nuclear accent. (20) (Many people only drank juice at John’s party.) Even JOHNF,N only drank juiceF at his party. Thus, the SOF example in (10) would be analysed by Beaver and Velleman as in (20), with John receiving the nuclear accent (‘important’ plus ‘unpredictable’ due to its new structural role) and thus winning the competition for prominence. Juice only bears a postnuclear prominence, since it is ‘important’ due to its association with the focus-sensitive particle only but at the same time predictable from the context. Juice is predictable because it occurs in a parallel structure to the one in the context sentence, here even in a ‘proper SOF’ structure defined above as a string identical repetition.
24.2.3 Empirical evidence As mentioned several times above, the basic claim of all kinds of association with focus theories is that focus (or importance) is marked by prosodic prominence, and this claim has been challenged by SOF structures. In recent years a variety of production and perception studies on SOF—at least in West Germanic languages—were conducted to examine whether the theoretical claim of association with focus models can 8 The
structural difference between pre-and postnuclear prominences will be discussed in Section 24.2.3 and in the unified approach proposed in Section 24.4.
Second Occurrence Focus 493 be empirically verified (e.g. Rooth 1996; Bartels 2004; Jaeger 2004; Beaver et al. 2007; Howell 2008 for American English; Féry and Ishihara 2009; Baumann et al. 2010 for German; van de Ven and Gussenhoven 2011 for Dutch). The studies clearly provide evidence for the fact that there actually is a phonological reflex of focus in SOF structures. However, SOF usually is not marked by fully-fledged (nuclear) pitch accents (i.e. by tonal movement), but by increased duration and intensity (compared to non-focus elements) reflecting secondary prominence. In other words, it could be shown that there is a correlation between focus and prosodic prominence but not between focus and (nuclear) pitch accent. The first, rudimentary experimental study was conducted by Rooth (1996) who acoustically analysed utterances spoken by himself, which contained SOF and Non- Focus elements. He found that SOF expressions were louder and longer than their Non- Focus counterparts, thus providing first empirical evidence in favour of weak (syntactic/ semantic) theories of focus sensitivity. In a more systematic production study in which pairs of American English speakers read sentences in a dialogue, Bartels (2004) investigated the acoustic differences between FOF and SOF but did not compare them with the prosodic characteristics of Non-Focus constituents. In fact, Bartels could confirm the assumption that SOF is not marked by pitch prominence, but she also found that SOF expressions are realized with shorter duration and intensity than FOF expressions. Furthermore, Bartels compared FOF and SOF with echo renditions and showed that a mere repetition does not always trigger reduced prominence. That is, her data suggest that echo NPs generally carry pitch accents (like FOF) but that they are often acoustically less prominent than first occurrence renditions. In comparison with SOF, echo NPs were found to display greater acoustic prominence. A larger-scale production and perception study by Beaver et al. (2007) concentrated on the prosodic difference between SOF and Non-Focus constituents. Twenty American English speakers read aloud short paragraphs like the ones in (21) and (22), with the (c) sentences being of particular interest. These sentences were composed of identical text but differed in the position of the SOF and Non-Focus elements (here: Sid and court, respectively). (21) a. Both Sid and his accomplices should have been named in this morning’s court session. b. But the defendant only named SidFOF in courtNON-FOCUS today. c. Even the state prosecutor only named SidSOF in courtNON-FOCUS today. (22) a. Defense and Prosecution had agreed to implicate Sid both in court and on television. b. Still, the defense attorney only named SidNON-FOCUS in courtFOF today. c. Even the state prosecutor only named SidNON-FOCUS in courtSOF today. The production data confirmed the tentative findings by Rooth (1996) in that a statistically significant increase in duration and relative energy (derived by multiplying
494 Stefan Baumann duration by root-mean-square intensity)9 could be found for SOF in comparison with Non-Focus. Differences in fundamental frequency were only marginal. This result adds to the evidence in favour of association with focus theories, since it shows that SOF elements are marked by a (slight) increase in prosodic prominence. The crucial next step was to find out whether the rather subtle phonological differences between SOF and Non-Focus are actually perceivable. Beaver et al. selected a set of minimal sentence pairs like (21c) and (22c) from the production experiment which were taken from the same speaker. These pairs—without the context they were produced in—were presented to subjects who had the task of deciding in which sentence a particular target word (e.g. Sid) was perceived as more prominent than another word (e.g. court). Subjects identified the SOF items as the more prominent ones in 63 per cent of the cases which led the authors to conclude that the prosodic marking of SOF is indeed perceivable. The empirical production data provided by Féry and Ishihara (2009) for SOF in German largely confirm the results for American English, in particular as far as the sentence-medial or ‘post-FOF’ position is concerned (i.e. no tonal movement but increased duration compared with non-focused items). Interestingly, Féry and Ishihara added conditions in which FOF, SOF, and Non-Focus elements occurred in sentence- initial position, as shown in (23) and (24).10 (23) a. Die meisten unserer Kollegen waren beim Betriebsausflug the most our-gen colleagues were at.the staff outing lässig casually
angezogen. dressed
‘Most of our colleagues were dressed casually at the staff outing.’ b. Nur only
PEterFOF Peter
hat has
eine a
Krawatte tie
getragen. worn
‘Only Peter wore a tie.’ c. Nur only
PEterSOF Peter
hat has
sogar even
einen a
ANzug suit
getragen. worn
‘Only Peter even wore a suit.’ (24) a. Wen whom
hat has
Peter Peter
geküsst? kissed
‘Who did Peter kiss?’ 9 Beckman (1986) called this factor total amplitude, and found that it is the most relevant postlexical stress marker in English. 10 Only the relevant subscripts on the target words are indicated, as well as the pitch accents in the target sentences (by capitalization).
Second Occurrence Focus 495 b. PEterNON-FOCUS Peter
hat has
MaRIa Maria
geküsst. kissed
‘Peter kissed Maria.’ Crucially, the authors found that SOF items in sentence-initial position were marked by a fully-fledged prenuclear pitch accent—showing a categorical difference to the same items in sentence-medial position. Still, sentence-initial SOF (23c) was marked as less prominent than FOF (which received a nuclear accent; (23b)), but more prominent than Non-Focus (24b).11 It is claimed that this three-way difference can be explained by boosting and inhibiting factors of information structure: Focus leads to higher pitch, givenness to lower pitch. Since SOF is a combination of focus and givenness, its mean pitch value lies between FOF (higher) and Non-Focus (lower). Féry and Ishihara found similar effects for duration, with focused elements (i.e. FOF and SOF) being longer than Non-Focus words. However, there was no duration difference between FOF and SOF in sentence-initial position, although FOF was expected to be longer (focused, non- given, nuclear accent) than SOF (focused, given, prenuclear accent).12 Féry and Ishihara (2009: 307) suggest that this outcome may in fact be due to a phrase boundary after the SOF constituent (nur Peter in (23c)) triggering a lengthening effect which masks the givenness effect (i.e. shortening) of SOF. As the relevant domain for pre-boundary lengthening the authors postulate the ‘prosodic phrase’ (p-phrase) which depends on syntax and may be embedded in an intermediate phrase. Thus, the (final) accent of a p- phrase may still be prenuclear (Féry and Ishihara 2009: 296). A similar observation has been made by Jaeger (2004) who found for American English that SOF elements may receive a pitch accent if they form an intermediate phrase of their own. In such a case, which is actually rather likely in slow speech, the pitch accent is in fact nuclear. If a nuclear accent on an SOF element is possible, this serves as even stronger evidence in favour of (direct) association with focus theories. The acoustic findings for SOF prosody in the reported studies could also be supported by articulatory data from German. By using an electromagnetic articulograph, Baumann et al. (2010) investigated not only the tonal and durational marking of sentence-medial constituents in three different focus conditions (Background (= Non- Focus), SOF, FOF) but also the modifications of the opening and closing gestures of the lips during the production of the target words. Results confirm that SOF is generally not marked by a nuclear pitch accent and show gradient but systematic adjustments of acoustic and articulatory parameters (word durations and temporal and spatial modifications of lip opening and closing gestures) leading to an increase in prominence from Non-Focus through SOF to FOF. Table 24.1 provides an overview of the strategies used, which are to some extent speaker-specific. 11 Nevertheless, Non- Focus items were marked by (prenuclear) pitch accents as well, which is a somewhat surprising result, since the Non-Focus target words in the experiment represent given information occurring in the same grammatical role as in the context question (cf. Terken and Hirschberg (1994) and the discussion in Section 2 above). 12 Nuclear accents usually show longer durations than prenuclear accents in West Germanic languages (see Silverman and Pierrehumbert 1990).
496 Stefan Baumann Table 24.1 Summary of tonal, durational, and articulatory adjustments as prominence increases in the marking of target words in three different focus conditions in German Tonal
Durational
Articulatory target (inter-lip duration of movements distance; sonority)
(nuclear) pitch accent
acoustic word duration
FOF
yes
longer
longer
higher
SOF
no
Non-F
no
shorter
shorter
lower
increase in prominence
Source: Adapted from Baumann et al. (2010: 75).
Inter-lip distance
Displacement (mm)
[b
a
b
[a
40
DM
35 30 BG
25
FOF
20
SOF 15 0
100
200 300 Time (ms)
400
Figure 24.1 Averaged trajectories for lip opening and closing movements during the target word B/a:/ber for one speaker (DM) in three focus conditions (BG = Non-Focus, SOF, and FOF).
The investigation of lip movements, that is, the degree of mouth opening, relates prominence to sonority, that is, the relative loudness of sounds, and shows its relevance as a distinguishing factor between focus types (which is in line with Beaver et al.’s findings for relative energy). Figure 24.1 provides averaged trajectories for the distance between the upper and lower lip during the production of the target word B/a:/ber. Low displacements indicate that the lips are closed for the production of the stop consonants. Going from Background (Non-Focus) to FOF, there is an increase in duration and lip aperture (displacement) corresponding to prosodic prominence. Summing up, the empirical studies—which did not try to predict a prosodic prominence but looked for experimental evidence—observed a secondary status of SOF elements in terms of their phonological marking. That is, they are usually not marked by
Second Occurrence Focus 497 pitch accents, and if they are, the accent is either prenuclear or is the only one in an intermediate phrase. In postnuclear position, SOF is marked by non-tonal prosodic parameters such as increased duration, intensity, and sonority. It has also been suggested that ‘postnuclear’ SOF prominence should be described in terms of L* pitch accents (which would by definition become nuclear; cf. Beaver et al. 2007: 28) or (low) phrase accents as defined by Grice et al. (2000) as edge tones with a secondary association to stressed syllables (cf. Baumann et al. 2010: 76). Although defined tonally, however, both concepts are mainly characterized by duration, at least in West Germanic languages.
24.3 Other second occurrence expressions There has been some discussion in the literature on the question of whether the characteristic prosodic pattern of proper SOF widely discussed in this chapter is also present in other, less restrictive structures. Thus, the question is whether only verbatim repetitions of first occurrence expressions are marked by secondary prominences, or also ‘quasi second occurrence expressions’ (Krifka 2004) such as cases of bridging (Clark 1977) or ‘implicit inferrability’ (Partee 1999: 216), which do not display segmental copies of first occurrence expressions. An example from Rooth (1996: 216) showing a case of implicational bridging is given in (25).13 (25) a. The provost and the dean aren’t taking any candidate other than Susan and Harold seriously. b. Even [the CHAIRman]FOF is only considering [younger]SOF candidates. Rooth claims that younger is coded by the same type of secondary prominence as, for example, juice in (10) above, provided that the inference the speaker wishes to express is that Susan and Harold are among the younger candidates. Krifka (2004: 203) gives a similar bridging example in (26) but claims that the inferrable information, namely that African-Americans are black, has to be highlighted by a pitch accent, even though it is ‘secondary’ in nature. Following the definitions introduced in the present chapter, however, this accent has to be interpreted as a—probably somewhat lowered in pitch, but still phonologically primary—nuclear pitch accent. (26) a. Mary only supports [AFrican-AMErican]FOF job candidates. b. So what? Even [JOHN]FOF only supports [BLACK]SOF job candidates.
13
We will be using the subscript ‘SOF’ for all kinds of second occurrence expressions.
498 Stefan Baumann Both analyses are purely based on the authors’ (diverging) intuitions. However, the different analyses do not seem to be justified by different degrees of inferability of the constituents in question, since both SOF phrases, younger candidates and black job candidates, are generic but accessible terms containing lexically new (younger, black) and given ((job) candidates) items. Furthermore, taking into account that persistence of grammatical function facilitates deaccentuation (Terken and Hirschberg 1994), the adjective black in (26) should be even less prominent than the adjective younger in (25), since the former replaces another adjective (African- American) while the latter replaces a noun phrase (Susan and Harold) as part of a comparative construction. Clearly, systematic experimental studies are needed to investigate cases like these. In fact, there is evidence from German corpus data (e.g. Baumann and Riester 2013) showing that postnuclear prominences do occur with phenomena which resemble proper SOF, for example epithets (cf. Clark 1977), defined as coreferential anaphors which consist of new lexical material. In the following example from a corpus of German radio news (DIRNDL, Eckart et al. 2012) the phrase der serbischen Provinz (‘of the Serbian province’) is an epithet to Kosovo mentioned in the previous sentence (Riester and Baumann 2013: 239f.). The RefLex annotation scheme for information status (Baumann and Riester 2012) is used here, which differentiates between various categories on a referential (R-) and a lexical (L-) level of givenness. (27) Der UNO- Sondergesandte Ahtisaari plädiert für eine Unabhängigkeit des Kosovo unter internationaler Aufsicht. Dies sei die einzige politische und wirtschaftliche Option für die ZUkunft [R-GIVEN der [L-NEW serbischen Provinz.]]
‘UN Special Envoy Ahtisaari is making the case for an independence of the Kosovo under international control. According to him, this is the only political and economic option for the future of the Serbian province.’
Epithets like these (on the word Provinz (‘province’)) are regularly realized by postnuclear prominence and exhibit a similar combination of boosting (newness at word level) and inhibiting (givenness at referential level) factors as second occurrence foci, which are combinations of focus/importance and givenness/predictability features. Thus, both types of expressions have a ‘hybrid’ information structural status, which is indicated by the same type of secondary prosodic prominence. Another widely discussed example potentially displaying ‘SOF phonology’ is Rooth’s (1992: 109) rice-grower example, given in (28) with a Büring-style analysis. (28) CC1[People who GROWF1 rice generally [only2 EATF1 riceSOF2]] Krifka (2004) proposes that there are contrastive pitch accents on grow and eat but no accent on the second occurrence of rice despite its association with only. Beaver and Velleman (2011: 1679) contradict this analysis and suggest that the second occurrence of rice in fact receives a secondary prominence just like proper SOF structures, since
Second Occurrence Focus 499 rice is important (= F-marked) but predictable (= not N-marked) information. In addition, the model generates secondary prominences on all unpredictable (= N-marked) elements (see (29)). (29) peopleN who GROWF,N riceN generallyN only EATF,N riceF . However, the difference between the structure in (28)/(29) and the SOF structures discussed in previous sections is the intervention of a contrastive element between the focus-sensitive operator and the associated element, that is, its semantic focus. Whereas in ordinary SOF structures, the second occurrence of rice would be expected (and has been found) to bear a secondary, postnuclear prominence, elements in the direct vicinity of contrastive accents have been shown to be downplayed in order to increase the prominence of the contrasted item. Postfocal words in particular have been found to be marked by a compression of the pitch range in both tone and intonation languages (cf. Xu et al. 2004; Xu and Xu 2005 on Mandarin and American English). Another aspect supporting the reduction of the prominence of the final element may be the avoidance of a stress clash between eat and rice. In a similar case displaying an overt contrast, namely another famous example by Rooth (1992) given in (30), no model would predict a secondary accent on the second occurrence of farmer, since it is not associated with a focus-sensitive operator. An analysis along the lines of Beaver and Velleman (2011) should look like this: (30) An AMEricanF,N farmerN was talkingN to a CaNAdianF,N farmer. It is doubtful whether the degree of prosodic prominence of the second occurrences of rice in (29) and farmer in (30) are really different, since their (surface) structures are very similar. Again, empirical evidence is necessary to shed light on this controversial issue. So far we have only discussed examples of SOF and related structures in West Germanic languages. However, there are also comparable cases in other languages, for example Japanese. Ishihara (2003, 2007) found prosodic differences between clause types if they are embedded in a wh-phrase. He analyses all wh-phrases as prosodically defined focus domains (indexed FI for Focus Intonation) which display a pitch rise on the WH-element. If a wh-phrase is embedded in another one, as in (31) below (Ishihara 2007: 153), the embedded WH-element náni-o is both raised (due to focus) and lowered in pitch (due to embeddedness), thus surfacing on an mid pitch level. (31) {dáre-ga [Mári-ga {náni-o nomíya-de nónda ka}FI] ímademo obóeteru no?}FI ‘Who still remembers what Mari drank at the bar?’ In an embedded yes/no-question, on the other hand, pitch is only lowered since a yes/ no-question is not interpreted as a domain of focus (analogous to the effect of postfocal compression mentioned above). Thus, embedded wh-phrases in Japanese show similar boosting and inhibiting effects as SOF structures in Germanic languages.
500 Stefan Baumann
24.4 Towards a unified approach The empirical studies reported above provide abundant evidence from West Germanic languages that SOF is mainly marked by non-tonal phonetic parameters such as duration and intensity and not by pitch movement (in postfocal position). This finding supports the proposal put forward by a number of authors in similar ways (Rooth 1996, 2010; Beaver et al. 2007; Büring 2013), namely that metrical stress is the basic focus marker rather than pitch accent. Metrical stress can be regarded as the representation of postlexical stress in a metrical grid (see Truckenbrodt 1995; Selkirk 2006; Myrberg and Riad, this volume), which can be applied to prosodic phrases of various sizes (in the present proposal the relevant domain is the intermediate phrase, which contains at least one—the nuclear—pitch accent). A stress-first approach like Büring’s claims that SOF elements receive the strongest metrical stress in the scope of their operator and that their (lexical and structural) givenness or predictability prevents them from receiving additional prosodic/metrical prominence by tonal movement. Note that non-tonal parameters are the primary markers of (postlexical) stress in stress accent languages (Beckman 1986) like the ones belonging to the West Germanic language family, but not in a pitch accent language like Japanese. Here, as we saw in the last section, the secondary prominence of SOF items is rather expressed by an intermediate pitch height. The metrical stress approach is compatible with the modified association with focus theories presented above and can thus serve as a unifying approach within this framework. In a broad combination of rules proposed by Büring (2013) and the weighting procedure suggested by Beaver and Velleman (2011) (see (19) above) we can assign the following rudimentary metrical grid to our proper SOF example in (4), repeated here as (32): (32) (Many people only drank juice at John’s party.) x x x Even JOHN only drank juice at his party. This pattern with two different prominence levels (1=secondary prominence, 2=primary prominence)14 can be derived in various ways. Following Beaver and Velleman, we assign level 1 prominence to each element that is either unpredictable (N-marked) or pragmatically important (F-marked). Level 2 prominence is added if a constituent is both F-and N-marked (cf. (33)). 14
We disregard a potential ‘level 0’ for unstressed words here.
Second Occurrence Focus 501
(33) (Many people only drank juice at John’s party.) x x x Even JOHNF,N only drank juiceF at his party. The same pattern follows from Selkirk’s (2008) analysis, if level 2 is directly assigned to F-marked elements and G-marked elements reduce F-marks by one level. A similar result also emerges from Büring’s analysis of the sentence, in that one prominence level can be assigned to each focus in its domain, be it associated or free (cf. (34)). (34) (Many people only drank juice at John’s party.) x x x CC1 [[Even2 [JOHN]FOF2]F1 only3 drank [juice]SOF3 at his party] Let us see how these abstract (or at least underspecified) prominence levels are realized. Büring’s (2013: 7) Stress-to-Accent-Rule (in a modified version in (35)) determines the mapping of prominence levels to pitch accents: (35) Stress-to-Accent-Rule Assign a pitch accent to the strongest/nuclear stress [level 2] and to every metrically strong syllable preceding it. This rule ensures that the rightmost prominence at level 2 surfaces as a nuclear pitch accent (as the head of an ip), in (34) on John. Furthermore, the rule entails that a postnuclear prominence at level 1 can only surface as a secondary prominence, marked by increased duration and intensity (on juice in (34)). We may equate this basic level with metrical stress (see (36)) and claim that this prominence level is generally assigned to SOF items. (36) (Many people only drank juice at John’s party.) x level 2: nuclear accent x x level 1: metrical stress CC1 [[Even2 [JOHN]FOF2]F1 only3 drank [juice]SOF3 at his party] The metrical approach also accounts for the empirical/perceptual difference between prenuclear accents on the one hand and both nuclear accents and postnuclear prominences on the other. These differences can be represented by an additional, medial level in the metrical grid, leading to three levels with a stepwise increase in phonological prominence:
502 Stefan Baumann (37) level 1: basic metrical stress level (increased duration and intensity of syllables) level 2: level assigning pitch accents (additional tonal movement) level 3: level assigning nuclear pitch accents (last accent in an intermediate phrase; preceding pitch accents are prenuclear) Let us apply these metrical prominence levels to a second occurrence expression as the one in (38) (which is a repetition of (29)), analysed by Beaver and Velleman. If we assume a division into two intermediate phrases, we receive two nuclear pitch accents, on grow and eat, as well as prenuclear pitch accents on people and generally. Furthermore, both occurrences of rice are marked by postnuclear non-tonal prominences. (38) x x
x x x
x
x x
x x x
x
level 3: nuclear accent level 2: pitch accent level 1: metrical stress
[peopleN who GROWF,N riceN]ip [generallyN only EATF,N riceF]ip
This simple incremental metrical model of the phonological realization of focus structures accounts for most of the empirical evidence for FOF and SOF, at least in Germanic languages. It is also compatible with many previous—and partly theoretical—proposals which suggest some sort of weighting procedure of boosting and inhibiting effects of focus and givenness on prosodic prominence. Additionally, an intermediate level of metrical prominence is proposed in order to distinguish between prenuclear and nuclear pitch accents, a difference which has been found to be relevant for a comprehensive description of SOF phonology (see Féry and Ishihara 2009). In general, the solutions found for the SOF challenge largely support association with focus theories, since SOF—as well as semantically related structures—has been found to be marked by prosodic prominence which is, however, non-nuclear and thus secondary in nature.
Chapter 25
Inf ormation St ru c t u re an d L anguag e C ha ng e Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer
The present chapter surveys how focusing and focus constructions are affected by language change. Focus in the sense of this handbook (Rooth 1985) is a universal pragmatic phenomenon: A form that indicates question–answer congruence, contrast and correction, and, on the meaning side, triggers alternatives. Focus in this sense does not change, arise or die out. What does change, however, is the range of focus sensitive particles of languages, the focus related syntactic patterns, and alternative-based constructions in languages that emerge from former focus constructions. We find the typical patterns of language change: emergence of new particles as well as bleaching and loss of constructions. The pathway of focus change starts where words develop into focus sensitive particles and associate with focus, it continues where they foster into conventionalized alternative-based constructions, and it ends where reference to alternatives or focus- background structure is lost. We will refer to the later stages as bleached focus. There is to date no extensive literature about the language history of focus (to one exception, to which we turn presently). We therefore present a survey of observations and case studies which, taken together, provide evidence for a pathway of focus change. There is, however, one thriving field of diachronic linguistics that is tied to information structure: V2 movement in Germanic languages, and its loss between Middle English and Early Modern English. Research in this field traditionally refers to weaker terms of information structure (e.g., topic, framesetting). In part, this is justified by the subject of investigation: Many grammatical patterns are bleached focus constructions rather than compositional focus. Yet, parts of the history of Germanic languages can be rephrased in the more rigid terminology of focus in the sense of this handbook, which we will undertake in this chapter. The chapter is organized as follows: The first section discusses the focus cline where fully compositional association with focus changes into alternative-based constructions that we call bleached focus. The second section investigates the emergence of focus sensitive particles, and in particular the semantic units that precede focus as part of semantic
504 Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer composition. The final section surveys information structure and syntactic change in Germanic languages, in particular the rise and loss of V2.
25.1 The focus cline The following characteristics establish ‘independent focus’ in the sense in which we will use it (cf. also Rooth, this vol.): A sentence shows an independent focus construction if • a word or phrase in a given sentence is highlighted in the way in which question– answer congruence is highlighted; • the word/phrase could also have been used without highlighting; • highlighting is interpreted as reference to alternatives of the same logical type—the actual set of alternatives is determined by context; • the alternatives serve as an argument of some focus sensitive operator (the operator discharges the alternatives); • the language has more focus sensitive operators, and the highlighted word/phrase could also have been associated with another operator. A simple example of independent focus is given in (1), inspired by Rooth (1985). (1) Mary only introduced BILLF to Sue. In (1), Bill is in focus (Rooth 1985; Beck, this vol.). The alternative semantic value of BillF is a set of individuals that count as alternatives to Bill in the given context. The focus associates with only. The word Bill could also have been used without focus. Focused BillF could also be discharged by other focus sensitive operators, like even, quantifiers, too, causal constructions, evaluatives (luckily, sadly). BillF can mark coherence with a preceding question or contrast. We include contrastive topic (CT) as a transparent focus construction (cf. Büring, this volume). We propose that independent focus must be distinguished from constructions that we will call bleached focus. Bleached focus constructions have one or more of the following characteristics: • An item/phrase is interpreted as giving rise to alternatives. Possibly, the item is also highlighted. • The alternatives are fully determined or restricted by lexical conventions beyond logical type and context. • The alternatives can only be discharged by one or few operators which are specified in grammar. We will use the emergence of negative polarity items (NPI) as our first example. Consider the German noun Schwein. In its common use, it means ‘pig’ and can be used
Information Structure and Language Change 505 unrestrictedly whenever the speaker wants to talk about pigs. In this use, it can also be put in independent focus, as in (2). It refers to alternatives which we have to infer from context. Sentence (2) could be about animals (cows, dogs, cats), but also about belongings in general (car, bike, gold). (2) Paul hat nur ein SchweinF . ‘Paul only owns a pigF’ However, Schwein can also be used in an NPI sense. (3) Hier Here
hat has
nie never
ein Schwein a pig
was something
gekauft. bought.
‘No one has ever bought anything here’ According to pragmatic theories of NPI licensing (Krifka 1995; Chierchia 2006), Schwein in the NPI use denotes the same as human being and moreover gives rise to more restricted alternatives (e.g., human being, wealthy human being, poor human). These alternatives are discharged by a tacit operator Øeven which shares the meaning of even. Øeven takes sentence-wide scope. The logical structure of (3) is hence as in (4), where we use bF for bleached focus. (4) Øeven [Hier hat nie [ein Schwein]bF was gekauft.] The alternative-based analysis successfully predicts that the word can only be used in downward entailing contexts (Krifka 1995; Chierchia 2006; for minimizers see Eckardt and Csipak 2013). The interpretation of bF is the same as of independent focus F, but the construction is not a fully independent focus construction because (a) Schwein in the NPI sense must always carry bF, (b) the alternatives of SchweinbF are conventional, not context-driven, and (c) no operator except Øeven can discharge the emerging alternatives at the propositional level. The Jespersen cycle of negation illustrates later stages in the focus cline: Transparent focus constructions turn into bleached focus constructions and develop further into constructions which are no longer alternative based but retain side messages which go back to the bleached focus stage. In Old French, as in any language, nouns such as pas (step), goutte (drop), mie (crumb) could be used in transparent focus constructions and be discharged by tacit or overt even. A sentence like (Even) il ne marche pasF transparently denotes ‘Even: he doesn’t walk a (single) step’ (see Beck, this vol.). Next, these nouns developed an NPI use with a new grammar and meaning: (i) pas, goutte, mie, etc. continue to be used without a determiner while OF developed a determiner system (ii) the nouns can be combined with predicates which would have been sortally unsuited for the noun in the old sense (e.g. ‘ne mange pas = ‘not eat?a step/at all’)
506 Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer At this stage, words like pas or mie are manner adverbials which require bleached focus, as in the Schwein example. They conventionally give rise to alternative, more specific manners of performing the eventuality at stake. For instance, (ne) dormir pas denotes ‘(not) sleep in any way’ and give rise to alternatives like ‘(not) sleep deeply’, ‘(not) sleep well’, etc. The alternatives must be discharged by Øeven. In the same way as for contemporary negative polarity items, the analysis predicts, first, that pas, mie, point, … are only used in NPI licensing contexts, and secondly, that the sentence is presented as a particularly emphatic assertion. The sentence ‘il ne dort pas’ in Old French must be paraphrased as ‘He doesn’t sleep in any manner, and this is worse than just denying that he sleeps well or sleeps long’ (Kadmon and Landman 1993, on any). However, the Jespersen cycle doesn’t end here. In a next step, the bleached focus construction was reanalysed into a syntactic co-occurrence pattern. We can tell this because over time, pas, point, rien, etc. no longer occur in the full range of NPI contexts but are restricted to negation. In parallel, the Old French single negation ne vanishes from the sources. The two-part construction ne … pas turned into the neutral expression of negation and no longer required bleached focus. Ne changed status from an NPI licensor to a word that, like pas, reflects the presence of negation on the basis of agreement (Zeijlstra 2004). However, other French negations retain the flavour of the bleached focus stage. A case in question is (ne) point. Schweickhäuser’s classic study on negation reports: ‘Here is how it [the Académie Française] expresses itself in the article on Ne: “Point negates more strongly than pas. (…) [P]oint followed by particle de is an absolute negation; while pas leaves the possibility to restrict, for reserve” ’ (Schweickhäuser 1852: 94). In the older bF construction, (ne) pointbF gave rise to an emphatic statement via alternatives. When this got lost, there remained a conventional implicature that the speaker ‘negates seriously’. The Jespersen Cycle is a classic example of independent focus that gets bleached and finally lost, but there are more. Focus operators can develop uses in which they relate to alternatives that are no longer focus driven. We discuss two examples, only and even. The particle only associates with focus and contributes a uniqueness assertion, as illustrated in (1). However, only can also be used in optatives such as (5). (5) If only the soup was less hot! The sentence conveys that there are several things that would make the speaker happier, that the state ‘the soup is less hot’ is the least of her wishes, and that this already would content the speaker. In this use, only does not associate with focus. For instance, if we place a narrow focus on soupF , the meaning of (5) changes and the optative interpretation is no longer available (‘if the soup is the only thing which is less hot, then …’). Optative only conditionals differ from focus sensitive (fs) only in various ways: • fs only in sentence initial position requires a narrow focus on the subject DP, optative only does not;
Information Structure and Language Change 507 • fs only is not stressed, unless in independent focus (ONLYF), optative only can be stressed without semantic consequences; • fs only can associate with narrow focus, optative only does not interact with narrow focus. We cannot give a full semantic analysis of optative only. However, we anticipate that it must refer to alternative ways to make the speaker happy, and that these might be captured as bleached focus. Another case is ‘exasperated’ even in questions, as discussed in Iatridou and Tatevosov (2013). (6) Which restaurant should we go to? Would you like the APEX?—I don’t know. Where is it, even? Iatridou and Tatevosov argue that the use of even in (6) cannot be analysed as a transparent focus construction. The authors envisage a meaning that can be paraphrased like ‘the set of questions that I would have to ask before I can answer yours contains (even) the most elementary one: Where is APEX?’. Once again, this use of even refers to alternatives that cannot be computed transparently as focus alternatives, and that are obligatorily discharged by even. The construction offers another example of bleached focus. Incidentially, optative only and exasperated even both follow another major trend in language history, namely subjectification (Traugott and Dasher 2002). Bleached focus can be recruited in order to express the speaker’s subjective comments. More bleached focus constructions can be found in the wide range of constructions that have received an alternative-based analysis in recent literature, such as epistemic indefinites (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002; Alfonso-Ovalle and Menendez-Benito 2010), free choice items (Menendez-Benito 2010), question pronouns (Hamblin 1973; Eckardt 2007), stressed and unstressed modal particles (Zimmermann 2011 on doch/DOCH). A special case of lexically ruled focus are words which necessarily carry focus. Consider the German adverbial eigentlich (‘truly, really’). Used with an accent, EIGENTLICH highlights a contrast between what ‘really’ is the case and what ‘seems’ to be the case, as in (7) and (8). (7) Der EIGENTLICHE Chef ist Frau Müller. The TRUE boss is Mrs. Müller. … even though you might think that it is Herr Schulze, given how he acts. (8) EIGENTLICH wollte ich einen Cappucino. Originally/in fact, I wanted a cappuccino … even though, from what you serve me, one could think that I wanted an espresso.
508 Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer Stressed EIGENTLICH can be analysed as an operator in obligatory focus. In terms of the focus cline, lexical fixedness indicates a bleached focus construction. Moreover, eigentlich has developed an unstressed use where it contributes emotional flavour.1 (9) Peter ist eigentlich ein netter Typ. ‘Come to think about it, Peter is a nice guy’ Example (9) does not evoke contrasts such as ‘how Peter looks’ (… ugly) and ‘how Peter is’ (… nice). Unstressed eigentlich conveys that the speaker makes the assertion after some reflection (Eckardt 2009). The two stages of EIGENTLICH/eigentlich pattern with the two stages of point as NPI/negation. The core item of a bleached focus construction turns into a focus-independent word that still echoes the pragmatic content of the preceding construction. Sometimes, old focus constructions give rise to new focus constructions. Intensifying Selb (E Pro-self, G selber, F soi-même) has been described as relating a thing or person to an entourage. Sentence (10) reports that the king held the speech and suggests that some delegate of the king could have spoken instead (Edmondson and Plank 1978). (10) The king gave the speech himself. Intensifying self must always be stressed. Eckardt (2001) analyses this as focus accent and proposes that Selb denotes the identity function Id in focus. Alternatives of Id are other functions which could map x onto other people (e.g. the king to any of his delegates). The focus requirement, as well as the conceptual content of focus alternatives of Id are lexical requirements of intensifying Selb. In this sense, intensifiers do not enter fully independent focus constructions. Unlike most other bleached foci, however, focused Selb can freely associate with all kinds of focus sensitive operators. Intensifiers can develop various later uses. English Selb-utterances predominantly occurred in direct object position in reflexive constructions. From these emerged the reflexive pronoun paradigm, replacing a focus construction by the syntactic requirement to co-refer with a local antecedent (Levinson 2000). German selbst was reanalysed from focus carrier to focus particle in potentially ambiguous uses in the late eighteenth century, as detailed in (Eckardt 2001, 2006). The present section presented the focus cline: independent focus constructions can lead to bleached focus constructions and beyond. Our final example leads the way into Section 25.2 where we investigate the emergence of new focus sensitive items that can associate with focus.
1 Unstressed
(Potts 2005).
eigentlich is restricted to root clauses. Its analysis requires a second meaning dimension
Information Structure and Language Change 509
25.2 The emergence of focus sensitive items At the beginning, we distinguished between universal focus effects and language-specific focus operators, observing that language change can only affect the specific parts of the grammar of focus. The emergence of focus sensitive items requires a more detailed picture. Beaver and Clark (2008) propose to distinguish between indirect and direct association with focus. Indirect association takes place where operators are sensitive to contextual domain restrictions in general. For instance, the quantifier always as in Tom is always busy quantifies over a reasonably restricted domain of times, leaving out times of Tom sleeping, being ill, and so on. Yet, these contextual restrictions can be reflected in the prosodic structure of the sentence. The operator is not focus sensitive (i.e. its lexical entry does not refer to focus alternatives) and can still exhibit readings which look like association with focus. Beaver and Clark offer intricate tests to distinguish such cases from cases of real association with focus, for instance in English only. Unfortunately, the distinction rests on unacceptability tests of a kind of example which is not likely to show up in historical corpora. The absence of such constructions is hence non-telling and it is impossible to distinguish real and indirect association with focus in historical stages. Instead, we propose to concentrate on focus sensitive items which do not start out from words which are likely candidates for indirect association with focus. In such cases, it is at least more likely that we witness the emergence of direct association with focus. According to this strategy, the history of focus sensitive only (‘one-ly’) or allein (‘solely’, lit. ‘all-one’), which emerge from quantifiers, can tell us little about how focus alternatives enter the lexicon: The most plausible (and least interesting) hypothesis being that indirect (pragmatic) association with focus became lexicalized as direct association with focus. Interesting as such changes may be for our general understanding of language change, they do not tell us how focus is recruited as a semantic argument of an item (see Traugott 2006). We therefore leave aside a range of items such as only, allein, bloss (‘bare-ly’) and, for similar reasons, words of exact hit (German gerade, eben, just, ausgerechnet, but also early stages of English even). Instead, we will present two case studies which are conducted with the specific aim of understanding the predecessors of focus: German nur (‘only’) and sogar (‘even’). The word nur draws on the exception constriction ni uuári = ‘not’ + ‘was/were/would be’ in OldHG. Texts show many variants (ne wâr, newas, niwan, niuwan … see Grimm and Grimm (1854–1971), Graff and Massmann (1838)) which phonologically reduced to nur in MHG. ni uuári combines with a full clause or a DP and follows a negative clause. The following examples are typical. (11) wir ne habin andrin chuninch ne uuán den romcheiser we not have other king ne uuán the Rome-Kaiser
‘we have no other king, only the Roman emperor’
510 Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer (12) ich ne sprach mit dem munde. niewar hu°n unde spot I not talked with the mouth. niewar scorn and mock
‘I didn’t say anything with my mouth, except (only) scorn and mock’
Example (11) starts with a negative statement ‘we do not have X’ where X cataphorically resolves to ‘any ruler except the Roman emperor’. It corresponds to the modern (13) with the indicated meaning. (13) Wir haben nur We have only
[den Kaiser in Rom]F . the Roman emperor.
a. Presupposition: ‘We have a Roman emperor’ b. Assertion: ‘For all x which are alternative (kinds of) rulers: It is not the case that we have an x’
These propositions match exactly with the bi-clausal sentence in (11). The first clause in (11) conveys (b). The (enriched) exception phrase under ne uuári adds the proposition which corresponds to (a). A detailed data record demonstrates that OHG niwan behaves exactly like modern English exceptive but (Gajewski 2013). The turning point from exceptive to ‘only’ is marked by uses without syntactic or semantic correlate, such as (14). (14) Si they
enkunnen not-can
niewan triegen vil menegen niewan betray many many
kindèschen childish
man. man
The verb kunnen lacks an obligatory complement (what is it that they cannot?). Speakers at the time could either assume a tacit øsomething complement clause, or reanalyse the entire niewan-clause as the complement of kunnen. The reanalysed sentence rests essentially on a new meaning for niewan, its modern ‘only’ sense. (Negation ne turns into a negation concord marker in the new reading; see Iatridou and Zeijlstra 2013) The modern structure of (14) uses focus alternatives to determine the domain of quantification of nur. Focus alternatives take over the function of the correlate in the earlier exceptive construction. For example, the correlate andere chuninch (‘other kings’) denotes the set from which niewan (‘but’) subtracts one element, den Romcheiser (‘the emperor in Rome’). In other words, focus alternatives replace overt domains. However, focus alternatives can also take over the function of discourse context, as illustrated by German so-gar (‘even’). It goes back to German gar, which originally meant ‘finished, ready’ (particularly of food: cooked ready, ready to eat). The adjective gar can be found in a variety of abstract uses ranging from gar = very (much) to gar as a reinforcement of negation (see Grimm and Grimm 1854–1971 for details) which set the scene for the emergence of sogar in eighteenth century. The focus particle arises from a ‘culminative’ gar, combined with so ‘so, such’ (between 1700 and 1800;
Information Structure and Language Change 511 the same gar remains an—archaic—particle in ModHG). This gar shows the following characteristics:2 gar occurs in a host sentence Sn. Sn is preceeded by one or more antecedent sentences Sn–1, Sn–2 … gar relates the proposition pn asserted by Sn to those of Sn–1, Sn–2, … gar expresses that pn–2, pn–1, pn are ordered on a scale, and that pn is the culmination point of that scale. Here is a classical example from Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter: (15) Der Friederich, der Friederich das war ein arger Wüterich, er fing die Fliegen in dem Haus und riß ihnen die Flügel aus. Er schlug die Stühl’ und Vögel tot, die Katzen litten große Not. Und höre nur, wie bös er war: Er peitschte, ach, sein Gretchen gar!
Frederick, Frederick that was a bad boy, he caught the flies in the house and ripped off their wings. He beat chairs and birds to death, the cats suffered great distress. And hear how bad he was: He whipped, ach, his Gretel gar.
The little text shows the typical discourse environment of gar. It starts with S1—S3 listing Frederick (a) torturing flies, (b) destroying chairs, (c) killing birds, and (d) teasing cats, and culminates in S4 which reports Frederick whipping his sister—worse than any of his other misdeeds. We used the DTA to assess the use of gar, so + gar, and sogar around 1800 in more detail. First, we searched for gar in order to see whether it could be used without antecedents. Excluding irrelevant uses, we manually searched the first 190 hits of gar in the crucial sense. Of these, we got: 51 culminative bare gar uses with discourse antecedents 4 culminative bare gar uses without antecedents 14 interesting uses of so gar, all dating between 1780–1800. rest: degree adverbs, words in other languages, adjectives among others. Of those uses without antecedent, one occurred in an elliptic title of a chapter, and another in the verse of a poem which was quoted in a footnote, again out of context. We can hence conclude that gar requires antecedents in discourse almost obligatorily. The DTA search for ‘so gar’, spelled as two words, yields an interesting result. Before 1800, we find uses with or without discourse antecedent. After 1800, we only found (rare) uses with so + gar with discourse antecedents whereas the single word sogar is 2
We confidently state this, as no other uses of gar in the relevant period are ever used in a remotely ‘even’-like sense.
512 Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer used for all culminations (‘even’) without a series of preceding alternatives in the text. Obviously, editors in 1800 adopted the convention to write sogar in the ‘even’ sense as one single word. While some still occur in a context which mentions other elements on a scale, we find antecedent-less uses with higher frequency: (16) “(…) Alles war schön, besonders das Essen.”—‘Exzellent. Sogar Taube und Beefsteaks.’ (Hit #4, Karl May, Durchs wilde Kurdistan.) “(…) Everything was fine, especially the meal.”—‘Excellent. Even dove and beefsteaks.’ In (16), sogar relates to the range of food served and expresses that dove and beefsteak are exceptional in this domain. The passage does not report a scale of food (even though it establishes other qualities of a visit). In summary, gar Sn relates to Sn–1, Sn–2 and expresses that Sn, Sn–1, Sn–2 are on a scale, and that Sn is extremal on this scale. Sogar SF expresses that the focus alternatives [[S]]f are ordered (with respect to likelihood, or surprise) and that S is extremal on this scale. In other words, focus serves to compute alternative propositions which previously had to be provided by discourse context. Our case studies illustrate that direct association with focus can potentially come about in more ways than lexicalized indirect association with focus. These cases complement the case of Selb in the preceding section where focus alternatives replaced other focus alternatives—focusing is reanalysed to a different position. The research literature at this point is rather fragementary, and more case studies are needed for a comprehensive survey of predecessors of focus.
25.3 Information structure in syntax: English and German Languages can use specific syntactic patterns to host focus, or to associate with focus. While English and German do not possess specific focus phrases, it has frequently been pointed out that the preverbal position in German main clauses (prefield) serves multiple purposes, all having to do with information structure in the wide sense. English
Information Structure and Language Change 513 does not have V2 syntax but likewise uses various types of movement for old material, framesetters, aboutness topics, contrastive topics, and ‘stressed elements’ which, as we will argue, might offer further cases of bleached focus. While the terminology in this research area clearly deviates from the notions focus, alternatives, contrastive topic, and background as used in the main body of the present handbook, there seems sufficient overlap and historical continuity to include these data in our overview of language change and information structure. Roughly speaking, there are three ways of encoding focus syntactically (cf. Weinert 1995). We list the cases which are illustrated in the examples below. (i) We can use a special focus construction, thus accommodating the whole macro- structure of the sentence to the marking of focus. Some examples for this are cleft-sentences in English (17a), Old Irish or German (although here clefts are somewhat marked), or pseudo-clefts, as in the English example (17b; from Weinert 1995: 354) and the German example (17c; from Weinert 1995: 355). Moreover, we can use movement operations, usually to the left periphery. Movement for marking focus has been described in two subcategories: (ii) First, movement to designated focus positions, such as in Italian (18a, from Rizzi 1997: 286) or other languages such as Hungarian (18b, from Molnár 1991: 154), Albanian or Modern Greek (see ref. in Rizzi 1997: 286). (iii) Secondly, movement to other positions that are not designated to any information structural content, such as English ‘topicalization’ in double focus constructions (19a; cf. e.g. Prince 1981; Speyer 2010) or prefield-movement (19b) or Left Dislocation (19c) in German. Here, the interpretation of the moved constituent as focus is achieved by non-implicational reasoning processes, perhaps implicature. (17) a. It is JOHN whom you forgot to invite. b. THAT’s what I thought you were talking about. c. DAS that
ist is
GENAU, exactly
was ich meine. what I mean
‘That is exactly what I mean.’
(18) a. IL TUO LIBRO ho letto (, non il suo) the your book have-I read not the his
‘I read your book, not his book.’
b. Attila Attila
a the
FÖLDrengéstől félt earthquake-from feared
‘It was the earthquake Attila was afraid of (not anything else).’
514 Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer (19) a. JOHN he liked, but BETTY he hated. b. SCHILLY Schilly
er he
bezeichnete denoted
er he
als as
Unruhestifter, troublemaker
SCHRÖDER nannte Schröder called
gar ‚ Volksverhetzer’. even rabble-rouser
‘He referred to Schilly as troublemaker, and to Schröder even as rabble-rouser.’ c. Den JÖRG, den hab the Jörg the have war was
aber but
ich allerdings gesehen. Der Max, I indeed seen the Max
der the
nirgends. nowhere
‘Yeah, Jörg I’ll say I saw. But Max was nowhere to be seen.’
In particular, the last case of movement to positions that are not designated for focus would be prone to misrepresentation without additional intonational clues (on their importance for focus see e.g. Zubizaretta, this volume). For instance, prefield-movement in German can serve to establish a topic–comment structure (20a) or a frame-propositon structure (20b; see Speyer 2008); Left Dislocation can serve a whole array of discourse functions, most notably thematization (14c; cf. to German Left Dislocation e.g. Altmann 1981; Frey 2004). (20) a. (Was what in in
der the
Susanne?) Susanne
Susanne Susanne
hat has
ihr Examen her exam
jetzt now
Tasche. bag
‘How is Susan?—Susan practically made her exam.’
b. Am at-the
macht makes
Nachmittag machte afternoon made
er einen he a
Spaziergang. walk
‘In the afternoon he went for a walk.’
c. Den Jörg, den hab the Jörg the have
ich gestern gesehen. Er I yesterday seen he
saß mit sat with
Max in Max in
der Kneipe. the pub
‘I saw Jörg only yesterday. He was sitting with Max in the pub.’
We will start with a survey of possible functions of prefield movement in Modern High German, assessing that at least some are relevant for focus. The term prefield denotes the
Information Structure and Language Change 515 constituent preceding the finite verb form in the Modern German declarative clause. Examples are given in (21). (21) prefield a. Gestern yesterday
| finite verb | haben | have
| rest of clause | wir viel gearbeitet | we much worked
‘Yesterday we worked a lot.’
b. (Du fragst nach deiner Tasche?) you ask about your bag Die | hat | Annette gestern noch gesehen. the-ACC | has | Annette yesterday yet seen
‘(You ask about your bag?) Annette saw it only yesterday.’
c. Schilly | bezeichnete Schilly-ACC | denoted Schröder | nannte Schröder-ACC | called
| er als Unruhestifter, | he as troublemaker | er gar ‚Volksverhetzer. | he even rabble-rouser
‘He referred to Schilly as troublemaker, and to Schröder even as rabble-rouser.’ d. (Was hat Hans gegessen?) (what did Hans eat?) Spaghetti | hat Spaghetti has
| Hans gegessen. Hans eaten
‘Hans ate spaghettiF’
The examples illustrate the functions of prefield movement. Sentence (21a) shows a frame-setter (gestern), (21b) illustrates an aboutness topic (die) and (21c) demonstrates that contrastive topics CT can be located in the prefield, with an associated focus coming later in the clause (cf. Speyer 2008). Question (21d), finally, shows that a question–answer focus can occupy the prefield. Given that a question–answer focus is the universal criterion to detect focus in languages, it seems justified to state that the prefield is a focus-friendly position. Yet, the variety of examples proves that the prefield is not a focus position; we should more appropriately call it a position in the service of information structure. Other Germanic V2 languages exhibit similar patterns. If we look into the history of German, we see that fewer functions seem to have been compatible with prefield-movement (see Speyer in prep.). In Old High German, we find frequent examples in which a topic (22a: mit imu) or a scene-setting element occurs in the prefield. Examples in which the prefield hosts a contrastive element are sparse. The few examples are all such that the sentence constitutes a double focus construction (22b).
516 Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer (22) a. (dhanne ir […] abgrundiu […] umbihringida […]) then he abysses encompassed
mit imu with him
was ich was I
danne then
al all
dhiz frummendi this creating
‘(Then he encompassed the abysses.) I then created all this together with him.’ (Isidor 2,2) b. In in
dhemu druhtines nemin the Lord’s name
in in
dhemu the
in in
sines his
uuorde word
archennemes chiuuisso fater, recognize-we surely father
chilaubemes sunu believe-we son
mundes gheiste mouth’s spirit
instandemes chiuuisso understand-we surely
heilegan gheist holy spirit
‘We surely recognize the Father in “the name of the Lord”, we believe that the Son is “the word”, we understand that the Holy Spirit is “the spirit of His mouth”.’ In terms of focus theory, the structure of (22b) shows contrastive topic in the preverbal position and an associated focus in the verb phrase. The historical record suggests that the prefield is mostly a topic-position in Old High German. Hinterhölzl and Petrova (2010) take this observation as their starting point for an account for the emergence of German V2 syntax. They propose that the prefield position originated by reanalysis of an orphan topic constituent before verb-first clauses (which were used for all-new sentences). The result was a hanging topic construction without a resumtive pronoun in the core clause, as topic pronouns used to be mute well into Old High German (cf. Volodina 2011). Over time, the preposed constituent was reanalysed as a displaced element from the clause. At that point, the ‘prefield’ changed its status from a clause external postion to SpecCP, an integral part of the clause. The schematic example in (23) demonstrates these stages, using a mock-Westgermanic sentence. (23) Stage 1: merii [CP tîγeti1 [IP kuninγáz2 [VP t2 proi bráðeri sîni t1]]]. sea-ACC shows king-NOM brother-DAT his
Stage 2: [CP meri3 sea-ACC
‘The king shows the sea to his brother.’
tîγeti1 [IP kuninγáz2 [VP t2 t3 bráðeri sîni t1]]]. shows king-NOM brother-DAT his
According to this theory, verb second syntax is in fact grammaticized discourse, where a referent is named and commented on. In reanalysis, the underlying syntax underwent a
Information Structure and Language Change 517 change, in that a left-peripheral position was newly recruited that had not been active in declarative clauses before. Once SpecCP was available in declarative clauses, it could in principle be used for other purposes as well. We find that the prefield position lost its original topic-marking force and was used for other information structural content, most notably contrastive topics. Contrastive topics systematically associate with another focus, that is, another stressed element. We could argue that the movement of contrastive elements to the prefield originally served prosodic purposes: A contrastive topic in preverbal position is less likely to occur directly adjacent to the focus. As languages have a tendency to avoid adjacent stressed elements (‘clash avoidance’, see Speyer 2010), movement to a preverbal position optimizes the prosodic form of the sentence. It is natural to assume that an existing position in the C-architecture was targeted by such movement (cf. Rizzi 1997; Frey 2006; and Aboh, this volume for a proposal for Modern German). These two kinds of prefield movement are distinct both in motivation and syntactic structure and should be kept apart: Topics and framesetters inhabited SpecCP for pragmatic reasons, whereas contrastive topics inhabited SpecCP for reasons of prosody. By the Early New High German period, however, movement of contrastive elements to the prefield was possible even without there being a second focus in the sentence. Contemporary German allows for focused elements in the prefield (contrast, but also question–answer focus and other focus constructions). We have a clear example for the focus cline: Prefield-movement of the second kind originally was motivated by the focal accent, which meant that the moved phrase must have been marked as focus. This phase prevailed in Old High German. Speculating, we could claim that from Early New High German on, the frame setters in the prefield constitute a bleached (contrastive topic +) focus construction. When stating Gestern haben wir viel gearbeitet (= 21a), the speaker loosely seems to contrast ‘yesterday’ with other days. Unlike true CT constructions, however, the speaker is not obliged to continue this train of thought explicitly in discourse (e.g. by reporting on todays activities). In this case, the bleaching process might have been promoted by the fact that the first kind of prefield movement, topic in prefield, was already established in the language. A language learner saw the prefield position as a multifunctional information structure position. The generalization to bleached CT was an easy step. The same multifunctional prefield, however, led to different developments in English language history. Language learners in Britain failed to see any system in the prefield position, except the function to host the subject, which led to SVO syntax in contemporary English. Yet, a multitude of fossilized and specialized fronting patterns in English emerged, each of which serves its own function in information structure.
25.3.1 Preposing in English There are several non-canonical word order patterns in Modern English, such as the preposing of temporal and local adverbials, locative inversion, and the preposing of an argument, in the following referred to as Object Preposing (ObjPrep). Preposing
518 Regine Eckardt and Augustin Speyer constructions in Modern English serve to express information structural content; object preposing, in particular, serves to mark the object as contrastive topic which associates with a second focus in the clause. Earlier authors such as Prince (1981), Kuno (1982), and Speyer (2010) offer detailed characterizations in terms of posets and alternatives which, as the data show, correspond to CT + F as used in this book (see Büring). Consider (19a), repeated as (24) below. (24) JOHNCT he likedF, but BETTYCT he hatedF . ‘John’ and ‘Betty’ refer to sets of alternatives which are evaluated with respect to the question ‘what is his attitude towards x?’. The verbs ‘liked’ and ‘hated’ provide answers to the two subquestions. They constitute the focus in either clause. The preposed objects ‘John’ and ‘Betty’ constitute the sorting key. Turning to the history of ObjPrep in English, there are two phenomena that are interesting in the context of this chapter. First, ObjPrep in Old English was less restricted and could serve to encode several information structural concepts. In this respect, it was comparable to German prefield-movement. Secondly, once ObjPrep came to be restricted to CT + F constructions, its use dwindled out as a consequence of an independent syntactic change, namely the loss of the verb second syntax in English. As detailed in Speyer (2010), the preposing of a non-subject constituent was subject to information structural requirements even in Old English, but the movement at that time was compatible with several information structural functions. Most common were scene-setting elements, contrastive phrases, and topics (compare the ModHG prefield). The number of pragmatic functions of ObjPrep decreased until, in Early Modern English, it became virtually impossible to prepose a non-focused topic and ObjPrep became restricted to the well-known CT + F construction that we find in contemporary English. The details of the development allow for an elegant explanation of this specialization. If we compare English to the German development, the loss of V2 syntax in Middle English is certainly the most striking difference (cf. van Kemenade 1987). Movements of non-subject topics to the left periphery decreased in language use, thus obliterating evidence for the language learner of a topic position. Over time, the pragmatic functions of the initial position came to be replaced by the syntactic requirement of subject-hood. A situation emerged in which ObjPrep was (a) no longer possible for non-contrasted topical objects, and (b) automatically led to V3 sentences of the type shown in (18). In a secondary development, ObjPrep in V3 sentences adopted additional restrictions, determined by prosody. In its remaining function as CT, it required a focus on some second element in the sentence. If the subject was chosen as that focus, it newly had to occur directly adjacent to the object (ObjCT SubjF V) which leads to a prosodic clash between two adjacent accents (Speyer 2010). Speakers of Middle and Early Modern English tended to avoid these clashes and in modern usage, ObjPrep is virtually only possible if the sentence contains an (unstressed) pronominal subject. As a result of a conspiracy of factors, we find a specialization of Object Preposing—an uncommon trend in language history.
Information Structure and Language Change 519 In addition to ObjPrep, English allows for the preposing of adjectival phrases and negations. (25) So excited they were that they couldn’t sit still. (26) Never have we seen such a breathtaking view. While preposed adjectives follow the modern English XP, Subj V … pattern, preposed negations still look like V2 syntax. To our knowledge, there is no detailed survey that offers evidence as to which of these patterns could be captured in terms of bleached focus: Which constructions can be analysed by making reference to alternatives, which are then discharged in a conventionalized way? Sentence (25) could be viewed as contrasting degrees (of excitement); (26) seems to evoke alternative frequencies which are contrasted with never. A comprehensive investigation of this potential link between focus, bleached focus, and fossilized syntactic patterns in English is beyond the limits of the present article.
25.4 Summary A closer look at focus in language history reveals a clear pathway of focus change. Focus as a universal pragmatic pattern in languages can influence semantic composition indirectly (pragmatic association) or directly (lexical association). Focus sensitive constructions can change to bleached-focus constructions. We proposed that these are characterized by conventional alternatives, the use of one specific associating item and, possibly, lexical requirement for a word to be focused. Bleached-focus constructions can develop into focus-free expressions where traces of earlier focus-triggered content remain as implicature (if-only, ‘exasperated’ even, (ne) point). Focus alternatives can replace earlier explicit domain arguments (exceptive niewan) or earlier discourse patterns (sogar). We suspect that more source constructions can be found in history. In the final section, we proposed that the syntax of Germanic languages, specifically leftward movement, can be described on a basis of focus and bleached focus, in addition to the established aboutness topic. In German, the original prefield function of topicmarking was extended to contrastive topic-marking in the CT sense of this handbook, as well as a bleached CT marking, traditionally classed as framesetting. English grammar lost the multi-purpose prefield of V2 grammar; however, Modern English has a variety of fossilized patterns in the left periphery that are specialized for various bleached focus and CT constructions. The term ‘bleached focus’ can bridge the gap between the formal focus and informal notions of information structure (also Velleman and Beaver, this volume). We hope to invite alternative-based analyses of contemporary and past language use which profit from the explicitness of formal description without being forced into compositional focus constructions.
Pa rt I I I
E X P E R I M E N TA L A P P ROAC H E S TO I N F OR M AT ION ST RU C T U R E
Chapter 26
Inf ormation St ru c t u re and L ang uag e C om prehe nsi on Insights from Psycholinguistics Elsi Kaiser
26.1 Introduction This chapter discusses how information structure, when signalled by syntactic or prosodic cues, is processed during language comprehension. I first briefly review some of the key psycholinguistic methods that have been used to investigate questions about information structure, and then identify major research findings. The chapter closes with a discussion of open questions and possible future directions. This chapter focuses on language comprehension. There is also a growing body of work on information structural considerations in language production, as discussed in the chapter by Michael Wagner. For related work in neurolinguistics, please see the chapter by Ina Bornkessel- Schlesewsky and Petra Schumacher. For specific definitions and in-depth discussion of different information-structural notions and theories, please see Parts 1 and 2 of this volume (Theories of Information Structure, Current Issues in Information Structure). Experimental work can shed light on the real-time processing of information- structural representations. For example, we can test how incrementally, how rapidly, comprehenders make use of linguistic cues to information structure. This information is important for models of real-time language comprehension, and can also help inform theoretical discussion. In addition, experimental work can help clarify areas where judgements are unclear and it can help us tap into processes that are not available to introspection. This information contributes to theories of language processing as well as theories of information structure.
524 Elsi Kaiser
26.2 Psycholinguistic methods used to investigate information structure This section focuses on psycholinguistic methods that have been used to investigate comprehension of information structure. I consider reaction-time-based measures, attention-based measures, and off-line methods. Other behavioural methods also exist, for example mouse-tracking (e.g. Spivey et al. 2005) and pupillometry (Engelhardt et al. 2010), which could also be used to investigate information structure. (For a recent review of experimental paradigms in psycholinguistics, including the advantages and disadvantages of different methods, see Kaiser 2014.)
26.2.1 Time-based measures Measuring how quickly people perform different kinds of actions or tasks offers insights into language processing. I first discuss self-paced reading and related methods, and then turn to eye-tracking during reading. In the ‘moving window’ version of self-paced reading, participants press a key to unmask words or phrases one by one as they proceed through a sentence. As one word/phrase/text segment is unmasked, the preceding one is re-masked (e.g. word-by-word: xxx xxxxx xx xxx => The xxxxx xx xxx => xxx house xx xxx =>xxx xxxxx is xxx …). This allows researchers to measure how much time participants spend on each section. This can be done word-by-word, clause-by- clause or sentence-by-sentence, and different presentation styles provide information at different grain levels. Traditionally, researchers have assumed that increased reading times point to processing difficulties.1 Self-paced reading has been used to explore many aspects of information-structural processing. This method is inexpensive, portable, and relatively easy to implement and analyse (see Baayen and Milin 2010 for new data-analysis approaches), but has been criticized for its artificiality (e.g. inability to backtrack/re-read). As a whole, self-paced reading has proved to be a fruitful method, and has generated a large number of insightful findings regarding information structure (as well as other aspects of language, see Mitchell 2004). Another task that measures reaction time is the lexical decision paradigm. In lexical decision tasks, participants see or hear words and indicate (often by pressing a key) whether these are real words of the language under investigation. Usually, all target
1 Recent
findings indicate that equating slower reading times with processing difficulty may be an oversimplification. Hale (2003) argues that slowdowns in reading time can occur because the current word reduces uncertainty about the syntactic structure at hand, and not because the structure is especially difficult (see also Levy 2008 on how results of prior work can be recast in terms of surprisal, i.e., how (un)predictable—and how informative—a certain element is).
Information Structure and Language Comprehension 525 words are real words (i.e. should receive ‘yes’ responses), but distractor trials/filler trials include nonwords. Lexical decision is often done in a cross-modal paradigm: target words are presented visually/in writing as participants hear words or sentences. The auditory aspect allows investigation of prosodic issues (e.g. information-structural contribution of different pitch accents.) Lexical decision experiments normally build on the phenomenon of semantic priming: a target word is recognized faster if a semantically associated word been processed recently. A wide range of linguistic issues have been investigated using lexical decision tasks, including the information-structural notion of focus and questions related to the status of focus alternatives (e.g. Braun and Tagliapietra 2010; Byram Washburn 2013). When designing and analysing experiments that use reaction-time based measures such as self-paced reading, it is important to keep in mind that ‘everything is relative’. Thus, to test whether a particular syntactic packaging of information structure (e.g. a scrambled/noncanonical word order) is ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ to process, it must be compared to another condition: For example, one might compare how quickly people read a scrambled word order (i) after a discourse context that provides the appropriate information-structural support for it, to how quickly people read the same scrambled sentence (ii) after a discourse context that does not provide the right kind of information structural support. Self-paced reading is often regarded as the ‘lower-tech’ cousin of eye-tracking-during- reading, where participants read text as their eye-movements are recorded. Different technologies have been developed to allow for maximum accuracy in tracking eyemovements (Duchowski 2007). When analysing reading data, language researchers focus on fixations (when the eyes ‘pause’ and fixate a particular region) and saccades (rapid movements). Fixation duration, saccade length and the frequency of regressive eye-movements are influenced by a range of linguistic factors, and can be used as a measure of processing load during reading (Rayner 1998; Rayner and Juhasz 2006). (There are many different ways of analysing eye-movement patterns during reading, see Clifton et al. 2007). Eye-movement data has led to important insights regarding information-structural issues (e.g. for an overview of research on the effects of focus on eye-movements during reading, see Filik et al. 2011).
26.2.2 Attention-based measures In contrast to self-paced reading and eye-tracking-during-reading which are well-suited for tapping into processing load, another type of eye-tracking called visual-world eye- tracking allows us to gain insights into how people are interpreting linguistic stimuli (see Tanenhaus and Trueswell 2006; Huettig et al. 2011 for reviews). In contrast to reading eye-tracking which uses written stimuli, in a visual-world eye-tracking study a participant hears words or sentences while looking at objects or a visual display. For example, participants in Tanenhaus et al.’s seminal 1995 paper—the first to apply visual-world eye-tracking to real-time auditory language processing—heard temporarily ambiguous
526 Elsi Kaiser instructions like ‘Put the apple on the towel in the box’ (‘on the towel’ is ambiguous between a destination and a modifier) and carried them out using real objects. People’s eye-movements are very closely time-locked to the speech stream, as demonstrated by Tanenhaus et al. (1995, see also Cooper 1974), which means that eye-movement patterns can provide a real-time indication of how people interpret auditory input. The auditory presentation modality means that visual-world eye-tracking is also well-suited for investigating prosodic questions, and can be used with pre-literate children. A growing body of work also uses visual-world eye-tracking to look at more or less unscripted interaction between two participants, one of whom is usually eye-tracked (e.g. Brown-Schmidt and Tanenhaus 2008). The interactive nature of this set-up is well-suited for investigating phenomena related to common ground and given vs. new information. Unlike eye-tracking during reading, where the focus is on temporal measures (e.g. duration of fixations), visual-world eye-tracking analyses focus on both the location and timing of the fixations. One of the most common visualization approaches is to compute the proportion of fixations to objects or regions over time (see Altmann and Kamide 2004). As regards statistical analyses, new methods are currently being developed that strive to go beyond some of the challenges faced by traditional approaches when dealing with visual-world data (Barr 2008; Mirman et al. 2008; Tanenhaus et al. 2008; Barr et al. 2011).
26.2.3 Off-line methods Off-line methods—including rating scales and questionnaires—do not measure the speed of processing or the moment-by-moment processes occurring during language comprehension, but can nevertheless provide important insights. One subtype of off- line method asks participants to rate how ‘good’ a particular stimulus is, for example how acceptable/natural/felicitous a certain word order or prosodic contour sounds in a particular context. This is often done with a rating scale (e.g. a five-point Likert scale) but can also be done with a binary response, magnitude estimation or other tools (e.g. Clifton and Frazier 2004; Byram Washburn 2013; Weskott et al. 2011). One methodological challenge is that infelicity is not the same as ungrammaticality: for example, a cleft may sound more felicitous in some contexts than in others, but being in an inappropriate/irrelevant context is not the same as being inherently ungrammatical. In some cases, though, strong infelicity may be hard to distinguish from ungrammaticality. Another subtype focuses not on how ‘good’ a stimulus is, but how people interpret it. For example, if we want to know if speakers associate different kinds of prosodic contours with different information structural notions, we could play them recordings of a sentence (e.g. Lisa bought milk), with pitch accents of varying types and locations, and probe their interpretation of the sentence (e.g. Choudhury and Kaiser 2012; see also Beaver et al. 2007).
Information Structure and Language Comprehension 527
26.3 Psycholinguistic research on the comprehension of information structure: syntactic cues In the next two sections, we review psycholinguistic research that explores the comprehension of syntactic cues (Section 26.3) and prosodic cues (Section 26.4) to information structure. This split between syntax and prosody is an artificial distinction and abstracts away from phenomena at the syntax–prosody interface, but I use it here because (i) from the psycholinguistic perspective, the methods used to investigate syntactic and prosodic aspects have been somewhat distinct, and (ii) the research questions that have motivated these two strains of work are also divergent. Due to space constraints, these sections are not a comprehensive review of research in this area.2 Research on the processing of syntactic cues to information structure tends to fall into two main groups: First, there is a body of work that looks at how syntactic cues to information structure (e.g. noncanonical/marked constructions) influence ease of processing. Existing research suggests that whether non-canonical structures are hard to process depends very much on prior context. Second, researchers have looked at how comprehenders extract information about notions such as givenness and focus during real-time comprehension, and how this can influence comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming discourse. There is also a considerable body of work on the relation between information structure and memory representations, especially on clefts (e.g. Sturt et al. 2004; Birch et al. 2000; Foraker and McElree 2007), which is beyond the scope of this chapter.
26.3.1 Syntactic marking of IS and ease of processing Existing research on ease of processing suggests that the processing of non-canonical structures (e.g. sentences with marked word order) is very sensitive to context, that is, whether the prior context supports the information-structural cues encoded in these 2 We will not discuss research on information-structural effects on reference resolution/production, due to space constraints. For psycholinguistic work on focus effects on reference resolution in English clefts, see Arnold (1998), Cowles et al. (2007) and Kaiser (2011a), see also Kaiser (2011b) on effects of focus on pronoun interpretation in Dutch, and Colonna et al. (2012) for work on the effects of topic and focus on reference resolution in German and French. Effects of word order have also been observed on pronoun interpretation in languages like Finnish and Estonian (e.g. Järvikivi et al. 2005; Kaiser and Trueswell 2008; Kaiser and Vihman 2009), which is presumably related to the information-structural functions that word order variation has in these languages. Another area relevant for the interplay of information- structure and reference resolution is the relationship between information- structural factors and the semantic coherence relations/rhetorical relations between clauses (Kehler et al. 2008; Kaiser 2010; see also Asher and Lascarides 2003).
528 Elsi Kaiser constructions. Much of this research has focused on languages with flexible word order and rich case-marking, such as German, Finnish, Japanese, and Russian. In general, speakers of flexible word order languages experience difficulty—as shown by self- paced reading or eye-tracking—when reading noncanonical sentences with marked word order in isolation, compared to sentences with unmarked/canonical word order (on Basque, see Erdozia et al. 2009; on Dutch, see Frazier and Flores d’Arcais 1989; on Finnish, see Hyönä and Hujanen 1997; on German, see Hemforth 1993, Bader and Meng 1999, Rösler et al. 1998, Bornkessel et al. 2002; on Hindi, see Vasishth, 2002, but see also Vasishth et al. 2012 on effects of context; on Japanese, see Miyamoto and Takahashi 2002). The question of what it means for a construction to be noncanonical is not entirely straightforward. Often, constructions with marked, relatively infrequent word orders— which are very often also constructions which occur in specific information-structural contexts—are described as noncanonical. Some researchers have attributed the increased processing load induced by noncanonical constructions to the greater computational and/or syntactic complexity of the constructions,3 as well as their relative infrequency. However, from an information-structural perspective, it is quite striking that many earlier studies tested canonical and noncanonical word orders without preceding context— presumably because the researchers were largely focusing on syntactic complexity and case marking. However, comparing how people process canonical and noncanonical constructions without a preceding context is an unfair comparison, since canonical/ unmarked constructions do not have the specific contextual requirements that characterize noncanonical constructions (put differently, that trigger/license use of noncanonical constructions). Strikingly, when noncanonical constructions are embedded in the right kind of discourse context, the higher processing load associated with noncanonical structures mostly disappears. In what follows, we review two experiments on this topic, one on German and one on Finnish (see also Vasishth et al. 2012 for related work on Hindi). Kaiser and Trueswell (2004) looked at how readers process canonical SVO and scrambled OVS order in Finnish, a language with flexible word order and no articles. Out of context, canonical SVO order in Finnish is easier to process than noncanonical OVS order (Hyönä and Hujanen 1997). However, these orders differ in their information- structural requirements, and are largely guided by the widespread principle of ‘old before new’—that is, linguistic elements that refer to already-mentioned (given) information tend to occur before elements that introduce new information. In Finnish, SVO order is used when the subject and the object are both given information or new information (where ‘new’ means information that is being added to common ground and is pragmatically focused in Krifka’s (2008) terms),4 or when the subject is given and the 3 However, from a syntactic perspective, it is not clear whether all marked word orders are structurally more complex than unmarked word orders. In this chapter, the term ‘noncanonical’ is used to refer to structures/word orders that have specific information structural requirements, tend to be less frequent than their canonical counterparts, and may be structurally more complex in some languages. 4 I use the term ‘new’ here rather than ‘pragmatically focused’ due this term being so established in the psycholinguistic domain.
Information Structure and Language Comprehension 529 object is new (see Arnold et al. 2000; Clifton and Frazier 2004 on effects of given–new ordering in English). Noncanonical OVS order occurs when the object is given and the subject is new. Thus, an SV sequence can be followed by an object that is given or new information, whereas an OV sequence is more specific and followed by a new subject. In a self-paced reading study, Kaiser and Trueswell tested how quickly people read SVO and OVS sentences in contexts manipulating the information structure of the subject and the object. Each item consisted of a three-sentence mini-story, where the third sentence was the target sentence and had SVO or OVS order (example (1); the subject is underlined and the object is in bold). The context mentions either the subject or object of the target sentence. The other argument in the target sentence is new information. Thus, we had four conditions: canonical sentences in supportive contexts [S=old|O=new]; canonical sentences in unsupportive contexts [S=new|O=old]; noncanonical sentences in supportive contexts [O=old|S=new]; and noncanonical sentences in unsupportive contexts [O=new|S=old]. (1) a. Context sentences Lotta etsi eilen sieniä metsässä. ‘Lotta was looking for mushrooms in the forest yesterday.’ Hän huomasi heinikossa {hiiren/jäniksen} joka liikkui varovasti eteenpäin. ‘She noticed in the grass {mouse/hare} that was moving carefully forward.’ b. Target Sentences (subject underlined, object in bold) SVO: Hiiri seurasi jänistä ja linnut lauloivat. Mouse-nom followed hare-part and birds-nom were-singing. OVS: Jänistä seurasi hiiri ja linnut lauloivat. Hare-part followed mouse-nom and birds-nom were-singing. The results show that processing of noncanonical sentences is facilitated by context: When OVS sentences were presented in an unsupportive context, they were read significantly more slowly than SVO sentences in an unsupportive context. However, things are different in supporting contexts: when noncanonical OVS sentences were preceded by a supportive context ([O=old|S=new]), the reading times were only slightly longer than reading times for SVO sentences in a supportive context, with only the verb showing a significant slowdown. This indicates that the presence of an appropriate discourse context facilitates processing of noncanonical structures. One might even go so far as to say that a particular information-structural configuration ‘licenses’ use of a noncanonical sentence. This finding also highlights how rapidly real-time language processing is sensitive to information structure. (A follow-up visual-world eye-tracking study by Kaiser and Trueswell 2004 is discussed in Section 26.3.2). Recently, Slioussar (2011) conducted related work on Russian, focusing on ditransitive sentences with preposed direct and indirect objects. Her results also reveal a clear effect of context.
530 Elsi Kaiser Although Kaiser and Trueswell found that supportive contexts facilitate the processing of noncanonical word orders, Finnish OVS order was never processed faster than SVO order (perhaps due to the syntactic complexity of OVS, or the information- structural flexibility of SVO, or to a frequency asymmetry between the two word orders). This raises the question of whether it is ever possible for noncanonical constructions to be read faster than their canonical counterparts. Can information- structural considerations trump issues such as syntactic complexity? This was investigated in a recent series of experiments by Weskott et al. (2011; see also related work on clefting in Hindi by Vasishth et al. 2012). Weskott et al. looked at canonical subject–verb–object (SVO) and noncanonical object–verb–subject (OVS) sentences in German ((2)). Prior work on German has shown that—as in Finnish—OVS sentences cause processing difficulties compared to canonical SVO sentences when presented out of context (e.g. Bader and Meng 1999). To find out whether the right context can make OVS easier to process, Weskott et al. (2011) compared SVO and OVS sentences in isolation and when preceded by a context sentence. (In example (2), the subject is underlined; the object is in bold.) In their target items, the object of the critical sentence (e.g. the side mirror) is in a part–whole relation with the entity in the context sentence (the car). These part–whole relations are a subtype of partially-ordered set (poset) relations, which are also crucial for OSV word order in English (Ward 1988; see also Birner and Ward 1998; Prince 1999). Weskott et al. also manipulated the nature of the predicate in the critical sentence, such that the preposed object either contrasts with (2c,d) or matches (2a,b) the rest of the car in terms of what was done to it, but this did not have an effect on people’s responses. (2) Context sentence: Peter hat den Wagen gewaschen. ‘Peter washed the car.’ a. SVO: Er hat den Außenspiegel besonders gründlich gewienert. He-nom has the-acc side-mirror particularly diligently polished. ‘He polished the side mirror with particular diligence.’ b. OVS: Den Außenspiegel hat er besonders gründlich gewienert. The-acc side mirror has he-nom particularly diligently polished. ‘The side mirror, he polished with particular diligence.’ c. SVO: Er hat den Außenspiegel ausgelassen. He-nom has the-acc side-mirror left-out ‘He left out the side mirror.’ d. OVS: Den Außenspiegel hat er ausgelassen. The-acc side-mirror has he-nom left-out ‘The side mirror he left out.’
Information Structure and Language Comprehension 531 Using an off-line rating task as well as self-paced reading, Weskott et al. (2011) essentially found that in the right kind of context, noncanonical sentences become ‘better’ than canonical sentences: Canonical SVO sentences were not affected by the absence/pre sence of context, but noncanonical OVS sentences were rated as better in a part–whole (poset) context than out of context. In fact, in part–whole contexts, OVS sentences were rated as significantly more acceptable than SVO sentences. The main finding about OVS order receives further support from a second study using reading time (see also Hörnig et al. 2006 for related work on German spatial descriptions, as well as Vasishth et al. 2012 who investigated clefting in Hindi and found that noncanonical orders can be processed faster than canonical orders in the right context. See Bornkessel and Schlesewsky 2006 for related neurolinguistic work). Further evidence for the importance of context comes from a series of studies by Hoeks et al. (2002) using fragment completion, self-paced reading as well as reading during eye-tracking to look at coordination ambiguities (e.g. The model embraced the designer and the photographer laughed) in Dutch. When sentences are presented out of context, people tend to get garden-pathed and treat the second noun (the photographer) as conjoined with the first one, which Hoeks et al. attribute to a preference for a structure with only one topic. However, when the sentences are preceded by a context that biases towards a two-topic continuation (e.g. a context that explicitly mentions both the model and the photographer in subject position, making them given information), the coordination bias goes away and participants are no longer garden-pathed (or are garden- pathed less, depending on whether self-paced reading or reading eye-tracking is used to measure processing). This is further evidence for the information-structural properties of prior context guiding real-time language processing. Weskott et al’s (2011) finding that in German noncanonical OVS sentences can be judged as good if not better than SVO canonical sentences—in line with Vasishth et al. (2012) on the processing of Hindi clefts—contrasts with Kaiser and Trueswell’s (2004) finding that in Finnish, OVS sentences are facilitated by the right kind of context but do not become as easy to process as SVO sentences. This asymmetry is also echoed in Hoeks et al.’s (2002) finding that the timing and strength of context effects can fluctuate. Why do the findings for Finnish SVO/OVS and German SVO/OVS differ? This may be due to typological and/or information-structural differences between the SVO/OVS alternation in Finnish and German: Standard Finnish has no definite or indefinite articles, and the SVO/OVS alternation plays an important role in signalling the distinction between given vs new information (information that has already been mentioned in the discourse vs information that is being introduced for the first time). In contrast, German has both definite and indefinite articles which help to encode given/new distinctions, and German OVS order is associated with a part–whole interpretation (which in Finnish is generally encoded with SOV or OSV order). Furthermore, asymmetries in the relative frequencies of noncanonical vs canonical word orders across languages can play a role, as can possible syntactic differences (German is a verb second language, but Finnish is not). In light of these information-structural and typological differences, it
532 Elsi Kaiser is perhaps not surprising that the ‘strength’ of the context effect can differ between languages (see also Bornkessel and Schlesewsky 2006 for neurolinguistic evidence suggesting that corrective and contrastive focus pattern differently in this regard). Recent work in English by Fedorenko et al. (2012) on the processing of subject- extracted and object-extracted relative clauses in supportive, non-supportive, and null contexts found that object-extracted relative clauses—which are commonly analysed as structurally more complex than subject-extracted RCs, due to a longer dependency— were processing more slowly regardless of context. Moreover, quite surprisingly, object- extracted RCs showed more processing difficulty in supportive contexts than in null contexts. Further research on the effects of preceding context on the processing of marked structures is clearly needed.
26.3.2 How comprehenders extract syntactic cues about IS during real-time processing So far, we have focused on ease of processing but we have not directly considered how comprehenders interpret information-structural cues. This question was investigated in a visual-world eye-tracking study by Kaiser and Trueswell (2004). Participants heard SVO and OVS sentences preceded by short contexts, while looking at pictures showing the entities in the stories. (Recall that in Finnish, an SV sequence can be followed by an object that is old or new information, whereas an OV sequence signals that the upcoming subject is new information.) Kaiser and Trueswell recorded participants’ eye-movements as they heard the critical SVO/OVS sentence (see example (3)), to see whether listeners would be able to anticipate the information-status of the post-verbal argument at the point where they have only heard SV or OV. (3) [The accompanying picture shows the doctor, the nurse, and the patient] On the hospital reception desk are leaning a doctor and a nurse, and it is almost two o’ clock. After a moment, a. Doctor-nom glances-at patient-part… (SVO) b. Doctor-part glances-at patient-nom… (OVS) This patient is holding a pair of scissors. Participants’ eye-movement patterns showed that they were indeed able to use word order to predict upcoming referents, based on their information structure. In OVS sentences, after hearing the object and the verb, participants started to look at the new subject (e.g. the patient in (3b)) even before they had heard the post-verbal noun: they were able to predict that the upcoming subject must be new information, given the properties of OVS order, and thus showed anticipatory eye-movements to the character in the
Information Structure and Language Comprehension 533 picture that had not yet been mentioned. In contrast, SV … sequences showed no anticipation (3a)—which is expected, since an SV … sequence can be followed by a given or new object. In sum, these results show that people were able to use the information- structural properties of word order rapidly and efficiently to make predictions about the discourse-status of upcoming nouns. As a whole, research on the syntactic encoding of information structure shows that the language processing system is very attuned to information structure: On the one hand, when the information-structural properties of a construction are not supported (‘licensed’), the processor struggles and slows down—but on the other hand, in the right context the processor uses information structural information in the linguistic input to make rapid predictions about what will be mentioned next. These results highlight the central role of information structure in language processing, and support claims regarding the importance of both common ground content and common ground management (in Krifka’s (2008) terms).
26.4 Prosodic cues to information structure Having reviewed work on the relation between information structure and syntax, we turn to psycholinguistic research on prosody and information structure. A large body of work has explored the comprehension of different kinds of pitch accents, focusing on questions such as how rapidly comprehenders use prosodic information to guide information-structural processing during real-time comprehension, the nature of the mapping between different pitch accents and information-structural notions, as well as the role of prosody—in addition to focus-sensitive operators like ‘only’—in evoking focus alternatives and guiding language processing.
26.4.1 Incremental and anticipatory effects of prosodic cues A growing body of findings indicates that prosodic cues regarding information structure are used by the language processing system in a highly dynamic, incremental and anticipatory way. Many of these insights have come from visual-world eye-tracking, which allows us to gain moment-by-moment insights into how comprehenders are reacting to auditory stimuli. In one of the earliest studies, Dahan et al. (2002) tested whether real-time eye-movements support the claim that listeners interpret accented words as referring to new information and deaccented words as referring to given information. Participants heard instructions ((4)) to move objects around on the computer screen.
534 Elsi Kaiser (4) Context sentence: Put the candle below the triangle. OR Put the candy below the triangle. Critical sentence: Now put the CANDLE above the square. OR Now put the candle ABOVE THE SQUARE The display included pictures of cohort pairs such as ‘candy’ and ‘candle’ in addition to phonologically unrelated objects such as ‘pear’ and ‘necklace’. Dahan et al. manipulated (i) the information status of the target noun (e.g. candle): it was either mentioned in the context sentence or not (i.e. linguistically present in common ground or not), and (ii) the prosody of the target noun in the critical sentence (accented or deaccented). The results show that people use prosodic cues to make rapid inferences about information structure: participants were more likely to look at the not-yet-mentioned object when the target word was accented than when it was deaccented. When the target was deaccented, there were more looks to the given, already-mentioned object. These effects are very early (starting 300ms after the onset of the target word), which shows that listeners’ are guided by prosodic prominence while the noun itself is still ambiguous. Dahan et al.’s (2002) accented condition had nouns with a mix of H* and L+H* accents. Subsequent work has looked more closely at the contrastive L+H* accent. Ito and Speer (2008) used eye-tracking to investigate processing of adjectives and nouns with L+H* accents (e.g. First hang the green ball. Now, hang the BLUE ball) in felicitous and infelicitous contexts. In their study, participants heard instructions to decorate small Christmas trees and had to choose ornaments out of a set. When participants heard an L+H* accent on a colour adjective, they rapidly anticipated that the upcoming noun contrasts in colour with a previously mentioned noun. Similar anticipatory findings were obtained in German by Weber et al. (2006) for contrastively-accented adjectives. Recent work by Sekerina and Trueswell (2012) on Russian children’s processing of contrastively accented adjectives and nouns found that children’s processing is less anticipatory but can be facilitated by contexts which make the contrast set salient. In sum, the processing system is able to use cues to information structure from prosody in a highly incremental and dynamic way (see Carlson et al. 2009 on the relationship between prosodic cues—in the form of pitch accents—and cues from word order patterns and clefts). The observation that prosodic cues to information structure allow listeners to predict/ anticipate upcoming referents is further supported by a sentence-completion study by Féry et al. (2009), which tested whether comprehenders use prosodic cues to predict the discourse-status (given/new) of upcoming referents. Building on Kaiser and Trueswell (2004), Féry et al. recorded canonical SVO sentences in German (example (5)) with two prosodic contours: The critical sentence in (5c) either had (a) a falling nuclear accent on the object (and a high tone on the post-verbal adverb gleich ‘soon’), or (b) a falling nuclear accent on the verb (and a low tone on gleich, and a deaccented object). In both cases, the subject was realized with a rising prenuclear accent. Based on existing work (e.g. Féry 1993), contour (a) should signal that the object is new information (not yet in common ground) and contour (b) should signal that the object is given information.
Information Structure and Language Comprehension 535 (5) a. On the hospital reception desk are leaning a doctor and a nurse. b. It is almost two o’clock. c. Der Arzt befragt gleich die Krankenschwester /die Patientin. The-nom doctor questions soon the-acc nurse /the-acc patient. ‘The doctor will question the nurse /the patient soon.’ Crucially, Féry et al. (2009) truncated the recordings of sentence (c) after the adverb gleich, that is, the recording ends right before the object noun. Participants listened to the mini- discourses with truncated third sentences and were asked to choose whether the truncated sentence was more likely to end with a mention of the given referent (e.g. nurse) or the new referent shown in the picture but not yet mentioned in the story (e.g. patient). The results show a significant effect of prosody: when the post-verbal adverb gleich ‘soon’ had a low tone, there were significantly more choices of the discourse-old referent than when it had a high tone, and correspondingly more choices of the discourse-new referent when gleich had a high tone compared to when it had a low tone. These results show that anticipatory processing can be triggered not only by contrastive accents on noun modifiers or by partial information about accenting on the noun itself, but also by more ‘indirect’ prosodic cues on preceding lexical items. This suggests that the language processing system can make rapid forward-looking inferences about what the prosodic information that is currently being heard (e.g. the word gleich) means for the prosodic and information-structural properties of subsequent words. This points towards a system capable of processing cues to information structure in a top-down, non-local fashion (see also Carlson 2001 on how prosodic cues can influence the processing of gapped sentences in a non-local way, and Schafer et al. 2000 on how pitch accents can resolve syntactic ambiguities).
26.4.2 Mapping between information-structural categories and prosodic realizations The question of how information-structural notions map onto different prosodic realizations has received considerable attention in psycholinguistics, both in perception and production work. As this chapter focuses on perception/comprehension, we will mostly consider the perception side. In an influential paper, Watson et al. (2008) used eye- tracking to investigate this question for English. They compared two main types of pitch accents—H* which has a simple rise to a high Fo target, and L+H* which has an initial drop in Fo followed by a rise to a high target—to see whether these tones encode distinct information structure categories as suggested by Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) (see also experimental data from Schafer et al. 1996, who found that H* and L+H* have different consequences for comprehension). Participants in Watson et al.’s (2008) study heard sentences and followed instructions (example (6)) to move objects on the screen, which included pictures of the target word (e.g. camel), a cohort competitor (e.g. candle), two unrelated objects, and four locations.
536 Elsi Kaiser As shown in example (6), sentence (a) creates a two-member set (e.g. camel and dog) and the sentence (b) renders one member salient (dog). Crucially, the target word in sentence (c) had an H* or an L+H* accent on the stressed syllable, which is still ambiguous between ‘camel’ and ‘candle’. If these accents map on to new and information respectively, an L+H* accent should trigger looks to the other set member (camel), whereas an H* accent should trigger looks to the new member of the cohort pair (candle). (6) a. Click on the camel and the dog. b. Move the dog to the right of the square. c. Now, move the CAMEL/CANDLE below the triangle. Eye-movements show that (i) L+H* triggers a contrastive interpretation, but (ii) H* results in consideration of both new and contrastive referents. This suggests that the distinction between L+H* and H* is not very clear-cut and that their information- structural properties can overlap—contrary to Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg’s (1990) claim that different accents map directly to different information-structural statuses (see also Breen et al. 2010 for additional data on the potential ‘confusability’ of H* and L+H*, and Chen et al. 2007 for related work on British English, using both natural and synthetic speech in a visual-world paradigm).5 These results (i) corroborate other data regarding the rapidity with which prosodic information is used and (ii) highlight the importance of empirically testing theoretical claims about the ‘meaning’ of different pitch accents. If listeners do not reliably map L+H* and H* accents onto new and contrastive focus, this poses challenges for theoretical approaches that map different acoustic focus types to different semantic/pragmatic focus types. For recent production work on English related to these issues, see Breen et al. (2010), Katz and Selkirk (2011). In addition, from a cross-linguistic perspective, Ouyang and Kaiser (2013) looked at the production of different focus types in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language which uses prosody to encode lexical semantics as well as information structure. There is a considerable amount of prior work on Mandarin but it has led to divergent findings regarding whether and what prosodic cues mark the distinctions between information-structural types. We investigated whether Mandarin speakers prosodically encode the presence/absence of corrective focus, and the distinction between new/given information. Our results show that correctiveness is reflected in all three acoustic parameters (duration, f0 range, and intensity range): words in corrective focus had longer durations, larger f0 ranges, and larger intensity ranges than non-corrective words. However, the new–given distinction was reflected only in lengthening and f0 range expansion, and only in the absence of correction (a Correctiveness × Givenness interaction).6 This suggests that in Mandarin, the prosodic encoding of 5
For work on the prosodic properties of second-occurrence focus, see Beaver et al. (2007). light of the fact that Mandarin has lexical tone, we do not make reference to labels like H* or L+H* here and instead focus on acoustic measurements of duration, f0 and intensity. Our target words were bisyllabic words made up of a sequence of High–High, High–Low, or Low–High tones. 6 In
Information Structure and Language Comprehension 537 new-information focus differs from corrective focus: only corrective focus is associated with intensity range expansion. Furthermore, our results support claims about the multi-functionality of acoustic–prosodic dimensions. Even in a language with lexical tones—which differ in f0, intensity, and duration—these same dimensions also encode information structure. The relationship between prosodic realization and information-structural categories can also be investigated using a two-stage production-and-perception approach. For example, Choudhury and Kaiser (2015; see also Choudhury and Kaiser 2012) conducted two sets of experiments consisting of an elicitation study and a perception study, to investigate whether speakers of Bangla (Bengali) distinguish new-information vs corrective focus prosodically, and whether listeners are able to perceive a difference between these two focus types. We also wanted to see whether the syntactic position of the focused constituent matters, in light of the fact that Bangla, with canonical SOV order, has a default preverbal focus position. We tested sentences with SOV order and adverb-SOV order. Both sets of experiments largely show the same patterns: correctively focused elements have a higher mean f0 than elements in new-information focus—at least when they are objects. Focused subjects do not show such stable differences between focus types. This asymmetry between subjects and objects is present in both the production and the perception data, and persists even if the subject is not the first element in the sentence. Although further work is needed, these results are compatible with the idea that prosodic distinctions between focus types are best expressed in the default preverbal focus position, even if focused constituents can also occur elsewhere in the sentence. As a whole, psycholinguistic experiments can provide valuable information about the potentially complex relation between prosodic realizations and information-structural categories, and pose challenges for the view that there is a one-to-one mapping between types of accent and information-structural categories.
26.4.3 Alternatives evoked by focus The relationship between prosody and information structure is also central to our understanding of focus and focus alternatives. Many theories of focus assume that use of focus-marking invokes a set of alternatives. However, questions remain about the nature of this process as well as what gets to be in this set. Braun and Tagliapietra (2010) used a cross-modal lexical decision task in Dutch to test whether presence of prosodic focus marking is sufficient to activate alternatives in the listener’s mind, in a context where alternatives have not been mentioned in the preceding context (see also Norris et al. 2006). Participants heard sentences like ‘In Florida, he photographed a flamingo’, spoken with neutral intonation or with a contrastive pitch accent on ‘Florida’ and on ‘flamingo’ (the critical word). Participants performed a lexical decision task on a written word that was either an alternative to the critical word (‘pelican’), a related word that is not a semantic alternative (‘pink’), or an unrelated
538 Elsi Kaiser word (‘celebrity’). Braun and Tagliapietra found that when ‘flamingo’ had a contrastive accent, participants recognized ‘pelican’ faster than ‘pink’ or ‘celebrity’, but when ‘flamingo’ had no contrastive accent, ‘pelican’ and ‘pink’ were recognized equally fast, faster than the non-associated word ‘celebrity’. This suggests that contrastive focus does activate potential alternatives in the minds of the listeners, supporting the psychological reality of alternatives. Related work by Kim (2012) and Byram Washburn (2013) provides further information about how the set of alternatives is constructed and/or constrained, indicating that contextual factors play a key role and that newly- learned associations can influence what the alternatives are taken to be (see also Cowles 2003 for neurolinguistic research on differences between new information focus and contrastive focus). A related issue concerns the effects of focus-sensitive operators like ‘only’ on language comprehension. Even in the absence of prosodic cues, ‘only’ signals that an element is being singled out of a set of alternatives. Existing work shows that comprehenders are able to make use of this information to guide parsing. For example, Ni et al. (1996) found that whereas sentences with ambiguous relative clauses, like ‘Businessmen loaned money at low interest were told to record their expenses’, can cause processing difficulties (presumably due to readers initially misparsing businessmen as the agent of the verb loaned), sentences like ‘Only businessmen loaned money at low interest were told to record their expenses’ showed no such difficulty (see also Sedivy 2002). Ni et al. argue that this is because the phrase ‘only businessmen …’ signals a contrast between two sets businessmen, which leads readers to anticipate the relative clause that disambiguates between these two sets, for example only those businessmen who were loaned money at low interest rates (however, see Clifton et al. 2000 for divergent results, and Paterson et al. 1999 for evidence that the effect of ‘only’ occurs later during processing). Further work by Filik et al. (2005) points to an interplay between contextual expectations (as created by a preceding ‘which’ phrase) and presence of ‘only’ (see also Paterson et al. 2007 on the processing consequences of ‘only’ in different syntactic positions, and Sauermann et al. 2013). Recent work by Carlson (2013) further confirms that readers are sensitive to the information-structural properties of ‘only’ (i.e. evoking a contrast between sets) during real-time processing, and that the contrastive function of ‘only’ can be satisfied by preceding material or be used to anticipate an upcoming contrast (see also Sedivy 2002). As a whole, psycholinguistic experiments on the comprehension of prosodic cues to information structure—as well as related elements such as focus-sensitive particles— suggest that (akin to what we saw with word order) language users are skilled at rapidly extracting information-structural cues from the linguistic input, and using them to make predictions about the information-structural properties of upcoming material. In particular, the results regarding prosodic cues point to a highly dynamic, anticipatory process, which suggests that it is operating on representations that are available before the critical word has been fully heard/processed, which has implications for how linguistic theories encode/represent information structure.
Information Structure and Language Comprehension 539
26.5 Future directions, broader issues Although psycholinguistic research on information structure is growing rapidly, many important issues still remain open for future investigation. For example, there is currently little interaction between information-structural approaches and information- theoretic approaches to language (e.g. Jaeger 2010; Aylett and Turk 2004; see Qian and Jaeger 2011 on topic-shifting), even though both are concerned with the fundamental notion of ‘information’. Research from an information-theoretic perspective focuses largely on statistical measures of frequency and predictability, which do not necessarily map directly onto a more information-structural notion of informativity, according to which new information could be argued to be more informative than given information. For example, words that refer to new entities can nevertheless be rather predictable, e.g. ‘Did Lisa buy a windows computer?’ ‘No, she bought a mac’. Conversely, lexically uninformative words can be highly informative within the context of the sentence, for example ‘What about Bob and Lisa? Which one did Mark see at the murder scene?’ ‘He saw her!’). One intriguing direction for future research is a better understanding of how these two conceptualizations of ‘information’ relate to each other, conceptually as well as in terms of their empirical effects on language production and comprehension. Taking steps towards this, Ouyang and Kaiser (2014) investigated how information- structural and information-theoretic notions influence prosody. In a production study, we manipulated words’ information-structural properties (type of focus: corrective focus, narrow new-information focus, broad new-information focus/VP focus) and information-theoretic properties (word frequency, based on corpus data, and contextual probability, based on norming). Our hypothesis was that the prosodic effects of information structure may be weakened when other factors also demand prosodic prominence—that is, prosodic cues for information structure might be obscured when statistical informativity is high (low frequency and/or unpredictable words). As a whole, we find that when a focused word is lexically frequent and contextually probable, both new-information focus and corrective focus conditions have greater pitch prominence (higher f0) than wide focus. In contrast, when a focused word is infrequent and improbable, neither the new-information focus nor the corrective focus condition is distinguishable from wide focus. Our results show that the prosodic prominence associated with information structure is modulated by word frequency and contextual probability, and highlight the importance of investigating both information-structural and information-theoretic notions in tandem. From a cross-linguistic perspective, it will be beneficial to see psycholinguistic experiments on a range of typologically different languages. This can contribute to our understanding of how different ways of marking information structure (including morphology) are processed, and how they compare to better-researched cues such as prosody and word order. Prosody can be viewed as ‘less local’ than morphology (e.g. clitics marking IS), since pitch accents can have consequences for the intonational
540 Elsi Kaiser properties of other parts of the sentence. It would be interesting to see how information- structurally relevant clitics are processed, and whether they tend to co-occur with prosodic or word order cues or on their own. Cross-linguistic work can also shed light on how the differences between languages influence their information- structural encodings. For example, standard written Finnish has no articles, and thus the ‘burden’ of indicating given vs new falls largely on word order, unlike German and English, which have articles (see Section 26.3.1). It might not be surprising to find that the cognitive importance of different information- structure encoding devices fluctuates from language to language, depending on what other devices are available. This observation is also supported by work on tonal languages like Mandarin (e.g. Xu 1999; Chen and Braun 2006; Ouyang and Kaiser 2013) which shows that the prosodic dimensions that encode lexical tones also encode information structure, but in ways that differ from English (see Section 26.4.2). Existing psycholinguistic research on information structure has generated a range of significant findings and has helped us to identify key questions for further work. Future research in this domain offers a promising means for exploring the relationships between different ways of marking information structure (e.g. word order, articles, prosody, morphology) both within and across languages, the consequences of the nature and availability of these different devices for on-line processing, as well as questions regarding the interplay of information-structural and information-theoretic notions.
Chapter 27
Inf ormation St ru c t u re and Production Pl a nni ng Michael Wagner
27.1 Grammar and processing The literature on production planning has a rich tradition of work which concerns phenomena that the linguistic literature would feature under the headline ‘information structure’, even if the perspective taken is quite different.1 Of central concern are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie certain choices in planning an utterance, and the incremental time-flow of the planning process. A model of production planning synthesizing insights from different strands of research (Garrett 1980, 1988; Levelt 1989, among others), and hence sometimes called the consensus model, differentiates the following stages in the planning of an utterance:2 (1) A model of production planning (Bock and Levelt, 1994) Message ⇓
Grammatical Encoding Functional Processing (Lexical selection and grammatical function assignment) ⇓ Positional Processing (constituent assembly and inflection) ⇓ Phonological Encoding 1 This chapter benefited tremendously from two insightful anonymous reviews and comments by the editors. The experimental results reported in this chapter were first presented at a conference on alternative semantics at Nantes in 2010; thanks for comments to the audience. Also thanks to members of prosody.lab for help in conducting the experiment and annotating the data, in particular Lizzy Smith, Lauren Mak, and Erin Olson. 2 It is important to note that message here is a technical term—of course choices at the functional level or positional level can be interpreted by listeners as meaningful and hence form part of the message in the intuitive sense of the word.
542 Michael Wagner To make this more tangible, let’s consider an example: (2) a. Obama was pleased by the decision. b. The decision pleased Obama. These two utterances constitute two ways of conveying the same fact about the world, and will be interchangeable in many situations. Yet the choice is not arbitrary. Studies from the production planning literature have found that one crucial factor in such word order choices is that speakers tend to realize constituents encoding more active and accessible referents earlier in the sentence (Bock and Irwin 1980; Bock and Warren 1985). These results suggest that speakers should be more likely to use the passive than the active form in (2) than would be expected given the general preference for using active sentences. The reason is that Obama is human, animate, more imageable, and also frequently mentioned in the media (in 2016), and hence more available than the referent or linguistic form of the decision, and more easily planned constituents tend to be realized earlier. The premise of these studies is that the two sentences in (2) actually encode the same message—that is, the same conceptual intent. Given a particular message, accessibility-based word order choices are then necessarily mediated by the grammatical roles that the referents are assigned to. This decision is taken to happen at the functional level. A linguistic account might take a different stance, and posit that the choice depends on which constituent is construed as the sentence topic. Topicality and givenness are often assumed to be grammatically encoded and part of the message. The idea that there is a representation of a complete message corresponding to the meaning of a sentence that is devoid of linguistic structure may seem counterintuitive—isn’t the compositional linguistic structure itself the way to generate complex meanings in the first place? Since production planning is taken to be incremental at all levels, however, it is not necessarily assumed in this model that the entire message has to be completely planned before utterance formulation, or at least not in all models of speech production adhering to (1) (Brown-Schmid & Konopka 2008). The aspect of production theories of linguistic choices relevant here is that they usually take the information-structural import that the choice between (2) has as a direct result of contextual availability on utterance planning, rather than positing that the difference is encoded more directly in the linguistic structure, for example by requiring the subject of a passive to be a sentence topic, as is sometimes assumed. Even if the choice between passive and active is indeed driven by extra-grammatical factors, it is surely a choice between two objects that differ substantially in their grammatical properties: The two arguments of the predicate will be realized with different grammatical functions, the form of the verb changes, an auxiliary is used, and one of the arguments is realized as an optional prepositional phrase. Consider now a different word order effect: Imagine you are asked to name ten politicians from the USA, as fast as possible. Chances are one of the first names you will list (at least in 2016) will be Obama. And yet this word order choice does not affect linguistic structure in the same way as choosing a passive over an active, and is usually not assumed to mark ‘Obama’ as topical by linguistic theories. In the production literature, word order in lists is often assumed to involve choices at the positional rather than the functional level. Both types of choices
Information Structure and Production Planning 543 show accessibility effects, but they differ in interesting ways with respect to the range of factors that affect them (cf. Gleitman et al. 1996, for discussion and references).3 The literature on production planning provides empirical methods to test which planning level is involved in word order choices, a question that is clearly relevant to anyone working on the information structural import of word order variation. If planning considerations at the functional or positional level can account for a particular choice, then accounts which presume differences at the message level—for example the grammatical encoding of topicality—might be simply superfluous. The typical methodologies used in linguistics are often unable to directly pinpoint the underlying source of an effect. Intuitions about acceptability, for example, do not wear their provenance on their sleeves, and are affected by many non-linguistic factors (e.g. by how much a linguistic structure taxes memory resources) (cf. Chomsky 1965; Schütze 2011, among others), and these include the factors at play at the functional and positional planning level according to theories of speech production. Certain information-structural effects might be due to the interaction of memory resources and the planning of linguistic structure (under a speaker-oriented view), or maybe they reflect choices on the side of the speaker that are intended to facilitate processing on the listener-side (under a listener-oriented view) (see Jaeger 2013, for a recent discussion of whether production biases are purely based on the need of the speaker). The promise of looking at the process of production planning is that it could provide a principled explanation of information structuring (for a look at evidence from perception and reading, see Kaiser, this volume). Two types of phenomena are addressed in this review, contextual effects on prosodic prominence, and choices between different word orders. These are both areas where encoding-level accounts (often assumed in the psycholinguistic literature) and message-level accounts (often assumed in theoretical linguistics) compete for the explanation of overlapping sets of data, and where quantitative studies of production studies have already established some of the basic facts and methods.
27.2 Prosodic prominence Linguistic constituents that encode information salient in the discourse are often prosodically reduced (cf. Féry and Ishihara 2010, and references therein). Consider the following contrast: (3) a. No Antecedent Guess what John’s aunt, who is incredibly generous, brought for his birthday: A new bicycle! b. Contrastive Antecedent Guess what John’s aunt, who deals with old bicycles, brought for his birthday: A new bicycle! 3
Linear order in coordinate structures plays an important role in the computation of presuppositions, but this fact is usually attributed to incremental interpretation rather than grammatical structure itself.
544 Michael Wagner The word bicycle is likely to be accented in (3a) and likely to remain unaccented in (3b). How exactly does this difference come about?
27.2.1 Anaphoricity or production facilitation? Focus theories such as the alternatives theory of focus (cf. Rooth, this volume) or theories of givenness (cf. Rochement, this volume) treat the lack of accentuation on ‘bicycle’ in (3b) as anaphoric. Just as pronouns are anaphors that require a linguistic antecedent of a certain type, so does deaccentuation require an appropriate antecedent, and this anaphoric requirement is encoded in the meaning of the focus operator whose phonological reflex is the shift in prosodic prominence. With respect to the model in (1), under this view prosodic prominence shifts are assumed to encode an aspect of the message. The semantics of anaphoric contrast is often modelled using alternative semantics (Rooth, 1985, 1992, this volume), which assumes that every constituent has two meanings associated with it, its regular denotation and a set of alternatives, called the ‘focus semantic value’. A prosodic prominence shift requires that the appropriate set of focus alternatives are contextually salient. In focus theory, prominence shifts act like anaphors, and a pragmatic principle explains why focus and givenness marking are often obligatory when possible. Williams (1997) proposes a principle called Do not overlook anaphoric possibilities; Schwarzschild (1997) postulates a principle called Be attentive; Wagner (2005) and Sauerland (2005) assume the source of the obligatoriness is the principle Maximize Presupposition (Heim 1991); and sometimes more specific constraints are assumed, for example a constraint on question–answer congruence (cf. Rooth 1992). And yet, it is not clear that examples like (3) warrant the introduction of such grammatical machinery. The word bicycle is repeated in the response, and the concept that the word bicycle refers to constitutes old information. This prior activation may more directly be the source of prosodic reduction. I will refer to accounts of this type broadly as ‘accessibility’ theories. A range of studies in the past 30 years have presented evidence that various factors increasing the accessibility of referents or of the linguistic expressions referring to them result in reduced prosodic prominence. Lack of accentuation has been linked to greater prior activation of referents in a speaker’s discourse representation (Nooteboom and Terken 1982; Terken and Hirschberg 1994), or to the activation, priming, or contextual predictability of linguistic expressions referring to them (Nooteboom and Terken 1982; Fowler and Housum 1987; Terken and Nooteboom 1987; Aylett and Turk 2004; Jaeger 2010; Watson 2010), both of which could plausibly be located at the level of lexical selection during functional processing rather than at the message level. Another source of prosodic reduction might be the prior activation of a motor-plan of a particular word or word sequence in cases of repetition (Terken 1984; Lam and Watson 2010; Kahn and Arnold 2012), a type of effect that could plausibly be attributed to the level of phonological encoding (see Arnold and Watson 2015, for a detailed overview of processing effects on prominence).
Information Structure and Production Planning 545
The existence of accessibility effects on prosodic prominence at the encoding level is not controversial: There is general agreement that frequency, predictability, and repetition can have effects on prosodic prominence at least under certain circumstances, (and, in fact, also on word order, cf. Bock 1987). But is it a sufficient explanation for the effects usually discussed in the linguistic literature under the headlines ‘focus’ and ‘givenness’? A challenge for answering this question is that processing explanations and linguistic accounts often make similar predictions, and a lot of the evidence used in the relevant literature to motivate each account does not actually distinguish them (see Wagner 2015, for a detailed discussion). Consider now the following example (cf. Wagner 2005, 2006; Büring 2008): (4) Non-Contrastive Antecedent Guess what John’s aunt, who produces expensive bicycles, brought for his birthday: A new bicycle! Once again, bicycle is repeated. But would it remain unaccented? If a repetition of bicycle sufficient to license its prosodic reduction, then we would expect a prominence shift, just as is likely in (3b); if a prominence shift does not occur here, it would suggest that it matters that expensive and new are not typically understood as alternatives to each other. Such an effect is unexpected if all that matters is the prior activation of the concept or the word bicycle, but it is expected if a prominence shift actually encodes a semantic contrast at the message level (cf. Wagner 2012a; Katzir 2013; Repp, this volume, for relevant discussions of the notion ‘contrast’). The comparison between (3b) and (4) thus offers a potential testing ground for which level of production planning contextual effects on prosody occur at.
27.2.2 An experiment on prominence shifts in English A production experiment was carried out looking at contrasts like (3b) vs (4), which to my knowledge have not been experimentally tested. What we are interested in here are the conditions under which speakers will spontaneously shift prominence in the target sentence to the adjective when producing these types of utterances. A set of 12 triplets similar to (3) and (4) were created. Participants were told to imagine saying them to a friend in a casual conversation. On each trial they had time to familiarize themselves with the materials. Every participant saw all conditions from each item. However, the presentation order was such we could analyse the data in a latin square design by only using the first 12 trials for each participant: The 36 sentences were partitioned into three playlists of 12 trials with one condition from each item, and four trials in each condition. The stimuli were presented in a pseudo-random order within each playlist such that the same condition was only repeated at most once, otherwise the order was random within each block. The order of the three blocks in turn was randomly varied between participants. The latin square design avoids repetition effects and
546 Michael Wagner prevents participants from guessing the purpose of the study. The fully-within-subjects- design offers greater power and allows us to test the development of the effect over time. Eighteen native speakers of North American English participated, with an age range between 19 and 31, 12 of whom were female. The recordings were hand-checked for whether speakers actually produced utterances according to script and checked for speech errors, which led to the exclusion of about 5 per cent of the trials. The recordings were forced-aligned using the HTK-based (Young et al. 2006) prosodylab forced aligner (Gorman et al. 2011), which provides a segment-by-segment and word-by-word alignment. We then automatically extracted acoustic measures in Praat (Boersma and Weenink 1996) from words of interest. The adjective and the noun in each target sentence in particular were examined. The acoustic measures considered were the maximum intensity over the word, the maximum pitch, and the duration. These measures have proved to be reliable correlates of prosodic prominence in earlier studies (Breen et al. 2010; Wagner 2012b). We computed relative measures of prominence between adjective and noun. In particular, we looked at the difference in log duration (effectively a measure of the duration ratio between the two words), the difference in pitch in semitones, and the difference in intensity. A shift in prominence toward the adjective would be reflected by an increase in the relative prominence measures. In addition to acoustic analysis, two research assistants were asked to annotate a prominence shift when the noun remained unaccented and the adjective hence carried the last accent of the utterance (Figure 27.1).4 They were only played the final part (e.g. a new bicycle) and hence did not have access to the context. Using the lme4-package in R (Bates and Maechler 2010), we fitted a mixed model regression with Context as fixed effect, and participants and items as random effects which included random slopes for Context (Table 27.1). All models report estimates and standard errors. The determination of p-values in mixed models is not trivial, since the degrees of freedom can only be estimated (Baayen et al. 2008). We report tables including p-values estimates generated with the R-package texreg (Hlavac 2013). The results show that there is a clear acoustic difference in terms of pitch and intensity between the Alternative condition and the other two conditions, but the acoustic measures used here did not detect a difference between the ‘no alternative’ condition in which the head noun was repeated but the adjectives were not mutually exclusive, and the control condition. The perceptual prominence annotation was more sensitive, however. A logistic mixed effects regression with random slopes and intercepts for Context for item and participants found a significant difference both between the Alternative condition and the other two, and between the No Alternative and the Control condition. The model estimates the odds for a prominence shift to be more than ten times higher in the Alternatives condition compared to the other conditions, and estimates the odds for 4 The annotation scheme is based on the assumption that the grammatically relevant aspect for prosodic focus marking is relative prominence, rather than accentuation of individual constituents (cf. Wagner 2005).
rintensity
4 2 0 New
No Alternative Context
Alternative
New
No Alternative Context
Alternative
rpitch
40 30 20 10 0
rduration
0.00 –0.05 –0.10 –0.15 New
No Alternative Context
Alternative
100%
Prominence shift
75%
Annot 50%
Shift No shift
25%
0% New
No Alternative Context
Alternative
Figure 27.1 Measures of relative acoustic prominence between adjective and noun. On the left: acoustic measures (> means adjective is more prominent compared to the noun it modifies); on the right: research assistant annotation of prominence shifts to the adjective.
548 Michael Wagner Table 27.1 Linear mixed effect regression model for relative intensity and relative pitch, and logistic mixed effects model for the occurrence of a prominence shift RelIntensity (Intercept)
RelPitch
ProminenceShift
3.10 (1.38)*
18.93 (6.75)**
1.25 (0.36)***
ContextAlternative.vs.Other
−1.99 (0.43)***
−24.18 (6.86)***
2.51 (0.46)***
ContextNew.vs.NoAlternative
−0.11 (0.43)
−1.82 (6.17)
1.56 (0.79)*
p FocP) such that the double in the CLLD-construction occupies the specifier position of the higher projection (TopP) and the fronted constituent the specifier position of the lower one (FocP; see Agouraki 1990; Tsimpli 1990, 1995; Georgiafentis 2004; see Aboh as well as Bocci and Poletto, this volume, about cartographic approaches to syntax). The alternative hypothesis is that the hierarchical structure hosts purely structural configurations such as the double constituent involved in CLLD and the fronted constituent in fronting, as schematically presented in (9b)3 (see the ‘non-configurational approach’ in Alexopoulou 1999 and the ‘syntax-information structure underdeterminacy hypothesis’ in Haidou 2012). The order ‘topic > focus’ is not accounted for by the constituent structure in these accounts. It results from independent generalizations of the phonological form: the topic is realized within a clausal layer that is higher than the clausal layer that contains the focus, which predicts that topics can only precede foci in the left periphery. (9) a. cartographic model: b. non-discourse configurational model:
[XPtopic [YPfocus [TP … ]]] [XPdouble [YPfronted [TP … ]]]
Research on Modern Greek syntax has established an extensive body of knowledge about the properties of the left periphery. In general, the fronting construction is an instance of A-bar movement, whereas CLLD shows mixed properties of A-bar movement (e.g. sensitivity to island constraints) and base generation (e.g. obviation of Weak
3
The properties discussed in this section do not apply to hanging topic left dislocation, which differs both in its contextual as well as in its syntactic properties (Anagnostopoulou 1997; Grohmann 2000).
Information Structure in Modern Greek 693 Crossover effects) (Iatridou 1995: 13f.). The relevant question for the present section is whether these phenomena are sensitive to the information structural features. Binding facts show an asymmetry between the CLLD and fronting: fronted constituents have the same binding properties as the basic configuration, as shown in (10a,b), while CLLD creates new possibilities, as shown in (10c) (Iatridou 1995: 13; Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1997; Alexopoulou 1999, 2009). (10) a. Canonical configuration *o ðáskalós def:nom.m teacher:nom.m
tui frondízi 3:gen.m care:3
káθe maθitíi. each pupil:acc.m
(intended) ‘Hisi teacher cares about each pupili.’ b. Fronted focus *kaΘe each
maΘitii frondízi pupil:gen.m care:3
o def:nom.m
ðáskalós teacher:nom.m
tui. 3:gen.m
(intended) ‘Hisi teacher cares about each pupili.’ c. CLLD káθe each
maθitíi pupil:acc.m
ðáskalós teacher:nom.m
toni 3:acc.m
frondízi care:3
o def:nom.m
tui. 3:gen.m
(lit.) ‘Each pupil, hisi teacher cares about himi.’ Crucially, the facts in (10) are not sensitive to information structure. The properties of focus fronting in (10b) are independent of focus. Example (11) is a paraphrase of the ‘topicalization’ construction in (8) with an intonational nucleus in the post-verbal domain. The topicalized constituent cannot bind into the possessor of the subject, that is, it is in a position that does not take scope over the core clause. Hence, the binding properties of fronted topics differ from the binding properties of CLLD in (10c) and are identical to the properties of fronted foci in (10b). (11) Fronted topic *káθe each
parástasii performance:acc.f
skinoΘétis director:nom.m
skinoθétise direct:pst.pfv:3
o def:nom.m
tisi. 3:gen.f
(intended) ‘Each performance was directed by its director.’
694 Stavros Skopeteas The independence of the syntax of CLLD from information structure is also supported by the binding properties of wh-questions. Wh-fronting shares the same binding properties as focus fronting; compare (10b) and (12a). However, the CLLD question has the same properties as the CLLD example in (10c) (Alexopoulou 1999: 111, 2009, Alexopoulou and Kolliakou 2002). Hence, binding possibilities pattern with the syntactic construction and not with information structure. (12) a. Fronted wh- *pjon which:acc.m o def:nom.m
maΘitíi pupil:acc.m
frondízi care:3
ðáskalós teacher:nom.m
tui? 3:gen.m
(intended) ‘Which pupili does hisi teacher care about?’ b. Clitic left-dislocated wh- pjon which:acc.m o def:nom.m
maΘitíi pupil:acc.m
toni 3:acc.m
ðáskalós teacher:nom.m
tui? 3:gen.m
frondízi care:3
‘Which pupili does hisi teacher care about?’ Further support for the independence of syntax from information structure comes from the scopal relations between quantifiers, as illustrated in (13) (Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998: 505; Alexopoulou 1999: 111f.). The canonical configuration in (13a) is scopally ambiguous. The fronting construction in (13b) also has both readings, although there is a preference for the narrow scope reading. This effect is irrelevant for the scopal properties of the hierarchical structure: focus evokes the exclusion of alternatives, hence it motivates an inference that a particular individual is at issue (Fox and Sauerland 1997). The scopal asymmetry between subjects and objects is independent of the focus domain of (13b), as has been shown experimentally by Baltazani (2002: 165–199). Crucially, the scopal relations are different in CLLD, where the subject cannot have scope over the left-dislocated constituent; see (13c). (13) a. Canonical configuration káθe each
ðáskalos teacher:nom.m
frodízi care:3
kápio some:acc.m
‘Each teacher cares about some pupil.’ (∀ > ∃; ∃ > ∀)
maθití. pupil:acc.m
Information Structure in Modern Greek 695
b. Fronted focus kápio some:acc.m
maΘití pupil:acc.m
frodízi care:3
káθe each
ðáskalos. teacher:nom.m
‘Each teacher cares about some pupil.’ (∀ > ∃; ∃ > ∀) c. CLLD kápio some:acc.m
maθitíi pupil:acc.m
toni 3:acc
frodízi care:3
káθe each
ðáskalos. teacher:nom.m
‘Every teacher cares about a certain student.’ (*∀ > ∃; ∃ > ∀) The same facts hold for fronting and CLLD questions, as illustrated in (14a,b). The question with the fronted wh-pronoun retains the scope ambiguity of the basic configuration, which replicates the observation for the fronting construction in (13b). However, the CLLD question has only a possible reading in which the universal quantifier is under the scope of the wh-pronoun; see (14b). (14) a. Fronted wh- pjon who:acc.m
maΘití pupil:acc.m
frodízi care:3
káθe each
ðáskalos? teacher:nom.m
‘About which student does each teacher care?’ (∀ > wh; wh > ∀) b. Clitic left-dislocated wh- pjon who:acc.m
maΘitíi pupil:acc.m
toni 3:acc
frodízi care:3
káθe each
ðáskalos? teacher:nom.m
‘Which student is such that every teacher cares about him?’ (*∀ > wh; wh > ∀) In sum, the scopal asymmetries between fronting and CLLD are independent of information structure. The presence of a clitic in CLLD gives rise to new scopal possibilities that are not influenced by the contextual trigger of the construction (topic or focus). This implies that, from the point of view of the hierarchical structure, the four information structural options are subsumed under two left-peripheral hierarchically ordered configurations. A final note is due concerning preverbal subjects in SVO. Some authors assume that subjects share the same position with left-dislocated objects (Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998: 501).4 As regards the information-structural possibilities, it is 4 The basic evidence for this view is that preverbal indefinite subjects can only have wide scope over universally quantified objects, while post-verbal subjects (in VSO) may not. However, there are counterexamples to this generalization (Giannakidou 2001: 3.2.3).
696 Stavros Skopeteas clear that the discourse properties of preverbal subjects and left-dislocated objects are completely different; as discussed in Section 34.1 the latter but not the former are contextually restricted. A closer examination of their syntactic properties shows that preverbal subjects crucially differ from left-dislocated objects. Left-dislocated and fronted constituents are islands for extraction (Tsimpli 1995: 182), whereas this is not the case for subjects (see Spyropoulos and Revithiadou 2009 for a detailed discussion about subjects).
34.2.2 Post-verbal domain The crucial question in the post-verbal domain is the syntactic status of clitic- doubled objects; see (5). Do these objects occupy an argument position, or are they adjoined elements (see summaries in Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 2000 and Philippaki-Warburton et al. 2002; see also Tsakali 2008 on cross-linguistic variation)? Constraints on extraction suggest the latter view (see further evidence and detailed discussion in Androulakis 2001; Philippaki-Warburton et al. 2002; Spyropoulos and Revithiadou 2009: 9), as illustrated in (15): extraction is possible out of objects in situ, but not possible out of left-dislocated or fronted objects; see the contrast between (15a) and (15b). Crucially, extraction is not possible with clitic-doubled post-verbal objects, which contrasts with the properties of objects in situ; see (15c). (15)5 a. Extraction out of object in situ pjanúi who:gen.m iðes see:pst.pfv:2
mu 1:gen
ípes say:pst.pfv:3
[to def:acc.n
óti that ti]
aftokínito car:acc.n
?
‘Whoi did you say to me that you saw [hisi car]?’ b. Extraction out of fronted/left-dislocated object *pjanúi who:gen.m [to def:acc.n
mu 1:gen aftokínito car:acc.n
ípes say:pst.pfv:2 ti]
óti that
(to) 3:acc.n
iðes? see:pst.pfv:2
5 These extraction facts hold true for instances of alienable possession (inalienable noun phrases may be accompanied by a zero pronoun that allows for more possibilities of extraction) and for verbs that exclude an ambiguity between extracted DP subconstituent and V-adjuncts (e.g. verbs allowing an experiencer genitive or several types of embedded prepositional phrases). Examples that do not fulfil these requirements have different properties, which are independent of the syntactic asymmetry under discussion.
Information Structure in Modern Greek 697 c. Extraction out of clitic-doubled object *pjanúi who:gen.m iðes see:pst.pfv:2
mu 1:gen
ípes say:pst.pfv:3
[to def:acc.n
aftokínito car:acc.n
óti that
to 3:acc.n
ti]
?
‘Whoi did you say to me that you saw [his car ti]?’ Assuming that material in adjoined positions is an island for extraction (see López, this volume), the implications of the facts in (15) are straightforward. Adjunction is possible at several layers of the clause structure (vP, CP), and post-verbal clitic- doubled objects exploit several possibilities in different constructions (Androulakis 2001; Philippaki-Warburton et al. 2002). For the purpose of understanding the information structural possibilities, the relevant issue is that the double is an adjoined constituent, as indicated in (16b), and this contrasts with an object in situ, as in (16a). (16) a. [vP … XPobject] b. [[vP clitic … ] XPdouble]
34.3 Prosodic properties Modern Greek is an intonational language with a repertoire of tonal events comprising pitch accents (L*+H, L+H*, H*+L, H*, L*), phrase accents (H-, L-, and !H-), and boundary tones (H%, L%, and !H%); see Greek ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) in Arvaniti and Baltazani (2005). Two issues are particularly relevant for the study of information structure: (a) the delimitation of prosodic domains (see Section 34.3.1), and (b) the role of accentual contrasts (Section 34.3.2).
34.3.1 Prosodic domains Figure 34.1 illustrates an SVO utterance with neutral intonation (left panel), and the same order with a clitic-doubled object (right panel); see gloss in (17).6 The prosodic realization of the SVO utterance in the left panel is felicitous as an answer to the question ‘What happened?’; see (18). The default prenuclear accent in Modern Greek is a rising pitch accent 6
The pitch tracks in this section are illustrations—not empirical proof; the evidence for the discussed phenomena is found in the cited literature.
698 Stavros Skopeteas clitic-doubled object
200
200
150
150 Pitch (Hz)
Pitch (Hz)
canonical, object in situ
100 60
L*+H
L*+H
H-
L*+H
60
H* L-L%
i kiria
maluilidu
diorganose ton agona
the Mrs.
Maluilidu
organized
0
100
the race
Time (s)
3
L*+H
L*+H
i kiria
manuilidu
the Mrs.
Manuilidu
0
H-
H*
L-L%
ton diorganose ton agona it organized
the race
Time (s)
2.8
Figure 34.1 Canonical configuration vs clitic doubling.
(L*+H) (Arvaniti and Ladd 1995; Arvaniti et al. 1998, 2000; Arvaniti and Baltazani 2005). The right edge of the preverbal subject is demarcated with a high phrase accent (H-); this tonal event is not bi-uniquely associated with a particular discourse function (such as topic), but occurs with a wide range of non-final prosodic constituents, for example left-dislocated material, lists, and parentheticals (Baltazani and Jun 1999), and non- final clauses (Botinis et al. 2004). The most frequent type of nuclear accent in declaratives involves a high target associated with the starred syllable (either H* or L+H*; see Section 34.3.2; see Baltazani 2002 for further options). The low target at the right edge of the intonational phrase is a boundary tone (Arvaniti and Baltazani 2005; see Arvaniti and Godjevac 2003 for evidence that this tonal event is independent from declination). The clitic doubling version in the right panel could be an answer to the question ‘What happened with the race?’. The nuclear accent is aligned with the starred syllable of the verb in this example; another possible tonal structure would be a nuclear accent on the subject (depending on focus). One possibility is categorically excluded though: the clitic-doubled object cannot bear the nuclear accent (Iatridou 1995; Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1997). The double is in an adjoined position, as presented in (16b), and adjoined material is extrametrical, that is it cannot bear nuclear stress; see (16) (Revithiadou and Spyropoulos 2008: 43). Additional evidence comes from the fact that sandhi rules do not apply at the left boundary of the clitic-doubled constituent (see the detailed discussion in Revithiadou and Spyropoulos 2008, Spyropoulos and Revithiadou 2009). (17) i def:nom.f
kiría Mrs:nom.f
ton def:acc.m
agónai. race:acc.m
Manuilídu m.
‘Mrs Manouilidou organized the race.’
(toni) 3:acc.m
diorgánose organize:pst.pfv:3
Information Structure in Modern Greek 699 (18) Appropriate contexts for the prosodic realizations in Figure 1 a. What happened? (canonical, object in situ: left panel) b. What happened with the race? (clitic-doubled object: right panel) The contrast between the left-peripheral configurations is illustrated in Figure 34.2, which presents the sample sentence in (19) pronounced in the contexts in (20) (the pronominal clitic occurs in the CLLD construction in the left panels). The properties of the figures in the top left and in the bottom right panel are reported in a large number of studies, but the intonations of the CLLD construction with an initial focus and the fronting construction with a final focus have not yet been studied with instrumental phonetic methods. The pitch tracks in Figure 34.2 reveal a major contrast between final foci (top panels) and initial foci (bottom panels). The focus hosts the nuclear accent and the postnuclear material is deaccented (Baltazani and Jun 1999; Baltazani 2002, 2003b; Arvaniti and Baltazani 2005; Gryllia 2008). This property is reflected in the non-final foci in the bottom panels: the focus bears a nuclear accent H* and the postfocal domain is generally deaccented. The CLLD utterance with initial focus (bottom left panel) is slightly different: the clausal core must bear a secondary stress (compare with the deaccented version in the bottom-right panel). The tonal structure of the final foci in the top panels is richer: the left side of the focus domain of the utterance is demarcated by an intonational boundary (see H-target in Figure 34.2, top panels). A further correlate of the alignment of the left edge of the focus with the boundary of a phonological phrase is the fact that some sandhi rules do not apply at this position (Revithiadou 2003). There is no evidence for tonal events demarcating the right edge of a focus domain. Clitic left-dislocated material is demarcated with a high phrase tone at its right edge; see top left panel. The fronting construction in the top right panel has a final focus aligned with a left boundary: the prefocal material is realized as a single prosodic phrase with two prenuclear accents (Baltazani 2002; Revithiadou 2003). (19) ton def:acc.m
agónai race:acc.m
(toni) 3:acc.m
i def:nom.f
kiría Mrs:nom.f
Manuilídu. m.
diorgánose organize:pst.pfv:3
‘The race was organized by Mrs Manouilidou.’ (20) Appropriate contexts for the prosodic realizations in Figure 2 a. What about the race? (topic/CLLD: top-left) b. Who organized the race? (topic/fronting: top-right) c. Did Mrs Manouilidou organize the performance? (focus/ CLLD: bottom-left) d. What did Mrs Manouilidou organize? (focus/fronted: bottom-right)
700 Stavros Skopeteas
200
200
150
150
100 60
L*+H Hton agona the race
L*+H
L*+H
ton diorganose i kiria
100 60
H* L-L%
it organized the Mrs. Manuilidu 2.9
Time (s)
200
150
150
100
H* L-
0
H*
L-L%
ton agona
ton diorganose
i kiria
manuilidu
the race
it organized
the Mrs.
Manuilidu
Time (s)
2.6
L*+H
H-
L*+H
H* L-L%
ton agona
diorganose
i kiria manuilidu
the race
organized
the Mrs. Manuilidu
0
200
60
L*+H
manuilidu
Pitch (Hz)
Pitch (Hz)
0
initial focus
fronting
Pitch (Hz)
final focus
Pitch (Hz)
clitic left dislocation
2.9
Time (s)
100 60
H*
L-L%
ton agona
diorganose
i kiria
manuilidu
the race
organized
the Mrs.
Manuilidu
0
Time (s)
2.3
Figure 34.2 Prosodic structure and left-peripheral configurations.
34.3.2 Nuclear accent contrasts The accentual contrast in the realization of the nuclear accent correlates with different types of focus in several languages (Alter et al. 2001: 65 and Steube 2001: 233 for German; Face 2002: 34 for Madrid Spanish; see several Italian dialects in Grice et al. 2005: 364). Studies on Modern Greek syntax frequently assume a concept of ‘contrastive stress’ that may encode information structural differences independently from word order (see, e.g. Georgiafentis 2004). Following Greek ToBI, such a contrast applies between the nuclear accents H* and L+H*. The H* accent corresponds to an f0-peak that is preceded by a small rise and signals broad focus (Arvaniti and Baltazani 2005: 87; see also Baltazani and Jun 1999; Baltazani 2003a). The bitonal L+H* corresponds to an f0-peak that is preceded by a noticeable dip and aligns with the middle of the accented syllable; this accent is reported for narrow focus contexts (Arvaniti et al. 2006). The contrast between these tonal realizations is illustrated in Figure 34.3, which presents the sentence in (17) under the contexts in (21). The critical difference lies in the realization of the nuclear accent, which is a high tonal target (H*) in the left panel (followed by a fall towards the low
Information Structure in Modern Greek 701 local (L+H*)
200
200
150
150 Pitch (Hz)
Pitch (Hz)
underspecified (H*)
100
100 60
60
L*+H
0
L*+H
H-
L*+H
H*
L*+H
L-L%
i kiria
maluilidu
diorganose ton agona
the Mrs.
Maluilidu
organized
the race
Time (s)
3
0
L*+H
H-
L*+H
L+H* L-L%
i kiria
manuilidu
diorganose ton agona
the Mrs.
Manuilidu
organized Time (s)
the race 3
Figure 34.3 Nuclear accent contrast.
boundary tone), and a rise (L+H*) in the right panel. The latter tonal event involves an initial dip, such that the H-target is aligned with the middle of the stressed syllable. (21) Appropriate contexts for the prosodic realizations in Figure 3 a. What did Mrs Manulidu organize? (left panel) b. Did Mrs Manulidu organize the performance? (right panel) Experimental studies on the interpretation of these accentual patterns do not reveal a significant correlation between accent and type of focus (Gryllia 2008). Crucially, both accentual realizations are possible in contrastive contexts (e.g. answers involving correction) and non-contrastive contexts (e.g. answers to wh-questions). However, there is evidence for a difference with respect to the focus domain: both varieties of the nuclear accent have a local interpretation, that is, the focus domain may be the phonological word that bears this accent. However, only the H* may be projected to higher layers of the metrical structure: for example an H* (and not the L+H*) accent on a final O may be interpreted as O-focus, VP-focus, and all-focus. This property is independent of focus type, that is, the L+H* does not project to a contrastive VP-focus domain (see the experimental results in Georgakopoulos and Skopeteas 2010). Given these facts, the relevant contrast is the distinction between an underspecified nuclear accent and a nuclear accent that is associated with its phonological host and cannot be projected to higher domains of the constituent structure, that is, it is not interpreted as the nuclear stress of the VP or the clause, as outlined in (22). This contrast only applies if the projection of the nuclear accent is made possible by the nuclear stress rule (at the right edge of a prosodic domain); otherwise (e.g. in clause-initial contexts) the two realizations of the nuclear accent alternate in free variation (Georgakopoulos and Skopeteas 2010).
702 Stavros Skopeteas (22) Final nuclear accents (in declaratives) a. H* b. L+H*
→ →
local or projected local
34.4 Interpretational properties 34.4.1 Focus fronting The introduced syntactic and prosodic assumptions open an array of information structural possibilities that can be straightforwardly accounted for through the rules for assigning the phrasal stress that independently hold true. Greek is a head-initial language, which implies that phrasal stress targets the rightmost constituent that is eligible for stress within the stress domain (see Georgiafentis 2004; experimental evidence in Keller and Alexopoulou 2001 and Georgakopoulos and Skopeteas 2010; see also Zubizarreta, this volume). Beyond the local interpretation of the nuclear accent, which is always available (under the tonal conditions determined in (22)), a final accent also allows for projected interpretations. This asymmetry gives rise to different focus sets, that is, sets of possible focus domains (Reinhart 2006); compare (23a) and (23b). (23)7
Structure a. [TP S [vP V Oaccented]] b. [FP Oaccented [vP V S]]
Focus set {O, vP, TP} {O}
According to the generalizations about phrasal stress, fronted constituents bearing a nuclear accent form a narrow focus domain, which implies that the discourse properties of fronted foci are already predicted by generalizations about the phonological form. Furthermore, fronted constituents are expected to be interpreted as foci only if they bear the nuclear accent. Fronted constituents that do not bear the nuclear accent are interpreted as topics; see (8). The question is whether this contrast captures the entire range of data in Greek. If there are interpretational properties beyond those that are independently predicted by the prosodic structure, then we must assume that a feature with semantic content is associated with the constituent structure. A good candidate for such a property is the identificational interpretation of focus fronting (see É. Kiss 1998, 2009). If a fronted constituent excludes alternatives while in situ focus does not, this would imply a semantic contrast that is not captured by the options in (23a,b) and has to be accommodated 7
FP stands for ‘functional projection’ underspecified for discourse features.
Information Structure in Modern Greek 703 by additional assumptions (such as an identificational operator triggering the fronting operation). Some research on focus in Modern Greek argues that the fronting construction involves identificational properties: Greek focus fronting is classified as [+exhaustive, +contrastive] (É. Kiss 1998: 270; based on Tsimpli 1995; see also Georgiafentis (2004) for a detailed examination of interpretational and distributional evidence). This generalization is established through comparisons of sentences with a fronted focus vs canonical sentences. However, canonical word order is ambiguous between a broad focus and several narrow focus readings in Greek depending on the accentual structure. Hence, the role of syntax can only be disentangled from the role of prosody by a comparison between fronted focus and narrow focus in situ as expressed with a non-projectable nuclear accent; see (22). The empirical facts do not indicate a contrast between these two possibilities of narrow focus. The basic facts are illustrated in (24) with a test proposed in É. Kiss (1998) for Hungarian (see detailed discussion on contrastive and exhaustive properties of Greek foci in Gryllia (2008: 7–55) and Haidou (2012: 126–197)). In example A1 (broad focus), the object constituent does not necessarily identify the exhaustive set of relevant referents for which the event is the case. In examples A2 (ex situ focus) and A3 (narrow focus in situ), the referents at issue are exhaustively identified. The empirical evidence for this contrast is that the presence of a further referent for which the proposition holds true contradicts A2 and A3 but not A1 (see appropriateness of the negation in the continuation B). (24) A1: agórase buy:pst.pfv:3
éna indf:acc.n
kapélo. hat:acc.n
‘S/he bought a hat.’ A2: éna indf:acc.n
kapélo hat:acc.n
agórase. buy:pst.pfv:3
‘S/he bought a hat.’ A3: agórase buy:pst.pfv:3
éna indf:acc.n
kapélo. hat:acc.n
‘S/he bought a hat.’ B: óxi, no
agórase buy: pst.pfv:3
ki also
éna indf:acc.n
paltó. coat:acc.n
‘No, s/he also bought a coat.’ (not felicitous in the context of A1; felicitous in the context of A2 and A3) There is evidence that the identificational interpretation of focus-fronting is a defeasible inference. First, this construction is compatible with expressions that contradict an exhaustive identification, for example an even-phrase; see (25a). Furthermore, the
704 Stavros Skopeteas exhaustive interpretation does not arise if there is another trigger for focus fronting: if focus fronting is motivated by the non-predictability of the referent, the interpretation that the focus referent denotes the exhaustive subset of referents for which the presupposition holds true does not apply (see experimental evidence that Greek differs from Hungarian in this respect in Skopeteas and Fanselow 2011). The direct object in (25b) denotes a referent that is non-predictable in this context. If non-predictability accounts for focus fronting in a particular context, the inference of exhaustive interpretation does not arise (world knowledge suggests that the ‘power outlet’ is only a subset of the entities washed by the grandfather in (25b)). (25) a. akómi even
ke and
to def:acc.m
próeðro president:acc.m
kalésane. invite:pst.pfv:3.pl
‘They even invited the president.’ b. tin def:acc.f o def:nom.m
príza power.outlet:acc.f
épline wash:pst.pfv.3
papús! grandpa:nom.m
‘The grandfather washed the power outlet!’ The focus options of the fronting operation in Greek are accounted for by the rules determining phrasal stress. Fronted foci evoke alternatives under particular contextual conditions and do not differ from narrow focus in situ in this respect. This interpretational property arises through a conversational implicature: the intuition that the proposition does not hold for the subset of non-asserted relevant alternatives can be explained by the quantity maxim (Spector 2005: 229). This intuition arises with any type of focus (also instances of broad focus) and is stronger if the relevant alternatives are easier to retrieve, which is the case for narrow focus.
34.4.2 CLLD and clitic doubling CLLD is not triggered by simple givenness asymmetries, that is, it requires a stronger contextual trigger than scrambling in Germanic (see cross-linguistic evidence from speech production in Skopeteas and Fanselow 2009). The appropriate context for CLLD is contrastive topicalization: the left-dislocated constituent identifies a referent among a set of relevant alternatives in the common ground for which the asserted information (in its complement) is the case (see an account in terms of ‘linkhood’ in Alexopoulou and Kolliakou 2002; see also López, this volume). This opens up an array of interpretative variants such as implicational topics, shifting topics, partial topics, etc. (see Büring, this volume), which are all possible with CLLD in Greek.
Information Structure in Modern Greek 705 The interpretation of CLLD is illustrated by the minimal pair in (26). The answer with an object in situ in (26a) is congruent to the VP question. The CLLD answer in (26b) evokes the intuition that there is further contextually relevant information that is not explicitly available in the presented context. In particular, the clitic left-dislocated object in (26b) evokes a set of alternative referents that are presupposed by the speaker as part of the Common Ground, for example {Harry Potter, The Hobbit}, and for which the asserted information (‘I read x’) is not the case. (26) ‘What did you do in the summer?’ a. ðiávasa read:pst.pfv:1
to def:acc.n
vivlío book:acc.n
tis def:gen.f
zúglas. jungle:gen.f
‘I read The Jungle Book.’ b. [to def:acc.n
vivlío book:acc.n
tis def:gen.f
zúglas]i jungle:gen.f
toi 3:acc.n
ðiávasa. read:pst.pfv:1 ‘Concerning The Jungle Book, I read it.’ CLLD is also possible with an intonational nucleus on the left-dislocated constituent; see Figure 34.2, bottom left panel. The interesting issue is the difference between fronting and left dislocation in this case. Starting with wh-questions, the default construction involves a fronted wh-pronoun as in (27a). This question presupposes that there is some x (x = pupil), who is called by the director and expresses a request to specify this referent. The question with the clitic in (27b) is contextually restricted. This question has a reading in which it is presupposed that the addressee knows the referent that instantiates the variable (‘Can you tell me again, who was the pupil who was called by the director?’). With this reading, example (27b) may occur as a quiz question. The effect of CLLD is that the clitic left-dislocated wh-phrase is interpreted D-linked (=discourse-linked), that is related to a referent that is already available in the common ground (Theophanopoulou-Kontou 1986–87; Iatridou 1995: 27). Furthermore, the same example (27b) can be used with a generic interpretation that does not presuppose a specific referent (Alexopoulou 2009); this interpretation can be supported by an adverb such as poté ‘ever’. The closest paraphrase of this type of question in English is ‘which pupil is such, that the director called him?’. This reading could be used in a rhetorical question implying that there is no such pupil that the director may have called. This reading cannot be accounted for by a D-linking account of CLLD. Example (27b) is interpreted as specificational predication: the double denotes a set and the specificational predicate characterizes this set by denoting a property that holds true for its members (compare the analysis of É. Kiss 2006 on Hungarian focus).
706 Stavros Skopeteas (27) a. pjon who:acc.m o def:nom.m
maθití pupil:acc.m
píre take:pst.pfv:3
tiléfono call:acc.n
ðiefθidis? director:nom.m
‘Which student did the director call?’ b. pjon who:acc.m o def:nom.m
maθitíi pupil:acc.m
toni 3:acc.m
píre take:pst.pfv.3
tiléfono call:acc.n
ðiefθidis? director:nom.m
‘Which student is such that the director called him?’ Turning to focus, the contrast is similar: the constructions in (28) uttered as answers to the wh-question in (27a) have different interpretations. The congruent answer is (28a); the CLLD answer in (28b) with an intonational nucleus on the left-dislocated material evokes the interpretation that the answer is not exhaustive, that is, it is not excluded that other referents are the case. This interpretation comes from the fact that the double in CLLD matches the pronominal variable of its complement. The utterance ‘Janis is such that the director called him’ is a partial answer to the question ‘Who did the director call?’ The speaker gives an under-informative answer: s/he asserts that the restrictor of the question specifies the referent of the left-dislocated object, which motivates the implicature that s/he does not have enough evidence to list the exhaustive subset of referents for which the restrictor of the question holds true. This implicature does not arise if the CLLD answer is uttered as an answer to the CLLD question in (27b): in this case, the utterance ‘Janis is such that the director called him’ is a congruent answer to the question ‘Who is such that the director called him?’. (28) ‘Who did the director call?’ a. to Def:Acc.M
jáni J.:acc.m
píre take:pst.pfv:3
tiléfono. call:acc.n
‘She called John.’ b. to def:acc.m
jánii J.:acc.m
toni 3:acc.m
píre take:pst.pfv:3
tiléfono. call:acc.n
‘The one who she called was John.’ CLLD is also possible with quantified noun phrases as doubles; see (10c) and (29). The double of these examples is clearly not a ‘contrastive topic’ and it is not D-linked. The
Information Structure in Modern Greek 707 CLLD utterance in (29) presupposes that the proposition ‘some x (x = pupil) exists such that x was called by the director’ is available in the Common Ground, which does not imply that the speaker commits to the truth of this proposition. In terms of specificational predication, the double denotes an empty set (‘no pupil’), and its complement (i.e. the specificational predicate) characterizes this set by denoting a property that applies to its members. (29) ‘The director called John, who is a pupil.’ kanénan noone:acc.m tiléfono call:acc.n
maΘitíi pupil:acc.m o def:nom.m
ðen neg
toni 3:acc.m
píre take:pst.pfv.3
ðiefθidis. director:nom.m
‘No pupil is such that the director called him.’ Clitic doubling does not occur under the same conditions as CLLD. Clitic-doubled objects cannot bear nuclear stress (Iatridou 1995), which is an expected correlate of right-dislocation; see (16b). This implies that only constituents that do not need to be accented may occur with clitic doubling. The counterparts of the constructions in (10c) and (29a) with quantified constituents are categorically excluded in clitic doubling; see (30). (30) *ðen neg
toni 3:acc.m
kanénan noone:acc.m
píre take:pst.pfv.3
tiléfono call:acc.n
o def:nom.m
ðiefθidis director:nom.m
maΘitíi. pupil:acc.m
(intended) ‘The director did not call any pupil.’ The condition that the double cannot be stressed in clitic doubling has repercussions on information structure, that is, it must be background information such that it can be deaccented; see (31). Givenness is not a sufficient condition for clitic doubling: the utterance in (31) would not be felicitous in the context of a question in which the double is given but not background information, for example ‘Did you read The Jungle Book or The Hobbit?’ (see also account in terms of a ‘prominence condition’ in Anagnostopoulou 1999: 777). The difference to the contrastive topics in CLLD is that clitic doubling does not evoke alternatives (Valiouli 1993). Similarly to CLLD, the utterance in (31) is a partial answer to the question ‘What did you do in the summer?’; see (26). However, a clitic- doubling answer to this question does not evoke alternatives, it rather suggests a context in which the question ‘Did you read The Jungle Book?’ is part of the implicit Common Ground.
708 Stavros Skopeteas (31) ‘Did you read The Jungle Book?’ toi 3:acc.n
ðiávasa read:pst.pfv:1
[to def:acc.n
vivlío book:acc.n
tis def:gen.f
zúglas]i. jungle:gen.f ‘I read The Jungle Book.’ There are some intensively discussed counterexamples with indefinites in clitic doubling which show that the clitic-doubled constituent is not necessarily given information; see (32) (Kazazis and Pentheroudakis 1976; Anagnostopoulou 1999; Androulakis 2001). These examples come with additional requirements: the indefinite double must be an afterthought and constitutes an intonational unit that is definitively not part of the intonational entity encompassing the predicate, that is, example (32) is not possible with a nuclear stress on the indefinite double (the preferred prosodic option for this example involves an intonational nucleus on the adverb). Hence, these examples do not challenge the generalization that the double cannot bear the intonational nucleus of the sentence. As previously discussed in Kazazis and Pentheroudakis (1976), these examples are cases of presupposition accommodation: they evoke a question that makes the indefinite object available in the implicit Common Ground. (32) toi 3:ACC.N
píno drink:1
efxarístos with.pleasure
éna indf:acc.n
uiskákii. whiskey:dim:acc.n
‘I drink a small whiskey with pleasure.’ (Kazazis and Pentheroudakis 1976: 399)
34.5 Summary Modern Greek is a language with flexible word order as well as intonational variation— both influenced by information structure. Two different syntactic configurations appear in the left periphery, that is fronting and clitic left dislocation. The fronting construction is predominantly used to express narrow focus, in which case the fronted constituent bears the nuclear accent of the utterance. Clitic left dislocation is a construction typically used for contrastive topics. However, it also occurs with an accented double, in which case it displays the interpretational properties of specificational predication. In the post-verbal domain, there is a contrast between objects in situ and clitic-doubled objects. There is syntactic evidence that clitic-doubled objects are right dislocated. As is generally the case for right dislocation, clitic-doubled objects cannot be accented, which has repercussions on their possible functions in discourse: only background information can occur with clitic doubling.
Chapter 35
Inf ormation St ru c t u re in Sl avi c Katja Jasinskaja
The Slavic (or Slavonic) languages are traditionally divided into three groups: East Slavic, which includes Russian (Ru), Ukrainian (Uk) and Belarusian (Bel); West Slavic, which includes Polish (Pl), Czech (Cz), and Slovak (Slk), as well as Kashubian and Upper and Lower Sorbian, minority languages spoken in Baltic coast Poland and southeastern Germany, respectively; South Slavic, which includes Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (or BCS), Slovenian (or Slovene, Sln), Macedonian (Mac), and Bulgarian (Bg).1 Slavic languages are notoriously rich in linguistic means that express or are sensitive to categories of information structure. This chapter will give a concise overview of these phenomena, concentrating mainly on descriptive generalizations and only touching upon theoretical issues that are more controversial. The first two sections, Intonation (Section 35.1) and Syntax (Section 35.2), focus on the two most widely discussed means of marking information structure (IS). Section 35.1 is concerned with the position and shape of pitch accents, whereas Section 35.2 deals, first and foremost, with the phenomenon of ‘free word order’, as well as with processes such as ellipsis, clefting, and doubling. Both sections are divided into two subsections: one describing the expression of focus, and the other dealing with the IS categories background, given, topic, and delimitation. These categories are grouped together because they tend to share the same patterns of expression. For reasons of space, the coverage of related issues will not be as comprehensive as would be desirable. The discussion of focus will be mainly limited to the issue of broad vs narrow focus distinction, at the cost of information focus vs contrastive 1 I would
like to thank everyone who helped me make my way through the intricacies of Slavic information structure, especially Anna Bondaruk, Matej Bošnjak, Boštjan Dvořák, Nina Gierasimczuk, Uwe Junghanns, Elena Karagjosova, Vadim Kimmelman, Anna Lobanova, Ora Matushansky, Maša Močnik, Anna Pilátová, Radek Šimík, and Luka Szucsich. This chapter was written with the support of the German Science Foundation (DFG, grant number BE 4348/2-1).
710 Katja Jasinskaja focus, also prominent in IS literature on Slavic languages (see e.g. Mehlhorn 2002; Bošković 2002; Stjepanovic 2003, for recent empirical and theoretical studies around the notion of contrastive focus). I will concentrate mostly on IS in simple SVO sentences, although intransitive sentences, as well as sentences with more complex structure surely deserve separate attention (see esp. Zybatow and Junghanns 1998, and Bailyn 2012: 254–66, on intransitives). Finally, the section on Intonation is based almost exclusively on Russian data (on intonation of other Slavic languages see e.g. Dogil 1980 on Polish, Palková 1994 on Czech, Misheva and Nikov 1998 on Bulgarian, Godjevac 2000 on BCS, Féry et al. 2007 on Ukrainian). These cuts were made in favour of the discussion of issues that figure less frequently in the literature on Slavic IS. This includes broader coverage of different syntactic means other than plain word order permutations—clefts of various kinds, as well as so-called ‘predicate clefts’ (Abels 2001; Bondaruk 2009). A separate section (Section 35.3) discusses ways in which IS interacts with Slavic clitic systems (Franks and King 2000)—an intriguing, but badly understudied issue. Finally, Section 35.4 gives examples of IS-sensitive behaviour of Slavic discourse particles.
35.1 Intonation 35.1.1 Focus In Slavic languages as in many others, focus is expressed intonationally by the primary, or nuclear, that is, the most prominent pitch accent of an intonational phrase: the nuclear accent must be realized on one of the words of the focused constituent (see Zubizarreta, this volume; Myrberg and Riad, this volume). That word is called the focus exponent (indicated by small caps in the examples). Normally, the most prominent accent is the last accent in the intonational phrase, which means that any word that follows the focus exponent bears no accent. This may be different in (dialects of) BCS and Slovenian where pitch accents are assigned lexically (see e.g. Smiljanić and Hualde 2000; Jurgec 2007). However, in those dialects as well one word in a sentence tends to be more prominent than the others. According to Godjevac (2006), this is achieved in BCS by association of the L-phrase tone with that word. When I use the term ‘focus exponent’ with reference to those languages, I mean a word made prosodically prominent in some such way. This section is concerned with the relationship between the focus exponent and the focused constituent: when the focused constituent is longer than one word, which word of that constituent is the focus exponent, or conversely, given the focus exponent, how big the constituent in focus is, also known as the focus projection problem (see Arregi, this volume). In traditional descriptions, as well as in the bulk of theoretical work on Slavic IS, a distinction is made between ‘neutral’ and ‘non-neutral’ (also emphatic,
Information Structure in Slavic 711 emotive, expressive, etc.) intonation in declarative utterances (see e.g. Svetozarova 1998, on Russian; Godjevac 2006, on BCS). A common assumption is that in sentences with canonical word order (SVO, cf. Section 35.2), ‘neutral’ intonation is ambiguous between broad and narrow focus, whereas ‘non-neutral’ intonation indicates narrow focus on the minimal constituent on which it is realized (see e.g. Bailyn 2012). This view, though widely adopted, raises a number of hard questions, which I will discuss with reference to Russian. Figures 35.1 and 35.2 illustrate the two intonation patterns for a simple Russian SVO sentence (1) (the dashed vertical lines indicate the boundaries of the syllable ‘mu’ bearing the nuclear accent). (1) Marina Marina:nom
slušala listen:IPFV:PST
muzyku. music:acc
Ru
‘Marina listened to music.’ Table 35.1 summarizes the prosodic features attributed to ‘neutral’ vs ‘non-neutral’ intonation by different authors. The nuclear accents differ in the alignment of the falling pitch movement. In the ‘neutral’ pattern, the high (H) tone is aligned with the 180
Pitch (Hz)
160 HL *
140 120 100 75
marina 0
slušala
muzyku 1.122
Time (s)
Figure 35.1 ‘Neutral’ intonation.
Pitch (Hz)
150 140
H*L
120 100 90
marina 0
slušala
muzyku
Time (s)
Figure 35.2 ‘Non-neutral’ intonation.
1.124
712 Katja Jasinskaja Table 35.1 Prosodic features of ‘neutral’ and ‘non-neutral’ intonation in Russian ‘Neutral’
‘Non-neutral’
Alignment of the nuclear fall
early (HL*, IK-1)
late (H*L, IK-2)
Position of the nuclear accent
on the last word
on any word
Prenuclear pitch accents
on all other words
few if any
Downstep
yes
no
Nuclear fall excursion
low
high
Intensity of the accented syllable
low
high
pretonic syllable or earlier, the low (L) tone is usually realized on the stressed syllable, the pitch movement on the stressed syllable shows a characteristic concave shape. In the ‘non-neutral’ pattern, the H is realized at the onset of the stressed syllable with a subsequent sharp (convex-shaped) fall to L. The two intonation contours are labelled as HL* and H*L, respectively, by Alter (1997), or as IK-1 and IK-2, in Bryzgunova’s (1980) influential classification of Russian intonational constructions (intonacionnye konstrukcii). These two nuclear accent types typically go together with other features listed in Table 35.1. Most importantly, the nuclear accent in the ‘neutral’ pattern is assumed to always occur on the last phonological word (the last fully stressed word plus its clitics). The standard view is that HL* (IK-1) is assigned by a rule such as the Nuclear Stress Rule à la Chomsky and Halle (1968) (see also Bailyn 2012: 252, for an application to Russian; Myrberg and Riad, this volume, and Zubizarreta, this volume, for discussion of more recent developments): (2) Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR): Assign nuclear stress/accent to the rightmost lexical category in S. Besides, HL* (IK-1) is usually preceded by prenuclear pitch accents on every fully stressed word. The accents form a downstep pattern, that is, the H tone of each accent is realized lower than the H tone of the previous accent (cf. the pitch movements on marina and slušala in Figure 35.1), which means that the H tone of HL* (IK-1) itself, being the last in the sequence, is realized lowest and has a relatively low excursion. In contrast, H*L (IK-2) can occur on any word in the utterance, tends to have higher excursion and a low number of prenuclear accents. According to this view, (1) would have the accentuation options shown in (3) and (4). The ‘neutral’ pattern in (3) is ambiguous between focus on the direct object ‘music’ (narrow focus), VP focus, and sentence focus (broad focus), that is (3) can be an appropriate answer to all the questions listed in (5). The ‘non-neutral’ patterns in (4) indicate narrow
Information Structure in Slavic 713 focus on the accented constituent, that is (4a) is only appropriate as an answer to (5c), (4b) answers the question What did Marina do to the music?, whereas (4c) answers the question Who listened to the music? (3) Marina LH*
slušala !H*
(4) a. Marina
MUZYKU.2 !HL*
slušala
b. Marina
SLUŠALA H*L
c. Marina H*L
slušala
MUZYKU. H*L
Ru
Ru
muzyku. muzyku.
(5) a. What happened? b. What did Marina do? c. What did Marina listen to? Notice that for (4b) and (4c) the generalization is the same as in English or German: in an SVO sentence, the nuclear accent on S or V does not ‘project’ focus to VP or the whole sentence. Only in (4a) is there an apparent difference. While in English and German the direct object can generally serve as the focus exponent of VP and S focus, in (4a) these options are not available. However, this generalization is not empirically correct. On the one hand, yes, there seems to exist a tendency for narrow focus interpretation in sentences like (4a) in contrast to broad focus in (3) (see e.g. Mehlhorn 2002). On the other hand, it is far from a categorical requirement (as also argued by Yanko 2001: 71, 93–4). As a matter of fact, the pitch contour shown in Figure 35.2, which corresponds to (4a), was produced in response to a VP question What did Marina do last night after dinner?3, implying VP focus. But even if this realization might be considered unusual in answers to questions (as suggested by previous production studies, e.g. Alter 1997; Mehlhorn 2002; cf. 151), there are other contexts in which the choice of H*L (IK-2) over HL* (IK-1) to express VP or whole sentence focus is quite natural. For instance, it is often pointed out that H*L (IK-2) in Russian can also signal contrastive focus, which can be both narrow and broad. For example, (4a) can be uttered as a denial of Marina čitala gazetu ‘Marina was reading a newspaper’, so the whole VP 2
The ‘!‘ symbol before H indicates that the high tone is downstepped. The pitch contours in Figures. 35.1 and 35.2 were produced by two different speakers in response to the same stimulus in a small pilot study, where participants had to read aloud answers to questions asked by the experimenter. 3
714 Katja Jasinskaja slušala muzyku ‘was listening to music’ in (4a) constitutes the correction and the focus of the sentence (again, see Mehlhorn 2002). Furthermore, H*L (IK-2) is also typical in sentences that express explanation (Yanko 2001: 93–4), very much in the sense of the discourse relation explanation in theories of discourse coherence such as Kehler (2002) and Asher and Lascarides (2003). That is, (4a) would be a natural answer to a question like Why did no one pick up the phone?, which induces focus on the whole sentence. In other words, both HL* (IK-1) and H*L (IK-2) show the standard broad–narrow focus ambiguity when realized on a sentence-final direct object. Moreover, a closer consideration of other pitch accent types suggests that they follow the same pattern. For instance, LH*L (IK-3) is a typical nuclear accent in yes/ no-questions. The question in (6) has three possible interpretations: (a) ‘Is it music that Marina listened to?’ (object focus); (b) ‘Is it listen to music that Marina did?’ (VP focus); and (c) ‘Is it the event of Marina listening to music that happened?’ (all focus).4 (6) Marina
slušala
MUZYKU? LH*L
Ru
In other words, accents of different types seem to be able to project focus to VP or the whole sentence if the nuclear accent is in a ‘projecting position’ (i.e. on O in SVO sentences). The other generalization—that HL* (IK-1) can only be realized on the last phonological word of a sentence—is also questionable. Again, there might be a tendency to this effect. However, Bryzgunova (1980) gives lots of examples to the contrary, and what is more, IK-1 in non-final positions seems to be subject to the same restrictions on focus projection as IK-2 in (4b) and (4c). In (7), the nuclear HL* (IK-1) is on a demonstrative adverbial at the left periphery of the sentence, that is, in a non-projecting position. The sentence has narrow focus on the adverbial, which is clear from the association with focus effect of the additive particle i ‘also’. (7) Bryzgunova (1980, p. 100): I
TOGDA HL*
on
uexal
and/also
then
he
left
Ru
‘He left also then. [He had left on a number of other occasions.]’ 4
All these questions are ‘non-neutral’ in the sense that they presuppose that (a) Marina listened to something; (b) Marina did something; or (c) something happened. A neutral yes/no-question without these presuppositions (Did Marina listen to music?) is expressed in Russian by the combination of LH*L with verum focus, i.e. the accent is realized on the finite verb (see also Ladd 1996; Meyer and Mleinek 2006, on Russian yes/no-questions).
Information Structure in Slavic 715 In other words, it is the position rather than the shape of the nuclear accent (or the intonation pattern as a whole) that seems to be primarily responsible for restricting the possibilities of broad vs narrow focus interpretation in Russian, just as in English or German. The ubiquitous fixation on the traditional opposition of ‘neutral’ vs ‘non-neutral’ intonation (also criticized a lot by Yokoyama 2001, 2009b) has obscured this similarity. This is not to say that other characteristics of ‘neutral’ and ‘non-neutral’ intonation listed in Table 35.1 play no role at all. One thing to be said of downstep is that step-by-step lowering of the topline on which high tones are realized makes the last accent ‘stick out’ less than it does otherwise, so all the accents in the utterance are perceived as almost equally prominent. This could be used as one of the means to indicate broad focus in contrast to narrow focus.5 In other words, the distinction between broad and narrow focus might be signaled by a complex combination of features, in which, however, the position of the nuclear accent plays the leading role.
35.1.2 Background, given, topic, and delimitation This section discusses intonational realization of various information-structural categories other than focus with reference to Russian. But first, a general remark on secondary accents. The primary, or the nuclear accent is the last and most prominent accent in the intonational phrase (Pierrehumbert 1980; Ladd 1996). It may or may not be preceded by one or more secondary, or prenuclear accents. The number and the shape of prenuclear accents depend on a number of factors, among which IS is only one. Crucially, prenuclear accents can be realized, in principle, on any word in the sentence that precedes the focus exponent. It can be both a contrastive topic and a continuing aboutness topic (as noted by Mehlhorn and Zybatow 2000; Yanko 2001). But it can also be a non-topical element of the background, a non-topical delimitation phrase, or part of the focus other than the focus exponent. As for post-nuclear accents, according to the standard view they do not exist (the nuclear accent is the last). Anything that follows the focus exponent has no accent, regardless of its IS function (see e.g. Yanko 2001, on post-focal vs pre-focal themes).6 This raises the question whether categories such as given, topic, or delimitation have any specific intonational marking, that is, whether there is such a thing as ‘deaccentuation of given material’ or the ‘topic accent’ in Russian. Givenness-driven deaccentuation surely exists in Russian in the sense that given material avoids nuclear accent. When given material is outside focus it is ‘out of reach’ for the nuclear accent, which has to be realized inside the focused constituent. If given 5
The presence of downstep has also been associated with other functional distinctions, such as the distant vs close mode of communication (Yokoyama 2001), as well as the narrative discourse mode (Kodzasov 1996: 196–7; Bolinger 1978: 490). 6 Some authors writing on Russian intonation (e.g. Meyer and Mleinek 2006) have characterized certain intonational phenomena as post-nuclear accents. I will not take a stand on this issue here.
716 Katja Jasinskaja material is a proper part of the focused constituent, the nuclear accent will be realized on some other part that is not given. If given material is realized after the focus exponent, as in (8), it receives no accent at all.7 If it precedes the focus exponent, it may or may not bear a prenuclear accent. (8) A: ‘Who is the American ambassador talking to?’ B: [S with
NEMECKIM german
poslomGiven ambassador
]F
Ru
‘To the GERMAN ambassador.’ This also means that if the focused constituent only consists of given material, the nuclear accent has nowhere to go and must be realized on given material. One of the consequences is that the nuclear accent on personal, anaphoric, and demonstrative pronouns, which are inherently given, indicates narrow focus on the pronoun (cf. discussion of the Slovenian example (27b) in Section 35.3). As far as prenuclear accents are concerned, the picture emerging from the existing literature and some of my own observations is that the role of IS in their distribution and shape is rather limited, whereas other factors often play a more significant role. Perhaps, the most influential factors are the shape of the nuclear accent and the communicative force of the utterance. In declarative utterances, if the nuclear accent is (!)HL* (IK-1), the prenuclear accents have rising shape (LH*) and rather high excursion, cf. Figure 35.1. If the nuclear accent is LH*L (IK-3) expressing continuation, the prenuclear accent (usually only one) also has a high starred tone (H* or LH*), but is realized much lower than the high that precedes (!)HL* (IK-1). Both patterns are reflected in (9) from Mehlhorn and Zybatow (2000): the contrastive topic of the first clause Andrej bears a low rise before LH*L, whereas the other contrastive topic Vova bears a high rise, cf. Figure 35.3. (9) Andrej LH*
učitsja
v
universitete, LH*L
Andrej
studies
in
university
a and
Vova LH*
v
gimnazii. !HL*
Vova
in
gymnasium
Ru
In yes/no-interrogatives, where the nuclear accent is also LH*L (IK-3), there are two options. Non-topical elements, especially parts of broad focus, realize the same secondary accent as before the continuation uses of LH*L (IK-3). Contrastive topics and delimitation phrases bear an HL* (IK-1) or an H*L (IK-2), that is, a fall rather than a rise (Kodzasov 1996: 96–7; Yanko 2001: 105–10). 7 The same holds for elements of the focus other than the focus exponent, and would also hold for topics and delimitation phrases, except that they tend to front, cf. Section 35.2.2, and are less likely to be realized after the focus.
Information Structure in Slavic 717 400 LH*
Pitch (Hz)
300 LH* 200
LH*L
100
andrej
učitsja
v
0
!HL*
universitete
a
vova
v
Time (s)
gimnazii 2.594
Figure 35.3 Pitch track for example (9).
(10) A: ‘Who was doing what?’ B: ‘Alena was reading a newspaper.’ A: A and
MarinaCT [ slušala HL* Marina:NOM listen:PST
MUZYKU? ]F LH*L music:ACC
Ru
‘And Marina, was she listening to music?’ In other words, only interrogatives seem to have a special kind of contrastive topic accent. For the rest, the accents often referred to in the literature as the ‘topic’ or ‘theme’ accents, are probably just prenuclear accents that happen to be realized on a ‘topic’ or ‘theme’. In those cases, IS plays a role only in so far as some IS functions tend to be associated with greater prosodic prominence (contrastive topic, delimitation), which means that they are more likely to receive prenuclear accent and the accent will be realized higher and/or with a greater excursion,8 while other IS functions (given, continuing topic) tend to lack prosodic prominence, are less likely to receive prenuclear accent, and if they do, the accent will be relatively less expressed. However, the shape of the accents is determined by other factors, and even their excursion/height is more strongly influenced by the overall characteristics of the intonation contour than by IS.9 8 In
fact, contrastive topics and delimitation phrases receive an accent almost obligatorily, perhaps with the exception of very short, one-syllable expressions. One could argue that they obligatorily form a separate prosodic phrase, and the presence of accent is the consequence of phrasing. This view makes a lot of sense, but I prefer to talk in terms of distribution of secondary accents because of the noted dependency of secondary accents on the global characteristics of the utterance. 9 For instance, Marina in (3) is a given, highly activated continuing topic, not contrastive (the sentence was read in the context of the question What did Marina do last night after dinner?). It is nevertheless realized with a very high rising accent by the speaker in Figure 35.1, which arguably has to do with the requirements of the overall intonation pattern ending in (!)HL*. This is the same accent as the rise on the contrastive topic Vova in Figure 35.3.
718 Katja Jasinskaja
35.2 Syntax Syntactic means that are involved in encoding the categories of information structure include, first and foremost, constituent order, as well as a number of specific constructions and processes such as ellipsis, clefting, and doubling. Slavic languages were among the first that attracted the linguists’ attention to the phenomenon of ‘free word order’, that is, constituent order dependent on the discourse status of the constituent rather than on its grammatical function. One could say that Slavic word order created the case for information structure in linguistics, promoted in the works of the Prague School (Mathesius 1932; Daneš 1960; Adamec 1966; Sgall et al. 1980; Firbas 1992). The topic gave rise to an enormous amount of literature both within the traditional Prague School approach and in generative linguistics, as well as in other theoretical frameworks. More or less recent overview articles on Slavic word order include Siewierska and Uhlířová (1998); Bošković (2009); Junghanns and Zybatow (2009); Kosta and Schürcks (2009); Yokoyama (2009a). Some recent dissertations and books on the subject are Van Gelderen (2003), Kallestinova (2007), Slioussar (2007), Dyakonova (2009), Bailyn (2012), Titov (2012) on Russian, Mykhaylyk (2010) on Ukrainian, Godjevac (2006) on BCS, Lambova (2004) on Bulgarian, Kučerová (2007) and Sturgeon (2008) on Czech, to name just a few. It will not be possible to give an adequate summary of all this work in this section. I will therefore only give a brief survey of the main generalizations and concentrate on issues that are controversial or have received less attention than they should have.
35.2.1 Focus Word order The focus of this section will be on the distinction between broad and narrow focus and the way it is signalled (or not) by the constituent order of sentences. According to the standard view, Slavic languages have an underlying canonical (neutral, basic) word order determined by syntax, whereas the full variety of observed word orders is derived from the basic one by means of movement operations that are triggered by information-structural features of syntactic constituents. It is generally acknowledged that (even if not sufficiently well-studied how) word order interacts with intonation in the expression of information structure, that is, these two phenomena cannot be studied independently. The most common assumption is that broad/narrow focus ambiguity is only present in sentences that combine neutral word order with neutral intonation (cf. Section 35.1). Virtually all Slavic languages are standardly assumed to have the SVO basic word order (Siewierska and Uhlířová 1998).10 In combination with 10 With
the exception of Upper and Lower Sorbian, which have basic SOV, presumably under the influence of German.
Information Structure in Slavic 719 a rule like NSR (2) or the more traditional notion of the ‘neutral intonation’ discussed in Section 35.1, according to which the focus exponent is the last word of the sentence, this implies prosodic prominence on the object under broad focus. For instance, the following sentence in BCS can be an answer to questions What happened? (all-focus), What did Jelena do? (VP focus) and What did Jelena buy? (narrow focus on the object), cf. Godjevac (2006: 110–11). (11) Jelena Jelena:nom
je aux
kupila buy:pst
KOMPJUTER computer:acc
BCS
Another order that is said to have all-focus interpretations is VSO. It is characterized by the movement of the verb to the left periphery of the clause,11 and only occurs in narrative discourse, particularly at the beginning of a story or a new episode—a phenomenon often referred to as narrative inversion (Erechko 2002; Dyakonova 2009). This phenomenon exists in many if not all Slavic languages including BCS, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian.12 VSO has been claimed to recede in Russian, reflecting an older grammatical system and an older narrative style that survives mostly in fairy tales (Restan 1981; Bailyn 2012: 264 (fn. 25), 337). However, this order is fully productive in jokes/anecdotes, and is also used in some other contexts (Yokoyama 1986: 284–5). (12) is a typical beginning of a joke in Russian: (12) Privodit bring:prs:3sg
mužik guy:nom
domoj home
DEVICU. girl:acc
Ru
‘A guy brings a girl to his home.’ http://live4fun.ru/joke/248378 last accessed on 27.09.2013 Unlike SVO, VSO seems to be restricted to broad focus thetic sentences.13 Zybatow and Junghanns (1998: 41–3) argue that in such sentences the verb raises from the VP and 11 King
(1993) argued that this order is basic in Russian, but see Bailyn (1995, 2012) for extended criticism. 12 Narrative inversion is also found, for instance, in Germanic languages (Platzack 1987; Önnerfors 1997) and Modern Greek (Skopeteas, this volume). 13 Godjevac (2006: 113) claims that VSO structures like (34) in BCS show the same broad/narrow focus ambiguity as SVO (11), and can answer both What happened?, What did Jelena do? and What did Jelena buy? type questions. (i) Kupila buy:pst
je
Jelena
KOMPJUTER
aux
Jelena:nom
computer:acc
BCS
If this is true, then BCS differs in this respect from other Slavic languages, e.g. Russian. However, VSO structures (in Russian) can also result from contrastive topicalization of V. This can go together with narrow focus on O, but in addition V must be a delimitation phrase. Such cases should not be confused with cases of narrative inversion.
720 Katja Jasinskaja adjoins to TP to mark the situation time as the topic of the sentence (see also Junghanns and Zybatow 2009: 697–8). Other word orders are generally believed to signal narrow focus. One should distinguish between (at least) two kinds of information-structurally relevant constituent reordering. One is when constituents move away from the right periphery of the clause ‘to evade nuclear accent’. A common view is that constituents are reordered according to a principle like (13) (as presented by Dyakonova 2009: 55, going back to the works of the Prague School), and then a rule like NSR (2) applies.14 This gives rise to sentences with non-canonical word order, but ‘neutral’ intonation. (13) IS Ordering Rule Topic > (Discourse Neutral Material) > Focus The following Czech example (from Lenertová and Junghanns 2006: 350) illustrates the result of applying this principle: the narrowly focused subject appears in sentence-final position: (14) [Talking about situations where somebody names objects.] Tentokrát this time
vyjmenovávala name:pst:f:sg
předměty [ objects:acc
jeho his
Cz
ŽENA ]F wife:nom
‘This time, his WIFE named the objects.’ The other kind of reordering is represented by cases where a constituent moves ‘together with its nuclear accent’. This gives rise to non-neutral intonation patterns. The standard view is that sentence-non-final foci are always narrow and/or contrastive (see e.g. Kondrashova 1996; Junghanns and Zybatow 1997 on Russian; Arnaudova 2001 on Bulgarian). However, more recent literature discusses a number of exceptions to this generalization, in particular, the possibility of broad focus in O(S)V and (S)OV structures with nuclear accent on O. Lenertová and Junghanns (2006) and Fanselow et al. (2008) show that Czech sentences like (15) can serve as answers to What happened? and What’s new?-type, as well as Why? questions. This possibility is largely restricted to sentences with null subjects, but is also available if the subject is contextually or inherently unaccented (e.g. indefinite pronouns like někdo ‘someone’). Fanselow and Lenertová (2011) analyse this phenomenon as fronting of the focus exponent (i.e. only a subpart of a broad focus) and observe the same phenomenon in Polish, Russian, Slovenian, and BCS. 14 An alternative view advocated by Šimík and Wierzba (2015): Constituents that otherwise would bear nuclear accent are deaccented due to givenness or narrow focus (cf. Section 35.1), and move away from the right periphery to create the optimal order with sentence final accent.
Information Structure in Slavic 721 (15) [MARTU Martha:acc
jsem aux:1sg
potkala meet:pst:f:sg
]F
Cz
‘I met Martha’ The ability of fronted accented objects to project focus to the level of the VP is also observed by Dyakonova (2009: 64–82) for Russian and by Godjevac (2006) for BCS. Concentrating on sentences with overt subjects, both authors reject the possibility of broadest sentence focus for OSV orders, but allow it for SOV. Dyakonova argues that object preposing to V, which is very common in colloquial Russian, is triggered by D- linking of the object or a bigger constituent, in particular the whole focused constituent. D-linking is defined as in (16) (Dyakonova 2009: 73, with reference to Pesetsky 1987) is supposed to be orthogonal to categories of focus and background. (16) D-linking:
A constituent is D-linked if it has been explicitly mentioned in the previous discourse, is situationally given by being physically present at the moment of communication, or can be easily inferred from the context by being in the set relation with some other entity or event figuring in the preceding discourse.
However, examples like (17), which is an attested first sentence of a joke (accent marking is mine), shed doubt on this generalization.15 This is obviously an all-focus sentence (note the narrative inversion) in a null context. It is not clear in what sense the direct object or any part of this sentence could be D-linked. (17) Rešil decide:pst:m:sg
mužik guy:nom
ŽENU wife:acc
ubit’ kill:inf
Ru
‘A guy decided to kill his wife.’ http://joyreactor.cc/post/332475, last accessed on 19 Dec. 2012 In this light, it is worth investigating the hypothesis that Dyakonova’s object preposing is related to Lenertová and colleagues’ movement of the focus exponent. Another possible approach is to assume that the basic order of V and O is not specified as long as the nuclear accent remains on O. This view is consistent with some ideas circulating in Russian linguistics (Kodzasov 1996: 183–4), as well as with what we know about SOV languages like German, where the accent on O projects broad focus regardless of whether 15 The accented object is preposed to an infinitival head here, but there is no reason to assume different basic orders for infinitival vs finite VPs (see e.g. Bailyn 2012). That is, object preposing to the finite verb studied by Dyakonova (2009) and example (17) are probably manifestations of the same phenomenon.
722 Katja Jasinskaja the clause shows the base-generated SOV or the derived SVO. Slioussar (2007: 188–91) suggests that colloquial Russian is developing into an SOV basic word order language, which would imply that VO and OV basic orders co-exist in the current stage of Russian.
Clefts Cleft constructions express an information-structural partition, typically a partition into background and focus, of what is underlyingly a single predication, by realizing the background and the focus part of that predication as two different clauses. Usually, the focus is realized in a main clause, whereas the background in a subordinate relative clause, and the construction expresses identificational, or exhaustive, focus. Cleft constructions in Slavic languages are not very well studied. Close counterparts of English it-clefts have been reported in Bulgarian and Czech (Reeve 2012: 167): (18) To that
beše was
Maria Maria
kojato who
Ivan Ivan
vidja saw
Bg
‘It was Maria that Ivan saw.’ The so-called èto-cleft construction in Russian (19) has the same function of expressing identificational focus (King 1993). However, its clefthood, that is, its biclausal analysis is much debated (Junghanns 1997; Reeve 2008, 2012; but see Markman 2008 for a biclausal view). For one thing, the construction involves no relative clause in the standard sense. The demonstrative pronoun èto is followed by what superficially is a full main clause, where the focused constituent is often fronted and immediately follows the demonstrative (but even that is not generally required). The construction also exists in other Slavic languages (with the demonstrative to rather than èto), for instance in BCS (Reeve 2008, 2012) and Polish (Tabakowska 1989). See also Progovac (1998), Paducheva (1980) and Kimmelman (2009) on the semantics of this construction. (19) Èto this
VODKU vodka:acc
Ivan Ivan:nom
vypil drink:pFV:pst
Ru
‘It was the vodka that Ivan drank.’ Finally, one should mention wh-clefts, like the Russian (20). In contrast to English wh- clefts, focus in (20) is not identificational, but scalar: Oleg is the one of whom it is least justified to doubt that he works (properly, hard, etc.). Slavic wh-clefts have hardly been investigated so far. (20) Už prt
kto who
rabotaet works
‘Oleg works if anyone.’
tak èto so this
Oleg Oleg
Ru
Information Structure in Slavic 723
35.2.2 Background, given, topic, and delimitation Ellipsis Ellipsis is essentially a process of deletion of material that is backgrounded (not focused) and given (highly activated in the common ground), see Winkler (this volume). The pragmatic function of ellipsis in Slavic languages has received little attention as a research issue in its own right, though some interesting findings are reported by McShane (2005) on Russian and Polish: besides backgroundedness and givenness, ellipsis depends on discourse relations (in the sense of Asher and Lascarides 2003, Kehler 2002, and similar approaches). Syntactic constraints on ellipsis are much better studied.
Word order Constituents referred to in various terminological traditions as ‘topics’ and ‘themes’ tend to appear leftward of their canonical position. What is meant by ‘topic’ or ‘theme’ is not always an aboutness topic, but can be a delimitation phrase, as well as a given or a background constituent. In Slavic languages, one can distinguish between several types of such leftward movement according to the landing site of the constituent, the presence vs absence, and kind of resumptive element, as well as the degree of syntactic integration of the ‘topic’ in the clause. Middle (object) scrambling (Mykhaylyk 2011), or middle-field topicalization (Bailyn 2012) is movement of a constituent canonically realized after the verb (esp. the direct object) to a position before the verb but after the subject (SVO → SOV). According to Mykhaylyk (2011), in Ukrainian, an object has to be definite, specific indefinite, or a member of a contextually evoked set in order to undergo such movement, cf. (21), nuclear accent marking is mine. This is also a typical position for pronominal objects in both Ukrainian and Russian.16 (21) a. Divčynka girl
dviči twice
kynula threw
M’JAČYK. ball
Uk
‘The girl threw a(ny)/the/a certain ball twice.’ b. Divčynka girl
dviči twice
m’jačyk ball
KYNULA. threw
‘The girl threw the/a certain ball twice.’
16 West and South Slavic languages have elaborate systems of pronominal clitics whose ordering with respect to each other and other elements in the clause obeys its own laws driven by grammar rather than information structure (see esp. Franks and King 2000, and Section 35.3 below). In East Slavic languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, positioning of pronominal objects is more flexible and resembles that of given/topical full DPs.
724 Katja Jasinskaja Mykhaylyk (2011) only considers word order permutations under preservation of the ‘neutral’ intonation, that is, with the final position of the nuclear accent, which means that the object loses nuclear accent by moving to the left of the verb. This could also be seen as another instance of givenness-driven deaccentuation followed by word order optimization so as to realize the nuclear accent in sentence-final position (see also Kučerová 2007; Šimík and Wierzba 2015 on Czech). (Left-Edge) Topicalization is movement of a constituent to the left periphery of the clause (without resumptive elements), present probably in all Slavic languages. Topicalization can affect continuing aboutness topics (topics that have already been established as topics in the previous context), new or shifted topics, contrastive topics, as in (22) from Arnaudova (2005: 16), as well as non-topical delimitation phrases. The question whether all these functions can or must be expressed by topicalization in all Slavic languages is largely open since much of related previous work did not sufficiently differentiate between these notions. (22) Šapka hat
kupi bought
Marija, Marija
a and
čanta bag
(kupi) bought
Milena. Milena
Bg
‘Marija bought a hat, and Milena bought a bag’ Left dislocation involves fronting with resumptive elements where the fronted constituent is integrated in the syntactic structure of the clause (see López, this volume). The resumptive element can have different forms: a clitic personal pronoun as in Bulgarian and Macedonian (hence the more broadly familiar terms clitic left dislocation and clitic doubling), cf. (23) from Arnaudova (2005: 18, see also Kochovska 2010, on Macedonian);17 or a non-clitic demonstrative as in Czech, cf. (24) from Sturgeon (2008: 81). Left dislocation usually requires case matching between the dislocated DP and the resumptive pronoun. (23) Knigite the.books
Ivan Ivan
včera yesterday
gi them:acc
vârna. returned
Bg
‘Ivan returned the books yesterday.’ (24) Tu that:acc
tašku, bag:acc
tu that:acc
sí refl
koupila bought
Hana. Hana:nom
Cz
‘That bag, Hana bought it [and that wallet, Jana bought it.]’ 17 Sometimes a distinction is made between clitic doubling that results from left or right dislocation (well-known from Romance languages, cf. López, this volume) and genuine clitic doubling, which is independent of dislocation. This view is advocated by e.g. Radeva-Bork (2012) for Bulgarian and by Marušič and Žaucer (2009) for a dialect of Slovenian.
Information Structure in Slavic 725 Finally, hanging topics (also external topics in Zybatow and Junghanns 1998; Junghanns and Zybatow 2009, and, somewhat misleadingly, left dislocation in Bailyn 2012) are constituents left-adjoined to a clause and external to it. In Slavic languages they usually require a coreferential resumptive element inside the clause. In contrast to left dislocation, hanging topics do not require case matching (and have a number of other distinctive properties, see e.g. Krapova and Cinque 2008 on Bulgarian clitic left dislocation vs ‘hanging topic left dislocation’). (25) [ Anička? ]T Anička:nom
Té that:dat
se refl
nic nothing:nom
nestalo. not.happened
Cz
‘Anička? Nothing happened to her.’ Concerning functional distinctions between different kinds of leftward movement, Arnaudova (2005) argues that topicalization in Bulgarian expresses contrastive topic in, roughly, Büring’s (2003, and this volume) sense, which corresponds to Krifka’s (2008) delimitation, that is, the most appropriate context for (22) is answering the subquestions Who bought a hat?, Who bought a bag? of a question like Who bought what? In contrast, (23) is a natural answer to a question like What happened? with salient Ivan and books. Arnaudova points out that the fronted constituent in left dislocation must be specific, generic, or referential, which are the standard restrictions on aboutness topics (Reinhart 1981). Czech draws the line differently. According to Sturgeon (2008), left dislocation signals delimitation, that is, (24) in Czech appears in the same type of context as (22) in Bulgarian, whereas hanging topics like (25) express what Sturgeon calls topic promotion (following Gregory and Michaelis 2001), that is, a familiar discourse referent that was not topical in the previous context becomes the aboutness topic of the current and the subsequent sentences. A special variety of fronting with a resumptive element is predicate fronting with doubling, alias predicate cleft, available in Russian (Paillard and Plungjan 1993; Abels 2001; McCoy 2002; Aboh and Dyakonova 2009), Polish (Bondaruk 2009), Bulgarian (Karagjosova and Jasinskaja 2015) and possibly in some other Slavic languages. The construction typically involves V-or VP-fronting leaving behind an overt copy of the verb. Normally, the fronted copy of the verb is infinitival, whereas the lower copy is finite: (26) Wypić drink:inf
HERBATĘ tea
(to) prt
Marek Marek
WYPIJE, … will.drink
Pl
‘As for drinking tea, Mark will drink it, [but he will not drink coffee.]’ The fronted VP is usually characterized as (Büring-style) contrastive topic, which corresponds to delimitation in our terminology: (26) realizes the discourse strategy Will Marek drink tea?, Will Marek drink coffee?, etc. (see Abels 2001). Interestingly, this
726 Katja Jasinskaja construction shows a strong tendency (if no categorical requirement) for polarity focus (Dyakonova 2009: 62), so the fronted verb copy realizes the delimitation function of the VP, whereas the lower finite copy serves as the polarity focus exponent. This is probably the reason why the whole propositional content of such sentences normally has to be given (Bondaruk 2009), with only the truth value being the issue under discussion.
35.3 Full forms, clitics, and zeroes South and West Slavic languages with the exception of Sorbian (a) are strong pro-drop languages; and (b) possess elaborate systems of auxiliary and pronominal clitics (Franks and King 2000; Franks 2005). Pronominal clitics are available in the accusative, dative, and often also genitive and are paralleled by segmentally distinct full pronoun forms.18 In this section, I give a brief survey of how the pro-drop property and the clitic systems of these languages interact with IS. When a discourse referent is given and highly activated in the common ground, it will normally be realized as zero (if it is a subject) or as a clitic pronoun. Overt nominative pronouns and full forms of other pronouns will be used only if they occur in a position or carry a function that requires a certain degree of prosodic prominence. This includes, in particular, the cases where the pronoun is focused or is the contrastive topic (or delimitation phrase). In the Slovenian example below, the full pronoun njêga is required for the realization of the nuclear stress, which in turn unambiguously indicates narrow focus on the pronoun. (27) a. [
Vsak every
teden week
ga him:cl
OBISKUJEM. visit.1sg
]F
Sln
‘I visit him every week’ b. Vsak every
teden week
obiskujem visit.1sg
[
NJÊGA. him:full
]F
‘I visit HIM every week’ Another place where IS interacts with Slavic clitic systems in interesting and intricate ways is the phenomenon of polarity focus, including both positive polarity, or verum focus, and narrow focus on the negation. According to the pattern familiar from Germanic languages, one expects negative polarity focus to be realized as a nuclear accent on the negative particle, whereas verum focus typically surfaces as a nuclear 18 The
pro-drop characteristic of East Slavic languages (Russian) is debated, and even if these languages are pro-drop, the contextual conditions under which null subjects are appropriate are considerably more restricted than in West and South Slavic languages (Lindseth 1998). East Slavic languages have also lost their auxiliary and pronominal clitics (Zalizniak 2008).
Information Structure in Slavic 727 accent on the finite verb, that is, in analytic forms it is the finite auxiliary rather than the main verb (Höhle 1992; Lohnstein, this volume). However, the negative particle is a clitic or a bound morpheme in all Slavic languages, whereas most of the finite auxiliaries are clitics everywhere except the East Slavic, which means that these elements cannot form independent prosodic domains and normally do not bear stress.19 Different Slavic languages resolve this conflict in different and sometimes quite unexpected ways. Focus on the negation can be realized as accent on the finite verb (main or auxiliary) if the finite verb is not a clitic (e.g. in Russian). More generally, it can be realized on the word that normally bears stress under negation. For instance, in Bulgarian, stress is realized on whatever happens to immediately follow the negative particle (Franks and King 2000). If negation is followed by, for instance, a pronominal clitic as in (28), the latter is stressed and will serve as the negative polarity focus exponent. (28) [A truck came around the corner.] Marin M.
go it
VIDJA, saw
no but
Ljudmil L.
ne not
GO it
vidja saw
Bg
Marin saw it, but Ludmil DIDN’T see it. Positive polarity focus can be realized as accent on a non-finite form of the main verb if the finite auxiliary is a clitic, for example in Czech: (29) A: ‘Everyone is running around you as if you’ve just won a million pounds.’ B: Ale but
já I
jsem aux:1sg
právě just
VYHRÁLA win:ptcp:f:sg
Cz milion million
liber. pounds
‘But I HAVE just won a million pounds.’ This is different in BCS and Slovenian. BCS has a complete paradigm of segmentally distinct clitic and full forms of auxiliary verbs and the copula. Just like narrow focus on pronouns, verum focus will require the use of a non-clitic auxiliary or copula instead of the clitic (Ivić, 2004): (30) On he
je is:cl
direktor. director
BCS
‘He is the director.’ 19
Of course, unstressed morphs can sometimes be accented precisely for the purposes of focusing, as in the famous example: This wine was not exported, it was DEported. However, at least in the case of Slavic clitics, this is perhaps a possible, but not the most common or unmarked way of expressing narrow focus. As in the wine example, it seems to focus the expression rather than its content.
728 Katja Jasinskaja (31) A: ‘Everyone is rushing around him as if he is the director, […]’ B: On he
JESTE is:full
direktor. director
BCS
‘He IS the director.’ Slovenian presents the most unusual case: Polarity focus is realized as accent on the rightmost clitic in the clitic cluster, which can be the negation, a finite auxiliary, or even a pronominal clitic, if no other clitic follows it (see Priestly 1993; Franks and King 2000; Dvořák 2003; Dvořák and Gergel 2004). (32) Vsak every
teden week
GA obiskujem. him:cl visit.1sg
Sln
‘I DO visit him every week.’ Crucially, it is accent on the pronominal clitic, for example ga in (32), that expresses polarity focus, rather than replacement by a non-clitic pronoun, for example njêga in (27b), which expresses narrow focus on the pronoun (see discussion above). Furthermore, Slovenian clitics are famous for their ability to get stranded under VP ellipsis, and to be used as short answers to yes/no-questions (see Priestly 1993; Franks and King 2000; Dvořák 2003; Dvořák and Gergel 2004). The possibility of realizing polarity focus as accent on a pronominal clitic in Slovenian is typologically rare.
35.4 Particles Slavic languages possess a wealth of particles, among which most major kinds of focus- sensitive particles (see also Beck, this volume) and topic particles are represented. This section gives several examples of their IS-sensitive behaviour.
35.4.1 Focus particles The standard classes of particles that associate with focus include exclusive particles such as the English only, just, or merely (Ru: tol’ko, liš’; Pl: tylko, dopiero; BCS: samo, tek), identificational particles such as English exactly or German gerade and eben (BCS: baš; Bg, Ru: imenno), plain additive particles such as also and too (Ru: takže; Cz: taky; BCS: takođe(r)), as well as scalar additive particles such as even (Bg, Ru: daže; Pl: nawet; Bg: dori; Mac: duri), cf. König (1991). The particle i functions in most Slavic languages as a general additive operator covering both scalar and non-scalar uses (Gast and van
Information Structure in Slavic 729 der Auwera 2011). Among scalar additives, we find an impressive variety of polarity- sensitive items: positive polarity even (celo in Sln), negative polarity even restricted to clause-mate negation contexts (ni in BCS, Ru, Uk, Bel; niti in Sln and BCS, nitu in Mac, nito in Bg, and ani in Pl, Cz, Slk, Uk, and Bel), concessive scalar particles (see esp. Crnič 2011), that is, kinds of negative polarity even that occur in downward-entailing, non- monotonic, and non-veridical contexts excluding clause-mate negation (Sln: magari; BCS: makar; Ru: xot’). Gast and van der Auwera (2011) point out a group of scalar additive particles that occur both in positive polarity and in clause-mate negation contexts, but not in typical contexts for concessive scalar additives (Cz: dokonce; Slk: dokonca). Finally, an interesting and so far less well studied kind of focus particle is represented by the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian až (aż) and Bulgarian čak, which are scalar, but not additive, and can be translated into English both as even and only depending on the context (Tomaszewicz 2013). The distinction between stressed and unstressed additive particles manifests itself in Slavic languages in the way familiar from English also and German auch. Unstressed additive particles associate with focus and usually precede it; under stress they associate with contrastive topic and follow it (Krifka 1999). This is attested, for instance, for the Russian takže (Paducheva 1977), Polish też, Czech taky (Bogusławski 1986), and BCS takođe(r). For example, the unstressed takže in (33a) requires a context in which Oleg congratulated someone else besides Marina; the stressed takže in (33b) associates with the contrastive topic Oleg and is appropriate in a context where someone other than Oleg congratulated Marina. Sometimes the functions of the stressed and the unstressed also or auch are divided between two different particles. For instance, Russian tože ‘too’ can only associate with contrastive topics and corresponds to the German stressed AUCH (Gundel 1975; Paducheva 1977; Girke 1981), cf. (33a) vs (33b). In contrast, the particle i is a pure association-with-focus additive. As a proclitic, it is never stressed and always immediately precedes the focus, cf. (33c). (33) a. Oleg Oleg
takže /#tože /*i also
b. [Oleg]CT Oleg c. Oleg Oleg
pozdravil congratulated
TAKŽE /TOŽE /*I too
pozdravil congratulated
i also
[ marinu ]F Marina
pozdravil congratulated
Ru
Marinu Marina
[ marinu ]F Marina
35.4.2 Markers of contrast and delimitation Another group of particles that we will briefly discuss could be roughly described as markers of contrastive topic. In fact, it would be more correct to say that these particles mark various kinds of contrast, which can go together with a more or less strong
730 Katja Jasinskaja requirement of the presence of a contrastive topic (or more generally, a delimitation phrase). First of all one should mention Slavic conjunction systems. Where English makes a two-way distinction between connectives and and but, most Slavic languages have three, four, or even five connectives, which in addition to their basic function of logical conjunction, encode different pragmatic restrictions on the relationship between their conjuncts. Leaving aside corrective conjunctions (that correspond to the German sondern or the Spanish sino), the following three functions usually have distinct encoding in Slavic: (a) general phrasal coordination and non-contrastive clausal coordination (Ru, Uk, Pl, Bg, BCS: i); (b) opposition, contrastive comparison, ‘weak’ or ‘mild’ contrast (Ru, Uk, Pl, Bg, BCS: a); (c) counterargument, denial of expectation, or ‘strong’ contrast (Ru, Bg: no; Uk, Pl: ale; BCS: ali), see for example Mauri (2008). From the point of view of IS, the most interesting distinction is between (a) and (b). Jasinskaja and Zeevat (2008, 2009) argue (with reference to Russian) that this distinction is best characterized in terms of types of questions under discussion answered by the conjuncts. The conjuncts of i must give distinct answers to a question with a single wh-variable, for example: What is the weather like? It is snowing and (Ru: i) the wind is blowing. In contrast, the conjuncts of a answer questions with multiple variables, for example: Who likes what? John likes football, and/but (Ru: a) Bill likes basketball.20 Each conjunct, in turn, can be seen as an answer to a subquestion: What does John like?, What does Bill like?, etc., where one of the variables (who?) of the multiple-variable question is instantiated to elements of the contextually relevant domain (John, Bill). In other words, conjunction a is systematically used in contexts which also license contrastive topics (Büring 2003) and delimitation phrases (Krifka 2008). Since contrastive topic phrases and delimitation phrases tend to move to the left periphery of the clause (cf. Section 35.2.2), conjunction a is normally immediately followed by such a phrase.21 Conversely, if a delimitation phrase is present, conjunction i cannot be used, so i turns out to function as a negative cue to delimitation in Russian. Other Slavic languages show similar distributions,22 though minor differences also exist. On the expression of contrast in West Slavic coordinate structures see also Adamíková (2004) and Fehrmann (2004, 2008).
20 It is enough for the conjuncts to be just different along at least two dimensions (John ≠ Bill, football ≠ basketball) for the conditions for ‘mild’ contrast to be met. There may, but need not be, any kind of antonymy or incompatibility relation between the contrasted terms. 21 There are a number of exceptions to this generalization. As I argued in Jasinskaja (2010), when one of the variables of the question is a polarity variable and that variable is instantiated in the subquestion, delimitation need not and sometimes cannot be expressed overtly. This situation arises mainly in corrective uses, and a small subset of mirative argumentative uses (cf. Kreidlin and Paducheva 1974; Jasinskaja and Zeevat 2008). For the rest, conjunction a shows a strong tendency to co-occur with contrastive topic or delimitation. 22 Notable exceptions are Czech and Slovak, where i has a more limited distribution, while a is a rough equivalent of the English and covering both the ‘no contrast’ and the ‘mild contrast’ domain. The Slovenian system is also quite different.
Information Structure in Slavic 731 Further examples of Russian contrastive topic particles are že and to. In one of its uses, že is interchangeable with a, except it sounds more bookish (Paducheva 1988). In contrast to a, že is a second position clitic that follows the first phonological word of the clause. Since contrastive topics always appear clause-initially in sentences with že, the particle follows the first phonological word of the topic constituent. The analysis of the particle to given by McCoy (2001) is virtually identical to Jasinskaja and Zeevat’s analysis of a: it is a marker of discourse strategy dominated by a question with two variables and split into single-variable subquestions. In addition, McCoy characterizes to as a marker of known but not necessarily activated information. More specifically, to can indicate that the question under discussion is somehow familiar to the communication participants, that is, that it has been or should have been addressed before (on Russian to see also Rathmayr 1985; Bonnot 1986, 1987; Bolden 2008). The position of to in a clause is rather flexible. It will encliticize to the contrastive topic or the delimitation phrase even if the latter is not in clause-initial position. To also functions as a topic/delimitation particle in Polish (Tabakowska 1989). Interestingly, the enclitic to in Czech is a focus particle (Šimík 2009), but the proclitic to has uses in which it marks contrastive topics or delimitation (Radek Šimík, p.c.).
35.5 Concluding remarks In this chapter I have tried to give a concise, but broad, survey of the linguistic means available in Slavic languages for the expression of information structure, which include intonational means, word order permutations of different kinds, cleft constructions, ellipsis, the choice between clitic and non-clitic forms, and various focus and topic particles. In the sections on intonation and syntax, I have paid particular attention to critical discussion of some traditional notions and widely accepted generalizations, such as the distinction between the ‘neutral’ and the ‘non-neutral’ intonation, the ‘theme accent’, and the projection behaviour of fronted foci. Furthermore, unlike most previous overviews, this chapter includes less widely discussed phenomena such as clefts, predicate doubling, clitics, and IS-sensitive particles. Obviously, this survey ended up being not as balanced between different Slavic languages and relevant phenomena as would have been desirable. This is primarily related to the extent to which different languages and phenomena are represented in linguistic research. While the phenomenon of ‘free’ word order has been by far the most popular research topic among the topics discussed in this chapter, other phenomena have received less, and some of them hardly any attention in the literature. Slavic cleft constructions, with the exception of the relatively famous èto/to-clefts, are basically undescribed. The behaviour of clitics in sentences with polarity focus still awaits proper theoretical analysis. There is a lot to be done in the area of formal description of truth-conditional and presuppositional effects of Slavic IS-sensitive particles and other IS devices. The study of Slavic IS would also profit from comparative research with
732 Katja Jasinskaja reference to non-Slavic languages. In particular, the study of intonation has been too isolated within the local academic traditions. Finally, one should note that among Slavic languages, Russian is by far the best researched language both in the domain of IS and in other areas of linguistics, which has inevitably led to a certain bias towards Russian data in this survey. On the other extreme are Belarusian and Upper and Lower Sorbian, listed by the UNESCO as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘definitely endangered’, respectively, and languages that have only recently gained dominant status in their regions, such as Macedonian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian. By comparison, very little is known about IS in these languages, and it is wrong to assume that they are just like their better-studied neighbours in all respects. For instance, the unique behaviour of Slovenian clitics under polarity focus (Section 35.3) shows most clearly that these languages deserve the attention of linguists in their own right. In sum, in this chapter I have summarized the main findings about information structure in Slavic languages and have pointed out a number of gaps in our knowledge in this domain. My hope is that this survey will instigate new research in this area.
Chapter 36
Topic and Fo cu s Ma rk i ng in Chin e se Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-l un Lee, and Haihua Pan
36.1 Introduction There is a general consensus that, in speech communication, information flow is structured so as to allow the interlocutors to regulate and control the way information is transferred in discourse. Languages of the world differ in the ways that they package information in discourse. This chapter will review the range of linguistic devices which have been reported to mark various information structure notions in Chinese. While the term information structure (IS) goes back to Halliday (1967) concerning the partition of information units within a sentence, there has been a long tradition of labelling information units as dichotomies such as theme–rheme, topic–comment, background–focus, presupposition–focus, or given–new (see Kruijff-Korbayová and Steedman (2003) for a summary of the terminologies). Concerning these dichotomies, there have also been heated debates on which IS notions are essential for modelling IS packaging and whether additional notions such as contrast/Kontrast are needed (e.g. Vallduví and Engdahl 1996; Umbach 2004). To avoid the terminological quagmire, we will adopt the IS notions laid out in Krifka (2008). Due to space limitations, particular attention will be paid to two important notions of IS: Focus and Topic. We will review how semantic particles and syntactic structures conspire to encode these notions (Sections 36.2 and 36.3) and how prosody, mandatory or optional, complements and enhances the relevant linguistic expressions in Chinese (Section 36.4). In the following, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Standard Chinese’ will be used interchangeably, referring to Mandarin or Putonghua, the official language of the People’s Republic of China, as well as Guoyu, the official language of the Republic of China.
734 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan
36.2 Semantic and syntactic marking of focus 36.2.1 Different types of focus in Chinese Liu and Xu (1998), in their pioneering study on focus in Chinese, attempted to provide a finer classification of focus from a grammatical perspective. They argue that there are three types of focus, namely informational focus (1), contrastive focus (2), and topical focus (3), which can be classified using the features [±prominent] and [±contrastive]. A focus is [+prominent] when it stands out against the rest of the clause as background, and it is [+contrastive] when it stands out against something outside of the clause as background. Informational focus (referred to as natural focus by Liu and Xu) can thus be defined as [+prominent, –contrastive], contrastive focus as [+prominent, +contrastive] and topical focus as [–prominent, +contrastive]. As for ‘topical focus’, it is [–prominent] as it conveys given information, and [+contrastive] as it also evokes alternative readings. Within the framework of Krifka (2008), topical focus would be classified as contrastive topic. (1) Informational focus a. Ta He
sanshi 30
nian year
lai since
zai at
Wuhu. Wuhu
me, dang-guo ME, serve-exp
kongjun. air-force
yizhi always
zhu live
‘He for thirty years has been living in Wuhu.’ b. Ta he
zai at
Wuhu Wuhu
yizhi always
zhu-le live-perf
sanshi nian.1 thirty years
‘He has been living in Wuhu for thirty years.’ (2) Contrastive focus Ta shi he BE
zuotian yesterday
xiawu afternoon
jin enter
de DE
chen. city
‘It was yesterday afternoon that he went to the city/downtown.’ (3) Topical focus Lao Wang dang-guo Old Wang serve-exp
haijun, Lao Zhang navy; Old Zhang
‘Old Wang served in the navy: Old Zhang, served in the air force.’
1 Abbreviations
used in this chapter include: CL: classifiers; EXP: experiential markers; PERF: perfective markers; PROG: progressive markers; and SFP: sentence-final particles.
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 735 Liu and Xu propose that for every sentence, the sentence-final position in Chinese is by default the position where new information is located, hence the syntactic structural position for informational focus. Wuhu in (1a) and sanshi nian in (1b) therefore can be interpreted as the new information of their respective utterance. In contrast, Zuotian xiawu ‘yesterday afternoon’ in (2) marks a contrastive focus, indicating that the time when he went to city/downtown was yesterday afternoon, not any other time. Lao Zhang in (3) is defined by Liu and Xu as a topical focus, as it is marked by the topic particle me and provides a contrastive reading with the NP Lao Wang in the preceding clause. Xu (2004: 277) further states that ‘Chinese is a language which exhibits a reverse relationship between syntactic positioning and phonological prominence of focus’, different from West-Germanic languages. For example, Xu argues that informational focus is always located in the final position in Chinese, whereas in languages such as English, focus has a systematic manifestation via pitch accent, regardless of whether the focused element is situated in the syntactically favoured focus position or not. (4) a. The baby is crying. b. The baby is crying. So, when an English sentence like (4) is uttered out of the blue, either the subject, as in (4a), or the predicate, as in (4b), may be pronounced with salient prosodic prominence2 to signal focus. In Chinese, however, once a focus element takes the default syntactically most-embedded position, the phonological marking of focus seems less prominent and has therefore been described by Xu (2004) as optional. (5) a. Shui lai who come
le? perf
‘Who has come?’ b. Lai-le come-perf
jige some
meiguoren Americans
‘Some Americans have come.’ c. Lai-le come-perf d. Jige some
jige some
meiguoren Americans
meiguoren. Americans lai-le come-perf
In (5b), as an answer to the preceding question (5a), Meiguoren (Americans) appears in the sentence-final position and the prosodic prominence is not required to be salient. To signal contrast (as in (5c)), however, prosodic prominence is necessary to invoke the alternative reading. Furthermore, when focus is not realized at the default structural focus position (as in (5d)), prosodic prominence is salient. 2
Prosodic prominence is marked in boldface in this chapter.
736 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan Despite the well-recognized contributions of Liu and Xu (1998) and Xu (2004) to our understanding of focus in Chinese, it is important to note that when syntactic devices are employed to convey focus, prosody is typically present, not optional. Section 36.3 will show that evidence abounds from well-controlled experiments that prosody is present even in well-known focus constructions. For example, Jia et al. (2009) reported robust acoustic cues used to mark the focused element in the ‘shi-construction’, regardless of the presence of the immediately neighbouring focus particle shi ‘be’.
36.2.2 Focus marked by shi and shi … de constructions Chinese boasts quite a range of morphological markers and syntactic constructions for focus-marking, which have aroused much interest in the literature. In example (2) above, zuotian xiawu ‘yesterday afternoon’ is marked as a contrastive focus by the copula shi ‘be’, which introduces contrast with the background ‘he came into the city some other time’. Following Paul and Whitman (2008), this pattern is called ‘bare shi focus construction’. The following examples are from Hole (2012).3 (6) a. Shi BE
[Zhangsan]f Zhangsan
zai at
Beijing Beijing
xue study
yuyanxue. linguistics
‘[Zhangsan]f studies linguistics in Beijing (and not my brother).’ b. Zhangsan Zhangsan
shi BE
zai at
[Beijing]f Beijing
xue study
yuyanxue. linguistics
‘Zhangsan studies linguistics in [Beijing]f (and not in Shanghai).’ (7) a. Zhangsan Zhangsan
zai at
Beijing Beijing
shi BE
[xue study
yuyanxue]f. linguistics
‘Zhangsan [studies linguistics]f in Beijing (and he doesn’t teach French there).’ b. Zhangsan Zhangsan
zai at
Beijing Beijing
shi BE
xue study
[yuyanxue]f. linguistics
‘Zhangsan studies [linguistics]f in Beijing (and not French).’ c. *Zhangsan Zhangsan
zai at
Beijing Beijing
xue study
shi BE
[yuyanxue]f. linguistics
Intended meaning: ‘Zhangsan studies [linguistics]f (and not French).’ Note that shi has to immediately precede the focus phrase here. Examples (6a) and (6b) have the contrastive focus preceding the VP, while in (7a) and (7b), it is inside the VP. 3
Contrastive foci are marked with the notation []f in this chapter.
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 737 The ungrammaticality of (7c) shows that shi cannot occur further to the right than at the left edge of the VP. The ‘bare shi focus construction’, however, is not the canonical cleft construction of Chinese. Hole (2012) argues that the canonical clefts in Chinese should be the ‘shi … de construction’ (Hole 2012). (8) a. Zhangsan Zhangsan
shi BE
zai at
[Beijing]f Beijing
xue study
yuyanxue linguistics
de. DE
‘It is in [Beijing]f that Zhangsan studies linguistics.’ b. TOPIC (shi) [[XP]FocP … ]COMMENT de. Sentence (8a) is an example from Hole (2012), with its linear syntax diagrammed in (8b). Cheng (2008) discusses a variant of the ‘shi … de cleft’—‘the bare de construction’, which is realized in two different forms, as exemplified below. (9) Ta he
mingtian tomorrow
hui will
lai come
zhao look-for
wo me
de. DE
‘(It is the case that) He will come to see me tomorrow.’ (10) a. b.
Who broke the cup? Zhangsan da-po Zhangsan hit-broken
de. DE
‘It is Zhangsan who broke it.’ In (9), the de marks the whole proposition in focus, without perceptually salient prosodic marking, which is comparable to the English construction ‘it is the case that’. The question in (10a) elicits focus on its answer only, as indicated by the salient phonological prominence on Zhangsan in (10b), an in-situ focus which typically requires phonological prominence. Moreover, the ‘shi … de construction’ is generally exhaustive, which presupposes the falsity of all alternative sentences with non-entailed focus values (Hole 2012), different from the ‘bare shi focus construction’. This contrast is exemplified in (11a,b), with the exhaustive reading of ‘shi … de clefts’ shown in (11a) and the non-exhaustive reading of the ‘bare shi sentences’ in (11b) (Paul and Whitman 2008). (11) a. #Ta shi [zai Beijing]f xue yuyanxue de. Dan ye shi [zai Shanghai]f xue de. s/he BE at Beijing study linguistics DE but also BE at Shanghai study DE #‘It is in Beijing that s/he studied Chinese, but also in Shanghai.’ b. Ta shi [zai Beijing]f xue-guo yuyanxue, dan ye shi [zai Shanghai]f xue-guo. s/he BE at Beijing study-exp linguistics but also BE at Shanghai study-exp ‘S/he studies Chinese in Beijing, but also in Shanghai.’
738 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan Hole (2012) also mentioned that when preceding the VP, the copula shi can be stressed to express focus in Chinese, which is referred to as ‘verum focus’, as illustrated in (12). (12) Copula-supported verum focus (cited from Hole 2012) a. [Q: Zhangsan is eating rice?] A: [Shi]f BE
(zai chi fan). prog eat rice
‘Yes, he [is]f eating rice.’ b. [Q: The rose is (not) red?] A: [Shi]f BE
(hongde). red
‘Yes, it [is]f red.’ Hole has further defined Mandarin verum foci as belonging to the same class as answers to canonical yes/no-questions and to the special kind of tag question frequently found in Chinese. Along such a line, we think that when the emphasized copula shi signals verum focus, what is confirmed/emphasized is the truth of the whole proposition. Here, shi is not a focus particle associated with any specific phrase in the sentence and should be differentiated from the shi in the aforementioned ‘bare shi focus construction’ and the ‘shi … de construction’.
36.2.3 Focus marked by lian … dou/ye construction Another widely discussed focus-marking construction is lian … dou/ye ‘even … all/ also’, as exemplified in (13b). (13) a. Zhangsan Zhangsan
qu-guo go-exp
feizhou. Africa
‘Zhangsan has been to Africa (before).’ b. Zhangsan lian Zhangsan LIAN
feizhou dou/ye Africa DOU/YE
qu-guo. go-exp
‘Zhangsan has even been to Africa.’ (14) Lao Lao
Liu Liu
zhu zai Shanghai, Lao Zhang live in Shanghai Lao Zhang
ne, zhu zai NE live in
Beijing. Beijing
‘Lao Liu lives in Shanghai, and as for LAO ZHANG, he lives in Beijing.’ Whether the phrase marked by lian … dou is a topic or a focus has long been a controversial issue. Xu and Liu (1998) argued that phrases marked by lian … dou are topical
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 739 focus while Chu (2003) proposed that they are contrastive topics. It is sufficient to say that lian … dou invokes a [+contrastive] meaning (in the sense of the focus features in Liu and Xu 1998). Since the [+contrastive] feature is generally found in focus but not topic, Chu used (14) to further support the claim that topics can be contrastive, although further studies are needed to tease apart these two proposals. Note that there is a difference between a contrastive focus appearing in the topic and the one in the comment, namely that a contrastive focus appearing in the topic part may be referred to as a contrastive topic, as in Chu (2003), while a contrastive focus appearing in the comment is still regarded as a contrastive focus.
36.2.4 Restrictive focus particles In Chinese, there are a few particles (i.e. jiu, cai, zhi, and dou) which are sensitive to focus and affect the truth condition of a sentence, known as focus-sensitive particles (e.g. Jackendoff 1972; Rooth 1992, 1996). Given their effects on the truth conditional meaning of a sentence, they are also known as semantic focus particles. (15) a. Lisi Lisi
jiu JIU
hui can
shuo speak
[deyu]f. German
‘Lisi speaks only German.’ b. Lisi Lisi
jiu JIU
hui can
[shuo]f speak
deyu. German
‘Lisi only speaks German.’ Examples of jiu as a restrictive focus particle are given in (15). Sentence (15a) conveys the meaning that Lisi only speaks German, but not any other languages, while (15b) means that Lisi only speaks German, but not reads, listens, or writes, under the assumption that the alternative set is triggered by the focus [speak]f which may include {listen, read, speak, write}. The interpretation of focus with the focus particle jiu above is generally termed as ‘focus association’ in Partee (1991, 1999). Further discussions on the characteristics of this particle can be found in Biq (1984, 1988), Lai (1995, 1999), and Paris (1987). A close counterpart of jiu in Chinese is cai, also sharing the restrictive function, as exemplified below. (16) a. Ta he
cai CAI
mai-le buy-perf
san three
ben CL
shu. book
ben CL
shu. book
‘He only bought three books.’ b. Ta he
jiu JIU
mai-le buy-perf
san three
‘He only bought three books.’
740 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan Cai and jiu are seemingly interchangeable in (16a) and (16b) as English ‘only’, with their restrictive function indicated by marking the asserted quantity to be less than expected. Although much research has been conducted on cai and jiu, there is no unified account regarding their semantics. Complications come from their polysemous nature, as gleaned from their four uses: (i) the temporal use indicating ‘immediate past’ or ‘close to’ meaning; (ii) the parametric use; (iii) the limiting or restrictive use; and (iv) the emphatic use (e.g. Biq 1984, 1988; Lai 1995, 1999; Hole 2004, 2006; Paris 1987, as discussed in Hole, 2004). Various proposals have been made, including their being (i) focus particles marking exclusive focus (Biq 1984) or denying-expectation focus (Biq 1988); (ii) connective elements with the discourse function to establish a relation between two units (Paris 1987); and (iii) as scalar particles (Lai 1995, 1999). Another restrictive focus particle in Chinese is zhi, which behaves similarly to the counterpart of English ‘only’, a typical focus-sensitive operator. In addition, Mandarin Chinese has another adverbial focus particle, dou ‘all’, which can be associated with a contrastive focus in both the topic and the comment. When in the topic, the contrastive focus only introduces an alternative set to serve as the domain of dou quantification, with no exclusive interpretation, like English ‘always’ or ‘all’. When in the comment, the contrastive focus serves to deliminate the scope of quantification so that the sentence excluding the focus functions as the domain. In this use, dou is just like English ‘only’, inducing an exclusive interpretation on the focused element, as exemplified in (17): (17) Ta he
dou all
chi eat
de DE
[pingguo]f. apple
‘All he ate is apples (not anything else).’ While contrastive focus in the topic can only serve as the domain of quantification and does not induce an exclusive interpretation, the one in the comment (as in (17)) has to serve as the scope of quantification and does induce an exclusive interpretation. For details, see Pan (2006) and Jiang and Pan (2013).
36.3 Semantic and syntactic marking of topic According to Li and Thompson (1981), what sets Chinese apart from many other languages is that in addition to the grammatical relations of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘topic’ is an indispensable notion for the description of Chinese. Topic, which typically appears at the beginning of the sentence, denotes what the sentence is about and is generally realized as definite or generic noun phrases. In line with Li and Thompson, Xu (2007) considers Chinese to be a topic-prominent language, or a topic configurational language (following É. Kiss 1995), in contrast with English which is a subject-prominent language.
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 741
36.3.1 Topics and subjects When talking about topic in Chinese, it is important to discuss the relationship between topic and subject. Three views have been summarized in Shi (2000). The first view is a modified version of the tradition started as early as in Mashi Wentong (Ma 1898), which maintains that subject–predicate is the fundamental relationship between VP and preverbal NP(s). If there are two or more preverbal NPs, the VP and the NP closest to it will first form a predicate and this predicate can take another NP as its subject (Lü 1986). Such a view basically denies the grammatical status of ‘topic’, suggesting that Chinese is unique in the sense that there could be as many subjects in a sentence as the number of preverbal NPs. The second view reinstates the dichotomy between topic- prominent languages and subject-prominent languages (Li and Thompson 1976) by claiming that syntactic notions such as subject and object are not grammaticalized in Chinese. The argument is that IS partitioning rather than syntactic structuring is essential in the grammar of Chinese and only topic and focus are grammaticalized in Chinese (LaPolla 1990, 1993). There could be more than one topic in a sentence, if there are two or more NPs in front of the verb (with the ones following the left-aligned initial topic generally considered sub-topics). The third view represents a symbiotic view of the two aforementioned ones, which, according to Shi, has been adopted by the majority of linguists working on Chinese. It states that both topic and subject co-exist in the same sentence in Chinese as separate grammatical notions (e.g. Li and Thompson 1976, 1981; Tsao 1979, 1990; Huang 1982; Li 1990; Jiang 1991; Tan 1991; Xue 1991; Ning 1993; Qu 1994; Shyu 1995). Despite the divergent views, Tsao (1979, 1990) gave the following six properties of Chinese topics. (18) a. Topic invariably occupies the S-initial position of the first clause in a topic chain. b. Topic can optionally be separated from the rest of the sentence in which it occurs overtly by one of the four particles a(ya), ne, me, and ba. c. Topic is always definite. d. Topic is a discourse notion; it may, and often does, extend its semantic domain to more than one clause. e. Topic is in control of the pronominalization or deletion of all the coreferential NPs in a topic chain. f. Topic, except in clauses in which it is also subject, plays no role in such processes as true reflexivization, equi-NP deletion, or imperativization. (cited from Tsao 1990: 56) Under the general assumption that topics are grammaticalized in Chinese, it is natural that word order should be a good indicator of topics. Chinese allows variations of SOV
742 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan and OSV, on top of its canonical order of SVO. Examples below are from Huang et al. (2009), with the original translation from the authors. (19) Canonical order: Wo I
hen very
xihuan like
yinyue. music
(SVO)
‘I like music.’ (20) Variations: a. Wo I
yinyue music
hen very
xihuan. like
(SOV)
‘As for me, it is music that I like a lot.’ (‘I, music, like.’) b. Yinyue, music
wo I
hen very
xihuan. like
(OSV)
‘As for music, I like it a lot.’ (‘Music, I like.’) With the marked word orders in the above examples, there have been considerable debates on whether topic structures are derived by movement or base-generated, which will be further discussed in the following section.
36.3.2 Moved topics and base-generated/dangling/gapless topics in Chinese Approaches which take topics as base-generated are generally characterized by an aboutness condition (e.g. Chao 1968; Chafe 1976; Li and Thompson 1981; Xu and Langendoen 1985), which is also the traditional characterization used to capture the relation between a topic and its comment in Chinese. But Chinese has also been argued to have moved topics (e.g. the so-called ‘instance topics’ as in Chen (1996)). One approach that has generated much debate in the literature is the dangling topic, also known as Chinese-style topic (Chafe 1976). Examples of dangling topics are given in (21) and (22) (see also, Chao 1968; Li and Thompson 1976, 1981; Tsao 1977). (21) Shuiguo, fruit
wo I
zui most
xihuan like
xiangjiao. banana
‘(As for) fruits, I like bananas most.’ Two ways have been proposed to account for dangling topic or ‘gapless’ topic structures. Shi (2000) adopts the movement approach and claims that Chinese does not have dangling topics and maintains that all the so-called base-generated topics can be derived by
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 743 movement and subsequent deletion, as shown in (22). In this way, he argues for a unified account of both gapped and base-generated topics in Chinese. (22) Shuiguo, fruit
wo I
zui most
xihuan like
[shuiguo zhong de] fruit among DE
xiangjiao. banana
‘(As for) fruits, I like bananas (among fruits) most.’ Since dangling topics are not always subcategorized by the predicate in question, they may not be related to a syntactic position in the comment, which is the required basis of the movement approach. Shi’s approach thus also amounts to claiming that dangling topic sentences that are not derivable by movement are not topic–comment but are subject–predicate sentences. Pan and Hu (2008) and Hu and Pan (2009), however, argue that all the dangling topic sentences should be treated as real topic sentences, not subject–predicate sentences. They propose an alternative analysis to unify both moved and dangling topics in Chinese. They start their analysis by reviewing the aboutness condition which is generally considered to be a condition that requires the comment to be related to the topic. They argue that this aboutness condition in fact fails to account for the contrast between (23a) and (23b). (23) a. *You’eryuan kindergarten
de DE
xiaohai, children
Zhangsan Zhangsan
jiao teach
erzi huahua. son draw-pictures
Intended meaning: ‘As for the children in the kindergarten, Zhangsan teaches his son to draw pictures.’ b. You’eryuan kindergarten
de DE
xiaohai, Zhangsan zhi children Zhangsan only
jiao teach son
[erzi]f huahua. draw-drawing
‘As for the children in the kindergarten, Zhangsan only teaches his son to draw pictures.’ The acceptability difference in (23a) and (23b) cannot be accounted for by aboutness or relatedness, as proposed in the literature. Although the aboutness condition may correctly predict the unacceptability of (23a) by claiming that the comment is not about the topic, the same account would wrongly exclude the acceptable (23b). The acceptability contrast between (23a) and (23b) shows that it is quite difficult to predict under what specific condition a comment may bear an aboutness relation to the topic, due to the reason that the precise nature of aboutness has never been made clear in the literature. Hu and Pan (2009) provide a more explicit characterization of the aboutness condition. Their proposal is that topics can be licensed either in syntax or at the semantic– pragmatic interface. When being licensed in syntax, there is a syntactic position (which can be filled by either a syntactic gap or a resumptive pronoun) in the comment related to the topic in question. When being licensed at the semantic–pragmatic interface, there
744 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan is a semantic variable in the comment. Hu and Pan propose a unified account to both cases and it consists of two conditions: a licensing condition and an interpretation condition. The licensing condition stipulates that a topic is licensed if there is a semantic variable in the comment and the set generated by this variable produces a non-empty set when intersecting with the set denoted by the topic. The interpretation condition requires that an element inside the comment forms a subject–predicate relation with the topic. The two decomposed components of the aboutness condition have the advantage of unifying both gapped and gapless topic structures within a single account. Notice that such a licensing condition for dangling topic can avoid the aforementioned problems with the aboutness condition. Example (23a) is unacceptable because the empty possessor of erzi ‘son’ can be easily identified as the relevant variable. However, if the empty possessor, that is, the fathers of sons, is the variable, the set thus generated produces an empty set when intersecting with the set of the topic which consists of all the children in the kindergarten. Sentence (23b) is acceptable because the intersection of the topic set with the set projected from the focus phrase erzi ‘son’ is not empty, as the alternative set to the focus is not the set of fathers in (23b), but all the entities which are compatible to erzi. Hence the relevant intersection produces a non-empty set, which is why (23b) is grammatical. Hu and Pan’s decomposition analysis is argued to be a more precise characterization of the aboutness condition, with the advantage of unifying both the moved and base-generated topic sentences.
36.3.3 Preposing objects and Topic in Chinese Although Chinese has a canonical order of SVO, object preposing is common in Chinese, leading to an alternative word order SOV. Consider (24) below, cited from Ernst and Wang (1995). (24) a. Wo I
jiu liquor
bu not
he drink
le. Sfp
‘I won’t drink liquor anymore.’ b. Jiu liquor
wo I
bu not
he drink
le. sfp
‘I won’t drink liquor anymore.’ For sentences like (24a), the commonly adopted analysis is double topicalization (e.g. Xu and Langendoen 1985; Lee 1986; Tang 1990; Lin 1992), in which the object first adjoins to IP, producing the sentence in (24b). The subject wo may then subsequently topicalize across the object, giving (24b). Ernst and Wang (1995) argue against the double topicalization analysis, and propose that sentences like (24a) are derived by adjoining the object directly to VP. One major argument comes from the distribution of adjuncts.
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 745 Specifically, for adjuncts which adjoin only to VP, double topicalization would predict that objects will always precede these adjuncts. On the other hand, if the preposed object is assumed to be directly adjoining to VP, it would predict that these adjuncts may precede the preposed object. Ernst and Wang appeal to sentences like (25) to support their claim. (25) a. *Yizhi always
Xiaolan Xiaolan
b. Xiaolan Xiaolan
yizhi always
bu not
kan see
dianying movies
dianying. movies *(dou all
bu) not
kan. see
‘Xiaolan always does not go to see movies.’ Example (25a) is used to show that the adverb yizhi ‘continuously, always’ must occur in VP, and (25b) shows that it may precede a preposed object. Based on (25), Ernst and Wang argue that sentences with preposed object should not be considered as double topicalization, and the preposed object is in fact directly adjoined to VP, although whether preposing objects should be considered as topic or not remains debatable and calls for further research.
36.4 Prosodic marking of focus and topic 36.4.1 Focus Most work on the prosodic realization of IS in Chinese has been concerned with focus. An earlier consensus on focus in West-Germanic languages is that it is encoded via specific pitch accents, which, in turn, are signalled mainly via fundamental frequency changes (e.g. Jackendoff 1972; Selkirk 1984, 1995; Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). This has led to the question of whether prosody is at all used to signal IS in tonal languages like Chinese, where changes of fundamental frequency (hereafter f0 or perceptually speaking, pitch) over a syllable encode lexical meaning. The first phonetic study on focus in Chinese dates back to Gårding et al. (1983) which shows that in Standard Chinese, under focus, lexical tones are realized within an expanded pitch range grid and out of focus, compressed range grid. This pattern has been repeatedly observed in many subsequent studies on focus in Standard Chinese (e.g. Shih 1988; Jin 1996; Xu 1999; Chen 2003; Chen and Braun 2006; Chen and Gussenhoven 2008; Chen et al. 2009; Greif 2012). Listeners also show sensitivity to such a partition of f0 range in focus perception (Xu et al. 2004). Xu and Xu (2005) therefore made an explicit proposal that focus is directly encoded via the tri-zone pitch
746 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan range control: Expansion under focus, compression after focus, and little or no change before focus. Chen (2003, 2010) and Chen and Gussenhoven (2008) took a closer look at the mechanism of lexical tone modification under focus in Standard Chinese and argued that the observed f0 adjustments lead to an enhanced implementation of the tonal contours that cannot be reduced to mere f0 range expansion. Specifically, on-focus tonal gestures are implemented with magnified and more distinct f0 contours, and exhibit less coarticulatory influence from neighbouring tones, comparable to the distinctive realization of segmental contrasts under focus-induced prominence in West- Germanic languages (e.g. de Jong 1995; Erickson 2002; Cho and McQueen 2005). Such a prominence-marking view of focus (in contrast to the f0-range marking view of focus) makes it possible for a unified account of focus-induced prosodic encoding across languages with typologically different prosodic systems. Under this view, focus introduces abstract prosodic prominence. Languages then only differ in their different instantiations of focal prominence in terms of their available phonological entities and phonetic cues to encode focus. For example, English employs intonational tonal events as a salient cue while Standard Chinese manifests focal-prominence more in the distinctive realization of lexical tones, since the addition of pitch accents is prohibited. In addition to f0, prior research on Standard Chinese has also reported that words under focus generally have longer duration (Jin 1996; Xu 1999; Chen 2006) and higher mean intensity (Shih 1988; Chen et al. 2009; cf. Jin 1996, for the variability of this parameter in focus encoding). With durational data, Chen (2006) showed that acoustic modification under focus is constrained by prosodic boundaries. For a quadri-syllabic monomorphemic word in Standard Chinese, focus on the initial syllable of the word results in robust lengthening of not only the target syllable but also the following non- focused syllable. When the second syllable is focused, however, foot boundary clearly attenuates the magnitude of such spill-over lengthening over the third syllable which shows a limited amount of lengthening. Given the various acoustic cues involved in focus-marking, new studies are yet to be carried out to compare the relative cue weighting of the different acoustic parameters in signalling focus. Within the Sinitic family, both cross-dialect similarities and differences have been reported on the prosodic encoding of focus. In Shanghai Chinese, a Wu dialect spoken in the metropolitan city of Shanghai, focus is realized with prosodic prominence, which generally leads to constituent lengthening and f0 range expansion (Selkirk and Shen 1990). When a syllable contains a short vowel, however, focus fails to introduce robust lengthening; when a high-register rising tone is under focus, f0 expansion also becomes restricted (Chen 2009). This is probably because the potential cues for focus expression, that is expansion of f0 range over a high-register rising tone and lengthening of a short vowel, would make the targeted focused items easily run afoul of lexical neutralization to items with low-register rising tone and long vowel, respectively. (For more details of the lexical tonal system and segmental structure of Shanghai Chinese, see Chen and Gussenhoven, 2015.) Of note is that focus does enhance the distinctiveness
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 747 of both lexical tonal contours (Chen 2009) and vowel formant patterns (Chen 2008a), as predicted by the prominence-marking view of focus. In Cantonese, a Yue dialect spoken mainly in Guangdong and Hong Kong, focus has been reported to introduce both lengthening and higher intensity, but only a variable effect on f0 (Man 2002; Wu and Xu 2010; Gu and Lee 2007). Furthermore, different from the tri-zone f0 manipulation often observed in Mandarin, Cantonese shows no post- focus f0 compression regardless of the identity of the preceding on-focus tone. The Min dialect is another Sinitic language which shows a robust effect of lengthening under focus but lacks consistent focus-related f0 range manipulation. For example, Pan (2007) shows that in Taiwanese, a Southern Min dialect spoken in Taiwan, f0 raising/expansion is clearly present in the HH and HL tones but not so evident in the ML and MM tones. Taiwanese therefore parallels Shanghai Chinese in that focus-related f0 modification is consistent only when it does not entail sacrifice in the distinctive realization of lexical tonal contrasts. In the post-focus position, Xu et al. (2012) further shows that Taiwanese lacks f0 compression, just like Cantonese. Taken together, the high functional load of pitch register for tonal contrasts in both Cantonese and Taiwanese seems to play an important role in forbidding post-focus pitch range compression. Future studies, preferably with more tonal combinations and varied syntactic structures, are desirable to substantiate the current findings and further examine how various factors dictate the prosodic expression of focus. It is well-known that focus may differ in the size of its domain (or breadth) depending on the context, which ranges from words (known as ‘narrow focus) to syntactic phrases or full sentences (known as ‘broad focus’) (e.g. Schmerling 1976; Ladd 1980, 1996; Gussenhoven 1983; Selkirk 1984). Much phonological work has been done to investigate the prosodic reflex of focus with varying breadth. It is generally held that the domain in which focus attracts the strongest stress as its prosodic reflex is the semantic scope of the focus (e.g. Truckenbrodt 1995, 2012; Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006). A common assumption of this body of work is that prosodic prominence (i.e. stress) for focus entails the presence of an accent in West-Germanic languages (Selkirk 1995, 2002, 2007), a phonological property which is absent in tonal languages such as Standard Chinese. Phonetically speaking, however, Chinese seems to be just like Germanic languages (e.g. Breen et al. 2010). When an SVO sentence in Standard Chinese is produced with different degrees of broad focus, the most prominent element tends to be on the object, comparable to the case of narrow focus on object although a moderate amount of durational increase and/or f0 expansion can also be observed on the preceding constituents (Jin 1996; Chen 2008b). Some Chinese dialects exhibit an interesting constraint on the minimal domain for the prosodic reflex of focus when the size of an expression for focus domain narrows down beneath the lexical level. This is different from West-Germanic languages where focus can be expressed over a domain below the syllable level (van Heuven 1994; Sluijter and van Heuven 1995). A case in point here is Wenzhou Chinese, where a disyllabic word serves as the domain for tone sandhi. Scholz (2012) shows that when only one syllable within a bi-syllabic sandhi domain is contrastively focused, f0 range expansion and durational lengthening are quite uniformly distributed over the entire disyllabic
748 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan domain, suggesting the constraint that the tone sandhi domain serves as the minimal domain for focus expression and focus cannot break up its internal structure (Chen 2009 for further discussion on Shanghai Chinese; cf. Chen 2000 on the effect of focus in sandhi domain formation). These findings lend further support to the prominence- marking view of focus, which takes focus-induced f0 range and duration increase as a consequence of more abstract, prosodic prominence brought about by focus, whose expression is contingent upon the prosodic structure of the focused constituent. Not only may the breadth of focus vary, an utterance may also vary in the number of constituents that are under focus. Jia et al. (2010) show that when an utterance contains two pragmatic/semantic foci, both are prosodically expressed as equally prominent. Under a multiple-focus condition (i.e. with three foci), however, only the rightmost focused element is realized with prominence. Kabagema-Bilan et al. (2011) report a different pattern. In their double-focus condition, only the second of the two foci shows phonetic f0 effects, while the first is neither cued via f0 nor duration. Further research is necessary to investigate the discrepancy of the two studies. What can be drawn from the studies is that a one-to-one mapping between focus and its prosodic expression is unviable, lending further support to the need for an abstract and indirect mapping relationship between focus and its prosodic expression. Two other findings are worth noting. Chen and Gussenhoven (2008) show that more emphasis under corrective focus leads to significant durational lengthening and little f0 range expansion, suggesting a constrained role of focus-induced f0 modification. The flexibility that Standard Chinese enjoys in lengthening is probably due to the lack of length contrast at the segmental level in the language. In the face of the different degrees of ‘expandability’ of f0 range and duration under different degrees of emphasis, the lexical tonal f0 gestures (in particular of the rising and falling tones) are nevertheless implemented in various ways so as to remain distinctive under the robust lengthening of the tone-carrying syllable. This again suggests the importance of prominence-marking, instead of mere f0 range expansion, as the prosodic reflex of focus. Liu and Xu (2005) report that when all target lexical tones are high level, focus is typically marked in a similar way in questions as in statements despite the fact that questions are cued mainly with f0 range modification. Their perception test reports the lowest identification rate for neutral focus (i.e. focus over the whole sentence) in questions and final focus in statements. While more lexical tones should be included for future research, the results of this study suggest that the parallel nature of the f0 encoding schemes for focus and interrogativity (for high-level tone) can be compromised/ constrained when there are competing demands for f0-range adjustments for different communicative functions.
36.4.2 Topic Over the last decades, research devoted to the study of topicalization in Chinese has mainly been concerned with semantic and syntactic issues (as reviewed in Section 36.3). Relatively little has been done on the prosodic encoding of topic.
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 749 Chen (2009) examined the prosodic realization of bi-syllabic nouns in Shanghai Chinese, produced as non-contrastive topic, contrastive topic, and focus, in a question– answer reading task. Focus induces significant lengthening over the noun phrase in question, compared to the contrastive topic condition, which, in turn, is significantly longer than the non-contrastive topic condition. f0 manipulation, however, is more varied and depends, to a large extent, on lexical tonal identity. Details aside, focus ensures a magnified and distinctive tonal gesture over the target noun phrase (and therefore may involve lowering of the f0 minimum), while contrastive topic raises the whole f0 contour. Furthermore, the verb following the target noun shows a significantly lowered f0 register post focus, as compared to the two topic conditions, which suggests a more local effect of prosodic marking for topic. Wang and Féry (2010) investigated the prosodic encoding of split noun sentences (i.e. OSV constructions with left object dislocation) in Standard Chinese. The object vs. noun was elicited with different preceding contexts which the authors classify as topic vs. focus. Their results show that focus introduces lower f0 maximum in the base part and shorter silence after the object noun than topic. No difference, however, was found on the dislocated object. The results thus provide further evidence for the global vs. local prosodic modification for focus vs topic. Wang and Xu (2011) is another study on prosodic realization of noun phrases in Standard Chinese with different information status. Given the way the data were elicited, it is difficult to pin down, within the framework in Krifka (2008), the specific IS notions they investigated. A general pattern to be noted is that focus raises on-focus f0 and lowers post-focus f0 while topic raises the f0 register at the beginning of the sentence and allows f0 to drop gradually afterwards, in line with the findings in Chen (2009) for Shanghai Chinese and Wang and Féry (2010) for Standard Chinese. These studies jointly reveal that contrast and newness are not directly encoded as pure f0 range manipulation. Needless to say, given the limited number of studies on topic and prosody, well- controlled experiments remain a must to substantiate these observations and to further understand the range and nature of the prosodic marking of topicalization in Chinese dialects.
36.4.3 Lacunae for studies on the prosodic expression of focus and topic Despite the progress that has been made over the last decades on prosody and IS marking in Chinese and various Chinese dialects, much more is yet to be done. Five lacunae have been identified which should serve as important questions on the agenda of the research community. First, an important aspect that has been neglected in all works of Chinese focus expression is the necessity to explicitly distinguish givenness and focus. Cross-linguistically, it has been argued that givenness should be treated as a fundamental concept in information structuring which is marked not only lexically (e.g. Ariel 1988; Gundel et al. 1993) and syntactically (e.g. Kučerová 2012), but also prosodically (e.g. Pierrehumbert
750 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan and Hirschberg 1990; Kohler 1991; Ladd 1996; Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006; Selkirk 2008). Changes in a referent’s level of givenness (or accessibility) are reflected in the corresponding adjustments in its prosodic marking (Baumann 2006) and can result in different updating costs of on-line discourse representation, as shown in a recent reading experiment that measures eye movements (Chen et al. 2012). Readers of Chinese are sensitive to the difference between focus and givenness: a critical word was read more slowly when it was the name of a previously-unmentioned individual (i.e. new) than when the name had been used earlier (i.e. given). This, as argued further by Benatar and Clifton (2014) with English data, suggests a strong influence of givenness as a core IS notion even in silent reading. Previous experimental work on focus in Chinese, however, has treated the prosodic effect of focus heuristically, without teasing apart the expression of focus from the prosodic encoding of givenness over contextually entailed constituents within the same utterance. For example, a pertinent question here is to what extent the observed compression of pitch range after a focused element should be accounted for as the effect of focus expression or as the prosodic encoding of givenness (see further discussion on post-focus compression in Chen 2010). Second, most prior studies did not explicitly differentiate the prosodic effects of different types of focus. Under the cover term focus, the methods employed to elicit data on focus in Chinese often include making corrections over (part of) a word (e.g. Chen 2006) or answering WH-questions set up in the preceding discourse (e.g. Jin 1996; Xu 1999). The potpourri of their results are often discussed and compared under the cover term focus. Within the framework of Krifka (2008), the former can be classified as expression focus while the latter denotation focus which has no consequence on the truth condition of the target utterances (i.e. involving only the pragmatic use of focus). An interesting question here is whether and how a language with a rather complex lexical prosodic system (such as complex lexical tonal inventory) allows for relatively fine- grained distinctions in the prosodic packaging of IS. Chen and Braun (2006) is the first study, to our knowledge, to compare the effects of various types of IS notions on the prosodic realization of bi-syllabic names in Standard Chinese. The study adopts the framework of Vallduví and Vilkuna (1998) and Steedman (2000) and tests whether in a tonal language, IS operates along two semantic dimensions with a primary distinction between theme and rheme and a secondary distinction of focus and background. Translating the results into the framework in Krifka (2008), we note that utterances that are new in discourse (i.e. informational focus with a broad scope) need to be differentiated from given information. The prosodic marking of alternatives to provide new information over a sub-constituent (i.e. narrow informational focus) is also different from that to correct information (i.e. corrective focus). This has been echoed in a few more recent studies. For example, Wang and Xu (2011) shows that when newness is independently controlled from focus, a new word is only slightly longer than a given word. Comparable results have been reported in Ouyang and Kaiser (2015). Further support for contrast and newness to have different information status comes from Chen et al. (2012), an eyetracking experiment, and Chen et al.
Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese 751 (2014), an event-related brain potential study. Both reveal differences in processing patterns between focus and newness, and suggest that they are different concepts that relate to different aspects of cognitive processing. Third, there is a general lack of care in data elicitation which simulates natural- occurring speech communication. By now, we all recognize that the basic notions of IS should be rooted in theories of how communication works. Krifka (2008) motivates the choice of IS notions within a model of speech communication where the interlocutors continuously update their common ground (CG) in terms of both CG content and CG management. Little, however, has been done on the possible effects of interlocutors’ mutual belief or CG on the prosodic marking of focus in Chinese. One happy exception is Greif (2012) who shows that we need to differentiate different types of corrective focus, one with the corrigendum being foregrounded assertion (A-COR) and the other presupposed background (P-COR), as compared to the baseline neutral information focus (NIF). P-COR differs from both A-COR and NIF with expanded f0 range and increased duration while A-COR shows a slight lowering of f0 than NIF. These results, yet to be replicated, suggest that studies of IS marking need to tune into perspectives of both speakers and listeners. A related problem is that most studies on the prosodic encoding of IS in Chinese have elicited data via reading aloud scripted dialogues. A few studies have emerged recently which elicited semi-controlled data by asking participants to describe visual scenes according to different contextual questions (e.g. Greif 2012; Ouyang and Kaiser 2015). It has also become clear that the more natural the task becomes, the more linguistically complex the stimuli are, and the more variability we observe in the data. We thus not only face the challenge of how to elicit naturally-occurring data which reflect genuine patterns of information exchanges between interlocutors but also need to address the issue of how to make sense of the variability observed in the prosodic encoding of information structure notions. A fourth issue to be addressed is to understand further the underlying mechanisms that account for the prosodic encoding of various IS notions. While there is a general consensus that focus induces prosodic prominence, various proposals have been made on how to pursue the idea further (see Rooth 1992; Truckenbrodt 1995; Selkirk 2002, 2007; Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006; Büring 2009 for different proposals). Such an indirect approach of focus-marking helps to explain the way various factors (such as tonal register and tone sandhi domain) condition the way lexical tones are modified to signal information structure, in addition to other acoustic cues, as discussed earlier (e.g. Chen 2003; Chen and Gussenhoven 2008; Chen 2010; Scholz 2012). This view also accounts for recent findings on the constrained prosodic expression of multiple foci in Standard Chinese (Kabagema-Bilan et al. 2011). The prominence-lending view of focus also raises the question of whether in addition to focal prominence, focus inserts a new prosodic boundary and introduces prosodic (re-)phrasing (e.g. Shih 1997 for Standard Chinese; Selkirk and Shen 1990 for Shanghai Chinese; and Chen 2000 for Wenzhou Chinese). There is some evidence which suggests that focus does not directly introduce rephrasing; rather, focus-induced acoustic modifications are sensitive to and respect
752 Yiya Chen, Peppina Po-lun Lee, and Haihua Pan the prosodic structure of the utterance (Chen 2004, 2010; Scholz and Chen 2014). More studies, however, are certainly needed to understand the interaction between the prosodic marking of focus and the general prosodic marking of utterance phrasing. Last but not least, we believe that another important question on the agenda of the research community is the way the IS of an utterance is planned during speech production. Little is known about this process. Ganushchak et al. (2014) reported an event picture description experiment where different focused referents (as a function of different preceding discourse contexts) induce different eye gaze shift patterns. This suggests that discourse, which in part determines the IS partition of an utterance, affects the processing of different focused referents. Furthermore, there is a cross-linguistic difference between Dutch and Chinese speakers, probably due to the different linguistic structures of the two languages (in particular with regard to their different WH-placements in the preceding discourse). Much more work, however, is needed to understand the formulation of a linguistic message with different patterns of information packaging.
36.5 Concluding remarks This chapter has reviewed how two important notions of information structure— topic and focus—are encoded in Chinese, a lexical tone language. Chinese is known as a topic-prominent language with a great variety of topic structures. It has also been classified as a wh-in-situ and focus-in-situ language (e.g. Huang 1982; Soh 2006; Hole 2012), with rich syntactic constructions for focus-marking. We have shown that there is a wide range of syntactic constructions, semantic particles, as well as a conglomerate of prosodic cues that speakers of Chinese have at their disposal to structure information so as to achieve effective communication. However, various issues are yet to be further explored. For example, it is debatable whether preposing objects should be considered as focus or topic. Both topical focus and contrastive focus bear the [+contrastive] feature. In what way can relevant syntax–semantics mapping account for their differences? Further investigation of different topic constructions across Chinese dialects can also be a fruitful enterprise (Xu and Liu 1998). We have also reviewed various debates and experimental findings concerning the underlying mechanisms of the prosodic encoding of various IS notions. While much progress has been made over the last decades, it is also apparent that much more experimental and theoretical work needs to be done (and preferably done together) in the future for us to gain a deeper understanding of IS marking in Chinese.
Chapter 37
Inf ormation St ru c t u re in Japan e se Satoshi Tomioka
This chapter presents a compact overview of the information structure of Japanese, focusing on three major concepts of information structure; focus (Section 37.2), givenness (Section 37.3), and topicality (Section 37.4).1 It is by no means a comprehensive and complete portrayal of all the relevant facts, as the richness of encoding information structure in the language makes such a task practically impossible to accomplish. There are inevitably some non-trivial issues that are left out or are only touched upon briefly, and I will make reference, whenever appropriate, to other sources from which more information can be obtained.2 On the other hand, I have chosen a few controversial or frequently misunderstood issues for more rigorous examination, as they provide important clues for understanding the universality and the cross-linguistic variability of information structure. The recursivity of information structure (Section 37.5) and the relation between contrastiveness and scalar implicature (Section 37.3.2) are among such topics.
37.1 Expressing focus 37.1.1 Focus prosody In the majority of natural languages, focused items are assigned prosodic prominence of various kinds (e.g. stress, higher pitch), and Japanese is no exception. The manifestation of focus prosody in Japanese differs, however, depending on whether foci are contrastive 1 I am grateful to the editors of this volume, Caroline Féry and Shin Ishihara, for comments and encouragement. I also benefited greatly from many insightful comments and suggestions by two anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Anne Peng, who helped me prepare the manuscript. 2 The recent review articles on information structure in Japanese include Heycock (2008) and Vermeulen (2012).
754 Satoshi Tomioka or not. Differences of this sort are not unknown. Katz and Selkirk (2011) report, for instance, that English speakers make a systematic phonetic distinction between contrastive focus and non-contrastive discourse-new focus.3 In the previous literature on Japanese prosody, much more attention has been paid to contrastive focus, presumably because the effects are more noticeable. There are two specific prosodic phenomena that have been reported in connection to contrastive focus in Japanese. One is ‘focal f0 rise’, in which the pitch (f0-peak) of a focused item in a sentence is raised. The second process is ‘post-focal reduction’, a process which reduces the f0-peaks of the material that follows the focus. At the descriptive level, these phenomena are universally acknowledged. Opinions differ, however, on how these effects should be characterized theoretically. The most popular analysis connects these prosodic effects with modifications of phonological phrasing (e.g. Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988; Nagahara 1994; Truckenbrodt 1995; Selkirk 2006). Nagahara (1994), inspired by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), proposed the following mechanism for the two prosodic effects of focus. (1) a. A major phrase of the prosodic hierarchy is characterized as the domain of ‘downstep’, a process of gradual lowering of f0 peaks. b. A major phrase boundary is inserted at the left edge of a focused phrase. This means that the downstep is cancelled, and that the pitch is ‘reset’. This explains the pitch boost of focus. c. After the focused item, the major phrase boundaries are removed. Therefore, the material that comes after the focus undergoes the downstep without any pitch resetting. This is the source of the post-focal reduction. There are some empirical objections to this ‘rephrasing’ analysis of focus prosody. First, the idea of phrase boundary insertion before a focused phrase has been challenged by Shinya (1999) and Kubozono (2007), whose experimental studies show that focused phrases are subject to downstep when they are preceded by accented words/phrases. If the f0 boost on a focused phrase is a result of the insertion of a phrase boundary which results in the cancellation of downstep, as stated in (1b), a focused phrase is expected to be free from downstep effects, contrary to Shinya’s and Kubozono’s findings. The mechanism of post-focal reduction under the rephrasing analysis has also encountered challenges. Sugahara (2003) claims that the post-focal deletion of phrase boundaries takes place only when the post-focal material represents given information. When it represents new information, on the other hand, f0-lowering occurs, but the phrase boundaries are retained. The preservation of phrase boundaries following focus is replicated in other experimental studies, such as Ishihara (2007) and Féry and Ishihara (2010). The rival theory to the rephrasing analysis (e.g. Poser 1984; Shinya 1999; Féry and Ishihara 2010; Ishihara 2011) argues that the focus prosody materializes as a result of 3 What counts as a contrastive focus is not a settled issue. In Katz and Selkirk (2011), focused phrases associated with only are regarded as contrastive. In Tokyo Japanese, the clearest cases of contrastive focus prosody are found in corrective expressions and wh-phrases. The inclusion of wh-phrases in this category may be subject to dialectal variations. Smith (to appear), for instance, claims that the focus prosody and the wh-prosody are distinct in Fukuoka Japanese.
Information Structure in Japanese 755 a pitch register manipulation that is independent of phonological phrasing. Ishihara (2011) furthermore presents a phonological account of this alternative approach by modifying the optimality-theoretic analysis proposed by Truckenbrodt (1995). He proposes to re-rank some of the constraints and to permit multi-headedness in a prosodic representation, which leads to a preference to avoid rephrasing (both boundary insertion and boundary deletion) in Japanese. As for non-contrastive focus, the effects are arguably weaker. For instance, Vermeulen (2012) reports, citing Deguchi and Kitagawa (2002) and Ishihara (2007), that in a question–answer pair, the f0-rise of the answer constituent is typically not as sharp as the one observed for the wh-phrase in the question. It remains to be seen whether the difference is categorical or is a matter of gradable scale. It has also been observed (e.g. Ishihara 2001) that an item that comes immediately before a verb receives the main prosodic prominence by default in Japanese. Therefore, the immediately pre-verbal position is the ideal location for discourse-new focus. It is also the position from which ‘focus projection’ (cf. Selkirk 1984) takes place. In (2), the entire VP corresponds to the main locus of the answer, and the primary prominence (indicated by the accent ´) must be placed on the direct object. Placing it on either of the other constituents leads to infelicity. (2) What did you do last night? Aoyama-de Aoyama-loc
ẃain-o wine-acc
nomi-mashita. drink-past
‘(I) had wine in Aoyama.’
37.1.2 Syntax of focus There are some syntactic operations that are frequently identified across languages as focalization strategies. The cleft and the pseudo-cleft constructions are among such strategies, and, not surprisingly, Japanese also has a similar construction, which takes the following form: it begins with a clausal structure with a gap, followed by the particles no and wa in that order, and it ends with the focused expression, which corresponds to the gap in the preceding clause, and the copula da. (3) a. Mari-ga Mari-nom
tabeta-no-wa ate-nml-top
ringo-ϕ apple-ϕ
mittu-da. three.cl-copula
‘It is (those) three apples that Mari ate.’ b. Mari-ga Mari-nom
tabeta-no-wa ate-nml-top
ringo-o apple-acc
mittu-da. three.cl-copula
‘It is (those) three apples that Mari ate.’ The focused items, those that are attached to the copula –da, are interpreted exhaustively. In (3a), for instance, it is understood that (the) three apples are the only relevant
756 Satoshi Tomioka items that Mari ate. More controversial is the syntax of this construction. The particle no is identified as a nominalizer, and with it, this construction is usually analysed as a bi- clausal structure with an embedded clause buried within a nominal structure. Thus, (3a) is paraphrased as ‘the things Mari ate are (the) three apples’, which is more or less identical to the conventional understanding of what the pseudo-cleft construction means. However, Hiraiwa and Ishihara (2012) argue that the nominal analysis does not uniformly apply to the Japanese cases. First, following Hoji (1987) and Fukaya and Hoji (1999), they categorize the construction into two sub-types, based on the presence vs absence of case morphology in the focus position. If the focus has no case particle (e.g. (3a)), the sentence is indeed a pseudo-cleft, a bi-clausal structure with no acting as a nominalizer. When the focus retains a case particle, on the other hand, it has an entirely different structure. Hiraiwa and Ishihara note (i) that the morpheme no cannot be replaced by a more semantically contentful noun, such as mono ‘thing’ or hito ‘person’, and (ii) that the nominative–genitive conversion, a signature property for a clause contained within a nominal structure, is not available when the pivot retains its case morphology. Importantly, these two nominal properties are observed with caseless foci. Hiraiwa and Ishihara (2002, 2012) propose a mono-clausal analysis of clefts. A summary of their analysis is given in (4). (4)
a. The clausal architecture is [TopP [FocP [FinP/CP [TP]]]]. b. The morpheme no is Fin0. c. A focused phrase within the FinP moves to Spec FocP. d. The remaining FinP undergoes remnant movement to TopP.
Example (3b) has the following derivation, starting with (5b). (5) a. Mari-ga Mari-nom
[ringo-o [apple-acc
mittu]F 3.cl]F
tabeta-no-da. ate-NO-copula
‘Mari ate (those) THREE APPLES.’ b. [TopP [FocP [FinP/CP Mari-ga [ringo-o mittu]F tabeta-no]](-da)] c. [[FocP[ringo-o mittu]1 [FinP Mari-ga t1 tabeta-no]-da]] d. [[TopP[FinP Mari-ga t1 tabeta-no]-wa]2 [FocP[ringo-o mittu]1 t2]-da] Under this model, the Japanese cleft construction does not resemble the bi-clausal structure that is customarily associated with clefts across languages. While the new analysis accounts for the unexpected facts listed above, it presents its own mystery. In the pseudo-cleft structure, the exhaustive meaning for the pivot can be attributed to the definite-description-like interpretation of the nominalized clause. No such strategy is available in the new analysis, however, and Hiraiwa and Ishihara (2012) attribute the exhaustivity to the focus movement of the pivot. The problem with this strategy is that there is no independent criterion to identify such a movement, as the examples below
Information Structure in Japanese 757 illustrate: (6a) shows that a dative NP with the additive particle mo ‘also’ can be fronted within the no-da structure. However, the clefted version of this sentence is ungrammatical, as shown in (6b), presumably because the lexical meaning of mo as the additive particle is incompatible with the exhaustive meaning associated with this construction. (6) a. [Ken-ni-mo]F, 1 [Ken-dat-also]F, 1
Mari-wa/ga Mari-top/nom
t1 atta-no-da. t1 saw-NO-copula
‘Mari saw KEN as well.’ b. *[Mari-ga [Mari-nom
atta-no]-wa saw-NO]-top
[Ken-ni-mo]F-da. [Ken-dat-also]F-copula
‘Lit: It was also Ken that Mari saw.’ Hiraiwa and Ishihara (2012) would regard the fronting operation in (6a) as an instance of scrambling, rather than focus movement, since the additive meaning is incompatible with the exhaustivity associated with the latter movement. Such an analysis is, however, simply a statement of the facts, rather than an explanation of them, and what is lacking is an independent and reliable way to distinguish a focus movement from other movements. As a matter of fact, there has been no solid evidence that confirms the existence of focus movement in Japanese, whether it elicits exhaustivity or is based on a broader definition of focus. Focused items can scramble, but it is far from clear that such a movement is triggered by focus. Long distance scrambling is perhaps the best candidate for focus movement, as Miyagawa (2006) claims that it obligatorily leads to a contrastive interpretation. While contrastiveness is much more routinely associated with long-distance scrambling than local scrambling, it remains a mere tendency, however. In the following example, in which the embedded clause has a wh-phrase, the scrambled object does not seem to elicit any sense of contrast.4 (7) [Sono hon-o]1 [that book-acc]1
Mana-wa Mana-top
t1 ageru-tumori-da]-to t1 give-intention-be]-comp
[pro DARE-ni [pro who-dat
itta-no? said-Q
Lit: That book, who did Mana say that she was going to give to?’ Scrambling can affect the focus interpretation by moving un-focused items from the default focus position (cf. Neeleman and Reinhart 1998; Ishihara 2001). As mentioned earlier, the immediately preverbal position receives the default prominence, which 4 In (7), there is no clear post- focal reduction on the wa-marked subject, which would be the expected pattern if the scrambled object were contrastively focused. If there is any discourse effect of the scrambling in the example, the fronted NP is more topical than focal.
758 Satoshi Tomioka makes it a suitable position for a discourse-new item. The example below is the scrambled version of (2), in which the locative PP is now in the immediately preverbal position and is interpreted as discourse-new focus.5 (8) [wain-o]1 Aóyama-de t1 nomi-mashita. wine- acc Aoyama-loc t drink-past
‘(I) had wine in Aoyama.’
37.2 Expressing givenness There are multiple strategies to indicate the given status of linguistic expressions. Such strategies include prosodic reduction, ellipsis/empty structure, right dislocation, and wa-marking. As mentioned in Section 37.2.1, the prosodic manifestation of contrastive focus has two components: the pitch boost on a focused item, followed by the compression of the pitch range of the material that follows the focused phrase. Prosodic reduction is commonly conceived as one effective strategy to express backgrounded/given information, and the ‘post-focal reduction’ in Japanese naturally presents itself as an ideal environment for discourse-old expressions to appear. In connection with the post-focal reduction, scrambling once again plays an interesting role. If a focused expression scrambles, the post-focal reduction domain expands, as previously pre-focus material now follows the focus after the movement. Therefore, scrambling of a contrastively focused phrase, such as a wh-phrase, has the effect of extending the domain of given material.6 Phonologically silent structures, either silent anaphora or ellipsis, are sometimes regarded as the ultimate form of reduction and, in this sense, only given material can become silent. The issues of how missing elements are represented and how their meaning can be recovered still divide the field (cf. Winkler this volume), and there have been extensive theoretical endeavours on ellipsis and null anaphora in Japanese. First of all, Japanese allows verbal arguments to go missing quite frequently. It is categorized as a ‘discourse pro drop language’ (cf. Huang 1984), in which the familiarity in the discourse is the primary condition for silent arguments. Hasegawa (1984/85) argues that they are pronouns with no 5 There are a few focus-related issues that are left out in this chapter. One is association with focus with focus-sensitive particles such as –dake ‘only’, –sae ‘even’ and mo ‘also’. Focus effects in wh-questions are also not included. The reader is referred to Vermeulen (2012: section 37.1) for an overview of these phenomena. 6 The expansion of reduction domains is an important part of the analysis of intervention effects in Tomioka (2007). It has been observed (e.g. Hoji 1985; Beck 1996; Beck and Kim 1997) that a wh-phrase cannot take scope over a certain quantifier or a focused expression (= intervener) that c-commands it, and that the ill effects disappear when the wh-phrase is scrambled past the intervener. Tomioka (2007) argues that the ill effect of the intervention structure is due to the focused status of the intervener. The leftward movement of the focused wh-phrase places the intervener in the post-focal reduction domain, and the intervener is considered given.
Information Structure in Japanese 759 phonological substance whereas Otani and Whitman (1991) propose that a silent internal argument is a case of disguised VP ellipsis that takes place after a verb raises out of a VP. Hoji (1998) challenges the VP ellipsis approach of Otani and Whitman (1991) based on a wide variety of empirical facts, some of which became the foundation for the most recent trend in the syntax of silent arguments, namely the argument ellipsis analysis (e.g. Saito 2007; Takahashi 2008b, 2008a). The main advantages of analysing silent arguments as instances of nominal ellipsis are twofold: (i) silent arguments yield so-called sloppy interpretations while their overt counterparts do not, and (ii) some silent arguments can be quantificational. These facts can be accounted for by assuming that silent arguments are not pro- form expressions but are instances of ellipsis and have a full-fledged structure at LF. However, those merits are not necessarily deterministic. As pointed out in Tomioka (2003), sloppy interpretations are not banned for overt pronouns. The distribution of overt sloppy pronouns is more restricted than their silent variants, but exactly how it is constrained is still poorly understood. It is also unclear whether the comparison between a silent argument and its overt pronominal counterpart is a reliable test. In Kurafuji (1999), null and overt pronouns are not regarded as semantically homogeneous, and such a hypothesis makes the null–overt contrast in sloppy readings hard to evaluate theoretically. The quantifier argument also encouters some challenges. In particular, downward monotone quantifiers cannot seem to be antecedents for null arguments. Pre-nominal downward monotone quantifiers are quite rare in Japanese, but X-paasento miman-no ‘less than X%’ is semi-acceptable. When it is used as an antecedent of a silent argument, however, it produces a very dubious result. (9) Context: We are discussing how hard the past exams were. Kyonen-no last.year-gen ukat-ta. pass-past
siken-de-wa, exam-loc-wa #Kotosi-no this.year-gen
30-paasento-miman-no 30-percent-less.than-gen
siken-de-mo exam-loc-also
gakusei-ga student-nom
e ukat-ta. e pass-past
Intended: In last year’s exam, less than 30% of the students passed. Also in this year’s exam (less than 30% of the students) passed.’ The first sentence is certainly not the most natural way to express the proposition, but the dubiousness of the second sentence is far beyond the matter of naturalness. It utterly fails to mean what it is intended to mean.7 The ellipsis analysis does not predict this fact.8 Another type of ellipsis that has been frequently discussed is sluicing. Takahashi (1994) initiated the debate by proposing that sluicing in Japanese is overt wh-movement 7 The sentence sounds really odd and is not easily interpretable. If it has any meaning at all, it means that the same set of students who passed last year also passed this year as well. 8 More convincing evidence for ellipsis would be extraction out of elided structures. Such evidence is difficult to come by for the case of silent arguments, however, as extraction out of a nominal structure is believed to be unacceptable.
760 Satoshi Tomioka followed by ellipsis of the clausal structure. Nishiyama et al. (1995), Kuwabara (1996), and Kizu (1998) present an alternative analysis in which sluicing is a reduced form of a cleft sentence with the renmant wh-phrase occupying the focus position, noting that there are some close correspondences between the two constructions. Furthermore, Fukaya and Hoji (1999) notice that case-marked and caseless wh-remnants in Japanese sluicing exhibit a number of different properties which are duplicated with cleft sentences, including island-sensitivty. Their observations played a key role in the aforementioned analysis of the cleft construction by Hiraiwa and Ishihara (2012), who also endorse their own version of the ‘sluicing-as-reduced-cleft’ approach. While Japanese is often considered to be strictly verb-final, it is actually not uncommon in colloquial speech to find some constituents placed after the matrix verb. This ‘right dislocated’ structure is arguably sensitive to givenness. Tanaka (2001), for instance, claims that the post-verbal position in right dislocation cannot host new information. However, it is more accurate to call it an ‘anti-narrow focus structure’, since it cannot host such items as a wh-phrase (10a) or an answer to a wh-question (10b), but a discourse new item can appear in the dislocated position, as pointed out by Shimojo (2005). For instance, (10c) can be uttered at the beginning of a conversation. (10) a. *Yon-da-no, read-past-Q
nani-o? what-acc
‘What did you read?’ b. *Yon-da-yo, read-past-DM
ihoozin-o. L’Étranger-acc.
(As an answer to What did you read?)
‘I read L’Étranger.’ c. Kat-tyatta-yo, buy-past-DM
atarasii new
ai-paddo. i-pad
‘I bought a new iPad.’ Finally, the particle wa is often associated with giveness, but its meaning is much more multi-layered. In particular, the particle is tied very closely to topicality, a notion that many theorists find difficult to define. In the following section, we will review its basic properties and the many theoretical puzzles and challenges that it presents.
37.3 Wa-marking It is generally believed that there are at least two distinct uses of the particle wa. We will follow this tradition in this chapter and first examine the two well-known subtypes;
Information Structure in Japanese 761 thematic wa and contrastive wa. Additionally, wa in negative sentences, which seems neither thematic nor contrastive, will be discussed.
37.3.1 Thematic wa The thematic use of the particle is frequently associated with the notion of topicality. A number of authors, including Mikami (1963), Kuno (1972), Noda (1996) and Portner and Yabushita (1998), identify wa as a topic marker. It is hard to determine whether such an analysis gives the correct characterization because we still do not know exactly how to define topics. Despite the considerable effort from theoreticians of diverse disciplines, topicality remains a slippery notion, as documented in some of the review articles on this issue (e.g. Roberts 2011; Büring, this volume). At the descriptive level, the differences between wa and the canonical nominative marker ga are extremely instructive, and comparing the two particles has become a popular methodological tool in studies of wa. However, I will not follow this practice in this chapter since Heycock (2008) provides detailed and informative portrayals of the wa–ga contrasts and their theoretical implications. The strategy I adopt is to go over typical attributes that topics are claimed to have and examine how wa-phrases behave in connection to those attributes.9 During this process, a few additional issues will be raised that deserve closer examination. (11) lists the three major concepts that are most frequently associated with wa. (11) a. abountess: The entity denoted by a wa-phrase is what the sentence is about. b. frame-setting: A wa-phrase can function as a frame-setter c. givenness: A wa-phrase corresponds to given information The idea of ‘aboutness topic’ (Reinhart 1982) is probably the most popular characterization of topicality. Krifka and Musan (2012) define it as in (12) within the file card semantics of Heim (1982) or some variant of it. (12) The topic constituent identifies the entity or set of entities under which the information expressed in the comment constituent should be stored in the common ground content. = Krifka and Musan (2012: (42)) There are a few empirical facts that support this characterization. First, thematic wa-phrases are limited to nominal or quasi-nominal categories (e.g. NP, PP, and CP), and adverbial topics, discussed in Roberts (2011: 1908–1909), are not compatible with wa. Presumably adverbial expressions do not correspond to file cards, which makes them incompatible with 9 One of the popular characterizations of topicality that has not been embraced in the Japanese literature is the idea of topic as a question-under-discussion (cf. Roberts 1998, von Fintel 1994). Portner and Yabushita (1998) argue that the ‘topic-as-an-entity’ analysis suits wa-marking better for wa-phrases.
762 Satoshi Tomioka wa. In addition, certain expressions, such as wh-based quantifiers (e.g. daremo ‘everyone, anyone’) and a disjunctive NP, cannot be marked with wa. In Tomioka (2007), the anti- topicality of those expressions is attributed to their inability to specify particular file cards. The notion of frame-setting in (11b) is what Chafe (1976) advocates for the definition of topicality. There has been some scepticism expressed (e.g. Jacobs 2001), however, that the frame-setting function is not always distinguishable from aboutness topic. While this criticism is applicable to wa-phrases as well, there are a couple of distinct types in Japanese that may be unambiguously characterizable as frame-setters: (13) Sono-ken-ni that-matter-dat
kansite-wa, concern-wa,
Mari-ni Mari-dat
makaseru-beki-desu. entrust-should-be
‘About that matter, we should let Mari take care of it.’ (14) [Sinbun-o [newspaper-acc
yomi-tai-hito]-wa, read-want-person]-wa
koko-ni here-loc
arimasu. exist
Lit: ‘Those who wish to read newspapers, there are some here.’ or ‘If you want to read newspapers, there are some here.’ Kuroda (1992: 283) Unlike aboutness topic constituents, which are usually nominal or quasi-nominal categories, frame-setting wa-phrases can be verbal. In (13), for instance, wa is attached to the gerundive form of the verb kans-‘to concern’. (14) is an instance of the ‘conditional topic’ construction. As noted by Tateishi (1990) and Kuroda (1992), the function of the wa-phrase in (14) mimics that of an if-clause in a relevance conditional (cf. Derose and Grandy 1999; Siegel 2006). While this is not a prototypical instance of a frame-setting topic that Chafe (1976) had in mind, its pragmatic function is clearly distinct from that of aboutness wa. The correspondence between topics and conditionals goes even further. (13), for instance, can be minimally altered by replacing the first wa-phrase with the if- clause, sore-ni kansite-i-eba ‘if (we) speak of it’, as shown in (15a), without affecting the overall meaning of the sentence. In addition, reduced conditionals of the form XP-nara/ dattara ‘XP-be-if/be.past-if ’ are sometimes interchangeable with XP-wa (cf. Munakata 2006), as in (15b). (15) a. Sono-ken-ni that-matter-dat
kansite-ie-ba, concern-say-if,
Mari-ni Mari-dat
makaseru-beki-desu. entrust-should-be
Lit: ‘If we speak of that matter, we should let Mari take care of it.’ b. Context: Have you seen Kenji? Aa, Ah,
Kenji-wa/nara/dattara, Kenji-wa/be.if/be.past.if,
sakki-made just.now-until
i-mashita-kedo … exist-past-but … ‘Ah, Kenji, he was over there just minutes ago.’
soko-ni there-loc
Information Structure in Japanese 763 The association between wa and givenness (and relatedly, definiteness) has been mentioned frequently (e.g. Kuno 1973; Martin 1975; Makino 1982 among many others). It is hardly surprising because the connection between topicality and givenness has also been frequently pointed out, particularly in the Prague School tradition (e.g. Daneš 1970). However, Krifka and Musan (2012) warn that the correlation is just a tendency, providing the following example in which the indefinite topic introduces a new discourse referent. (16) [A good friend of mine]Topic [married Britney Spears last year]Comment. = Krifka and Musan (2012: (43)) The concept of discourse-new topics has been suggested to account for wide-scope/specific indefinites (e.g. Cresti 1995; Endriss 2009). As for wa–phrases, they can refer to new discourse referents as long as the referents are inferable. For instance, a proper name can bear wa even when the name is mentioned for the first time in the conversation, provided that the participants can all identify its referent. However, discourse novelty with indefinites is a different matter. In the Japanese translation of (16), the indefinite subject cannot appear with wa. Although it is tempting to connect this impossibility of indefinite wa-phrases to the popular view that givenness is an essential, and possibly the defining attribute of wa (e.g. Martin 1975; Makino 1982; Fiengo and McClure 2002), there are reasons to be cautious with this approach. First of all, not all given elements are wa-marked, and the aforementioned anti-topical expressions can be discourse-old but are still unable to have wa. The giveness-based theory of wa also offers very little once we consider the distribution of wa-phrases in the embedded contexts discussed in Section 37.4. In addition to some theoretical disagreements in analysing wa, we occasionally find descriptive discrepancies as well. Multiple wa-marking is one of such controversial phenomena. Kuno (1973: 48) states that ‘a given sentence can have only one thematic wa: if there is more than one occurrence of wa, only the first is thematic: all the rest … are contrastive’. Krifka and Musan (2012) also mention that a sentence typically has only one topic, which can be accounted for with the ‘file card’ analogy of aboutness topics in (12). On the other hand, Kuroda (1988) goes so far as claiming that wa is essentially iterative, which is more in line with Rizzi’s (1997) observation on topics in Italian (i.e. clitic-left-dislocated phrases). The truth is somewhere in the middle but probably closer to Kuroda’s characterization. First of all, multiple wa-phrases are quite natural when a temporal or a locative phrase is involved.10
10 Multiple frame-setting wa-phrases are possible and can appear in addition to an aboutness wa, as in (i).
(i) Sono-ken-ni
kansite-wa, boku-no iken-de-wa,
that-matter-dat concern-wa I-gen
Mari-wa kanzen-ni
muzitu-desu.
opinion-loc-wa Mari-wa certainty-dat innocent-be
‘About that matter, in my opinion, Mari is totally innocent.’
764 Satoshi Tomioka (17) a. Kinoo-wa yesterday-wa
boku-wa I-wa
kaisya-o firm-acc
yasun-da. be.absent-past
‘Yesterday, I took a day off from work.’ b. Akemi-wa Akemi-wa
Kyoto-de-wa Kyoto-loc-wa
ryokan-ni Japanese.inn-loc
tomaru. stay
‘Akemi stays in a Japanese-style inn in Kyoto. Multiple argument wa-phrases are more likely to be construed as Kuno described: the first wa is thematic, and the rest are contrastive (cf. Heycock 2008). For instance, (18a) fits this generalization. However, the multiple thematic interpretation becomes much more natural if what follows the multiple wa-phrases becomes ‘heavier’ or more descriptively loaded, as in (18b).11 (18) a. Mana-wa Mana-wa
sono-eega-wa that-movie-wa
mi-ta. see-past
‘Mana saw that movie (but perhaps not the others).’ b. Mana-wa Mana-wa
sono-eega-wa that-movie-wa
hikooki-no-naka-de airplane-gen-inside-loc
nihon-kookai-maeni Japan-showing-before mi-ta. see-past
‘Mana saw that movie in the airplane before it was shown in Japan.’ To sum up, multiple thematic wa-phrases are indeed possible and perhaps more prevalent than standardly assumed. A proper theoretical interpretation of this fact is still unclear. Krifka and Musan (2012) maintain that having one topic per sentence makes it easier to explain wa-marking in terms of the ‘file card’ metaphor. At the same time, they also acknowledge that multiple topics are possible when a relation between two files cards is commented on. Their example (Krifka and Musan 2012: 29) is As for Jack and Jill, they married last year, but the multiple wa cases shown above do not necessarily fit the profile of this kind of example. It remains to be seen how the notion of ‘a relation between two file cards’ can be extended to the Japanese multiple wa-phrases.
11 Vermeulen (2013) presents some instances of multiple wa structures in which a non-initial wa is not a topic but merely a given expression (‘discourse anaphoric’ in her term). In her examples, all of the non-initial, discourse-old wa-phrases have already been marked with the same particle in the previous contexts. Therefore, they can be described as ‘second occurrence topics’, a term inspired by ‘second occurrence focus’ (cf. Baumann, this volume).
Information Structure in Japanese 765
37.3.2 Contrastive wa The contrastive use of the particle wa is generally considered a distinct type from the thematic wa since they have a number of differences that are not easily resolved. (19) a. Wacontrast typically displays the focus prosody for contrastive focus; an f0- boost and the subsequent f0-compression. No such prosody for its thematic variant. b. Wacontrast can be attached to a discourse-new item, such as an answer to a wh-question. c. Unlike watheme, wacontrast need not be in the sentence initial position. d. While watheme can only attach to (quasi-)nominal phrases (e.g. NP, CP, PP), there is no categorical restriction for wacontrast. The following two examples are representative of the kinds of environments in which the particle is used contrastively. (20) Context: Tell me who sang what at the concert. Mari-wa aru hareta hi-ni-o, Akira-wa kiyoki aiida-o utat-ta. Mari-wa some fine day-on-acc, Akira-wa pure Aida-acc sing-past ‘Mari sang Un bel di, and Akira sang Celeste Aida.’ (21) Context: Who passed the exam? Mari-ga/-wa Mari-nom/wa With With
ga wa
ukari-mashita. pass-past ‘(It is) ‘(At least)
Mari (that) Mari
passed.’ passed.’
In (20), the two wa-phrases are contrasted with each other, and pragmatically, they seem to function as the ‘sorting keys’ in answering a multiple-wh question (cf. Kuno 1982). (21), on the other hand, does not furnish an overt expression that contrasts with the wa-phrase. It is often reported for a case like (21) that the wa-phrase contrasts with implicit alternative candidates and indicates that the other candidates would make the sentence false. However, this characterization makes the contrastive wa indistinguishable from the focalizing strategy with the canonical nominative ga, which gives, in the context described above, a complete and exhaustive answer. While the wa-version in (21) sometimes elicits the same exhaustivity effect, its meaning is much more loaded, as pointed out in Hara (2006) among others. It can indicate that the speaker does not know about the outcomes of the other students, and this is confirmed by the fact that the wa-version of (21) can be followed by such statements as ‘but I don’t know about the others’. The possibility of a weaker interpretation than
766 Satoshi Tomioka the ga-version presents a good basis for a lexicalist analysis of contrastive wa, in which the ‘at least’ meaning is conventionally encoded in the particle.12 The advocates of this type of analysis include Hara (2006), Schwarz and Shimoyama (2011), and Sawada (2013). The basic meaning of the wa-answer in (21) is, according to the lexicalist view, ‘(at least) Mari passed, and the others may or may not have passed’. It can be strengthened in some cases to the exhaustive meaning that Mari came and the others did not. However, the lexicalist view leaves a few matters unresolved. First, the correlation between the two uses of the particle is obscured. Despite the differences, there are some indications that they are, at some level, interconnected. Recall that reduced conditionals with X-nara/dattara can function as thematic topics. With focal accent, they exhibit a scalar meaning that is very similar to that of contrastive wa. (22) Sakana-wa sukizya-ari-masen-ga, SYAKE-nara/dattara fish-wa like-be-neg-but salmon-cond/cond
tabe-rare-masu. eat-can-polite
‘(I) don’t like fish, but (at least) I can eat SALMON.’ There is also a cross-linguistic factor to consider. Some languages have designated positions for topics. Hungarian, for instance, is believed to have such a position in the left periphery of a clause (cf. É. Kiss, this volume). It has been claimed that Hungarian uses this same position for contrastive topics that yield semantics/pragmatic effects that closely mirror those of contrastive wa (cf. É. Kiss 2002; Gyuris 2009). The lexicalist analysis would have virtually nothing to say about these facts. It should also be noted that the scalar interpretation of contrastive wa is very similar to a ‘weak’ scalar implicature. According to what Geurts (2010) calls ‘the standard recipe’ for generating scalar implicatures: (23)
a. The speaker S says ϕ. b. S could have made a stronger and/or more informative claim by saying ψ. c. The reason for S’s not saying ψ may well be that S fails to believe that ψ is true. d. Assuming S is knowledgeable or has a strong opinion about the truth/falsity of ψ, one can conclude that S believes that ψ is false.
The statement in (23d), called ‘Competence Assumption’ in van Rooij and Schulz (2004), is an extra step needed to generate the ‘strong’ implicature (e.g. the ‘not all’ meaning for some or most, the ‘not both’ meaning for or).13 Without it, the implicature remains weak: The speaker is unsure whether the stronger alternative ψ is true or false. 12 The scalar meaning of the contrastive topic strategy is observed in many other languages. Büring (this volume) gives an informative review of the phenomenon, focusing primarily on data from English. 13 (23d) has other names such as ‘Experthood Assumption’ (Sauerland 2004) and ‘Authority Assumption’ (Zimmermann 2000).
Information Structure in Japanese 767 This uncertainty meaning is very much like the scalar meaning of contrastive wa, but the lexicalist analysis cannot offer a good explanation for this similarity since it takes the second meaning to be conventionally encoded in wa. A possible alternative to the lexicalist analysis is a ‘mixed’ approach with both conventional and conversational meaning involved. The ‘at least’ scalar meaning of wa itself is not a part of its conventional meaning. Rather, it is a result of some inferences derived from a more general convention of the particle. Imagine, for instance, that wa conventionally signals the avoidance of the Competence Assumption, as in (24). (24) Do not apply Competence Assumption to the stronger alternatives generated by the contrastive wa. Without the Competence Assumption, the hearer is invited to entertain a variety of possible reasons for the speaker’s not making stronger statements. The speaker’s ignorance as to the stronger alternatives and her belief that such alternatives are false are both good possibilities. A non-epistemic reason is also possible. The speaker might have avoided talking about the other alternatives for reasons of politeness. The other two did not pass, and the speaker may not have wished to advertise their failure. Since the avoidance of the Competence Assumption does not mean the application of the Incompetence Assumption, the stronger meaning (the exhaustive interpretation) is not automatically ruled out either. Thus, (24) can match the interpretive possibilities of contrastive wa. This strategy is adopted in Tomioka (2010), and it is further argued that the effect of (24) is derived via the wide-scope property of a wa-marked phrase. Fox (2007) endorses a ‘grammatical theory’ of the Competence Assumption in which the strong implicature is derived by the syntactic presence of the Exhaustive Operator, Exh, that operates at the level of proposition. The role of wa is to ensure wide scope, a function shared by the thematic use of the same particle (cf. Jacobs 1984; Krifka 2001; Endriss 2009), which allows a contrastive wa-phrase to escape the exhaustification process.14
37.3.3 Negative wa Relatively lesser known is the peculiar fact concerning the appearance of wa-phrases in negative sentences and sentences with inherently negative predicates, such as kirai-da ‘dislike’ or nigate-da ‘be poor at’. McGloin (1987) reports that wa is used much more liberally in negative sentences than in affirmative sentences, and its meaning is not easy to pin down, as it seems neither thematic nor contrastive. The following pair was presented in Kuno (1973: 31) to highlight the affirmative–negative contrast.
14
See Wagner (2012) for a similar proposal.
768 Satoshi Tomioka (25)
?Watashi-wa I-wa
tabako-wa cigarette-wa
sui-mas-u. smoke-polite-pres
‘I smoke cigarettes.’ a. Watashi-wa I-wa
tabako-wa cigarette-wa
sui-mas-sen. smoke-polite-neg
‘I don’t smoke cigarettes.’ The affirmative version is quite awkward unless the second wa-phrase is contrastive with proper focus prosody (as is often the case for multiple wa-phrases). The negative counterpart, on the other hand, sounds perfectly natural without focus prosody. As noted by Oshima (2011), the lack of focus prosody presents a big challenge to the most common analysis of ‘negative’ wa: Kuno (1973), McGloin (1987), and Noda (1996) endorse the view that it is an instance of contrastive wa licensed by negation, which these authors assume intrinsically induces a sense of contrast. Oshima (2011), on the other hand, proposes a givenness-based analysis of the negative wa, as part of his hybrid analysis of wa-marking. It is indeed true that a negative wa-phrase tends to be discourse-old. Consider (26). (26) Context: We are trying to guess where Mari is from, and someone speculates that she is from Kansai. What is the reason? Datte why
ano-hito, that-person,
natto-ga/??wa natto-nom/??wa
kirai-da-kara. dislike-copula-because
‘Because she hates natto.’ The clause under because represents new information in this context, and the wa- marking in it makes it a less natural answer than its ga counterpart. However, the effect is rather weak, which is surprising since the wa/ga contrast in a discourse- new/old context is usually much stronger. The true nature of negative wa is therefore still a mystery. It is neither contrastive nor thematic and is only mildly givenness-oriented.
37.3.4 Summary We have reviewed three types of wa-phrases. They do not appear to share many properties. Indeed, differences among them are much more noticeable than similarities. The most pressing question is, therefore, whether it is still possible to find a common thread that binds the three uses together. Some are more optimistic on the prospect than others, but it is certainly a worthy research project.
Information Structure in Japanese 769
37.4 Recursivity of information structure Recursivity is one of the most fundamental properties of natural language, and syntactic embedding and the integration into compositional semantic processes are the key manifestations of it. Where does information structure stand in this respect? Among the key concepts of information structure, the embeddability of focus has not been raised as a debatable issue. A matrix-level focus (often called a sentence focus) can appear in an embedded clause, and an embedded focus can be locally ‘resolved’ by the presence of a focus-sensitive operator at the embedded level. The following is one such example. The focus on the wh-phrase is bound off by the concessive morpheme mo at the embedded level, and there is a higher focus (on karee, ‘curry’) which functions as a matrix level focus. (27) [Dono]F-mise-ni which-store-loc
itte-mo, go-MO
tanomu-no-wa order-nml-wa
itumo always
[karee]F-da. curry-copula
‘No matter which restaurant I go to, it is always curry that I order.’ Givenness expressed by prosodic reduction or by ellipsis/null anaphora applies both at the matrix and the embedded level. Perhaps, embeddability is not even a relevant question for givenness, as this notion seems to be superimposed at a higher level onto syntactic embedding and compositional semantics.15 Therefore, the most intriguing question concerning the recursivity of information structure is topic. In the present context, it translates into the question of whether a wa-phrase can be embedded. It has often been reported that thematic wa is a root phenomenon and therefore cannot be embedded (e.g. Roberts 2011) or that it can be embedded only in the complements of some attitude predicates (e.g. Heycock 2008; Vermeulen 2012; Maki et al. 1999). Such clauses are identified as ‘statement-making’ (Kuroda 2005) or ‘complements of non-factive bridge verbs’ (Maki
15 Interestingly, however, the right dislocation construction, discussed in Section 37.3, is strictly a root phenomenon. In many cases, right dislocated structures accompany sentence-final discourse particles, such as yo and ne, and those particles are not easily embedded in non-quotative contexts. One marker that can be used in both root and embedded clauses is the proposative marker (y)oo. Even with this marker, however, the embedding of a right dislocated structure is not possible.
(i) Naoki-ni mise-yoo, kono-syasin-o. Naoki-dat show-propose this-photo-acc ‘I shall show to Naoki, this photo.’ (ii) *Maya-wa [Naoki-ni mise-yoo, kono-syasin-o]-to sita. Maya-wa [Naoki-dat show-propose this-photo-acc]-comp did ‘Maya tried to show to Naoki, this photo.’
770 Satoshi Tomioka et al. 1999). Miyagawa (2012) goes beyond the criterion of ‘statement-making’, but his generalization would not allow wa-marking in clauses under the nominal koto. However, these characterizations are not entirely accurate. For instance, Wasureru ‘forget’ is a factive non-statement making verb that selects a koto-clause but can nonetheless host wa fairly comfortably, as in (28a), and (28b) shows that a question in the subject position can also have wa with a predicate that cannot possibly select a speech act or a statement. (28) a. Daremo-ga everyone-nom
[Mana-wa ninsin-site-iru]-koto-o [Mana-wa pregnant-do-be]-fact-acc
sukkari totally
wasurete-ita. forget-past ‘Everyone has completely forgotten that Mana is pregnant.’ b. [Mita-wa [Mita-wa
dare-to atte-ita-ka]-ga who-dat meet-be-Q]-nom
mondai-no kakusin-da. problem-gen core-copula
‘Who Mita had a meeting with is at the core of the conspiracy.’ Examples of these sorts are abundant, and although the nominative ga may be preferred in many cases, the wa option is definitely available.16 Although not acknowledged often, there are adjunct clauses that can host wa-phrases. One such linguistic environment is because-clauses, as discussed in Ueyama (2007), but Tomioka (2015) notes that not all because-clauses license wa, as the following examples demonstrate.17 (29) a. [Mari-wa ryoori-ga [Mari-wa cooking-nom osara-o plate-acc
suki-da-kara] fond-copula-because]
kekkoniwai-ni wedding.gift-for
age-masita. give-past
‘Because Mari likes cooking, (I) gave (her) plates for the wedding gift.’ = (Ueyama 2007 (57a)) 16 Other non-statement-making predicates that license wa include … to gokai-suru ‘misinterpret that … ’, … ka wakaru ‘know whether … ’, … koto-ga hanmei-suru ‘(the fact) that … becomes known’. In fact, there are not too many attitude predicates that clearly ban wa. Kuroda (1992) lists … koto-o zannen-ni omou ‘think of it regrettable that’ as one of the predicates incapable of licensing wa. The crucial point may not be the meaning but the form, … koto-o … ni omou. For instance, … koto-o ikan/husigi/kooun-ni omou ‘think of it regrettable/strange/fortunate that … ’ does not license wa within its complement. 17 Larson and Sawada (2012) also discuss root phenomena in because- clauses, but the distinction based on the two Davidsonian notions is not considered in their analysis. Similarly, the ‘central vs peripheral’ distinction in adverbial clauses proposed in Haegeman (2012) does not correspond to the Davidsonian categorization.
Information Structure in Japanese 771 b. *[Mari-wa koron-da-kara], [Mari-wa fall-past-because]
mae-o front-acc
arui-te-ita walk-prog-past
Ken-mo koron-da. Ken-also fall-past ‘Because Mari fell, Ken, who was walking in front of her, also fell.’ The difference between the two cases is rooted in the semantics of causation. In (29a), the because-clause specifies the basis for the speaker’s decision to send plates to Mari. This exemplifies Davidson’s (1963) notion of causal explanation, and wa-phrases can appear in this type of because-clause. (29b), on the other hand, corresponds to Davidson’s singular causal statement, where the first event caused the second event without provoking any sense of conscious decision-making processes. Other typical adjunct clauses, such as temporal adjuncts and conditionals, are generally believed to be incapable of licensing wa. (30) a. Nanako-ga/*wa Nanako-nom/*wa totemo very
sotugyoo-si-ta-toki/ato, graduate-do-past-when/after
ryoosin-wa parents-wa
yorokon-da. please-past
‘When/After Nanako graduated, her parents were very happy.’ b. Mosi Mako-ga/*wa If Mako-nom/*wa
yamere-ba, quit-IF
dareka someone
hokano-hito-ni other-person-dat
tanomu-koto-ni-naru. ask-fact-dat-become ‘If Mako quits, we will need to ask someone else.’ Surprisingly, however, there is a certain type of conditional that is more comfortable with embedded wa (cf. Tomioka 2015). The form is either no-nara or n(o)-dattara, which contains the no-da ‘nml+copula’ component in its structure. This type of conditional can be used in a very specialized situation. Someone asserts p. The addressee is, however, still not 100 per cent certain about p and makes a statement of the form if (indeed) p, then q.18
18 This
is what Iatridou (1991) calls factual conditional. See Bhatt and Pancheva (2006) for more discussion on factual conditionals and related phenomena.
772 Satoshi Tomioka (31) Context: Someone said that Kei recently got divorced. Mosi if
hontooni indeed
Kei-wa Kei-wa
rikon-sita-no-nara, divorce-did-nml-IF
ryoosin-wa parents-wa
kanasigatte-iru-daroo. sad-be-evid ‘If Kei indeed got divorced, his parents must be unhappy.’ This fact conforms with the observation by Haegeman (2002, 2010) that this type of conditional, which Haegeman calls ‘peripheral conditional’, can host such root phenomena as argument fronting, long-distance adverbial fronting, and the presence of high modal markers. So far, three embedding contexts have been identified as wa-friendly: (i) complement clauses of attitude verbs, (ii) because-clauses of the causal explanation type, and (iii) no- da-based conditionals. Tomioka (2015) suggests that the crucial characteristic that sets (i)–(iii) apart from other embedded clauses is the local presence of a point of view (cf. Tenny 2006). It is easy to imagine that a complement CP of an attitude verb furnishes a point of view that is identified with the attitude holder ( = the matrix subject). When a because-clause is used as a causal explanation, the agent in the matrix clause event believes the complement of because. In (29a), for instance, the sender of the wedding gift ( = the speaker) believes that Mari likes cooking. The presence of such a propositional attitude is not entailed in the other type of because. A no-da conditional is often used when the proposition within the if-clause has just been asserted by someone. In (31), the conditional can be paraphrased as ‘if Kei got divorced, as you said’, where the embedded proposition is presented with the addressee’s point of view. Needless to say, a root clause has a point of view, which is most frequently identified as the speaker of the sentence. Those who claim that wa is a root phenomenon consider wa-embedding clauses to be ‘root-like’. The presence of a point of view is what makes an embedded clause ‘root- like’ enough for wa, although the new generalization of embedded wa makes it unclear whether it makes sense to maintain the ‘wa as a root phenomenon’ label.19 19 One exception to the new generalization is relative clauses. In many cases, they do not license wa even when the point of view condition is met. To account for this exception, Tomioka (2015) proposes a ban on semantically meaningful abstraction over wa, appealing to Kuroda’s (1992) notion of predication. The embeddability of contrastive wa is not too different from its thematic counterpart. It can appear in complements of attitude predicates, and Hara (2006) notices the same contrast in the two types of because-clauses for contrastive wa. Other embedding environments are less certain. Kuroda (2005), for instance, claims that a conditional can host contrastive wa, but this judgement is not shared by everyone (e.g. Hara 2006). Hara (2006) also claims that relative clauses fail to host contrastive wa, but there have been some grammatical examples reported. Tomioka (2015) maintains that a relative clause like [NP [CP e EEgo-WA hanas-eru] hito] ‘a person who can speak (at least) ENGLISH’ is quite acceptable. Oshima (2011) presents a relative clause example which embeds a conjoined sentence in which each conjunct has the subject marked with contrastive wa. Negative wa is more widespread. It can appear in a conditional or a relative clause (e.g. [NP [CP e eego-wa hanas-e-nai] hito] ‘a person who cannot speak English’). See Tomioka (2015: appendix) for more discussion.
Information Structure in Japanese 773
37.5 Conclusion The readers of this chapter should not be overly disappointed to learn that very few issues connected to Japanese information structure are settled. This state of affairs certainly does not reflect the lack of interest or effort. On the contrary, it proves the popularity of this intriguing research area and the diversity of the research endeavours engaged in the field. The Japanese language has also been a major player in the theorization of information structure in general, particularly in the area of topicality. There are clear indications that studies of information structure will continue to evolve and expand. Japanese is hardly an understudied language for information structure-related studies, but it still offers a rich empirical ground for exploration. It is my hope that the inclusion of this chapter in the handbook will further stimulate research interest in this exciting area.
Chapter 38
In f orm ation st ru c t u re in Asia Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan) and Vietnamese (Austroasiatic) Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle
38.1 Introduction The present chapter is intended to be complementary with the overview of information structure (IS) in Chinese by Chen et al. (this volume).1 Neither of the two languages presented in this chapter, Yongning Na and Hanoi Vietnamese, belongs to the small set of ‘canonically exotic languages’ (Matisoff 1973: xlv), such as Japanese, which are often discussed in the literature, so their inclusion in a textbook can be seen as a modest contribution towards broadening the empirical basis of IS research. Moreover, these two languages differ sharply in the way they convey IS, providing an illustration of the great diversity found among languages of Asia. ‘Information structure is a vast topic of research that has been pursued within different theoretical frameworks’ (Krifka 2008: 244), and with different objectives in view. While we have adhered to the framework set by Krifka (2008), we are keenly aware that cross-linguistic categories can only capture a small part of IS (see Matić and Wedgwood 2013, and the general discussion by Haspelmath 2007); we have accordingly stated our observations in terms that we hope can easily be interpreted by
1 Many thanks to the Na and Vietnamese consultants and friends, and to the editors and reviewers. Financial support from Agence Nationale de la Recherche (HimalCo project, ANR- 12-C ORP-0006, and LabEx EFL, ANR-10-L ABX-0083—Investissements d’Avenir) is gratefully acknowledged.
INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN YONGNING NA AND VIETNAMESE 775 readers working within different theoretical frameworks. Our view of IS is that it is not to be viewed as a separate ‘module’, but as part and parcel of language as communicative activity. IS ‘cannot be described without referring to the strategies used to narrate events or make arguments’ (Krifka 2008: 272; see also Karcevskij 1931: 191; Kohler 2009; Horn, this volume). The chapter consists of two sections looking in detail at the two languages Yongning Na and Hanoi Vietnamese. Each of the two sections deals with topics, focus, and givenness.
38.2 Yongning Na Yongning Na is a language of the Naish subgroup of Sino-Tibetan (Jacques and Michaud 2011). It has typologically salient characteristics, many of which are shared with other Sino-Tibetan languages.
38.2.1 Topics 38.2.1.1 Word Order The following generalization about Qiang proposed by Lapolla and Huang (2003) also applies to Yongning Na: The structure of the clause is to some extent affected by pragmatic factors, but this only applies to the order of noun phrases in the clause. The utterance-initial position is the unmarked topic position (though secondary topics can follow the primary topic), while the position immediately before the verb is the unmarked focus position, and so the focused element will generally appear there. The verb always appears in final position; there is no possibility for the actor of a clause to appear in postverbal position, even if it is focal. The only exception to this is the occasional afterthought clarification of a noun phrase that was omitted or expressed as a pronoun in the clause. (LaPolla and Huang 2003: 221)
IS in Na has accordingly been described as ‘topic–comment’, extending an observation made by Chao Yuen-ren about Chinese: ‘the grammatical meaning of subject and predicate in a Chinese sentence is topic and comment, rather than actor and action’ (Chao Yuen-ren 1968: 69; Shi 2000; LaPolla 2009). The primary information structure in Na is topic/comment rather than subject/ predicate… . a topic can be a nominal argument, about which the rest of the sentence will comment upon, but the topic can also be an adverbial, an independent clause, or a dependent clause. (Lidz 2010: 296)
776 Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle Word order thus plays an important role in the structuring of IS in Na. Example (1) provides an illustration.2 Sentence (1) is translated with a conditional, illustrating the proximity between topics and conditionals (Haiman 1978). (1) le˧-dzɯ˥ ǀ bi˧mi˧ go˩3 le˧- accomp
dzɯ˥ eat
bi˧mi˧ stomach
go˩ ache (verb)
‘If [you] eat [of it], [your] stomach [will] hurt!’ (Field notes, speaker F4. Isolated sentence transcribed on the fly. Context: on the mountain, pointing out a berry that is not edible.)
38.2.1.2 Discourse Particles Conveying IS Yongning Na is similar to a number of other Sino-Tibetan languages in possessing a wealth of discourse particles that contribute to the structuring of information. Pinpointing the exact range of uses of particles can be a thorny task, given their various connotations and rich compositional potential. Grammars that address these issues in detail are available for Lahu (Matisoff 1973), Lalo (Björverud 1998), and Qiang (LaPolla and Huang 2003). Particles stand at different points along the path towards use as ‘pure’ information-structure markers. In Na, a few particles are exclusively used for the marking of IS, such as the topic marker /-dʑo˩/; others are about as commonly used as (bleached) information-structure markers and in another function, such as demonstratives; others still are used secondarily to indicate IS, in particular particles indicating the relationship that a noun phrase bears to a verb (thematic relations). In (1), the topic marker /-dʑo˩/does not appear; a plausible reason is that in this context (after a verb preceded by the accomplished morpheme /le˧-/) /-dʑo˩/would be interpreted as the progressive, which is homophonous with the topic marker. In the second sentence in (2), on the other hand, the topic marker /-dʑo˩/appears as expected: 2 Unless specified otherwise, the examples provided in the chapter have been collected by the authors or coined and double-checked with native speakers. Apart from example (1), all the Yongning Na examples are drawn from a set of twenty narratives; the recordings are available online with time- aligned transcriptions through the Pangloss Collection (Michailovsky et al. 2014). The reference to these texts is provided in the following format: .. For instance, Housebuilding.259 refers to sentence 259 of the narrative ‘Housebuilding’, and Seeds2.67 refers to sentence 67 in the second version of the narrative ‘Seeds’. The numbering of sentences is indicated in the online display of the texts. Glossing follows the Leipzig Glossing Rules, with the following additions to the core set of standard abbreviations: accomp for accomplished; advb for adverbializer; certitude for an epistemic value of the copula in Yongning Na; and exist for existential verbs. 3 The vertical bar ǀ indicates a juncture between tone groups; about the division of utterances into tone groups in Yongning Na, see Section 38.2.3.2. Tone is indicated by means of International Phonetic Alphabet tone letters placed after the syllable at issue: ˥ for High, ˧ for Mid, ˩ for Low, and the combinations for Low-to-High and for Mid-to-High; for a presentation of the Yongning Na tone system, see Michaud (2013).
INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN YONGNING NA AND VIETNAMESE 777 (2) kʰv˧mæ˧-ʈʂʰɯ˧-ɳɯ˩, ǀ hĩ˧-bv˧, ǀ ə˧tso˧ do˩, ǀ ə˧tso˧ ʈʂæ˧-ɲi˥-ze˩! ǀ qæ˧do˧ do˩- dʑo˩ ǀ qæ˧do˧ qæ ! kʰv˧mæ˧ bandit do˩ see -dʑo˩ top
-ʈʂʰɯ˥ top(/dem.prox)
ə˧tso˧ interrog.what qæ˧do˧ lumber
ʈʂæ rob
-ɳɯ abl/a/top
hĩ˥ person
-bv poss
ə˧tso˧ interrog.what
ɲi˩ -ze qæ˧do˧ do˩ cert_str(cop) pfv lumber see
qæ burn
‘Bandits steal people’s [belongings]: whatever they spot, they will steal! (=Bandits steal whatever belongings of a person they see.) If they spot lumber, they will burn it!’ (Housebuilding.259) In the first sentence in (2), ‘robbers’ is strongly brought to the fore through the combination of /-ʈʂʰɯ˥/ and /-ɳ ɯ/. These two particles help to indicate that the preceding noun has the status of topic; on the other hand, /-ɳɯ/ and /-ʈ ʂʰɯ˥/are often associated with the topic marker /-dʑo˩/, highlighting the fact that they are not yet fully grammaticalized as topic markers. The marker /-ʈʂʰɯ˥/was grammaticalized from a proximal demonstrative, also used as a 3rd-person pronoun, with which it remains formally identical. The postposition /-ɳɯ/is an ablative marker, which has developed into an agent marker (Lidz 2011:53; for observations on similar developments in neighbouring languages: LaPolla 1995; on the use of case markers to convey IS, see also the alternation between ergative and absolutive in Newari: Genetti 1988). A close examination of cases of use of /-ɳɯ/as an agent marker reveal that it is fairly rare for there to be true ambiguity as to semantic roles, however, see Lidz (2011: 55). Cases like (2) are common: the agent marker functions prominently as an IS indication. From a lexicographic point of view, it is an issue whether to set up a distinct subentry. It appears appropriate to set up three subentries for the morpheme /-ʈʂʰɯ˥/, since its uses as a proximal demonstrative, as a third person pronoun and as a topic marker are by now relatively well-differentiated. The three glosses used are dem.prox, 3sg, and top(/dem.prox): the latter combines an indication of the particle’s IS function (topic marker) with an indication of its origin as a proximal demonstrative. On the other hand, the use of /-ɳɯ/as an IS marker does not currently appear highly grammaticalized; omission of this particle from (2) would not modify the IS in any spectacular way, even though it would lend less salience to the topic. It therefore does not appear warranted to set up a distinct subentry; the three uses of /-ɳ ɯ/—as ablative, agent, and topic marker—are therefore indicated side by side in the gloss, in the hypothesized order of diachronic development: abl/a/top. In addition to /-dʑo˩/, /-ʈʂʰɯ˥/, and /-ɳ ɯ/, there exist three less frequently occurring topic markers, whose origin remains unclear. One is an archaic word, /-læ˧/, appearing only once in the recorded data. The two others are /-no /and /-se/, which can only
778 Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle apply to a noun phrase, whereas the other topic markers can bear on a noun phrase or an entire clause. Examination of the contexts of appearance of /-no / and /-se/ brings out the presence of strong emphasis on the topicalized element in contrast to others: a possible translation is ‘as for X/as concerns X’. These two morphemes can be described as contrastive topic markers (Krifka 2008: 267).
38.2.2 Focus Focus in Yongning Na is conveyed by local phenomena of intonational emphasis. The discussion progresses from emphatic stress to less extreme cases of intonational emphasis.
38.2.2.1 Emphatic Stress Emphatic stress is found in Yongning Na. It appears to have essentially the same function as in English and French—calling the attention of the listener to a particular word—hence the choice of this label (proposed by Coustenoble and Armstrong 1937). In the languages where emphatic stress has been experimentally investigated, it has been found that prototypical realizations involve supplementary activity of the expiratory muscles, resulting in a sudden increase in subglottal pressure during the articulation of a consonant (Benguerel 1973; Carton et al. 1976; Ohala 1978; Fant et al. 1996), hence the term ‘force-accent’ used by Kohler (2003). Acoustically, this exerts an influence on spectral slope (Rossi 1971: 143; Glave and Rietveld 1975; Gobl 1988; Fant and Kruckenberg 1995; Sluijter et al. 1997; Heldner 2003). Emphatic stress has been somewhat neglected in intonation studies, as researchers focused their attention mostly on the acoustic parameter of fundamental frequency. But it is an important component of intonation, in Na as well as in a number of other languages. Its linguistic functions range from the attitudinal and emotional to the pragmatic. It is most often encountered in toned-down versions, physiological effort at a subglottal level being mimicked through such strategies as f0 excursions and consonant lengthening. Like other linguistic phenomena, emphatic stress comprises important language-specific and speech-style-specific dimensions: its frequency of use varies greatly from language to language, from speaker to speaker, and from style to style; its stylistic effect is inversely proportional to its frequency of use. An ‘up’ arrow ↑ to mark intonational emphasis is adopted for the Na data, following Mazaudon (2004). The arrow is placed to the left of the emphasized syllable, as in (3). (3) tʰi , | ə˧mv˧-ʝi˥-hĩ˩ ǀ -dʑo˩, | ↑zo˧ ɲi˥-tsɯ˩ | -mv˩. tʰi then
ə˧mv older_sibling
zo˥ boy/son
ɲi˩ cop
-tsɯ rep
ʝi˥ do
hĩ nmlz.agt
-dʑo˩ top
-mv affirm
‘The elder [of the two siblings] was a boy.’ (Sister.5)
INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN YONGNING NA AND VIETNAMESE 779 In many contexts, emphatic stress appears on a constituent that can be predicted to receive normal focus prosody. For example, in (3), we would expect the focus to be in the immediate preverbal position—the usual unmarked focus position for verb-final languages. Emphatic stress can be considered an extreme form of focus prosody; it is an extreme along a continuum: there is no hard-and-fast boundary between emphatic stress and milder realizations of focus prosody. When annotating recordings, it is sometimes an issue whether to add an ‘up’ arrow ↑ or not. The phonetic realization of emphatic stress includes effects on the articulation of vowels and consonants and also partakes in the realization of emphatic stress: for instance, the second syllable of the verb /dʑɤ˩↑bv˥/‘to play’ is realized in Caravans.231 with a much stronger trilling of the /b/than is found in non-emphatic contexts. (About ‘articulatory prosodies’, see Niebuhr 2009, 2013; Kohler and Niebuhr 2011.) Emphatic stress is phonetically located on one syllable only, but from the point of view of interpretation, there is ambiguity of focus-marking. This phenomenon is extensively studied in the literature on focus projection (e.g. Selkirk 1995); Lambrecht uses the terms ‘broad focus’ vs ‘narrow focus’ (Lambrecht 1994). In its most vehement manifestations, emphatic stress intrudes into a sentence’s intonation, wreaking havoc on tonal contrasts. Example (4) is a case in point. (4) pʰv˩-tɕæ˥ɻæ˩-gv˩-kv˩-ze˩-mæ˩ pʰv˩-tɕæ˩ɻæ˥ very_white
gv˩ prepare
kv abilitive
-ze accomp
-mæ affirm
‘[after boiling, linen thread] can become really white!’ (FoodShortage.73) The usual pronunciation is /pʰv˩-tɕæ˩ɻæ˥/‘very white’. In (4), the second syllable is realized phonetically with extremely high fundamental frequency on the syllable /tɕæ˩/, which is considerably lengthened. From a phonetic point of view, its phonetic L tone is conspicuously disregarded. One way of looking at this modification would be to describe it as due to an intonational overlay: functionally, one could consider transcribing it as /pʰv˩-↑tɕæ˩ɻæ˥-gv˩/, where the arrow ↑ indicates emphatic stress on the second syllable, and the underlying tonal string is unchanged. The lowering of the syllable string /ɻæ-gv-…/would then be ascribed to post-focal pitch range compression. Another interpretation is that this forcible intonational modification interacts with the phonological tone string of the tone group (on this notion: see Section 38.2.3.2). If the modification of the second syllable in /pʰv˩-tɕæ˩ɻæ˥-gv˩/only took place on an intonational level, and the underlying tonal string remained unchanged, the third syllable would retain its phonological H tone. Discussions with the consultant who produced this story suggest that the third and fourth syllables in (4) are lowered to L, however, yielding /… ɻæ˩-gv˩/, as expected if the second syllable carried H tone: the lowering of all tones to L after an H tone is an exceptionless tone rule of Yongning Na. At present, no truly decisive evidence on this issue can be offered; if the speakers could write their language, it would be interesting to see which solution they would prefer, but so far there
780 Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle has not yet been any opportunity to work with a consultant who had metalinguistic awareness. This phenomenon is provisionally analysed as involving a categorical tone change, from a L.L.H sequence, /pʰv˩-tɕæ˩ɻæ˥/, to a L.H.L sequence, /pʰv˩-tɕæ˥ɻæ˩/.
38.2.2.2 Focalization Through a Dipping Contour In Yongning Na, one means of emphasizing a word within a sentence consists in a rapid dipping contour, as in example (5). Focalization through a dipping contour is compatible with emphatic stress, but formally distinct from it. (5) hĩ˧-ki˧ ǀ ɖɯ˧-kʰwɤ˥ F ǀ mə˧-pi˥ hĩ˥ person
ki to
ɖɯ˧-kʰwɤ˥ 1-clf_pieces
mə neg
pi˥ say
‘(S)he did not say anything to the people present! /(S)he did not greet anyone!’ (Field notes, 2009) The phenomenon marked as ‘F’, for ‘intonational Focalization’, is an intonational device to set part of the utterance into relief. It is realized through a dip in fundamental frequency, accompanied by lengthening and formant movement towards a central vowel. The realization of focalization is sufficiently specific—involving a movement in fundamental frequency, and a change in the vowel: a difference in the time course of formant frequencies—to avoid interference with lexical tone. Emphatic stress is likewise identifiable as such, from cues other than fundamental frequency. This greatly limits the possibility of a misperception of lexical tone caused by these intonational phenomena. (An example is found in Healing.55.)
38.2.3 Givenness 38.2.3.1 Referential Density One of the means for backgrounding information in Yongning Na consists simply in not making any mention of it. This holds true of any language, but is especially salient in Yongning Na. Referential density—the ratio of overt to possible argument NPs (Bickel 2003)—is low in many languages of the Tibeto-Burman area. The active referent, known from the earlier context, serves as given, without being mentioned (Mazaudon 2003 on Tamang). Yongning Na does not require pronouns to stand in place of the pragmatically inferable noun phrases, as illustrated by (1); this can be referred to as a case of ‘Pro-Drop’ (for Pronoun Dropping; Chomsky 1981), but as pointed out by Launey (1994: 45, 93), the perspective could just as well be reversed, considering languages that require overt NP arguments as a special case (widely represented in Western Europe: Haspelmath 2001). There is a limit to economy in referential density, however. For instance, in example (2), one could be tempted to push referential economy further and—in
INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN YONGNING NA AND VIETNAMESE 781 addition to ellipsis of the subject argument—to avoid the repetition of the object /qæ˧do˧/‘lumber’. However, it is not acceptable to remove the second /qæ˧do˧/ ‘lumber’: when this manipulation was attempted, the result, shown in (2′), was rejected by the consultant. (2’) *qæ˧do˧ do˩-dʑo˩, ǀ qæ qæ˧do˧ lumber
do˩ see
-dʑo˩ top
qæ burn
Intended meaning: ‘If they spot lumber, they will burn it!’ (adapted from Housebuilding.259) This probably has to do with several factors. First, there exist numerous homophonous roots, following monosyllabicization and phonological erosion (Michaud 2012); lexical identification can be difficult for a monosyllabic verb without an object. A second factor that may be at play is rhythm and the overall symmetry of the utterance (what see, what rob; lumber see, lumber burn). A third factor, certainly not the least important, concerns IS: ‘(they) burn lumber’ is the focal information, so it would be inappropriate to give it a less complete representation than other components of the utterance. Cross-linguistically, there is a closer syntactic integration of object and verb, as compared with subject and verb; this goes a long way towards explaining why all languages that allow Object Pro-Drop also allow Subject Pro-Drop, whereas the reverse is not true.
38.2.3.2 How Prosodic Phrasing Reflects Information Structure: The Division of the Utterance into Tone Groups A salient characteristic of Yongning Na is the interaction of IS and morphotonology. Yongning Na possesses abundant tonal morphology, comparable in its extent to the segmental morphology found in the (very distantly related) Kiranti languages (Jacques et al. 2012; Jacques 2012). For instance, the determinative compound /ʐwæ˧zo˧-gv˧dv˥/ ‘colt’s back’ has a final H tone, whereas the coordinative compound ‘father and mother’, which has the same input tones, is /ə˧dɑ˧-ə˧mi#˥/, with a floating H tone (a tone which can only associate to a following syllable; it is represented as #˥). The floating H tone on ‘father and mother’ is not by itself a marker of the morphological status of the compound as being coordinative rather than determinative: not all determinative compounds share the same tone pattern, any more than coordinative compounds do. The output tone depends on the input tones, but different rules apply in determinative compounds and in coordinative compounds. The tone rules that apply when combining an object with a verb are likewise different from those that apply when combining a subject with a verb. A systematic study of numeral-plus-classifier determiners brings out no less than nine categories with different tone patterns (Michaud 2013). The tone group is the domain within which these abundant morphophonological tone rules apply: each utterance consists of one or more tone groups; tonal computation takes place separately in each tone group. The phenomena that refer to this domain are exclusively tonal: they
782 Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle consist of tone rules, in particular the following seven rules: (i) L tone spreads progressively (‘left-to-right’) onto syllables that are unspecified for tone; (ii) syllables that remain unspecified for tone after the application of Rule 1 receive M tone; (iii) H and M are neutralized to M in tone-group-initial position; (iv) a syllable following an H-tone syllable receives L tone; (v) all syllables following an HL or ML sequence receive L tone; (vi) LH and LM contours on a tone-group-final syllable are neutralized to LH; and (vii) if a tone group only contains L tones, a post-lexical H tone is added to its last syllable. As illustrated by examples (6)–(9), different divisions into tone groups have different implications in terms of prominence of the various components. Tone groups may be considered as constituting one phonological phrase each; changes in phonological phrasing serve to highlight a certain element, lending it focal prominence. (The term ‘tone group’ is nonetheless used here in preference to ‘prosodic phrase’; the defining characteristic of this phonological unit is that it serves as the domain of tonal processes.) A tone group boundary is always found after topicalized phrases; but apart from this hard-and-fast rule, speakers generally have several options for dividing the utterance into tone groups. They may choose to integrate large chunks of speech into a single tone group, resulting in a stronger integration; or they may divide the utterance into a number of tone groups, with the stylistic effect of emphasizing these individual components one after the other. The latter option is illustrated by (6): (6) dzɯ˧-di ǀ mə˧-dʑo˧, ǀ ʈʰɯ˩-di ǀ mə˧-dʑo˧ dzɯ˥ eat
-di mə nmlz neg
dʑo˧ ʈʰɯ˩b exist drink
-di nmlz
mə neg
dʑo˧ exist
‘[Before mankind had learnt to grow crops], there was nothing to eat and nothing to drink!’ (Seeds2.67) The noun phrase /dzɯ˧-di /‘food’ and the negated existential verb /mə˧-dʑo˧/ ‘there isn’t’ can be separated into two tone groups, as in (6). This has the effect of emphasizing the two noun phrases, /dzɯ˧-di /‘food; thing to eat’ and /ʈʰɯ˩-di˩/‘drink; beverage’. The following sentence in the story repeats the statement ‘There was no food’, continuing the same strategy of bringing out the noun phrase ‘food’, this time with the topic marker /-dʑo˩/: /dzɯ˧-di ǀ -dʑo˩, ǀ mə˧-dʑo˧-ɲi˥-tsɯ˩ ǀ -mv˩/‘As for food, it’s said that there was none!’ (Seeds2.68). Then the narrator recapitulates, and moves on: (7) dzɯ˧-di˧ mə˧-dʑo˧˥ ǀ -dʑo˩ ǀ tʰi … dzɯ˥ eat
-di nmlz
mə neg
dʑo˧ exist
-dʑo˩ top
tʰi so/then
‘As there was nothing to eat, …’ (the narrative moves on to: ‘there were some exceptional, smart people, who stood up and did something about it’) (Seeds2.69)
INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN YONGNING NA AND VIETNAMESE 783 At this juncture, ‘there was no food’ is integrated into a single tone group, and followed by the topic marker /-dʑo˩/. This provides an exemplary illustration of the integration of larger chunks of information into a single tone group as this information changes its status from new to old and backgrounded. Conversely, insertion of a tone-group boundary highlights the word or phrase that precedes. Even function words can be emphasized in this way. Consider (8): (8) ɬo˧pv˥-ti˩-kv˩ ǀ -tsɯ ǀ -mv˩! ɬo˧pv˥ kow-tow
ti˩ hit
kv -tsɯ abilitive rep
-mv affirm
‘It is said that [on that occasion, the whole family] will kow-tow!’ (Sister3.138) A simpler formulation would be /ɬo˧pv˥-ti˩-kv˩-tsɯ˩-mv˩/, integrating the passage into a single tone group. The formulation in (8) emphasizes the reported-speech particle. This particle is used over and over again by the consultant when telling narratives: it is used whenever the speaker has only indirect knowledge of the situation at issue. But in the context of (8), the emphasis laid on this particle is one of the manifestations of the speaker’s efforts to adhere to truthfulness and precision: the narrator never witnessed the ritual that she describes. The particle could be paraphrased, in this context, as: ‘at least, that’s what they say’, or ‘but I can’t personally vouch for it: this is just hearsay, you know’. As a final example, consider (9): (9) kʰv˩mi˩-ʂe , ǀ dzɯ˧-mə˧-ɖo˧-pi˧-zo˥! kʰv˩mi˩-ʂe˩ dog-meat
dzɯ˥ eat
mə˧ neg
ɖo˧ ought_to
pi˥ say
zo advb
‘It is said that one must not eat dog meat! /It is said that dog meat is something one must not eat!’ (Dog2.37) In (9), the noun phrase ‘dog meat’ is set into relief by constituting a tone group on its own. Despite the absence of a morphemic indication that it is topicalized, it clearly has the status of topic. In this context, tonal integration with a following verb would not be stylistically appropriate. This is parallel to prosodic grouping in English: the phrase ‘the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’ contains three lexical stresses, but someone who is familiar with the place is likely to pronounce it (when not using the acronym ‘MIT’) as one single prosodic phrase, integrating the three stressed words and two grammatical words into a single fundamental frequency contour. (On a similar phenomena in French, see, among other descriptions, Vaissière 1975; Rossi 1999; Vaissière and Michaud 2006; Martin 2009.)
784 Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle
38.3 Vietnamese 38.3.1 Topics Like Yongning Na, Vietnamese tends to favour a topic+comment order (Thompson 1965: ch. 10; note that what the author calls ‘focal elements’ corresponds to Krifka’s ‘topic’; see also: Cao 1992; Clark 1992, 1996). The relevance of word order for topicmarking can be illustrated by a variety of passive-like structures. As these structures are described in more detail elsewhere (Simpson and Hồ 2013), a single example is given in (10). While in (10a) police is the topic, in (10b) it is Hoa that is topicalized. (10) a. Cảnh sát giao thông bắt Hoa gần cầu Long Biên. cảnh sát police
giao thông transportation
bắt catch
Hoa Hoa
gần near
cầu bridge
Long Biên Long Biên
‘The traffic police caught Hoa near Long Biên bridge.’ b. Hoa bị cảnh sát giao thông bắt gần cầu Long Biên. Hoa Hoa
bị neg.exp
cầu bridge
cảnh sát police
giao thông transportation
bắt catch
gần near
Long Biên Long Biên
‘Hoa was caught by the traffic police near Long Biên bridge.’ Another frequent topicalization strategy is pause insertion, as in (11). This strategy is not necessarily associated with a special focus, although such an interpretation is not ruled out if focus is marked intonationally (see Section 38.3.2). A sentence such as (11) could not be expressed in Na without using information-structure morphemes: (11) Măng cụt, ai cũng thích. măng cụt mangosteen
____ top
ai who
cũng also
thích like
‘Everybody likes mangosteens.’ A strategy very similar to pause insertion, if more rare, is the use of the equative copula là to mark a neutral type of topic in sentences like (12). Here, the fact that everybody likes mangosteens is merely indexed under the entry mangosteen in the common ground, without any special emphasis. Once again, focus could be intonationally assigned to the topic, but this is not a common strategy.
INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN YONGNING NA AND VIETNAMESE 785 (12) Măng cụt là ai cũng thích. măng cụt mangosteen
là top(cop)
ai who
cũng also
thích like
‘Everybody likes mangosteens’. More interestingly, Vietnamese has a contrastive topic marker, thì, which, as in (13), serves a role comparable to the topic marker /-dʑo˩/in Na. This topic marker has the effect of contrasting the topic with its alternatives, which Clark (1992) analysed as an attributive meaning. (13) Măng cụt thì ai cũng thích. măng cụt mangosteen
thì top
ai who
cũng also
thích like
‘Everybody likes mangosteens (as opposed to other fruits)’. Thì can also be used after an entire sentence, but in that case, it does not clearly serve to rule out alternative interpretations. In (14), for instance, thì is used to set a piece of information as a common ground explaining the following clause (and is glossed as ‘so’). As pointed out by Cao (1992: 141), there does not appear to be a clear cut-off point between the contrastive and non-contrastive uses of thì. (14) Hôm qua Phương đi chợ thì hôm nay ở nhà. hôm qua yesterday
Phương Phương
đi go
chợ market
thì so
hôm nay today
ở stay
nhà home
‘Yesterday, Phương went to the market, so today she stays at home’. When the topic is co-referential with the subject, the use of an anaphoric pronoun in the subject position can also be used to focus it. This is illustrated in (15): (15) Tây, nó không biết dỗ con. tây West
nó 3
không neg
biết know
dỗ soothe
con child
‘Westerners don’t know how to soothe their children’ (as opposed to the Vietnamese) Other markers can be used for contrastive topicalization in Vietnamese, such as còn ‘as for, and lại ‘on the other hand’. In the same way as their English equivalents, these two
786 Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle expressions are only possible if alternatives have explicitly been set into the common ground in previous clauses. Vietnamese sentences can have multiple topics as in (16). While we would not analyse là as a topic/theme marker, but rather as an equative/identification copula (contrary to Cao 1992, but following Clark 1996), the first two constituents are nonetheless both topicalized. (16) Ở Tokyo thì máy này mỗi cái là năm ngàn. ở Tokyo thì máy này ___ mỗi cái là năm In Tokyo top machine this top each clf cop five
ngàn thousand
‘In Tokyo (as opposed to other places), these machines are five thousand each.’ (Modified from Cao 1992: 147).
38.3.2 Focus Experimental work on the phonetic realization of information structure in Vietnamese is limited to the realization of pragmatic focus (Jannedy 2007) or corrective focus (Michaud and Vu-Ngoc 2004; Michaud 2005). These studies reveal that these two forms of in-situ focus are realized by most, but not all, speakers as an f0 increase on the target constituent (Michaud 2005; Jannedy 2007) and a hyperarticulation of voice quality (Michaud 2005). Duration and intensity are even more speaker-specific. From this, we can conclude that Vietnamese does not have a single grammaticalized means of marking contrastive focus, but that speakers pick and choose from a pool of hyperarticulation strategies. Jannedy (2007) also shows that although listeners can identify focused constituents, their performance is generally poor, and even more so for broad scope focus (entirely VP or entire sentence). The only other explicit proposal for a phonetic marking of IS in Vietnamese is Thompson (1965). In his section 12.5, Thompson describes a three-way stress system in which: By far the great majority of syllables are accompanied by medium stress; it is deviation from this in either direction which marks a particular form as conveying an especial heavy or light load in conveying information. In general, weak stress signals information already known or obvious in the context; heavy stress signals new or contrastive information. (Thompson 1965: 287)
More details are given in Thompson’s following subsections (12.51 and 12.52), but he does not explicitly address the issue of the phonetic nature of stress in Vietnamese, and many (if not most) of his examples of stress notation fail to coincide with native speaker’s intuitions (regardless of the dialect). In the end, a close look at Thompson’s examples suggest that he is conflating several types of prominence: 1. Grammatical words seem to have reduced phonetic prominence, while lexical words do not.
INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN YONGNING NA AND VIETNAMESE 787 2. As discussed above, contrastive focus seems to be marked by means of increased prominence. The existence of a prosodically-marked new information focus (phonetically identical or distinct from contrastive focus) is less clear. 3. Like many languages (Beckman and Edwards 1990; Turk and Shattuck-Hufnagel 2000), Vietnamese shows phrase-final lengthening. The nature of the phrasal domains that condition this lengthening is still unclear, as is the exact amount of phonetic lengthening involved. In any case, it is likely that this final-lengthening effect provides cues to prosodic phrasing, which in turn plays a role in conveying of IS (see the examples of pause insertion in Section 38.3.1). A systematic description of the intonational marking of focus thus remains to be undertaken. However, besides in-situ intonational focus, two other strategies are used to mark pragmatic focus. The first one is the use of contrastive topicalization (with marker thì) or of a topic followed by a resumptive pronoun, already described in Section 38.3.1. The second is the use of cái as a focus marker (Nguyễn 2004, 2013; Simpson and Hồ 2013). Although cái is normally used as a classifier, it also serves as a focus marker, and as such, always precedes a classifier or a mensural noun. Although cái usually conveys the idea of a negative emphasis, as in (17), Nguyễn (2004) also gives examples devoid of this negative connotation. (17) Cái con chó của hàng xóm sủa suốt đêm thì cả nhà mất ngủ. cái top nhà house
con clf mất lose
chó dog
của pass
hàng xóm neighbour
sủa bark
suốt entire
đêm night
thì so
cả all
ngủ sleep
‘The neighbour’s damn dog barked all night so the whole family lost sleep’. Vietnamese also has focus-sensitive particles like thậm chí/đến ‘even’, cả ‘also’ and chỉ/mỗi ‘only’ that indicate semantic focus (Hole 2013). Each of these focus-sensitive particles is associated with another particle introducing information that is already part of the common ground. In the case of thậm chí, đến ‘even’ and cả ‘also’, the cũng particle is mandatory, as in (18). In the case of chỉ ‘only’, the particle mới is optional, as in (19). A full discussion of these focus-sensitive particles can be found in Hole (2013), from which we take up the notion of background particle, which we label bg. Another focus-sensitive particle with a more limited scope is sentence-final không ‘only’ (Brunelle et al. 2012). (18) Cả Hàn Quốc cũng ăn thịt chó. cả foc_even
Hàn Quốc Korean
‘Even Koreans eat dog meat.’
cũng bg_even/also
ăn eat
thịt meat
chó dog
788 Alexis Michaud and Marc Brunelle (19) Mỗi người Việt (mới) ăn thịt nhím. mỗi foc_only
người clf
Việt Vietnamese
mới bg_only
ăn eat
thịt meat
nhím hedgehog
‘Only the Vietnamese eat hedgehog.’
38.3.3 Givenness Like Yongning Na, Vietnamese allows frequent ellipsis of arguments; corpus studies will be necessary to quantify its referential density relative to a broad sample of other languages. Illustrative examples of subject and object pro-drop are given in (20) and (21). As in Yongning Na, the active referent is usually inferred from previous sentences, but it is not uncommon to find sentences in which the referent is inferred from common situational knowledge. For instance, in (20) the subject could be interpreted as ‘we’ or ‘I’, depending on context. Argument ellipsis is often used as a strategy for avoiding an overt argument, especially in contexts where the proper use of pronouns is difficult to assess—for instance when the relative age or hierarchical status of interlocutors is unclear. Inversely, it tends to be avoided in formal situations, especially when the argument is a pronoun or an address term. (20) Chưa thấy bà nội đâu cả. chưa not.yet
thấy see
bà grandmother
nội paternal
đâu where
cả all
‘[I]haven’t seen your (grandmother) anywhere yet’. (Hạ 2012:63; excerpt from telephone conversations) (21) Thằng trộm chạy thoát à? Không, công an bắt rồi. thằng guy
trộm rob
chạy run
thoát escape
à Q
không neg
công an police
bắt catch
rồi already
‘The burglar escaped? No, the police caught him already.’ As in Yongning Na, leaving out an argument is a way of backgrounding it; probably for the same reasons as in Yongning Na, object ellipsis seems rarer than subject ellipsis.
38.4 General Conclusion The overview in this chapter offers elements of answer to the question of the relative roles of morphosyntax and intonation in conveying IS. In Na, which has a host of
INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN YONGNING NA AND VIETNAMESE 789 particles conveying IS, intonation plays a lesser role in conveying IS, even though Na has emphatic stress as well as a specific intonational device for focalization. In Vietnamese, intonation seems to play a more important role, although experimental findings reported so far in the literature are largely limited to focus, and cover a relatively narrow range of speaking styles. The nature of the language’s tone system also appears to play a role. The multiplicity of phonetic cues to tone in Vietnamese allows for greater malleability: for instance, a tone that has final glottalization can have its overall f0 register raised to convey intonational information (Michaud and Vu-Ngoc 2004; Hạ and Grice 2010) without a major threat to lexical identification, so long as the phonation-type characteristics that are part of the definition of this tone are present. On the other hand, in a language where tones are specified solely in terms of pitch levels, such as Yongning Na, intonational modification of the f0 curve is more difficult for the hearer to tease apart from the effect of the tones themselves. On a methodological note, the findings reported above suggest that it is useful to maintain a clear functional distinction between lexical tone, on the one hand, and intonational modifications (reflecting boundaries/junctures and IS), on the other. A fully fledged study of the respective contributions of the various components of prosody (lexical tone; phrasing; prominence; speaker attitude …) in shaping f0 curves remains a task for the future. Research of this type has been attempted for Qiang, a Sino-Tibetan language (Evans et al. 2010); general proposals have been put forward for languages with lexical stress (Mishra et al. 2006).
Chapter 39
In f orm ation St ru c t u re in Bant u Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman *
39.1 Introduction There are some 500+ Bantu languages, making it the largest subgroup within the Niger- Congo language phylum, which is in turn the largest in the world, comprising approximately 1,500 languages. Bantu languages are spread over most of Africa south of a line extending from eastern Nigeria in the west to southern Somalia in the east. This language family has provided important insights into the marking both of topic and focus, which have captured the attention of general linguists from at least the 1970s on. In this chapter we present an overview of the major means by which different aspects of information structure are marked in representative Bantu languages. After a brief background section which sketches the basic grammatical properties of Bantu languages, the two main sections of the chapter present a brief survey of the some of the ways that focus and topic structure the grammars of particular Bantu languages.1 * We would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on the original manuscript. 1 Throughout the paper, the first citation of a language indicates the noun class prefix in parenthesis as well as its updated Guthrie referential code (Maho 2009). Each code begins with a letter which indicates the approximate geographical location, e.g. Abo (A42) in the Northwest, Kikongo (H16) in the west, Luganda (J/E15) in the east, and Zulu (S42) in the south. While these codes sometimes suggest approximate subgrouping, for our purposes what will be important is to recognize that languages in the northwest zones A–C often diverge typologically from more canonical eastern and southern Bantu, as do some of the languages in zone D. Subsequent references adopt the usual citation form of the language, which may or may not include the prefix, e.g. Luganda vs Zulu. In the morpheme glosses, numbers indicate noun class agreement, following the standard Bantu glossing system. The following abbreviations are used: aug = augment (a determiner-like morpheme); cl = noun class marker; cop = copula; dj = disjoint verbal affix; inf = infinitive; loc = locative; neg = negative; obj = object marker; rel = relative; subj = subject marker; tam=tense–aspect marker.
Information Structure in Bantu 791
39.2 Background information 39.2.1 Phonology Both Proto-Bantu (PB) and most Bantu languages exploit tone for both lexical and grammatical contrasts (Meeussen 1967; Kisseberth and Odden 2003). By convention high (H) tone is marked with an acute accent and low tone (L) is either unmarked or is indicated by a grave accent. In many of the eastern and southern Bantu languages that have lost the Proto-Bantu vowel length contrast, lengthening of the penultimate vowel is a cue to prosodic phrasing, as we shall see (Downing and Pompino-Marschall 2013; Hyman 2013).
39.2.2 Morphology A hallmark of Bantu languages is their rich noun class agreement system. A head noun takes a prefix indicating its agreement class, and modifiers in construction with it take an appropriate agreement prefix. As seen in the Swahili (G41–43) examples in (1), agreement is also marked on verbs, on the obligatory subject prefix and an optional object prefix: (1) Swahili nominal and verbal agreement (Katamba 2003: 111) a. m-toto cl1-child
m-dogo cl1-little
a-me-fika 1subj-tam-arrive
‘The little child arrived.’ b. ki-kapu cl7-basket
ki-dogo cl7-little
ki-me-fika 7subj-tam-arrive
‘The little basket arrived.’ Verbs also contain tense–aspect affixes, as shown in the maximal verbal template in (2), cited from Nurse (2003: 90) and illustrated in (3) with an especially complex Kinande (J/ D42) example, both cited from Nurse and Philippson (2003: 9): (2) Initial − Subject − Negative − TAM − [Object ≠ Root − Extension(s) − Final = Enclitic (3) Kinande verb tu-né-mu-ndi-syá-tá-sya-ya- [ba ≠ king-ul-ir-an-is-i̹-a = ky-ô
‘we will make it possible one more time for them to open it for each other’
792 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman In these examples, ≠ marks a stem boundary and = marks a clitic boundary. In canonical Bantu, the verb stem consists of a root (e.g. ≠king-), possible verb extensions marking causative (-is-i)̹ , applicative (-ir-), etc., and an obligatory final inflectional ending, for example /-a /in the example in (3). Tense–aspect and agreement markers typically precede the stem.
39.2.3 Syntax The basic word order in most Bantu languages is: (Subject) Verb (Object1) (Object2) (Oblique) (Heine 1976; Bearth 2003). Although there is variation, canonical Bantu languages allow multiple objects, with a non-theme (e.g. benefactive) object generally preceding the theme object. Zulu (S42) provides an example where this order is rigidly enforced (apostrophes indicate vowel elision; note the penult lengthening in the phrase-final word): (4) Zulu (Cheng and Downing 2009)2 (ú-Síph’ cl1-Sipho
ú-phékél’ 1subj-cooked.for
ú-Thánd’ cl1-Thandi
in-kúukhu) cl9-chicken
‘Sipho cooked chicken for Thandi.’ (Adjuncts follow objects, as shown in (5a), below.) In (4) and throughout this chapter parentheses are used to indicate phrasal domains. We thus note in the above example that under broad focus, a Zulu sentence can be parsed into a single prosodic phrase whose main cue is penultimate lengthening, indicated by a doubled vowel.
39.2.4 Preview of the effects of information structure Information structure has consequences for prosody, morphology, and syntax in many Bantu languages. This is again illustrated with data from Zulu, in (5), where the resumptive class 6 object marker is in bold and the focus is underlined: (5) Zulu topic and focus (Cheng and Downing 2009) (si-thwéle we-carry
ámá-thánga cl6-pumpkin
ngó-bhasikíídi) with.1a-basket
(= ‘broad focus’)
‘We carry (the) pumpkins with a basket.’ 2
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss a theoretical syntactic analysis of the data presented. The interested reader should consult Cheng and Downing (2009) and references cited therein.
Information Structure in Bantu 793
Q
(u-wa-thwéle You-6obj-carry
ngáan’) how
(amá-thaanga) cl6-pumpkin
‘How are you carrying the pumpkins?’ A1 (ámá-thaanga) cl6-pumpkin
(si-wa-thwéle we-6obj-carry
ngó-bhasikíídi) with.1a-basket
‘We are carrying the pumpkins with a basket.’ A2 (si-wa-thwéle we-6obj-carry
ngó-bhasikíídi) with.1a-basket
(ámá-thaanga) cl6-pumpkin
‘We are carrying the pumpkins with a basket.’ In this exchange IS has influenced the syntax (word order), morphology (verb morphology), and prosody (vowel length) of each utterance. As was stated in §2.3 the basic word order in Bantu is for an object to precede an adjunct, as in the first sentence of (5), which represents ‘broad focus’. However, in Zulu, as in many Bantu languages, (most) focused constituents, including WH-elements, occur in the immediate after verb (IAV) position, while non-focal information commonly occurs in peripheral positions. As a result, the remaining sentences in (5) do not have canonical word order: that is, the objects do not precede the adjuncts. Instead, the WH-adjunct ngááni ‘how’ precedes the object in the question, and the object is sentence initial (A1) or sentence final (A2) in the answers. Object marking on the verb (embolden) obligatorily resumes an object that does not occur in its basic position. Focused IAV elements are followed by a prosodic phrase break that correlates with penultimate vowel lengthening. The next two sections discuss in detail these kinds of correlates of, first, focus and then topic (or out of focus) in representative Bantu languages.
39.3 Focus marking As Hyman and Watters (1984: 238) have observed: ‘Focus distinctions are typically realized in one of three ways: prosodically, morphologically, and syntactically’. As these authors show, it is not just Bantu, but many African languages which exploit these three types of marking. However, as Hyman (1999: 152) points out, features in Bantu languages that appear to be focus-conditioned are often instead conditioned by certain grammatical configurations which in turn only imperfectly correlate with focus. This point will be amply demonstrated in this section.
794 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman
39.3.1 Syntactic marking of focus: IAV position Significantly, many Bantu languages exploit the immediate after verb position (IAV) for focus-marking, especially of non-subjects. This was illustrated for Zulu in (5), above, and further exemplified by the Luganda (J/E15) exchange in (6): (6) Q y-a-fúúmbà he-tam-cook
mù= n-gélí =kí in=cl9-kind =which
o-mu-púùngá aug-cl3-rice
‘how did he cook rice?’ (i.e. ‘in what manner’?) A y-a-gú-fúúmbà he-tam-3obj-cook
mù= n-tamû in=cl9-pot
o-mu-púùngá aug-cl3-rice
‘he cooked the rice in the pot’ The IAV requirement on non-subject focused elements is found in a number of other Bantu languages, including Kimatuumbi (P13) (Odden 1984), Makhuwa (P31) (van der Wal 2006, 2009), Matengo (N13) (Yoneda 2011), Tswana (S31) (Creissels 1996a, 1996b, 2004, 2012), and Tumbuka (N21) (Downing 2012). It is also found in more distant Bantoid languages such as Noni (Hyman 1981), Naki (Good 2010), and Mambila (Perrin 1994, cited in Güldemann 2007) and in other African language families, for example Chadic (Tuller 1992). Since most Bantu languages are canonically SVO, exploiting IAV position is consistent with the observation of Harries-Delisle (1978) that the object position is often the locus of focus marking, hence IAV in VO languages vs immediate before verb (IBV) position in OV languages. The Western Grassfields language Aghem has been widely cited as exploiting the IAV for focus (Watters 1979; Hyman 1985, 2010; Hyman and Polinsky 2010), as in the following examples:3 (7) a. tɨ-́ bvʉ́ cl10-dog
tɨ-̀ bɨ̀ghà cl10-two
mɔ̂ tam
zɨ̀ eat
kɨ-́ bɛ́ cl7-fufu
zɨ̀ eat
nɛ́ today
↓nɛ́
today
‘the two dogs ate fufu today’ b. tɨ-́ bvʉ́ cl10-dog
tɨ-̀ bɨ̀ghà cl10-two
mɔ̂ tam
↓bɛ́
fufu
↓kɔ́
cl7.det
‘the two dogs ate fufu today’
3 In this chapter we refer to languages which have maintained the traditional agglutinative structure of the verb in (2) as ‘canonical Bantu’. This structure tends to break down in Northwest Bantu (roughly, Cameroon and neighbouring countries) and especially in other Bantoid languages, such as Grassfields Bantu, also spoken in Cameroon. For example, while prefixal object marking on the verb provides cues to information structure in canonical Bantu, as shown in the Zulu example in (5), such marking is absent in much of Northwest Bantu and all of Grassfields Bantu and Bantoid.
Information Structure in Bantu 795 c. tɨ-́ bvʉ́ cl10-dog
tɨ-̀ bɨ̀ghà cl10-two
mɔ̂ tam
bɛ́ fufu
↓kɨ́
cl7.det
zɨ́ eat
nɛ́ today
‘the two dogs ate fufu today’ d. à es
mɔ̀̀ tam
zɨ̀ eat
tɨ-́ bvʉ́ cl10-dog
tɨ-̀ bɨ̀ghà cl10-two
bɛ́ fufu
↓
kɔ́ cl7.det
nɛ́ today
‘the two dogs ate fufu today’ (es = expletive subject) The broad focus word order S-AUX-V-O-X is shown in (7a). In (7b) the focused temporal adjunct ‘today’ is in IAV position with the backgrounded object ‘fufu’ appearing after it. The same effect is achieved in (7c), where defocused ‘fufu’ is instead in preverbal position, thereby isolating ‘today’ as the focused IAV element. Example (7d) shows that the subject may also be focused in IAV position, requiring an expletive subject. Only some canonical Bantu languages that exploit the IAV position for focus allow this option for focusing the subject. (See the discussion of subject inversion in Section 39.4.1.1.) As already seen in the Zulu examples (4) and (5), it is not only explicitly focused constituents that occur in IAV position, but also WH-elements, which are inherently focused. As a result of their proximity to the verb, they often develop into enclitics, as in Luganda:4 (8) a. bá-wá they-give
=ání wh
è-kì-kópò aug-cl7-cup
‘who do they give the cup to?’
b. bá-wá
=kí
ò-mw-áànà
‘what do they give the child?’
c. bá- lábá
=ddí
ò-mw-áànà
‘when do they see the child?’
d. bá-lábá =wá ò-mw-áànà they-see=wh aug-cl1-child
‘where do they see the child?’
Interestingly, it is possible for the WH-element to occur in post-IAV position in an echo-question (Hyman and Katamba 2011: 70). Thus, contrast (9a) with (8b). (9) a. bá-wá they-give
ò-mw-áànà aug-cl1-child
b. *a-bá-wá =kí aug-they-give=what c. a-bá-wá aug-they-give 4
kí what
‘they give the child what?’
ò-mw-áànà aug-cl1-child
ò-mw-áànà aug-cl1-child
kí what
‘they who give the child what?’ ‘they who give the child what?’
The Bantu augment (aug) is an article-like morpheme whose function varies from one language to another. In Luganda its (non-) appearance often correlates with focus structure (see (24) and (25) below).
796 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman In addition, (9b), a subject relative, which here requires the determiner-like augment morpheme a-, shows that WH elements are not attracted to the IAV in relative clauses. Instead, the WH element occurs in situ, as in (9c), as it would in an echo question. In (10a) we see that multiple post-verbal WH-markers cannot co-occur: (10) a. *a-wá =ání =↓kí he-give=who=what
(intended: ‘who do they give what?’)
b. àní à-lábá =kí who he-see =what
‘who sees what?’
c. àní gwè à-wá =kí who rel he-give =what
‘who does he give what?’
(Luganda otherwise allows strings of more than one enclitic, e.g. y-a-gí-téék-á =múù =kí ‘what did he put in it?’, lit. he-past-it-put-tam =in =what). Since subjects are questioned in situ, the multiple WH-question in (10b) is grammatical, as is (10c), which involves a cleft construction marked by the relativizer (rel) gwè. Since Aghem allows multiple WH elements to follow the verb, while languages like Luganda do not, whether a WH element can occur post- verbally outside the IAV is a parameter of variation across Bantu languages. Interesting in this context, Basaá (A43) shows attraction of most non-subject WHs to the IAV, but speakers prefer canonical word order in the corresponding answers (Hamlaoui and Makasso 2011: 55): (11) a. a she
n-lɔ́↓ná tam-bring
kí what
ɓɔɔŋgɛ́ ‘what did she bring (to) the children?’ children
b. a n-lɔ́↓ná ɓɔ́ɔ́ŋgɛ́ makala ‘she brought the children doughnuts’ she tam-bring children doughnuts Hamlaoui and Makasso conclude that there must be a reason other than focus that WH- elements, but not answers, are attracted to the IAV in Basaá, and accounting for this distinction is a topic of current research. While the IAV focus word order strategy is quite widespread, many Bantu languages do not exploit it. An alternative focusing structure is the cleft, also available in Luganda: (12) Q aní who
gwè cl1.rel
A mw-áánà cl1-child (13) Q àní who
bá-làbà they-see
gwè cl1.rel
‘who do they see?’ /‘who is it that they see?’
bà-làbâ ‘it’s the child that they see’ they-see
(e-)y-a-gwâ aug-he-tam-fall
A mw-áánà cl1-child
yèè= cl1.cop
‘who fell?’ (*àní yèè= y-a-gwâ) y-a-gwâ he-tam-fall
‘it’s the child who fell’
Information Structure in Bantu 797 In (12) evidence for the cleft structure is that the same marker (gwè) is used as in relative clauses, while in (13) note that the answer uses a copular proclitic, yèè= (Hyman and Katamba 1990: 6–7). As also seen in (13), in Luganda subject questions optionally take an augment (a determiner-like element), but cannot be clefted. Similarly, adjunct WH- words cannot be clefted, although their answers can (Walusimbi 1996: 67, 71; Hyman and Katamba 2011: 76).5
39.3.2 Morphological marking of focus As in many languages in the world, some Bantu languages have specific focus markers that appear before or after the targeted constituent. In Abo (A42), when the focus marker ndi occurs after a pre-verbal constituent, for example the subject in (14b), it focuses that constituent. When it occurs immediately after the verb, as in (14c), it ambiguously marks focus on the verb, the object, or the verb phrase (Hyman and Lionnet 2012: 11): (14) a. mǎn cl1.child
ǎ he
sɔ̀ŋsɛ́ count
má-sɔ̌ŋ cl6-tooth
mé cl6.his
‘the child is counting his teeth’ (broad focus) b. mǎn cl1.child
ndì foc
ǎ he
sɔ̀ŋsɛ́ count
má-sɔ̌ŋ cl6-tooth
mé cl6.his
má-sɔ̌ŋ cl6-tooth
mé cl6.his
‘the child is counting his teeth’ (subject focus) c. mǎn cl1.child
ǎ he
sɔ̀ŋsɛ́ count
ndí foc
‘the child is counting his teeth’ (non-subject focus) While marking focus with particles or adpositions is relatively common cross- linguistically, what makes Bantu (and certain other African languages) special is a focus- dependent morphology affecting either TAM marking or nominal complements of the verb. Originally surveyed under the heading of ‘auxiliary focus’ (Hyman and Watters 1984), TAMs may either exhibit allomorphic distinctions correlating with the focus structure of the utterance, or they may show ‘inherently focused’ effects on the rest of the utterance. In both cases the effects typically involve differences in phrasing that affect the prosody, especially tone. We survey these possibilities in the following sections. 5 In other Bantu languages, in contrast, a cleft is obligatory for questioning the subject (Downing 2012; Zerbian 2006); see section 4.1.1 for discussion.
798 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman
39.3.2.1. Conjoint/disjoint verb morphology Originally introduced into Bantu by A. E. Meeussen, the terms ‘conjoint’ vs ‘disjoint’ refer to contrasting allomorphs of the same tense–aspect category which (partially) encode different focus structures in main clauses. These are found in languages such as Kirundi (JD62) (Meeussen 1959; Ndayiragije 1999), ChiBemba (M42) (Sharman 1956; Givón 1975), ChiTonga (M64) (Carter 1962; Meeussen 1963), Tswana and Northern Sotho (S31) (Creissels 1996a, 1996b; Zerbian 2006), Zulu (Buell 2005, 2006; Doke 1961; van der Spuy 1993), and Makhuwa (P30) (van der Wal 2009). (See also the papers in van der Wal & Hyman, in press.) As the terms indicate, verbs with conjoint tense allomorphs are in a close syntactic relationship with what follows, while verbs with disjoint tense marking are not. Focus—either on the verb or what follows—partially correlates with the distribution of conjoint/disjoint verb morphology. We illustrate this first with the following oft-cited sentences from Chibemba (Sharman 1956: 30). (15) a. disjoint -la- : bušé mu-la-peep-a ‘do you (pl.) smoke’? b. conjoint -Ø- : ee tu-peep-a sekelééti ‘yes, we smoke cigarettes’ c. disjoint -la- : bámó bá-la-ly-á ínsoka ‘some people actually eat snakes’ In (15a) the prefix -la-marks the disjoint form of the present tense on the utterance-final verb, which is clearly in focus, since the question is about smoking, not some other activity. In the answer in (15b), the conjoint form of the present tense lacks this prefix, since the focus is now on ‘cigarettes’ (as opposed to, say, cigars). Example (15c) shows that the disjoint form can be used when the verb is not final, but is included within the scope of focus. The following table of Chibemba verb forms from Hyman and Watters (1984: 251), based on Sharman and Meeussen (1955), Sharman (1956), and Givón (1972), provides an idea of how pervasive conjoint/disjoint allomorphy can be in a Bantu language: As seen in Table 39.1, the disjoint verb often has a fuller marking than the corresponding conjoint form. The progressive forms in Table 39.1 show that the conjoint/disjoint distinction need not involve different TAM prefix marking on the verb, but rather can be strictly tonal. Verb forms marked [+TS] (for ‘tone spreading’) spread their last underlying H tone to the end of the word (Sharman and Meeussen 1955: 395). [±TS] indicates +TS in the disjoint and –TS in the conjoint form. The following shows the [±TS] alternation on the final vowel of the verb -toba ‘break’ in the Past1 tense (Sharman 1956: 40): (16) a. conjoint [-TS]: nga mw-aa-tób-a úmutóndó, twáákuláatápíla múnsupa ‘if you break the pot, we will have to use a calabash to draw water’ b. disjoint [+TS]: nga mw-aa-tób-á úmutóndó, bálééisaafúlwá ‘if you break the pot, they will get angry’ In (16a) focus is on úmutóndó ‘the pot’ (contrasting with múnsupa ‘calabash’). In (16b) focus is on breaking the pot; the verb is included in the focus and occurs in the disjoint form.
Information Structure in Bantu 799 Table 39.1 Chibemba conjoint/disjoint forms Non-progressive conjoint
Progressive
disjoint
Present/hab.
:
-Ø-
-a
-la-
-a-
[±TS]
Past1/Future1
:
-á-
-a
-áa-
-a
[±TS]
Past2
:
-ácí-
-a
(complex)
Past3
:
-á-
-ile
-álii-
-a
Past4
:
-a-
-ile
-alí-
PresLinger
:
-Ø-
-ile
PastLinger
:
-a-
Future2
:
(-ka-
-lée-
-a
[±TS]
-ácíláa-
[±TS]
[±TS]
-álée-
[±TS]
-ile
[+TS]
-alée-
[±TS]
náa-´
-á
[-TS]
-á
-alí
-a
[+TS]
-a
-ka-
-a)
[+TS]
-kalée-
[±TS]
We illustrate some of the cross-Bantu range of conjoint/disjoint TAM morphology by comparing Chibemba with Zulu. Zulu only shows a conjoint/disjoint distinction in two tenses, the present and the perfective (Doke 1961). In (17a,b), we see that it is ungrammatical to use the disjoint present tense prefix -ya-if a post-verbal constituent is focused. When the disjoint verb form occurs before post-verbal constituents, as in (17c), it necessarily indicates that the verb is focused: (17) Zulu conjoint/disjoint (Cheng and Downing elicitation notes) a. Q [When is Sipho cooking meat?] A (ú-Siipho) (ú-yí-phéka namuhláanje) (í-nyaama) cl1-Sipho 1subj-9obj-cook today cl9-meat
(conjoint)
‘Sipho is cooking meat today.’ b. * ú-Sipho cl1-Sipho
ú-ya-yí-phéka 1subj-DJ-9obj cook
namuhlánje today
í-nyama cl9-meat
(disjoint)
‘Sipho is cooking meat today.’ (answering the same question in (17a)) c. Q [Is Sipho going to cook the meat today?] A (ú-Síph’ ú-yá-yí-phéék’) (í-nyama namuhláanje) cl1-Sipho 1subj-DJ-9obj-cook cl9-meat today ‘Sipho is going to cook the meat today.’
(disjoint)
800 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman In contrast with Chibemba, the Zulu disjoint morpheme cannot be considered a focus marker, in spite of examples like (17c). This is illustrated by the Zulu example in (18), where the verb has disjoint morphology (-ya-) because it is an intransitive verb, canonically final in this SV clause, not because it is in focus (Cheng and Downing elicitation notes): (18) Q [What is happening?] A (ú-Síph’ ú-yá-pheeka) cl1-Sipho 1subj-DJ-cook ‘Sipho is cooking.’ As work like Buell (2005, 2006), van der Spuy (1993), and Zerbian (2006: 96–104) have argued, the disjoint marker found in Southern Bantu languages like Zulu predictably occurs when the verb is final in a major syntactic constituent (vP/IP/CP), and this syntactic position only sometimes correlates with verb focus. (Note in (17c) that object marking on the verb indicates the object is external to vP, so the verb is vP final.)
39.3.2.2 TAMs with intrinsic focus In this section we show that focus-marking can be triggered by specific TAMs and negation. We shall first illustrate this from the Grassfields Bantu language Aghem. Recall from (7a,b) that Aghem exploits the IAV for focus-marking; note in (19a,b) that the position of ‘today’ varies according to its focus status: (19) a. ò he
mɔ̀ tam
zɨ̀ eat
kɨ́-bɛ́ cl7-fufu
b. ò he
mɔ̀ tam
zɨ̀ eat
nɛ́ today
↓nɛ́
‘he ate fufu today’
today
↓bɛ́
↓kɔ́
fufu
cl7.det
‘he ate fufu today’
Note that when the direct object kɨ́-bɛ́ ‘fufu’ occurs in the IAV in (19a) it appears in its citation form. In (19b), however, the bare noun cannot occur. Instead a ‘dummy determiner’ is required (which, like most other modifiers, conditions the deletion of the prefix on ‘fufu’). Since it would take considerable discussion to distinguish between the following two interpretations (see Hyman 2010; Hyman and Polinsky 2010), let us simply assume that the isolation form kɨ́-bɛ́ ‘fufu’ does not occur in (19b) either because it is ‘out of focus’ or because it is not in the IAV position. Now consider the use of the ‘dummy determiner’with ‘fufu’ in the sentences in (20). (20) a. ò he
máà tam.foc
b. ò he
kà neg
mɔ̀ tam
c. zɨ́ eat
bɛ́ fufu
↓kɔ́
zɨ̀ eat
↓bɛ́
zɨ̀ eat
cl7.det
fufu bɛ́ fufu (nô) foc
↓kɔ́
cl7.det ↓kɔ́
cl7.det
‘he did eat fufu’ ‘he didn’t eat fufu’
(*kɨ́-bɛ́) (*kɨ́-bɛ́)
‘eat fufu!’ (‘eat fufu!’)
(*kɨ́-bɛ́)
Information Structure in Bantu 801 In (20a) another form of the same TAM (hodiernal past tense) has been used, which indicates that the truth value is included within the scope of focus. Perhaps because the auxiliary máà is explicitly focused, the determiner kɔ́ is required. We might first propose that this is because ‘fufu’ is pragmatically out of focus (as the gloss implies). However, in (20b,c) we observe the same marking of the object after a negative or imperative verb. In this case we cannot refer directly to the focus of the utterance: (20c) would be the appropriate response not only to a question ‘what should I do with the fufu?’ (‘eat (the) fufu!’), but also ‘what should I eat?’ (‘eat fufu!’) or ‘should I eat rice?’ (‘no, eat fufu!’), where ‘fufu’ would clearly be in focus (and possibly marked by the focus marker nô). Instead, the hypothesis that works is that ‘fufu’ is not in the IAV focus position in (20a–c), even though it occurs right next to the verb: there is a major break between the verb and what follows. However, for this to go through, we have to say that negatives and the imperative require the same disjoint phrase break after the verb as the one we find in (20a), independent of actual focus structure. Indeed, as Hyman and Watters (1984) show, ‘marked’ tense, aspect, mood and polarity (negation) behave as if they are intrinsically focused in many Bantu and other African languages (cf. Marchese 1983 for additional evidence from Kru, and Güldemann 2003 for further discussion). Further evidence that grammatical marking only imperfectly lines up with actual pragmatic focus considerations is seen in Table 39.2, which summarizes the intrinsically focused [+F] vs unfocused [–F] TAMs in Haya (J/E22): The above [±F] marking is required to account for a process of H tone reduction. All of the H tones of a [–F] verb are deleted, when it is followed by a constituent within the same clause, and with which it forms a tonal domain. [+F] verbs are unaffected by the process. H tone reduction is thus observed in the [–F] present habitual in (21a), but not in the [+F] progressive (21b), which is identical except for the addition of the initial
Table 39.2 Intrinsic focus of TAMs in Haya (cf. Hyman and Watters 1984: 260). [−F]
[+F]
0
(present habitual) PROG
(progressive)
P1
(today past)
PERF
(perfect ‘to have already...’)
P2
(yesterday past)
EXP
(experiential ‘to have done before’)
PH (past habitual)
PRST
(persistive ‘still’)
F1
(today future)
SJCT
(subjunctive)
F2
(general future)
IMPER (imperative) NEG
(all negatives)
marked tense-aspect
marked mood
marked polarity
802 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman ni- prefix (an historical focus marker in fact!). Example (21c) shows that negatives are also intrinsically [+F]: (21) a. ba-jún-a ‘they help’ 2subj-help-tam
vs ba-jun-a káto
‘they help Kato’
b. ni-ba-jún-a ‘they are helping’ vs ni-ba-jun-á káto ‘they are helping Kato’ prog-2subj-help-tam c. ti-ba-jún-a ‘they don’t help’ neg-2subj-help-tam
vs ti-ba-jun-á káto ‘they don’t help Kato’
(In all three examples /-jun-á/is realized -jún-a phrase-finally.) Although this may appear to be a tonal reduction conditioned by lack of focus, again it has more to do with generalizations concerning phrasing: a verb’s H tones are deleted only if it forms a tonal domain with what follows, as in (21a). This is what gives the impression that [+F] TAMs have disjoint and [–F] TAMs have conjoint properties. In (22), we summarize the canonical properties of the conjoint/disjoint distinction. As we have seen, not all of them will be present at one time: (22) a. b. c. d. e. f.
differences in inflectional prefix morphology on the verb differences in inflectional suffix morphology on the verb differences in prosodic cohesion with what follows the verb differences in information structure (focus) differences in distribution within the clause (final vs non-final) differences in distribution across clause types (main vs subordinate; root vs non-root)
We have illustrated all of them in this section so far except for (22f). Many Bantu languages have different TAM allomorphy in main (MC) vs subordinate, for example relative clauses (RC), or in the affirmative vs negative. This is seen in the following Haya data: (23) MC: bá-ka-mú-jun-a 2subj-tam-1obj-help-tam RC: a-ba-a-mu-jun-île aug-2subj-tam-1obj-help-tam
‘they helped him’ ‘they who helped him’
Since relative clauses are ‘backgrounded’ at the discourse level, essentially identifying referents rather than advancing the story line, they often fail to undergo innovations that occur in main clauses. (See Hyman and Watters (1984) for additional examples and discussion.)
Information Structure in Bantu 803
39.3.3 Prosodic marking of focus In familiar European languages, IS roles such as focus and topic often directly condition prosodic prominence and related phrasing. (See Gussenhoven 2004; Ladd 2008 and various contributions to this volume for detailed discussion.) As far as we know, focus does not directly condition the analogous use of obligatory prosodic prominence or prosodic restructuring in Bantu or other African languages.6 (See Downing 2012 for a recent survey.) Instead, as we have already seen, prosodic marking of focus in Bantu languages involves the establishment of focus-related phrasal domains that are only indirectly conditioned by focus. A common phenomenon is for the verb to phrase with a following constituent that is in (narrow assertive or contrastive) focus. This was illustrated for Zulu, above, where the evidence for the prosodic phrasing is the distribution of penult lengthening. As Cheng and Downing (2009, 2012) show, the phrasing is syntactically motivated, however, not directly conditioned by focus. In other languages, a Verb + X sequence may form a single prosodic domain within which tones are modified, as we saw, for instance, in Haya in (21a). A very similar example comes from Luganda, where instead of H tone deletion, a [–F] affirmative verb which has a H to L drop in it will lose its L and plateau with the H of the following word (Hyman et al. 1987), as in (24a), where y-marks the subject, -a-is the general past prefix, and te-marks negation): (24) a. y-a-lábà H L
+ bi-kópò HL
→ y-a-lábá bí-kópò HØ HL
+ bi-kópò → HL
b. te-y-a-lábà HL
te-y-a-lábà HL
bì-kópò HL
‘he saw cups’ ‘he didn’t see cups’
The [+F] negative verb keeps its H to L drop in (24b). An additional complicating factor is that the post-verbal constituent must not begin with an augment (e.g. the e-in (25a)). (25) a. y-a-lábà HL
+
→
y-a-lábà HL
e-bi-kópò HL
katambâ → H L
y-a-lábá HØ
kátámbâ ‘he saw Katamba’ ~ HL ‘he saw Katamba’
e-bi-kópò HL
‘he saw cups’ (broad focus) b. y-a-lábà HL
+
6 The only African language, to our knowledge, where it has been claimed that focus directly leads to prosodic restructuring is Chicheŵa (Kanerva 1990; Downing et al. 2004). However, Downing and Pompino-Marschall (2013) demonstrates that there is, in fact, no obligatory focus prosody in Chicheŵa. What had been reported as obligatory focus prosody is instead best interpreted as optional emphasis prosody.
804 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman As was seen in (24a), the lack of an augment corresponds with post-verbal focus, suggesting a conjoint relationship with the verb, while the presence of the augment in (25a) corresponds with broad focus, suggesting a disjoint relationship with the verb. However, this is not predictive. When the IAV constituent begins with a word that does not take an augment, for example a proper noun as in (25b), L tone deletion and H tone plateauing are automatic and hence independent of focus. It is thus not only a [+F] verb, but also a following word occurring with the augment, that will block H tone plateauing between the verb and what follows. For this and other reasons Hyman and Katamba (1993) conclude that focus does not directly determine the phrasing that is needed for H tone plateauing. The nominal augment in focus-marking has been shown both to be implicated in focus-marking and to affect tonal realizations in other Bantu languages as well. In Makhuwa the first H of a nominal is deleted after a conjoint verb (van der Wal 2009: 128; cf. Stucky 1979: 191): (26) a. conjoint b. disjoint
: :
enyómpé tsi-n-khúúr-á malashi enyómpé tsi-náá-khúúr-á maláshi
‘the cows eat grass’ ‘the cows eat grass’ (broad focus)
As seen in (26a), the noun ‘grass’, whose H in its citation form maláshi comes historically from the Proto-Bantu *H augment, becomes all L after a conjoint verb (although another rule assigns it a final H tone if occurring before a pause). No such change occurs in (26b), where the corresponding disjoint verb is not as tightly bound to the object. Van der Wal (2009: 32) clearly shows that it is only nouns that were marked by an historical augment that undergo this change. As currently in Luganda, we can hypothesize that the H tone augment was historically lacking in post-verbal focus constructions such as (26a). Since the augment has since dropped out of the language, the impression one gets is that focus is marked by tone lowering.
39.4 Topic marking, topicality, and givenness There has been general linguistic work on topic-marking in Bantu dating back to the 1970s (Givón 1976). Topic, topicality, and givenness, like focus, have been claimed to have an effect on the prosody, morphology, and syntax of many Bantu languages. We discuss each of these in turn, beginning with the morphosyntactic marking of topic.
39.4.1 Morphosyntactic effects of topic marking and topicality 39.4.1.1 Subject as topic While focus is mainly expressed on the verb or by post-verbal position, as shown in the preceding section, preverbal position is often reserved for topics (or ‘out of focus’). The
Information Structure in Bantu 805 Zulu example in (5), repeated below for convenience, provides an example where the given/topic object amá-thaanga ‘pumpkin’ occurs in preverbal position. (27) Zulu topic and focus (Cheng and Downing 2009); focused words are underlined; resumptive Object Marker is emboldened Q (u-wa-thwéle You-6obj-carry
ngáan’) how
(amá-thaanga) cl6-pumpkin
‘How are you carrying the pumpkins?’ A (amá-thaanga) cl6-pumpkin
(si-wa-thwéle we-6obj-carry
ngó-bhasikíídi) with.1a-basket
‘We are carrying the pumpkins with a basket.’ The correlation between preverbal position and topic has been proposed to account for why subjects are canonically preverbal in Bantu languages (see Section 39.2.3, above): subjects are inherently topical (as in SVO languages in general).7 The inherent topicality of subjects is traditionally appealed to in order to account for the fact that, in many Bantu languages, subjects cannot be focused in situ. They must either be clefted or occur in post-verbal position when focused. This phenomenon is discussed in, for example: Bearth (2003); Bokamba (1976); Bresnan and Kanerva (1989); Cheng and Downing (2007); Downing (2012); Maxwell (1981); Mchombo (2004); Moshi (1988); Muriungi (2003); van der Wal (2009); and Zerbian (2006). Tumbuka (N20; Downing 2012) provides an example of a language where subjects must be clefted when they have new information focus (i.e. when they occur as WH- questions or -answers): (28) Tumbuka clefted subjects (Downing 2012) Q (Ni Cop
njáani) cl1.who
ŵ-áana) cl2-child
(uyo cl1.Rel
wa-ku-capa 1sbj-tam-wash
vya-kuvwara cl8-clothes
vya cl8.of
(ku-máaji) Loc-cl6.water
‘It is who that is washing the clothes of the children in the river?’ A (m-ba-máama) (aŵo ŵa-ku-capa vya-kuvwara vya ŵ-áana) (ku-máaji) ‘It’s the woman that is washing the clothes of the children in the river.’ When a subject has presentational focus, it appears to be common cross-Bantu for it to occur in post-verbal position. As Bresnan and Kanvera’s (1989) study of Chicheŵa locative inversion shows, in this construction a focused subject occurs immediately after the verb, while the preverbal locative triggers subject agreement on the verb (29a). The obligatory 7
See, e.g., Givón (1976), Morimoto (2000), van der Wal (2009) and Zerbian (2006) for discussion.
806 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman focal (or non-given status) of the post-verbal subject is illustrated in (29c), which shows that locative inversion is infelicitous if this sentence is a response to (29b) because the postverbal subject a-lendóo-wo has been previously mentioned in the discourse. (In (29c) the locative answer to the indirect question is focused by means of clefting.) (29)
Locative inversion in Chicheŵa (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989: 2, 33)8 a.
Ku-mu-dzi 17-cl3-village
ku-na-bwérá 17subj-tam-come
a-lendóo-wo cl2-visitor- cl2.those
‘To the village came those visitors.’ b.
Ndi-ku-fúná I-tam-want
ku-dzíwá inf-know
kutí comp
´n-kuti cop-where
a-lendó cl2-visitor
á-ná-fiika 2subj.rel-tam-arrive ‘I want to know where it was that the visitors arrived.’ c. # Ndi cop
ku-mu-dzi 17-cl3-village
kú-ná-fíká 17subj.rel-tam-arrive
a-lendóo-wo cl2-visitor-cl2.those
Lit.: ‘It’s at the village where arrived those visitors.’ Strikingly, in other languages where focused subjects occur in post-verbal position—for example, Dzamba (H10), Rundi (J60), and Rwanda (J60)—even preverbal logical objects can trigger subject agreement on the verb (Bokamba 1976; Ndayiragije 1999; Morimoto 2000). This phenomenon—called subject–object reversal—is illustrated with the Rundi data in (30). In this dataset, the canonical SVO word order is illustrated in (30a). The subject– object reversal order (OVS) is illustrated in (30b). As Ndayiragije (1999) shows, OVS order implies a contrastive focus reading on the post-verbal logical subject (underlined), while the preverbal object is out of focus. Notice that a disjoint marker -ra-occurs on the verb in the canonical order (30a); it cannot co-occur with a post-verbal focused element (30b). (30) Rundi subject–object reversal (Ndayiragije 1999: 400) a. Abâna cl2.child
ba-á-ra-nyôye 2sbj-pst-DJ-drink:perf
amatá cl 6.milk
SVO
‘Children drank milk.’ b. Amatá cl 6.milk
y-á-nyôye 6sbj-pst-drink:perf
abâna cl2.child
OVS
[Lit.: ‘Milk drank children.’] ‘Children (not parents) drank milk.’ 8
The class 17 prefix ‘ku’ is a locative prefix. The complementizer kuti and the word for ‘where’ are near homonyms.
Information Structure in Bantu 807 The attentive reader will have noticed that the examples in this section do not necessarily show that subjects correlate with topics in the information structure sense. They merely show that preverbal position is incompatible with narrow focus on the grammatical subject. While appealing to the inherent topicality of subjects might account for this, Zerbian’s (2006) thoughtful study shows that preverbal subjects in Northern Sotho—a language which also bans in situ focus on subjects—are not required to display defining topic properties, like definiteness or aboutness. This raises the issue of what is meant by inherent topicality, which is addressed in the next section.
39.4.1.2 Topicality hierarchies and object status Another important influence of topicality on the syntax of many Bantu languages is that intrinsically topicality of object NPs correlates with an array of morphosyntactic effects. Intrinsic topicality is defined as having the properties ranked high in the semantic hierarchies in (31): (31) Topicality hierarchies (Hyman and Duranti 1982: 224) a. Benefactive > Recipient > Patient > Instrument b. 1st > 2nd > 3rd human > 3rd animal > 3rd inanimate c. definite > indefinite These properties help account for asymmetries often found in the morphosyntactic status of the two object NPs in a ditransitive construction. The object NP which is higher on the topicality hierarchy is, first, more likely to be able to become the subject of a passive construction based on a ditransitive. Note that this property is related to the general topicality of subject position discussed in the previous section. It is also more likely to trigger object marking on the verb when the overt object is deleted due to its given discourse status. (More on object marking and given status in Sections 39.4.2 and 39.4.3) And, paradoxically, it is also most likely to be licensed to occur in immediate post-verbal (IAV) position in VPs under broad focus. (Recall from Section 39.3.1 that IAV is a privileged position for elements in narrow focus in many Bantu languages.) Hyman and Duranti’s (1982) analysis of ditransitive objects in Sesotho (S30), based on Morolong and Hyman (1977), illustrates the role of the topicality hierarchy—and especially the human factor—in accounting for asymmetries in their morphosyntactic properties. These authors show that the complete analysis of Sesotho objects involves a rather complex interaction between the hierarchies in (31a,b). We can see in (32) that when a non-human circumstantial ‘object’ of an applicative (app) co-occurs with a human patient ‘object’, it lacks the following properties that the human patient object in the same sentence has. (The human patient baná and its object marker referent are emboldened in the data.) • It cannot occur immediately after the verb (32a). • It cannot be passivized (32b). • It cannot be referred to with an object marker (32c).
808 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman (32) Sesotho human vs non-human object properties (Hyman and Duranti 1982: 225–6) baná cl2.child
a. Ke-bítselítsé I-called.for
mokéte. cl3.feast
‘I-called children for the feast.’ *Ke-bítselítsé I-called.for
mokété cl3.feast
baná cl2.child
‘I-called for the feast the children.’ b. Baná cl2.child
bá-bítselítsoé 2subj-called.for.pass
mokéte cl3.feast
‘Children were called for the feast.’ *Mokété ó-bítselítsoé baná cl3.feast 3subj-called.for.pass cl2.child ‘Feast was called for the children.’ c. Ke-ba-bítselítsé I-2obj-called.for
mokéte cl3.feast
‘I called them [children] for the feast.’ *Ke-o-bítselítsé baná I-3obj-called.for cl2.child ‘I called it [feast] for the children.’ The role of such syntacticized hierarchies of intrinsic topics in accounting for object asymmetries has also been demonstrated for Shona (Hawkinson and Hyman 1974), Haya (Duranti and Byarushengo 1977), and other Bantu languages. (See Givón 1988, among many others.)
39.4.2 ‘Dislocation’ of non-focused constituents and its prosodic consequences The requirement that topics be preverbal while focused elements occur in IAV position leads to displacement (informally, ‘dislocation’) of non-focused nominals from their canonical positions. The displaced nominals (if they are objects) require resumptive pronominal marking on the verb in many Bantu languages: for example Chicheŵa (Bresnan and Mchombo 1987), Haya (Tenenbaum 1977), Luganda (Hyman and Katamba 2010), Northern Sotho (Zerbian 2006) and Zulu (Cheng and Downing 2009)—see (17), above.
Information Structure in Bantu 809 While both left and right dislocation are widely attested in Bantu languages, asymmetries in the information structure status of left vs right dislocation has been reported for some languages. For example, to return to the Zulu example in (27), above, we can see that it is felicitous to left dislocate amá-thaanga ‘pumpkins’, the object repeated from the question. However, as Cheng and Downing (2009) show, right dislocating ‘pumpkins’ would be an infelicitous answer. Both contrastive topics and aboutness topics must be preverbal in Zulu. It has been suggested since Byarushengo et al.’s (1976) study of Haya that right dislocations have an afterthought function, rather than a true topic function. Zerbian (2006) finds for Northern Sotho that right dislocations are almost non-existent in her natural language corpus, and proposes that this is due to their information structure status as afterthoughts. However, Tenenbaum (1977) demonstrates that in Haya right dislocations are also used to connote surprise, emphasis, or contrast. She proposes that this follows from the fact that both utterance-initial and utterance-final positions are perceptually salient. The asymmetries in the information structure of left vs right dislocations found in some languages therefore require further explanation. Left vs right dislocation also has different prosodic consequences in different Bantu languages (Hyman and Byarushengo 1984; Hyman 1999, 2010; Zerbian 2006, 2007; Downing 2011). In languages like Northern Sotho (S30), left dislocations phrase with what follows, while right dislocations phrase separately. (Resumptive object marking on the verb is emboldened): (33) Northern Sotho left and right dislocation prosody (Zerbian 2007: 250–3) Canonical order a. (Mo-lámó cl 1-brother
ó 1subj
tla come
gááe) cl9.home
‘The brother is coming home.’ Right dislocation b. (Bá thúšá 2subj help
malóóme) cl1.uncle
(ba-kgalaabje) cl2-old man
‘They help the uncle, the old men.’ Left dislocation c. (Ba-sádi cl2-woman
bá 2subj
a bá DJ 2obj
thúúša) Help
‘The women, they are helping them.’ (or ‘The women are helping them.’) In languages like Luganda, in contrast, left dislocations (and subject NPs) phrase separately, while right-dislocations join in the same phonological phrase with what precedes:
810 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman (34)
Luganda (Pak 2008: 135; Hyman and Katamba 2010) Canonical order a. (òmùlènzì) cl1.boy
(à-gúlírá 1sbj -buy.for
Múkásá cl1.Mukasa
kááwà) coffee
‘The boy is buying Mukasa some coffee.’ Right dislocation b. (tè-bá-lì-lù-yìmbá Neg-2sbj-Fut-11obj-sing
á-bá-límí Aug- cl2-farmer
ó-lú-yîmbá) Aug- cl11-song
‘They will not sing it, the farmers, the song.’ Left dislocation c. (òmùlènzì) cl1.boy
(Mùkàsà) cl1.Mukasa
(à-mú-gúlírá 1sbj-1obj-buy.for
kááwà) coffee
‘The boy, Mukasa, [he] is buying him some coffee.’ And in languages like Chichewa (N30), both left and right dislocations phrase separately: (35) Chichewa (Downing et al. 2004) Canonical order a. (Mi-káango) cl4-lions
(i-ná-sáka 4subj-TAM-hunt
mbúzí cl10.goat
iizi) cl10.these
‘The lions hunted these goats.’ Right dislocation b. (I-ná-zí-saaka) 4subj-TAM-10obj-hunt
(mi-káango) cl4-lions
(mbúzí cl10.goat
iizi). cl10.these
‘They hunted them, the lions, these goats.’ Left dislocation c. (Mbúzí cl10.goat
iizi) cl10.these
(mi-áango) cl4-lions
(i-ná-zí-saaka). 4subj-TAM-10obj-hunt
‘[As for] these goats, the lions hunted them.’ Downing (2011) suggests that the different phrasings might well provide cues to the different syntactic status of the dislocations (clause-internal vs clause external) in different languages. Clause internal dislocations, for example, could be more likely to phrase with surrounding material. The syntax and the information structure status of left vs right dislocations and their influence on prosodic phrasing clearly require further research.
Information Structure in Bantu 811
39.4.3 Reduction of given information While given elements can be dislocated, it is also common for them to either be deleted or pronominalized in Bantu languages, as in many other languages. We have seen several examples of resumptive object marking with an overt given NP object above. The examples from Northern Sotho (Zerbian 2006), below, illustrate how answers to questions in natural speech typically delete discourse-old information from the question (36a) or pronominalize arguments which cannot be grammatically deleted (36b): (36) Reduction in Northern Sotho (Zerbian 2006: 88, 89) a. deletion of discourse old information Q O rema eng mosegare 2subj chop what midday ‘What do you chop at day?’ A mo-ruula cl3-marula ‘The marula tree.’ b. pronominalization of discourse old information (object marker is emboldened) Q O 2subj
dira do
eng what
ka with
mo-rwalo cl3-load
‘What are you doing with the load?’ A Ke I
a o DJ 3obj
rwaala carry
‘I carry it.’ As Zerbian (2006) demonstrates, while the result of these reduction processes, along with dislocation, is to place focused elements in a particular syntactic position in Northern Sotho (in this case, IP/VP-final), crucially, it is not focus which triggers these processes, rather the given status of certain elements. (See Buell (2009) and Cheng and Downing (2009, 2012) for a similar account of IAV ‘position’ in Zulu.)
39.5 Further considerations and conclusion In the above sections we have surveyed some of the most prominent structures and issues which arise in the study of information structure in Bantu. Most of our attention
812 Laura J. Downing and Larry M. Hyman has been on the ways in which focus and topic are marked, rather than on their semantics or actual use in discourse. While we have attempted to give a representative sampling of how syntactic, morphological, and phonological markings correlate with differences in information structure, we are only just beginning to understand their full range and nature—including cases which appear to go against the general trends. For example, while Bantu and many other African languages exploit the IAV position to mark focus, Bostoen and Mundeke (2011: 75–6) show that although Mbuun (B87) has the expected unmarked SVO word order, as in (37a), it exploits the Immediately Before Verb (IBV) position for focus-marking, as in the Q/A exchange in (37b,c). (37) a. ɔ-káár cl1-woman
o-á-súm 1subj-tam-buy
b. ɔ-káár cl1-woman
nké what
c. ɔ-káár cl1-woman
a-sáŋ cl6-millet
ki-te cl7-chair
ká-wó-kon? 1subj-tam-plant
‘the woman buys a chair’ ‘what did the woman plant?’
ká-wó-kon ‘the woman planted millet’ 1subj-tam-plant
d. a-sáŋ maam o-á-(á-)kon ‘millet, mother plants it’ ~ cl6-millet mother 1subj-tam-(6obj)-plant ‘millet is planted by mother’ While such use of the IBV for focus frequently correlates with OV, not VO, (37d) shows that topical information occurs initially, as expected. On the other hand, Tunen (A44), one of the rare Bantu OV languages, does not exploit the IBV for focus (Mous 1997). What this means is that much more attention needs to be paid to the syntax of Bantu languages in the northwest zones. Concerning morphological and prosodic marking, we have only scratched the surface in the above presentation. In addition to conjoint/disjoint verb marking and the presence vs absence of the augment on objects, a number of Western Bantu languages have been reported to have what Schadeberg (1986) has called ‘tone cases’. In such languages starting in the north with the B40 languages (Blanchon 1999) and going through the H10 Kikongo group (Daeleman 1983; Blanchon 1998) as far south as (Otji) Herero (R31) (Kavari et al. 2012), nouns take different tonal forms in different contexts, some related to information structure. A particularly rich such system is presented in (38) from (Gi)Phende, from unpublished work by the second author with Mwatha Ngalasso: (38) Case 1: Case 2: Case 3: Case 4: Case 5:
citation, subject, left dislocation, object of negative infinitive focused object genitive, object2, object after negative verb, subject after relative verb object after affirmative verb or na ‘with’ predicative (‘it’s …’)
As seen, the above distinctions go beyond what is traditionally identified as ‘case’. While the correlations are not perfect, case 1 seems to be topic-like and cases 2 and 5
Information Structure in Bantu 813 focus-like. Case 4 represents how an object is realized with broad or VP-focus. This raises the broader question of how the various tonally implicated markings are related to each other: conjoint/disjoint verbal morphology, augment nominal morphology, tone cases, and, ultimately, ‘metatony’ (Meeussen 1967: 111), a phenomenon by which a subset of verb forms are realized H before an object, L otherwise, as in the following examples from Songye (L23) (Stappers 1964, cited by Dimmendaal 1995: 32 and Schadeberg 1995: 176): (39) a. ku-sep-a b. ku-sep-á mfumu
‘to laugh (at)’ ‘to laugh at the chief ’
(without metatony) (with metatony)
In some languages the subset of verb forms end High when followed by any element, including a non-object, and hence end with Low tone only when phrase-final, suggesting that the High tone is an IAV focus marker. While conjoint/disjoint verb forms, the nominal augment, and tone cases undoubtedly bear an historical, if not synchronic relationship to information structure, Hyman and Lionnet (2012) show that proposals to relate metatony to focus are fraught with difficulties. Such overextensions are perhaps understandable, given that focus-marking is so extensive in Bantu—and many other African languages. As these final remarks make clear, the overview we have presented in earlier sections certainly underestimates the considerable diversity that still awaits discovery in the many Bantu languages in which information structure and its various markings have not been studied in depth.
Chapter 40
In f orm ation St ru c t u re in Sign L a ng uag e s Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau
40.1 Introduction In this chapter, basic Information Structure (IS) notions will be applied to sign languages (SLs), that is, languages in the visual-gestural modality of signal transmission (as opposed to the oral-auditory modality of spoken languages). It will be demonstrated that IS notions are relevant for SLs, just as they are for spoken languages—as is expected, of course, given that SLs are fully-fledged natural languages with complex structures on all levels of linguistic description (Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006). At first sight, it may appear a little awkward to discuss SLs as a group within a single chapter. After all, one would not devote a chapter to ‘spoken languages’, but rather to a single language or a language family (as in Chapters 33–39). Comparative studies on SL structure have revealed that SLs differ from each other structurally and that, to a large extent, they differ along similar lines as spoken languages (Perniss et al. 2007; Pfau 2012). Still, in certain areas of grammar, SLs also show striking similarities, some of which are likely to be motivated by the visual-gestural modality (Meier 2002). As the following discussion will reveal, there are also interesting similarities in the realm of IS—and it may therefore not be so awkward after all to discuss SLs as a group in this chapter instead of focusing on a single SL. In Section 40.2, we will set the stage by providing some background information on SL structure and notation. Subsequently, the structure of the chapter reflects the well- known basic distinctions Topic–Comment (Section 40.3) and Focus–Background (Section 40.4). We will show that, across SLs, IS is encoded by syntactic and prosodic strategies, sometimes in combination, while morphological markers, the third strategy commonly found in spoken languages, are not attested. In Section 40.5, we conclude
Information Structure in Sign Languages 815 by briefly addressing modality effects: features in the expression of IS that are unique to SLs, such as the use of space and body leans. Throughout the chapter, we take a comparative perspective; that is, an effort will be made to provide and compare data from different SLs.
40.2 Background on sign language structure Space does not allow us to provide a detailed overview of aspects of SL structure. Therefore, we will focus on two aspects that will turn out to be relevant to the discussion of IS in Sections 40.3 and 40.4: the grammatical use of the signing space and of non- manual markers. In most SLs investigated to date, the signing space in front of the signer’s body can be employed for referential purposes. This space can be used, for instance, to localize non-present referents. In the SL of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal, NGT) example in (1a), the signer talks about his brother, who is not present in the discourse setting. The lexical sign brother is followed by an indexical (pointing) sign towards location 3a (forward right) in the signing space, thereby localizing the referent at this arbitrary location. Subsequently, the same location can be used for pronominalization, that is, the second instance of index3a in (1a) is interpreted as ‘he’. Interestingly, some verbs, the so-called ‘agreeing’ or ‘directional’ verbs, can be modulated such that they target loci in signing space—be it the locus of a present referent or a locus established by means of index. In (1a), the verb visit, which in its citation form moves forward from in front of the signer’s body, is directed from location 3a towards the signer, thereby agreeing with the subject and object (‘he visits me’; see Lillo-Martin and Meier (2011) for a recent discussion of this phenomenon). The example is visualized by the video stills in Figure 40.1 (for visit, the beginning and end locations of the movement are shown).1 1 Following standard conventions, SL examples are glossed in English in small caps. Obviously, these glosses do not provide any information about the phonological form of a particular sign. Subscript numbers (in some examples, subscript letters) indicate points in the signing space used in pronominalization and verbal agreement, whereby ‘1’ is used for a locus close to the signer, ‘2’ for a locus close to the addressee, and ‘3’ for established loci and loci close to present third-person referents. index/ ix stands for a pointing sign (usually with index finger extended) and poss for a possessive pronoun. The convention sign-sign is used when two English words are necessary to gloss a single sign; sign^sign indicates that two signs are combined in a compound. Lines above the glosses indicate the scope (i.e. onset and offset) of a particular non-manual marker. Note that abbreviations used may refer to the form (e.g. ‘br’—brow raise) or the function (e.g. ‘top’—topic) of a particular marker. Other abbreviations used in this chapter include: ‘neg’—negative headshake and ‘wh’—wh-question marker (further abbreviations will be explained in the context of specific examples).
816 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau
POSS1
EVENING
BROTHER
INDEX3a
INDEX3a
3aVISIT1
Figure 40.1 Video stills illustrating example (1a). © Nederlands Gebarencentrum (Dutch Sign Centre; NGC 2002); stills used by permission.
br/top (1) a. poss1 brother index3a, evening index3a 3avisit1 ‘As for my brother, he will visit me tonight.’ wh b. john buy what yesterday
[NGT]
[ASL]
‘What did John buy yesterday?’ Example (1a) also illustrates the use of a non-manual marker, namely a brow raise accompanying a topic NP. The topic constituent is followed by a prosodic break (indicated by the comma and realized as a pause and a change in non-manual activity). Actually, across SLs, non-manual markers—that is, mouth configurations, head and body movements, and facial expressions—may fulfil functions at all levels of grammar (see Pfau and Quer (2010) for an overview). Here, we only provide one more example of a syntactic marker. Across SLs, wh-questions are commonly marked by furrowed brows, as illustrated by the American SL (ASL) example in (1b) (Petronio and Lillo-Martin 1997: 26). While both markers in (1) can be argued to fulfil a syntactic function, it has also been claimed that at least some non-manuals are prosodic in nature and can thus be compared to intonational contours in spoken languages (Sandler 2011). Under this assumption, the wh- marker in (1b) could be considered the prosodic reflex of a [+wh]-feature.
40.3 Topic–comment distinction Traditionally, topic constructions have received more attention in the SL literature than focus constructions. On the one hand, topics (especially their frequent use in
Information Structure in Sign Languages 817 ASL) have been subject to investigation since the early days of sign language research (Friedman 1976; Ingram 1978); on the other hand, they have been studied for various unrelated SLs, such as ASL (Aarons 1994; Todd 2008), Finnish SL (FinSL: Jantunen 2007), Hong Kong SL (HKSL: Sze 2008b, 2011), Israeli SL (ISL: Rosenstein 2001), NGT (Coerts 1992; Crasborn et al. 2009), and Russian SL (RSL: Kimmelman 2015). The data reveal that across SLs, topic (backgrounded) information tends to occupy a left-peripheral position in the clause; also, it is often accompanied by a non-manual marker (e.g. raised eyebrows) and followed by a prosodic break. It has thus been argued that topichood in SLs is commonly syntactically and prosodically marked. In addition, some SLs have even been claimed to be topic-prominent, for instance, ASL (McIntire 1982), British SL (Deuchar 1983), and ISL (Rosenstein 2001).2 In this section, we will address a number of complexities concerning the use and interpretation of topics. First, in Section 40.3.1, we will present and discuss different types of topics, focusing on semantic and syntactic distinctions that are well- known from the study of spoken languages (see Büring, this volume). We then turn to the issue of non-manual marking, and the occasional absence thereof, in Section 40.3.2. Finally, in Section 40.3.3, we investigate possible combinations of topics, that is, topic stacking.
40.3.1 Types of topics 40.3.1.1 Semantic distinctions Topic constituents can be linked to the preceding discourse in various ways and may include different types of information. Here we adopt the basic semantic distinction between ‘aboutness’ and ‘scene-setting’ topics (Jacobs 2001), which is, amongst others, applied by Sze (2008b, 2011) in her study on HKSL. Although not everyone would agree that both aboutness and scene-setting topics belong to one general category of topics, the data discussed below (from HKSL and RSL) suggest that this a reasonable analysis for SLs, as both types of topics are similarly marked. It is generally assumed that an aboutness topic represents what the sentence is about. It includes information which is either familiar to the interlocutors or identifiable from the preceding context. Based on these characteristics, Sze (2011: 137) identifies the fronted object in (2a) as the topic of the sentence; this NP is followed by a prosodic break but it is not non-manually marked (see Section 40.3.2 for further discussion). The NGT example in (2b) contains a topicalized subject, which is non-manually marked and the articulation of which is prolonged by means of a final hold (as indicated by the horizontal line) (Coerts 1992: 223). For both examples, we must assume that the topicalized NP has been mentioned in the preceding discourse.
2 Slobin (2013) goes further by claiming that all SLs are topic-prominent, based on Li and Thompson’s (1976: 466) observation that ‘[i]n topic-prominent languages, there will be a surface coding for the topic, but not necessarily for the subject’.
818 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau
[HKSL] (2) a. interpreter^sign-language, government pay-them not-have ‘The sign language interpreters, the government does not pay (them).’ top b. airplane―|
neg come not
[NGT]
‘As for the airplane, it did not arrive.’ In contrast to aboutness topics, scene-setting topics provide a spatial or temporal context within which the main predication holds (Chafe 1976). They may thus involve either locative expressions or temporal information (be it expressed by adverbials, NPs, or subordinate clauses). While aboutness topics usually include discourse-old information, scene-setting topics may include both discourse-new or -old information. Two examples from FinSL, in which a locative expression (3a) and a temporal adverbial (3b), respectively, occupy the topic position, are provided in (3); both topics are marked non- manually (Jantunen 2007; ‘ew’ = eyes wide).
(3) a.
ew & br night club indexa, index1 work doorman
[FinSL]
‘That night club, I work (there) as a doorman.’ b.
ew & br now evening, index1 go pub
[FinSL]
‘This evening, I (will) go to the pub.’ At the same time, the examples in (2) and (3) also illustrate an important distinction related to the thematic roles assigned by the verb. Simplifying somewhat, aboutness topics are generally arguments of the verb (object in (2a), subject in (2b)), while scene- setting topics are adjuncts (see also Crasborn et al. (2009) for the distinction of ‘argument’ and ‘spatio-temporal’ topics). Sze (2011), however, points out that, occasionally, adverbials may also represent what the sentence is about. A third semantic type mentioned in the literature is contrastive topics (see Büring, this volume). Just like aboutness topics, contrastive topics refer to previously mentioned information and are arguments of the verb; unlike aboutness topics, however, they create a contrast between the topic constituent and a previously mentioned constituent (see example (5) below for further discussion).
40.3.1.2 Syntactic distinctions Besides semantic characteristics, topics are also commonly distinguished based on their syntactic properties or, to be more precise, the extent to which they are
Information Structure in Sign Languages 819 syntactically integrated into the rest of the sentence. The crucial distinction, which has first been explicitly discussed for SLs by Aarons (1994), is that between ‘base- generated’ and ‘moved (fronted)’ topics. According to Aarons, the topic vegetable in the ASL example (4a) must be base-generated in topic position, as it does not constitute an argument of the verb. Commonly, in these cases, an argument of the main clause bears a semantic relationship to the topic—in (4a), a relation of class membership (Aarons 1994: 152). Note that the example also illustrates that topics need not be specific and definite. top (4) a. vegetable, john like corn
[ASL]
‘As for vegetables, John likes corn.’ top b. maryi, john like indexi
[ASL]
‘As for Mary, John likes her.’ Aarons also assumes that structures like (4b) involve a base-generated topic. While mary—just like vegetable in (4a)—is not an argument of the verb, it is co-referential with the pronominal index in object position (cf. the NGT example (1a), which illustrates the same phenomenon for a subject). Constructions in which a topic NP is co- referential with a (resumptive) pronoun within the clause are often referred to as ‘left dislocation’ (López, this volume). The example in (5) displays different properties, as the clause following the topic NP would be ungrammatical by itself (Aarons 1994: 154; also see example (2b) above). According to Aarons, we therefore have to assume that the object NP mary moved to the topic position (SpecTopP) leaving behind a trace (‘t’) in its D-structure position.3 Structures which involve movement of a noun phrase to the left periphery of the sentence are labelled ‘topicalization’. top (5) maryi,
john
love ti
[ASL]
‘Mary, John loves.’
3 Aarons
(1994: 154) also provides the corresponding example with the topicalized subject john (johni, ti love mary). In this case, only the prosody (non-manual marking and pause) indicate that we are dealing with a topic construction, as the word order is SVO. Note that it is crucial that the verb in (5) is a plain verb, as it is commonly assumed that agreeing verbs may license empty arguments (pro) in subject and object position; that is, in the presence of an agreeing verb, it cannot be determined whether the topic is moved (trace in argument position) or base-generated (pro in argument position).
820 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau Interestingly, Aarons points out that topicalization either selects one specific member from a set or is used for contrastive focus. Therefore, what we are dealing with is actually focus (see the discussion of (18) in Section 40.4.1.2; also see Neidle (2002), who assumes that mary in (5) actually occupies the specifier of a Focus Phrase). Wilbur (1997), however, argues that (5) might well be uttered in a context like the following: There are three girls in John’s class, Jane, Mary, and Sasha—Jane, he hates, but Mary, he likes. In this context, mary would indeed be a contrastive topic. The different possible functions of fronted constituents are attested in other languages as well, including English (Prince 1986). A third type that is often distinguished in the literature are ‘hanging’ topics (sometimes also referred to as ‘Chinese-style’ topics; e.g. Todd 2008; Sze 2011). In contrast to left dislocation, a hanging topic is not co-referential with an argument of the clause following it; in contrast to topicalization, the topic NP is not an argument of the verb. Sze (2011: 137) categorizes the topic constituent in (6) as a ‘hanging “aboutness” topic’. (6) [ixdeaf-allowance deaf deaf-allowance ixdeaf-allowance] money (hesitation) money every-month have
[HKSL]
‘About the deaf allowance, (I) get the money every month.’ As for the syntax of topic constructions, Crasborn et al. (2009) observe that in NGT, a clause-final indexical sign may optionally be used, which is co-referential with the topic constituent. Crucially, this sign is different from the (resumptive) pronouns attested in examples like (1a) and (4b) above, as it does not occupy the position of the respective argument (NGT is an SOV language). The example in (7a) actually contains three pointing signs targeting the same position: the first one localizing the topic NP girl, the second one being a resumptive pronoun in subject position (indicative of left dislocation), and the third one appearing in clause-final position (Crasborn et al. 2009: 359). In previous studies on ASL (Padden 1988) and NGT (Bos 1995), it has been argued that such clause-final pronominal signs always refer to the subject (hence the name ‘subject pronoun copy’). Crasborn et al., however, provide examples in which the final index refers to an object (7b) or a locative expression. They argue that the final index actually refers to the topic and therefore label the phenomenon as ‘topic agreement’. (7) a. girl indexleft , indexleft book throw-away indexleft
[NGT]
‘That girl, she threw away the book.’ b. book indexright, indexleft throw-away indexright ‘He threw away the book.’
[NGT]
Information Structure in Sign Languages 821
40.3.2 Non-manual marking Ever since the early studies on IS in SLs, it has been observed that topicalized constituents are commonly accompanied by specific non-manual markers. A marker that is mentioned in basically every study addressing this issue is brow raise; in addition, head movements are often described. Ingram (1978: 204), for instance, observes that ‘ASL topics may be marked with the raising of the eyebrows, the tilting of the head, the twitching of a shoulder’ and goes on by pointing out that it is ‘not yet known whether the choice of topic marker is determined by individual preference…, by sociolinguistic influences, by grammatical context, or by a combination of these’. Similarly, Liddell (1980) mentions brow raise and a slight backward head tilt for ASL, while Coerts (1992) concludes that ‘eyebrows up’ is the only non-manual feature characteristic of topics in NGT, as it is the only feature in her data that accompanied more than 50 per cent of all topics (in fact, this feature accompanied 90.6 per cent of all topics).4 Other markers that one may come across in the literature include ‘eye gaze at addressee’ and ‘head nod’ (see Sze (2011: 126f) for a convenient overview of non-manual markers as identified in different studies). In other words: the abbreviation ‘top’ as used in some of the above examples is often a cover term for a set of non-manual markers. Aarons (1994) was the first one who attempted to establish a correlation between topic type and non-manual marking. She distinguishes three subtly different non-manual markers, glossed as ‘tm1’, ‘tm2’, and ‘tm3’, which systematically accompany different types of topics in ASL. Here we only consider the former two, the form of which Aarons (1994: 156) describes as follows: tm1 —raised brows; head tilted slightly back and to the side; eyes widened; head moves down and forward → moved topics tm2 —large movement of head back and to the side; eyes very wide; head moves down and forward → base-generated topics She observes that ‘tm1’ accompanies moved topics like the one in (5) while ‘tm2’ occurs with base-generated topics of the type illustrated in (4). Note that it may well be the case that these (and other) markers are compositional in the sense that different components (e.g. brow position, head position) contribute distinct meanings. All of the non-manual markers discussed so far are domain markers in that they extend over a syntactic/prosodic domain. In addition, there are boundary markers. Left-peripheral topics generally constitute an intonational phrase which is followed by 4 Janzen (1999) argues that the non- manual topic marker (in particular, raised eyebrows) is grammaticalized from a communicative questioning gesture commonly used by speakers. This non-manual co-speech gesture entered the grammar of ASL as a yes/no question marker and then developed further into the topic marker (for grammaticalization in SLs, see Pfau and Steinbach 2011).
822 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau a prosodic break and which may also be manually marked by a phrase-final hold (as in (2b)). A non-manual marker which is frequently observed in this context is an eye blink (‘bl’) coinciding with the final hold or following the topic constituent, thus marking the prosodic boundary (Sze 2008a; Herrmann 2010), as illustrated in the German SL (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS) example in (8) (Herrmann 2010: 23).5
(8) your dog,
bl
name what
[DGS]
‘Your dog, what was his name again?’ All of Aarons’ examples include a non-manual (domain) marker accompanying all types of topics (moved and base-generated, arguments and adjuncts). Similarly, Jantunen (2007: 165) points out that in his data, topics ‘were always layered with some sort of a position of the eyes and eyebrows’. Later research on other sign languages, however, suggests that SLs may differ from each other when it comes to non-manual marking. Rosenstein (2001), for instance, claims that topics in ISL are not marked by brow raise—at least not in spontaneous discourse. Sze (2008b, 2011) observes that in HKSL, only a very small number of aboutness topics—including hanging topics, left- dislocated topics, and topical (clause-internal) subjects—are accompanied by brow raise and/or a specific head position (see e.g. (2a) above). Also, they are not consistently followed by an intonational break. In contrast, scene-setting topics in her data (with the exception of temporal adverbials) are much more likely to be accompanied by either brow raise, a forward head tilt, or both. In (9), the NP secondary-t wo, which sets up a temporal domain, is marked by brow raise and forward head tilt (‘fht’) (Sze 2011: 14). br & fht (9) secondary-two, start play-basketball, have-competition fare-better-than
[HKSL]
‘At secondary two (= grade 8), I started playing basketball and had competitions; I was better than (other senior schoolmates).’ In contrast to HKSL, in NGT and RSL both aboutness topics (10a) and scene-setting topics (10b) can be marked by eyebrow raise (Kimmelman 2015). However, neither of the two types of topics is obligatorily marked; in fact, the majority of topics remain unmarked. Furthermore, with respect to aboutness topics, the NGT and RSL data 5 Liddell (1980) and Aarons (1994) further observe the presence of a head nod (‘hn’) on the subject of the main clause in case of VP topicalization; see example (i) (Liddell 1980: 30).
top (i) chase cat,
hn dog
‘As for chasing the cat, the dog did it.’
Information Structure in Sign Languages 823 reveal another contributing factor: only shifted aboutness topics in these two SLs can be marked by eyebrow raise. br (10) a. ix cat ix, think
[RSL]
‘The cat thinks.’ br b. ix wall, rain pipe
[RSL]
‘There is a rain pipe on the wall.’ Taken together, the data from different SLs reveal (i) that topics are commonly, but not consistently, marked by non-manual domain and boundary markers, (ii) that different types of topics may be accompanied by subtly different domain markers, and (iii) that SLs may differ with respect to the form and frequency of the markers employed.
40.3.3 Topic stacking In his study on ASL topics, Ingram (1978) points out that topic NPs may combine with temporal and/or locative phrases to form what he calls the ‘theme’ of the sentence. Put differently, he may have been the first one to observe that argument and adjunct topics may be stacked, as shown in (11) (adapted from Ingram 1978: 204).6
(11) long-time-ago,
top girl small, decide walk in woods
[ASL]
‘A long time ago a little girl decided to walk in the woods.’ Aarons (1994) further investigated the possibilities of topic stacking in ASL. She finds that there is a maximum of two topics adjoined to the sentence (CP) and also describes some interesting combinatorial constraints. First, she observes that two base-generated topics of the types presented in (4) may be combined, as illustrated in (12) (Aarons 1994: 176). However, while in (12a), the order of the two topics, neither of which is co- referential with an argument of the verb, is free, in (12b), reversal of the two topics would lead to ungrammaticality; that is, a topic which is co-referential with an argument of the clause (john) must precede a topic which is in a class-member relationship with an argument of the clause (vegetable). 6 The example actually comes from a study on pauses in ASL by Grosjean and Lane (1977). Ingram does not provide the non-manual marker in his gloss, but points out that the constituent girl small carries a non-manual topic marker. The commas reflect pause durations as measured by Grosjean and Lane.
824 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau tm2 (12) a. vegetable,
tm2 china ix, people prefer broccoli
[ASL]
‘As for vegetables, in China, people prefer broccoli.’ tm2 b. johni,
tm2 vegetable, ixi prefer artichoke
[ASL]
‘As for John, as far as vegetables are concerned, he prefers artichokes.’ Second, grammaticality judgements by native signers indicate that two moved topics can never co-occur, irrespective of order, as shown by the ungrammaticality of (13a) (Aarons 1994: 179). Third, when it comes to the combination of a base-generated and a moved topic, only the sequence of base-generated topic followed by moved topic appears to be marginally acceptable (13b), while the reverse order is judged ungrammatical (Aarons 1994: 177). tm1 (13) a. * johni,
tm1 maryj, ti love tj
[ASL]
‘John, Mary, he loves her.’ tm2 b. ? johni,
tm1 maryj, ixi love tj
[ASL]
‘As for John, Mary he loves.’ Crasborn et al. (2009) discuss topic stacking from a different perspective, focusing not on the co-occurrence of moved and base-generated topics but rather on the combination of argument and spatio-temporal (scene-setting) topics. They observe that in NGT, argument topics precede spatio-temporal topics and within the latter group, time specifications typically precede place specifications, as illustrated in (14) (Crasborn et al. 2009: 359). In Aarons’ system, the topic constituent [ixrt person] would be classified as a base-generated topic, as it is resumed by a pronoun in the clause. Note that the left-dislocated topic is not non-manually marked (‘neutral’ expression) while the scene-setting topics are marked by head tilt—which is in line with the observation made by Sze (2011) for HKSL. Crasborn et al. also claim that an argument topic always constitutes a prosodic unit of its own (an intonational phrase) while spatial and temporal topics may be merged into a single prosodic unit, as is the case in (14). neutral tilted nod neutral (14) ixrt person, tomorrow at-home, ixrt newspaper read ixrt ‘The man, tomorrow at home he will read the newspaper.’
[NGT]
Information Structure in Sign Languages 825 Clearly, in a phrase structure model like that of Rizzi (1997), which assumes multiple topic positions within the left periphery, topic stacking can be accounted for (see Aboh, this volume). Lillo-Martin and de Quadros (2008), however, further assume that the higher topic position (which they label ‘Topic-Comment Phrase’) hosts base-generated topics while the lower one hosts moved topics—with a Focus Phrase sandwiched between the two topic positions, as illustrated in (15a) (also see (16b) below). (15) a. [T-C P topic [FocP focus base-gen. (‘tm2’)
[TopP topic [IP moved (‘tm1’)
]]]]
b. [FamP topic [ShiftP topic [ContrP topic [IP base-gen. base-gen. moved (‘tm3’) (‘tm2’) (‘tm1’)
]]]]
Similarly, Puglielli and Frascarelli (2007) claim—based on spoken and sign language data—that aboutness topics occupy a topic projection in the left periphery (‘ShiftP’) above contrastive (i.e. moved) topics (15b). They further assume a third topic position for familiar topics, which they situate highest in the tree (note that these are the topics, which, according to Aarons (1994), are marked by ‘tm3’, and which we excluded from the discussion in Section 40.3.2). While this order of dedicated positions allows for the derivation of the (marginally acceptable) ASL example (13b), it seems that one further has to assume that the projection for aboutness topics (‘T-C P’ or ‘ShiftP’) is recursive in order to account for the examples in (12).7
40.4 Focus–background distinction Although the focus–background distinction in SLs has been explored in less detail than topics, the expression of focus has been relatively well studied for ASL (Wilbur 1994, 1996; Neidle 2002), and some data is available for other sign languages, including Brazilian SL (Língua de Sinais Brasileira, LSB: Nunes and de Quadros 2008), NGT (Van der Kooij et al. 2006), and DGS (Herrmann 2013); for an overview, see also Wilbur (2012). Based on the available data from these languages, we first address
7 With
respect to SL, Puglielli and Frascarelli (2007) do not specify the hierarchical position of the Focus Phrase, but only point out that ‘Focus is realized in a position in the C-domain that is higher than the subject (but lower than a Topic)’ (2007: 155). For spoken language, they establish the sequence ShiftP > ContrP > FocP > FamP > IP. Moreover, they explicitly claim that only FamP is recursive. They base their arguments on the data provided by Aarons (1994), but it has to be pointed out that (i) they neglect the fact that examples like (13b) are only marginally acceptable and (ii) they wrongly claim that the combination of two base-generated (aboutness) topics is ungrammatical in general (see (12b)).
826 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau types of focus in Section 40.4.1; this will be followed by a discussion of non-manual marking of focus in Section 40.4.2, while the association with focus will be reviewed in Section 40.4.3.
40.4.1 Types of focus It has been shown that different types of focus, including information focus, contrastive focus, and emphatic focus, each have a different means of expression across SLs (Wilbur 2012). Crucially, just like topics, all three types of focus can be expressed both syntactically and non-manually (see Section 40.4.2 below). Before addressing the three types of focus, we should briefly address the relation between focus and stress in SLs. As in many spoken languages, the focused constituent in SLs generally has to be stressed (Wilbur 1994, 1999). Despite a disagreement among researchers as to how exactly stress is realized in different SLs, the most common features of a stressed sign are longer duration, larger movement trajectory, and higher velocity of the movement (Wilbur 1999; Van der Kooij et al. 2006; Crasborn and Van der Kooij 2013). As Crasborn and Van der Kooij (2013) point out, there is no research on potential analogues of focus projection in sign languages (see Arregi, this volume).
40.4.1.1 Information focus As for the first type of focus under consideration, information focus is often not marked syntactically (Lillo-Martin and de Quadros 2008), which means that the constituent expressing information focus remains in situ, as in (16a), which could be an answer to the question ‘What did you read?’. However, in ASL, the focused constituent can optionally be moved to a clause-initial position—SpecFocP in Neidle (2002) and Lillo-Martin and de Quadros (2008). The example in (16b) illustrates the co-occurrence of a left- peripheral information focus (banana) with a base-generated topic (fruit). As pointed out by Lillo-Martin and de Quadros (2008: 169), this sentence could be uttered as a reply to the question ‘As for fruit, what does John like?’ (‘t-c’ = topic-comment topic; see (15a)). (16) a. i read book stokoe
[ASL]
‘I read Stokoe’s book.’ t-c
I-focus
b. fruit, banana, john like more
[ASL]
‘As for fruit, John likes bananas best.’ It should be noted that a different analysis of the ASL data has been proposed by Petronio (1991) and Wilbur (1997), who claim that stress in ASL—unlike in English—has a fixed position: the right edge of the clause. As a consequence, the constituent in focus must
Information Structure in Sign Languages 827 either undergo rightward movement or be doubled, that is, appear once in its original position and once in the clause-final one (see Section 40.4.1.3 for discussion).8 Should the focus be expressed syntactically, one of the main means to do so in SLs is the so-called ‘wh-cleft construction’, which has been described for many SLs, including Australian SL (Johnston and Schembri 2007), NGT, and RSL. Wilbur (1996) argues that ASL constructions like (17a) should be analysed as wh-clefts, where the first clause expresses the topic and the second clause expresses the focus of the sentence (Wilbur 1996: 210).9 She provides several syntactic arguments—for instance, embedding, interaction with negation, and ellipsis—for the claim that these constructions are single sentences, and not a combination of a rhetorical question and an answer, as had previously been argued by Baker-Shenk (1983). In particular, she argues that the first part of the construction is a reduced relative clause, while the second part is a constituent smaller than a clause, which conveys new information. br (17) a. me dislike what, lee poss tie
[ASL]
‘What I dislike is Lee’s tie.’ br b. john have motorcycle, no (he not have motorcycle)
[ASL]
‘John doesn’t have a motorcycle.’ Recently, however, Caponigro and Davidson (2011) have claimed that these constructions are not syntactically and semantically parallel to wh-clefts in spoken languages, but have instead analysed them as clausal question–answer pairs unique to SLs. According to them, the function of these constructions is indeed connected to Information Structure, but cannot be subsumed under the traditional functions of wh-clefts. While they agree with Wilbur in treating the whole construction as a single declarative sentence, they provide arguments against her analysis of the two parts of the construction. As for the first (question) part, they argue that it is an embedded interrogative and not a relative clause, as ASL relative clauses never contain wh-words. In addition, they show that the question part can also be a polar question. As for the second (answer) part, they provide evidence that it actually is a partially elided declarative clause. For illustration, consider the example in (17b), which includes a polar question in the first part and the obligatory negative reply no along with the optionally omitted material (he not have motorcycle) in the second part (Caponigro and Davidson 2011: 336).
8
9
For a recent discussion of different analyses, see Wilbur (2012). See Wilbur (1997) for a discussion of other types of clefts attested in ASL.
828 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau
40.4.1.2 Contrastive focus With respect to the second type of focus, contrastive foci in SLs are also often marked by topicalization, as has already been mentioned in the context of example (5). Aarons (1994), for instance, has shown that in ASL, topicalization can be used to express contrast, as illustrated in (18) (Aarons 1994: 159; example slightly adapted). tm1 (18) johni not-like jane. maryj , indexi love tj. ‘John doesn’t like Jane. Mary he loves.’
[ASL]
Lillo-Martin and de Quadros (2008) also claim that in ASL and LSB, the constituent which is in contrastive focus is moved to the focus projection in the left periphery of the sentence. As pointed out previously, however, Wilbur (1997) has suggested that a left-peripheral contrastive constituent can either be a contrastive focus or a contrastive topic. This implies that topicalization as a syntactic mechanism is used to express a variety of meanings, and not just contrastive focus. Interestingly, syntactic marking of contrast can also be achieved by certain modality- specific means, in particular, by making use of the signing space or the two manual articulators. As for the former, two referents that are contrasted can be localized in opposite locations in the signing space, and this strategy alone can yield a contrastive reading in SLs. Moreover, contrasted referents may trigger the use of a so-called ‘dominance reversal’ (Frishberg 1985). Dominance reversal is a phenomenon connected to the fact that signers usually use one hand more actively than the other, so that one-handed signs, for instance, are signed with this dominant hand (‘dh’). However, sometimes the roles of the hands are switched with the non-dominant hand (‘ndh’) becoming more active. According to Frishberg, this strategy can be applied in order to separate a topic (signed with one hand) from the comment (signed with the other hand), as in the Jordanian SL (Lughat il-Ishaara il-Urdunia, LIU) example in (19a) (Hendriks 2007: 250), but it may also serve the purpose of contrasting referents, as in the NGT example in (19b) (adapted from Crasborn and Van der Kooij (2013)). The latter use implies that referents localized contrastively (to the right and to the left of the signer) can be signed with two different hands, leading to the dominance reversal. (19) a. dh: ndh:
multi-coloured-coat beautiful good
[LIU]
‘The multi-coloured coat was beautiful and good.’ b. dh: ndh:
neg no no wife
hn son ix self ix
‘No, it’s not my wife, it’s my son (who went to the movies).’
[NGT]
Information Structure in Sign Languages 829 In addition to syntactic marking, contrastive focus or, more generally, contrast is usually marked non-manually. The non-manual marking associated with it can be the same as the one that is associated with information focus (Lillo-Martin and de Quadros 2008), but contrastive focus appears to be marked more consistently (and other special means are also available, see Section 40.4.2).
40.4.1.3 Emphatic focus Turning to the last type of focus, emphasis in SLs is usually connected to the phenomenon of doubling, which means that a constituent referring to the same object/activity appears twice within a single clause, as illustrated for the modal verb can in the LSB example in (20) (de Quadros 1999; cited in Nunes and de Quadros 2008: 178).
(20) i (can) go party
hn can
[LSB]
‘I can go to the party.’ This phenomenon has been described for many SLs, including ASL, LSB, and HKSL (Sze 2008b). According to Nunes and de Quadros (2008), doubling in ASL and LSB is used to express emphasis, and it surfaces when two copies of a moved constituent are overtly realized. Alternative analyses of doubling have been proposed by Petronio (1991), who connects doubling to all types of focus, and by Fischer and Janis (1990), who argue that doubling is motivated by morphosyntactic factors. Recently, Kimmelman (2012) has proposed a unified account of doubling in RSL and NGT. Based on the observation that different types of constituents—from pronouns to full clauses—can be doubled, he claims that doubling in these two sign languages serves for foregrounding of both topical and focal information, both at the syntactic and discursive level. Although prominent across SLs, doubling as a grammatical phenomenon is not unique to the visual-gestural modality. Kandybowicz (2007) has shown that it occurs in many spoken languages from different language families, and that it fulfils similar functions related to IS: emphasis, contrast, or polarity.
40.4.2 Non-manual marking Similar to topics, foci in SLs can be marked non-manually. Interestingly, non-manual marking of foci is in many respects similar to non-manual marking of topics. For instance, according to Lillo-Martin and de Quadros (2008), different types of focus (information, contrastive, and emphatic) in ASL and LSB are consistently marked by eyebrow movement and a backward head tilt; judging by pictures provided in their article, contrastive focus is also marked by a forward head tilt. In other SLs, similar non- manual markers have been observed. In DGS, for instance, replacing and corrective foci are marked by raised eyebrows and head tilts and movements, while information and
830 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau selective foci are not consistently marked (Waleschkowski 2009). In addition, Crasborn and Van der Kooij (2013) claim that information and contrastive foci in NGT can be marked by a large number of non-manuals. In particular, all kinds of foci are characterized by eye contact between the signer and the addressee and mouth actions; in addition, focus can be marked by body lean, head tilt, head nod, and brow raise. One can notice that non-manual markers that are used to mark focus (such as raised eyebrows) also commonly accompany topics. In addition, in some SLs both topics and foci can be fronted. These similarities could be taken to suggest that these markers actually mark something else; Wilbur and Patschke (1999), for instance, claim that raised eyebrows in ASL consistently mark A′-positions. On the other hand, there are also numerous differences in syntactic and non-manual marking of topics vs foci in different SLs (see also below). Further research on more SLs is required to disentangle how syntactic position and (possibly subtle) differences in non-manual marking correlate with the IS status of a constituent. Until recently, it was largely unknown how exactly different non-manual markers interact with each other. Lately, however, the importance of this question has begun to be understood. For instance, Crasborn and Van der Kooij (2013) discuss the possibility that in NGT, raised eyebrows, open eyes, and backward head tilts are all realizations of an abstract phonological feature [open up!]. It would therefore be insightful to study the features that can have multiple phonetic realizations and find out their IS-related functions. In addition to non-manual markers that are used to mark both topics and foci, there are non-manual markers associated specifically with focus and contrast, namely body leans and contrastive spatial localizations. Wilbur and Patschke (1998) have found that forward and backward body leans in ASL serve to mark inclusion vs exclusion in general, and, more specifically, that they may also mark stress, accompany the focus particles even and only, and signal focus and contrast. According to Van der Kooij et al. (2006), body leans fulfil similar functions in NGT: in particular, the focus particles only and also are accompanied by backward and forward leans, respectively. Unlike ASL, however, in NGT contrast is expressed by left-vs rightward body leans, as shown in (21), where two actions are contrasted (Van der Kooij et al. 2006: 1607, slightly adapted). lean leftward headshake (21) no, index ride-bike,
lean rightward index asl study, index
[NGT]
‘no, he is not out biking, he is studying ASL.’ Non-manual contrast marking by sideward body leans is probably a manifestation of a more general strategy, namely localizing contrasted referents in opposite areas in the signing space, as discussed in Section 40.4.1.2. By leaning towards these contrastive locations, the signer further emphasizes the contrast. Actually, the same contrastive opposition is also manifest in dominance reversals.
Information Structure in Sign Languages 831 The fact that three related strategies—body leans, contrastive localization, and dominance reversal—are used to express contrast in SLs may be an argument in favour of considering contrast a separate notion of IS, and not a subtype of focus (see Repp, this volume). However, Crasborn and Van der Kooij (2013) have suggested that in longer stretches of discourse, these strategies can be used to mark focus (without contrast) as well. Therefore, this question requires further research, in particular, the analysis of data from various SLs.
40.4.3 Focus particles Focus-sensitive particles, such as only and also (Beck, this volume), also exist in SLs. These particles have, for instance, been claimed to exist in ASL (Wilbur 1994) and NGT (Van der Kooij et al. 2006). Herrmann (2013) investigates and compares the use of focus particles in NGT, DGS, and Irish SL, describing both similarities and differences between the three languages. Manually expressed particles are usually associated with non-manual marking. Focus particles are often accompanied by non-manuals connected to focus, such as eyebrow raise and head tilt, as well as by additional markers. For instance, the manual sign only in ASL and NGT is often accompanied by a backward body lean, while the particle also is usually accompanied by a forward body lean (Wilbur and Patschke 1998; Van der Kooij et al. 2006). Moreover, these non-manuals alone can express the relevant meaning, that is, the manual sign is optional, as is evident from example (22) (Van der Kooij et al. 2006: 1603).
(22) newspaper,
forward book interesting
[NGT]
‘The newspaper, but also the book, is interesting.’ According to Herrmann (2013), particles expressing meanings similar to only and also are present in many SLs; however, a particle that is functionally equivalent to even has not yet been found in any SL. The emphatic meaning connected to this latter particle in spoken languages can only be expressed non-manually in SLs, or by a non-manual combined with a manual particle with a different function. For example, in DGS, the emphatic non-manual expression can be combined with the sign also, yielding the emphatic meaning (23) (Herrmann 2013: 261, slightly adapted; pf stands for a particle, ‘g-pu’ for a palm-up gesture). hn+br (23) tim ix3 book
also pf
‘Tim has even read the book.’
even [read]f g-pu
[DGS]
832 Vadim Kimmelman and Roland Pfau This fact is interesting from a typological perspective, as it provides evidence for the universality of the restrictive and additive particles, but not the emphatic ones. While the status of the non-manual marker that can serve to express emphatic meaning is not clear yet, its use in (23) suggests that the relevant meaning can be expressed compositionally.
40.5 Modality effects While spoken languages exist in the oral-auditory modality, sign languages exist in the visual-gestural modality. Furthermore, SLs use several partially independent articulators to transfer information, namely the two hands, the torso, the head, the lips, and the eyebrows, among others. Therefore, it is always important to determine whether and, if so, how the modality influences the structure and functioning of a sign language. Separating modality-specific from modality-independent properties of languages is also crucial to the quest for linguistic universals and our understanding of the linguistic capacity in general. For this reason, we will briefly summarize the possible modality effects identified in the domain of IS in SLs. The first major modality effect that appears in connection to IS is the crucial role of non-manual marking. It has been claimed that non-manual marking in SLs is in many respects parallel to intonation (pitch movement) in spoken languages (Pfau and Quer 2010). However, despite the parallels, non-manual marking is formally much more elaborate than intonation due to the availability of multiple articulators. These different articulators are commonly used to express several separate bits of information simultaneously; for instance, eyebrows can mark information focus while a body lean may express contrast at the same time. In addition, several non-manual features can be a realization of a more abstract phonological feature (see Section 40.4.2 above). Furthermore, non-manuals interact with manual signs in a non-trivial way: they can double the meaning of the sign (as in the case of non-manual marking accompanying only or also); they can have a separate meaning (e.g. a sideways body lean that expresses contrast), or they can create a meaning in combination with the manual sign (as in the case of emphatic non-manual marking combined with the sign also yielding the meaning ‘even’). As a result, in SLs, the non-manual channel can be employed to express elaborate semantic distinctions in the domain of IS. Another group of effects of modality on IS is connected to the presence of two hands as partially independent articulators, which in principle would allow for expressing two streams of information simultaneously. Due to processing difficulties, the hands are generally not used independently: it is almost impossible to produce or understand two separate utterances at the same time. However, the hands do not always act as one articulator either, and signers can exploit their partial independence to structure information. For instance, dominance reversal can be used to express contrast and also to separate the topic, signed with one hand, from the comment, signed with the other hand (Frishberg 1985). Moreover, the use of the non-dominant hand in general is probably
Information Structure in Sign Languages 833 connected to IS: it may convey less important or backgrounded information and maintain a continuous topic in discourse (Vermeerbergen et al. 2007). Although a few studies that consider this phenomenon are available, the role of the two hands in relation to IS awaits further research. The third group of effects is connected to the use of space, a hallmark of the grammar of SLs. As mentioned previously, referents are often localized in the signing space, and this localization is connected to topicality (Barberà 2012) and contrast. Furthermore, localization can be realized not only directly (through pointing signs) but also indirectly by means of body leans and dominance reversals. As has already been suggested, these mechanisms may be relevant for the discussion of the universality of IS notions (Section 40.4.1.2). Finally, another interesting difference between SLs and spoken languages has surfaced in the discussion of structures that have been analysed as wh-clefts, a construction also attested in spoken languages. Recently, however, it has been claimed that these structures actually constitute question–answer pairs of a type not attested in spoken languages (Caponigro and Davidson 2011). It is not clear how this phenomenon can be directly connected to the visual-gestural modality of SLs; however, if it is confirmed that only SLs have such pairs, a modality-specific explanation would be welcome. To sum up, the discussion in this chapter reveals that across SLs, IS is expressed by syntactic and prosodic strategies that are similar to those that have been described for spoken languages. Crucially, the basic IS notions, such as topic and focus, which have been developed based on spoken languages alone, can also be applied to SLs. However, modality, as manifested in multiple simultaneously used articulators and the use of space, also has its effect on the encoding of IS, as it allows SLs to employ means of expressing IS that are not available in spoken languages.
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Subject Index
A(naphoric)-deaccenting and Nuclear Stress (NS) Shift see deaccenting aboutness topic see topic aboutness condition 742–4 accent: contrastive accent see contrastive accent deaccenting see deaccenting /destressing deaccentuation see deaccentuation focus accent see focus accent new-information accent 537, 539, 592 nuclear (pitch) accent see nuclear accent / nuclear pitch accent phrase accent see phrase accent pitch accent see pitch accent (PA) prenuclear accent see prenuclear accent production of pitch accents 536–7 word accent see word accent accentuation 143–4, 544, 564–7, 576, 592–4, see also deaccenting /destressing, deaccentuation accessibility 43, 47, 48, 544, 132, 542–5, 553, 558–9, 548–9, 591–2, 611 accommodation 51ff, 94–96, 99, 133–4, 142–3, 257, 584, 592 of questions 71, 94 Across The Board (ATB) 371–2, 378 additive particle 79, 352, 728–9, 832 afterthoughts 414, 649–51, 708 AlignHead constraint 452–4 alternative semantics /Alternative Semantics 5, 19, 65–6, 90, 129–35, 229, 245–50, 253–4, 315, 318, 350–2, 354, 489 alternatives /focus alternative 129–31, 253–4, 490, 544, 592, 597, 702 processing of see processing types of 271–5, 280–3, 287–9
ambiguity 72–3, 777 American farmer sentence see farmer sentence anaphoric dependence 394, 396–7, 399–400, 592 anaphoric presupposition trigger 351 annotation 603ff automatic annotation 614ff coreference annotation 605ff evaluation of 608ff of information status 605ff manual annotation 603ff anterior negativity (AN) 591, 596, 598 approximatives 113–6, 120, 126 assertoric inertia 108–9, 114–6, 120–1, 127 association with contrastive topic 729 association with focus 22, 105, 255, 317–9, 330, 483–4, 486–7, 491–2, 495, 500, 502, 728–9, see also focus association at-issueness 101 degrees of 109–12, 127 attention 557 attention orienting 582, 583–585, 590, 592–4, 597–8 Autonomy of Syntax hypothesis 433–8 Availability constraints 94 B-accent 67 background 57–8, 81, 135–41, 316–9, 334–5, 495–6, 663–4, 676–7, 679–84, 689–91, 707 Baker ambiguities 240 bare argument ellipsis (BAE) see ellipsis beliefs, desires, and intentions 91 binding 693–4 bleaching 503–4 boundary tone 449–50, 468, 478, 697–8, 701
956 Subject Index bridging 133–4, 497, 592, 606–11 brow raise 821–3, 829–32 but 108–13, 115–6, 271, 275–8 cartography 438–9, 621, 626, 630, 633, 692 cataphora 258 clash avoidance 499, 517 clause 775 embedded 309ff left periphery of the 149, 287–9, 294ff, 621, 625-7, 633–5, 638–9, 643–49, 690 right periphery of the 649–53 cleft 57–8, 117–27, 318, 322, 324–7, 333, 335, 593, 722 and pseudo-cleft 755–7 clitic 724–5, 726–8, 729, 730 auxiliary 726–8 pronominal see clitic pronoun / pronominal clitic clitic doubling 383–5, 393ff, 399, 627, 689–91, 698, 707–8, 724 clitic pronoun /pronominal clitic 402, 406, 724–5, 726–8 coherence relation see discourse relations coherence theory of truth see truth comment 252, 339, 566, 569–7 1, 663–6, 671–2, 676–7, 680, 684, 733, 737, 739, 742–5, 784, 828 common ground /Common Ground (CG) 42ff, 74, 76, 108–11, 115, 120, 334, 336–7, 351–2, 416–8 CG Content 5 CG Management 5, 42–4, 53–5, 332, 336–7 definition of 4–5 configurationality 424–5 conflict: constraint 203–23, 329, 451–4, 460, 660–1 between modules 221 Congruence constraints 94–5 consensus theory of truth see truth conservativity 252 context 254, 337, 351, 583, 587, 590–3, 595–7 contrast /contrastiveness 78–9, 270–89, 383, 387, 389, 390ff, 398, 400–1, 415, 429, 431–2, 436, 545, 593–6, 621–2, 626–32, 635–40, 701, 705, 729–731, 733–7, 739–40, 743, 746–7, 749, 750–2
constituents 271–5, 279–80, 287 discourse relations see discourse relations interrogatives and 278, 280–1 contrastive accent 284, 286–7, 498–9, 534–6, 700–2 contrastive ellipsis (CE) see ellipsis contrastive focus see focus contrastive interpretation 363, 375, 379 contrastive topic (CT) 64–80, 89, 281–2, 348, 360, 374, 376, 428, 431, 433, 439, 626, 629–32, 636, 638, 645, 657, 663–4, 671–2, 704, 706–7, 716–7, 725–6, 729, 730–1, 734, 739, 749, 765–7, 820, 828 contrastive topic marker 69, 73, 595, 729–31 CT+F(ocus) contour 67 CT-semantics 66 licensing by alternatives 37 conventional implicature 66, 74, 108–10, 112–5, 117–9, 124–5, 127 conventionalized association 255 conversational implicature 108–12, 115, 120, 126–7 conversational operator 298 coordinate structures 550 corpus/corpora 599–617 corpus architecture 604ff task-based 602ff correction 273, 276, 278–9, 283, 287–9, 485, see also focus correspondence theory of truth see truth crosslinguistic variation 213–4, 215–6 D-linking 49–50, 705–6, 721 d-pronoun, German 407–8 dative shift 624, 634 deaccenting / destressing 42–54, 57–8, 60–2, 467–9, 544, 699, 707 A(naphoric)-deaccenting and Nuclear Stress (NS) Shift 167, 177n27, 180–4 deaccentuation 143–4, 485, 487, 498, 544, 621, 622–4, 628, 640, 715–6, 724 declarative 304 defeasible entailment 351 DeStressGiven constraint 452–3, 489 destressing see deaccenting /destressing determiner 251, 260, 265–6 weak determiner 260
Subject Index 957 discourse particle see focus-sensitive operator/particle, see also doch, ja discourse referent 257–8, 332–3, 485, 592–7, 607, 611, 613 discourse relations 59–60, 271, 275–80, 281–3, 287–9, 714, 723 discourse situation 306ff discourse template 439 discourse-configurationality 422–3, 427, 690, 692 strong 432–3 weak 432–3 discourse-prominence 425–7, 543, 592 disjunction 233, 237 alternative semantics 38 dislocation 402–21 clitic left dislocation 428, 431, 625, 627, 643–646, 649–50, 655, 657, 659–660, 688 clitic left dislocation, definition of 403–5 clitic right dislocation, definition of 403–5 contrastive left dislocation, definition of 403–5 contrastive topic left dislocation 428 D-type dislocation, definition of 403–5 English left dislocation 407 H-type dislocation, definition of 403–5 hanging topic /hanging topic left dislocation 428, 643–5, 649, 659, 725, 820 hanging topic, definition of 403–5 left dislocation /left object dislocation 398ff, 428–9, 513–4, 518, 560, 688–9, 704–8, 749, 820 right dislocated topic 650–1, 653, 657–8, 659–60, 662 right dislocation 390, 395ff, 399, 409–10, 429, 707, 760, 769 distinguished variables 240, 248–50 diversity 1–2 doch 338–9, 342–3, 344n8, 346–56, 358 dominance reversal 828, 830, 832 doubling 724, 725–6, 829 downstep 471–3, 477–81, 712, 715 economy 436–8 eigentlich 507
ellipsis 144–5, 334, 723, 758–60, 769 bare argument ellipsis (BAE) 374–7 contrastive ellipsis (CE) 360, 364, 370–7 1 givenness marking ellipsis (GME) 334, 364, 366–7, 370, 382 NP-ellipsis (NPE) 362–3, 365, 367–8, 369n2, 370, 382 TP-ellipsis (TPE) 362–5, 367, 369, 382 VP-ellipsis (VPE) 362–7, 370, 378, 382, 728 emphasis 543, 638, 748, 778, 829, see also stress epithet 498 event-related brain potentials (ERPs) 581–98 eventive see thetic vs. categorical distinction events 256–7 exhaustivity /exhaustive(ness) 64–5, 109, 117–27, 273, 664, 671, 677–8, 681–2, 730–4, 722 extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM) 597–8 extended indirect reference hypothesis 471, see also indirect reference hypothesis extraction 696–7 extraposition 384, 389–90, 628 eye-tracking methods 525–6, 532, 750, 752 F-feature 190, 273, 463, 470–1, 474, 476, see also focus feature F-marking / F-marked 54ff, 189–190, 192–5, 196–7, 200, 274–5, 279, 282, 286–7, 485–7, 489–92, 499–501, see also focus marking and givenness see givenness F-projection 192–8, see also focus projection F0 / f0 height see downstep, tonal height, upstep lowering of 470–81, 745–9, 751 range 286, 745–9, 751 farmer sentence 22, 25, 271, 452–7, 499 feature-checking 437 few 260–1 file card semantics 82–5 final lowering 473, 474n3 first conjunct (FC) 359–60, 372–3, 376–8, 380–1 First Occurrence Focus (FOF) see focus focal accent see focus accent focalization 780 Focus (functional projection) 149–52, 558, 825
958 Subject Index focus: in A′-related phenomena 390ff annotation of 606–8 association with focus see association with focus, see also focus association broad focus 280, 283, 285–7, 346, 747 compositional semantics 28–33 contrastive focus (CF) 270–5, 284–6, 287–9, 347, 360, 371, 374, 375–7, 380–1, 425, 430–2, 437, 439, 488–90, 492, 543, 593, 628, 710, 713–714, 720, 734–6, 739, 740, 752, 828–9 contrastive import 646–8, 650, 651–2, 654–5, 661 corrective focus 273, 275–9, 288–9, 593, 748, 750–1, 829 corrective import 647, 651, 655 definition of 5–6 on determiners 265–6 effect on quantification 253 effect on stress 441–462, 466–9 effect on tonal height 469–82 effect on truth conditions 22 exclusive focus 273, 740 F-marking / F-marked see F-marking / F-marked First Occurrence Focus (FOF) 457–61, 483–5, 487–9, 491–7, 501–2 givenness and see givenness identificational focus 287–8, 422, 431–3, 676–7, 681, 702–3, 722 in situ focus 119, 121, 124–5, 127, 204–5, 323, 696–7 left peripheral focus see focus fronting licensing by alternatives 27 licensing by entailment 33 mirative import 646n10, 647–8, 659 multiple (occurrence of) focus 64–7, 241, 474–6, 663, 748, 751 narrow focus 280, 284–6, 347, 627–8, 702–4, 747 nested foci see nested foci (new) information focus /informational focus 273–4, 431, 490, 646, 648, 651–3, 654–5, 661, 734–5, 750, 826–7 polarity focus 71, 297, 726–8 post-verbal focus 204, 325, 646, 650, 651–3, 656, 660–2 pragmatic focus 87
pragmatic use of 5, 486–7 predicate focus 163, 314–335 prosodic focus see in-situ focus scope of 24–5 Second Occurrence Focus (SOF) 58, 62, 457–61, 483–502 semantic focus 87, 486, 499 semantic use of 5 structural focus 109, 117–8, 121–7, 664, 677, 682 subject focus 327, 331, 335 TAM-focus 314–5, 321, 327 term focus 315–9, 323, 325–9, 331–5 topical focus 73–5, 738–9, 752 unstressed focus 217–8 verum focus 290ff, 315, 327, 356, 714, 726–8, 738 focus accent 314, 318, 320, 322–4, 329–30, 333–4, 345, 449–462 focus accent thesis (FAT) 298 focus association 350, 354, 739, see also association with focus focus–background 136, 141, 503, 672–85, 825–32 focus domain 191, 444, 489, 499, 747 focus exponent 345–6, 348–50, 357, 486, 489, 710, 713, 715–6, 719, 720–1 focus feature 312, 427, 434–6, see also F-feature focus fronting 288–9, 323–4, 645–9, 655–6, 659–62, 693–4, 702–4 focus interpretation 129–33 focus marker 321–2, 325–7, 329–30, 333–4, 797 focus marking 315, 317, 319, 323–4, 326–9, 331–4, 733–40, 746, 751–2, see also F-marking / F-marked asymmetries 319, 323, 326, 331, 333 focus movement 288–9, 326–7, 333, 638–40, 663, 674–7, 692–3 lack of 204 focus particle 349n11, 351n13, 354–5, 484, 488, 492, 567, 572–3, 578–9, 593, 831–2, see also additive particle, focus-sensitive operator/particle, restrictive focus particle focus position 426–7 focus positivity see P300
Subject Index 959 focus projection 185–202, 204, 346, 434, 486, 692, 710–4, 721, see also F-projection Default Prosody approach 185, 188, 189–91, 197–200, 202, see also prominence, stress F-projection approach 191–8 focus prominence /focal prominence 185–91, 193, 197–8, 200–2, 320, 426–7, 443, 448, 456–62, 466–7, 543, 746, 751, see also prominence focus prosody 281, 434, 470, 485, 753–5, 765, 768, 779, 803n6 focus semantic value 129–31, 352, 490 focus sensitivity 55ff, 105, 229, 338, 352n15, 353–4, 357, see also additive particle, restrictive particle focus-sensitive determiner 264 focus-sensitive discourse particle 338, 352, 357 focus-sensitive operator/particle 483, 485–8, 490–2, 499, 728–9 acquisition of 572–8 focus-configurational 423, 427, 429–30 formal fronting 633–7, 639–40 frame setting 514 free association 255 fronting 720–1, 724–6 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 582, 586, 588–9, 590–1 functional projection 435, 438–9 G-marking 467–8, 490, 501 gapping 359, 362–4, 370–4, 377–9, 382 generalized pied-piping 15, 157–8, 160, 163 Generalized Quantifier theory 251–2 givenness 41ff in A-related phenomena 384ff accommodation 51–4, 584, 592 and adverbial quantification 257–8 annotation of 605–8 children’s language production, impact of 568–9 children’s language comprehension, impact of 571–2 and clitic doubling 395ff contextual 487 degree of 595, 604 and dislocation 414–6 definition of 6, 487 and definiteness 40–2, 49
destressing effect of 466–9, 654 and entailment 46–8 F-marking and 192–4 and focus 45, 55–62, 339, 749–50 Given-before-New generalization 385 marking see G-marking and memory 585 illusion 45 neurocognitive correlates of 591–2 and predictability 490–2 presupposition and see presupposition referential and lexical levels of 498, 500 and Second Occurrence Focus (SOF) 483–5, 495 and topic 595–6 water shedding and 339–41 and word order 622–5 givenness marking ellipsis (GME) see ellipsis grammaticalization 777, 821 heavy NP shift 628–9 height-subordination 476–7, 479–80 identificational predicate 676–7, 681 illocution type operator 293 immediately after the verb position (IAV) 425, 793, 794ff imperative 306 Inclusiveness 436 indefinites 49, 268 indeterminate phrase 236, 242 indeterminate pronoun 20, 32 indirect evidence 601ff indirect reference hypothesis 445, 471, see also extended indirect reference hypothesis individual/stage level predicates 420 inference 47–8, 586, 591–2, 594, 703–4 information packaging 4–5 information status 265, 450, 485, 498, 532, 534, 563, 591, 599, 604–10, 614, 616, see also givenness effect on accentuation 565–6 information structure (IS): automatic annotation of 614–6 frequency effects on prosodic realization of 539 history of 3–4 information structural import 543 recursivity of 769–72
960 Subject Index intensifying self 508 inter-annotator agreement / inter-rater reliability 608ff intermediate phrase 484, 491, 495, 497, 500, 502, see also phonological phrase internal model 582–3 intersective determiners 260, 262–3 intervention effects 240 intonation 284–7, 449–51, 463–82 intonation phrase /intonational phrase 216–8, 410–2, 445ff, 464–9, 474–5, 477–8, 480, 821 ja 336–45, 347–50, 358 Jespersen cycle 505–6 judgment 303 last answer problem 75–6 left periphery 287–9, 428–9, 433, 438, 594–5, 621, 625–7, 633–5, 638–9, 691–6, 825–6, 828 clausal see clause lexical decision task 524 lexical operator thesis (LOT) 298 lexical tone 745–6, 748, 751–2 lian…dou/ye construction 738–9 locality 134–5 lumpers 484, 487 many 260–1 marginalization 660 marked order 384–5, 388, 401, 590, 595–6 marked stress see stress matrix 251 Maximize Presupposition see presupposition memory 585–6 message 541 metrical (in)visibility 176–8 metrical grid 441–62, 500–1 metrical incorporation 179–80 metrical stress 484, 489, 500–2 Minimalism 435–6 minimalist 437 modal particle 336 monotone decreasing 268, 343 mood phrase 302 most 251, 259–60
motivation see trigger multi-layer corpus architecture 604ff N400 585–6, 590–2, 595, 596, 597, 598 narrative inversion 719, 721 negation 506 negative concord 510 negative polarity and alternative semantics 39 negative polarity item (NPI) 114, 116, 118–9, 234, 505–6 nested foci 451ff new 6, 54ff, 336, 338, 341, 565, 568 nominalization 327 non-at-issue meaning 112–15, 120–1, 125–7 non-configurationality 424–5 non-manual (marker) 816, 821–5, 829–32 NP-ellipsis (NPE) see ellipsis nuclear accent /nuclear pitch accent 355, 451, 483–6, 489, 491–8, 500–2, 698–702, 710–6, 720, 721, 726, see also nuclear stress (NS) nuclear scope 251 nuclear stress (NS) 190, 194, 426–7, 464–6, see also nuclear accent /nuclear pitch accent A(naphoric)-deaccenting and NS Shift see deaccenting /destressing and intonational nucleus alignment 166, 181, 207–9, 215–6 Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) 168, 170, 177, 179–80, 182, 183, 189, 198–9, 207–9, 215–8, 452n12, see also rightmost strengthening only 111–6, 119–20, 122–3, 125–6, 229, 354 processing of see processing optative if only 507 Optimality Theory (OT) 203–33 ordinary semantic value 352, 490 OV sequence 160–1, 163 P300 584–5, 593–4, 598 P600 584–5, 592, 595, 596 parallelism condition (PC) 364, 371, 379 particle verb 219 partitive determiner 265 passive 624–5, 635
Subject Index 961 perception-action cycle 582–3, 586 PF-deletion 361, 366, 369, 381–2 phonological phrase 213–4, 220, 450–1, 464–6, see also intermediate phrase, prosodic domain, prosodic phrasing phrasal stress see stress, phrase accent phrase accent 201–2, 497 phrasing see prosodic phrasing pitch accent (PA) 192–3, 200–1, 284–7, 355, 359, 362–3, 370, 376–7, 380, 465–6, 468, 472–3, 477–81, 534–6, 654–5, 657–8 see also nuclear accent /nuclear pitch accent comprehension of 534–7, 592–4 plasticity parameter 216 polysynthetic languages 403 poset 626, 638 post-focal reduction /post-focus f0 compression /postfocal compression 499, 747, 749–50, 754, 757–8 the Prague school /the Prague Linguistic Circle 3 predicate 775 predicate doubling 725–6 predication 663–5, 676–7, 681–2 predictability 50, 52–3, 490–2, 498, 500, 544 prediction 582–4, 586, 590–2, 596–8 predictive coding 583, 598 prefield (Vorfeld) 512ff, 590, 594–5, 611–2, 631–40 and givenness 635 prenuclear accent 45, 451, 457–61, 492, 495, 497, 501–2, 697, 699, 712, 715–7 preposing objects 744–5, 752 presupposition 109, 114, 117–8, 124, 127, 254, 337, 351, 577–8 background presupposition 135–41 existential presupposition 663–4, 676–7, 679–84 existential presupposition of focus 101 focus presupposition 129–35, 544 and givenness 42ff, 51ff, 141–5, 544 Maximize Presupposition 54, 544 vs. salience 41–4 processing effects of crosslinguistic differences on information structure processing 539–40, 559
of only 538, 593 of focus alternatives 537–8, 592–4, 544 of prosodic cues 534, 592–4 of scrambled word order 528–30, 595–6 production planning 541 production-comprehension asymmetry 566–7, 572, 578 prominence 42, 58, 62, 441–62, 483–96, 499–502, 543, 583, 592, 594–5, 735, 737, 746–8, 751, see also, focus prominence / focal prominence, stress default prominence 185, 189–91, 197–200, 202, see also stress secondary/postnuclear prominence 457–61, 484, 487–90, 492–3, 496–502 pronoun 549, 551, 716, 723, 724–725, 726–728 clitic pronoun see clitic German d-pronoun see d-pronoun, German indeterminate pronoun see indeterminate pronoun resumptive pronoun 724–725, 819–20 wh-pronoun see wh-pronoun proportional determiners 263–4 prosodic domain /phonological domain 445–8, 697–700, 821, see also intonation phrase /intonational phrase, phonological phrase prosodic hierarchy 200, 445–6, 450 prosodic phrasing 212–4, 217, 286–7, 320, 322–3, 451, 751–2, 782, see also intonation phrase /intonational phrase, phonological phrase prosodic recursion 447, 459–460 prosody 58, 410–2, 441–62, 464–471, 541, 592–4, 684–5, 733, 736, 745, 749, see also focus prosody pseudogapping 363 psychological predicate 315, 318 quantification 251–69, A-quantification 252, 253–8 adverbs of 252 asymmetric quantification 258 D-quantification 252, 259–65 domain of 251
962 Subject Index quantifier 251, 265, 343, 350 cardinal quantifier 263 comparative quantifier 262 existential quantifier 252 numeral quantifier 263, 266 universal quantifier 252, 663–4, 667–8, 680 quantifier scope 72–3, 623, 694–5 quasi association 255 question 233, 249, 303–304, 827 alternative semantics to, application of 31–3 Current Question 86 question-answer congruence 20, 24, 64, 186–7 question under discussion /Question Under Discussion (QUD) 65–73, 76–80, 86, 299, 277–8, 336n2, 353, 489, 491, 726, 730–1 reaction time 524–5 redundancy theory of truth see truth reference 541, 585, 590–2, 597 referential density 780–781, 788 referring expression, type of 551, 568–9 Relevance constraints 94, 97 repeated-name-penalty 552 repetition 546 requantification problem 256–7 restrictive focus particle 739–40, 832 cai and jiu 739–40, 744 zhi 739–40, 743 restrictor 251 resumption 402, 406–8, see also pronoun rheme 3, 338–9, 349, 733, 750 rhetorical opposition 109–10, 112 rhetorical relation see discourse relations Rhetorical Structure Theory 276–7, 607 Right Frontier Constraint 93 right node raising (RNR) 360, 362, 364, 370, 377–82 rightmost strengthening 465, 468, see also nuclear stress (NS) rise-fall-rise (RFR) pattern 73–5 scalar implicature 766 ScalAssert 235, 242 scaling (of tones) see tonal downstep, height, upstep
scope inversion (under rise-fall) 72–3 scrambling 590, 595–6, 622–5, 626–7, 629, 630–1, 636–7, 639, 757–8 A′-scrambling / A-bar-Scrambling 383, 387, 390ff, 630–1 A-scrambling 383, 384ff, 395, 622–4, 627, 639 processing scrambled word order see processing scrambling negativity 590, 597, 598 second conjunct (SC) 272, 360, 363–4, 371–2, 375–8, 380–1 Second Occurrence Focus (SOF) see focus secondary assertion 110, 115, 127 Segmented Discourse Representation Theory 276 self-paced reading 524, 556 sentence adverbial 342–345, 626–7 sentence melody see intonation sentence mood 301ff sentential force 302 shi construction 736 bare shi focus construction 736–8 bare shi sentences 737 shi…de constructions 736, 737, 738 signing space 815, 828, 830, 833 situations 253–4, 256, 315–318, 332 sluicing 362, 369 snowballing movement 152, 154, 158 specificational predication 664, 676–7, 681–2 splitters 484, 487, 489 squiggle operator 230, 246, 248–9, 254 statement see thetic vs. categorical distinction stress 463–82, 786, 826, 830, see also prominence default stress 464–6 emphatic stress 557, 778–9, see also emphasis nuclear see nuclear stress (NS) phrasal stress and spell-out domain 169–70, 172–3, 213–4, 200 (un)marked stress 167–7, 180–4 StressFocus constraint 213–5, 217–8, 444, 452–4 StressXP constraint 212–4, 452–4, 465
Subject Index 963 stress–focus correspondence 213–5, 217–8, 444, 452–4, 676 Strict Layer Hypothesis 447 stripping 362, 364, 370–1, 374–7, 382 structured meaning 316, 318 stylistic fronting 634–5, 637 subject 337, 342, 344n8, 627–8, 630–5, 637–41, 735, 740–1, 743–5, 785 logical subject 663, 665–6 topical subject 315 Superman sentences 452–6 syntactic movement 318, 324, 326–8, 333 syntax-discourse model (SDM) 597 syntax-prosody interface 209–10, 214, 216–7, 219, 221, 289, see also prosody T-model 209, 211, 216, 219, 221, 434, 439 theme 3, 80–6, 338–9, 349, 733, 750 thetic sentences 52–3, 315–6, 322, 344n8, 611–2, 669 thetic vs. categorical distinction 172–3, 184 thought 303 tonal height 469–82 tone 465–70, 476, 478, 480 tone change 780–1 toneme 151–2, 155 Topic (functional projection) /TopP 149–52, 342, 825 topic: in A′-related phenomena 390ff and aboutness 413, 418–9, 420 aboutness topic 80–5, 334, 341–2, 344–5, 348–50, 357, 390, 429, 438, 551, 594–5, 645, 626–7, 634–7, 650, 657, 761–3, 817–8, 822, 825 annotation of 606–11 base-generated topic 742–4, 819, 823–4 clitic left dislocated topic see dislocation contrastive topic see contrastive topic (CT) dangling topic 742–4 definition of 6–7 double topicalization 744, 745 external topic 428 familiar topic see givenness frame-setting topic 761–3
given topics 595, 645, 650, 657, 659 hanging topic see dislocation implicational topic 70–1 interpretation condition 744 licensing condition 744 moved topic 742–4, 821, 824–5 multiple topic 763–4 partial topic 68–9 right dislocated topic see dislocation shift topic 650 topic drop 637 topic position 342 topic promotion 413ff, 725 topic shift 69–70, 595 topic stacking 823–5 topic–comment 172, 514, 558, 566, 569–71, 611, 665–72, 687, 670, 743, 816–825, see also thetic vs. categorical distinction topic-configurational 423, 427–9, 431 topic-prominence 426, 817 topicality 341, 348, 542, 559 topicalization 429, 693, 704, 719, 723–4, 725, 819–20, 828 English 407 TP-ellipsis (TPE) see ellipsis trigger 337, 351, 384–6, 388–9, 395–6 tripartite structure 252 truth 311f coherence theory of 311 consensus theory of 312 correspondence theory of 311 redundancy theory of 311 truth conditions 108, 110, 112–5, 120, 125–7 truth predicate 293 unexpectedness 272, 591 universals 334–5, 832–3 unmarked stress see stress updating 337, 582, 592, 597 upstep 472, 477–80 verb copying 319, 328, 334 verb movement 663–4, 677 verb raising 210–2 verb second (V2) 513, 516, 621, 631–4, 638, 639–40
964 Subject Index VERUM 294, see also focus VP-ellipsis (VPE) see ellipsis WH elements 795–6 wh-cleft 827, 833 wh-phrase 663, 675, 682 wh-pronoun 235, 249 wh-question /wh-interrogative 272, 280, 305, 314, 688, 690–1, 694–5, 705–6 when-clause 254 witness set 268 word accent 201–2, 449–62
word order 108, 111, 118, 204–12, 214–21, 355, 357, 549, 564, 568, 570, 590, 592, 594–6, 622–40, 741–2, 744–6, 784 neutral order 67–8, 384 processing of scrambled word order see processing scrambled word order 205–6, 528–30, 622–5 word order flexibility 528–30, 532, 560 yes/no-question, yes/no-interrogative 75, 280–1, 304, 499, 714, 716, 728
Language Index
Abo 797 Afrikaans 621–2, 629 Aghem 321, 325, 426, 429, 794, 800 American Sign Language (ASL) 429, 816–7, 819, 820–1, 823–4, 826–30
East Cree 425 English 186–99, 215–6, 219–21, 284–6, 424, 432, 441, 451–54, 468–7 1, 480, 493, 495, 499, 621–2, 624–31, 640–1, 735, 737, 740–1, 746, 750
Bangla/Bengali 537 Bantu 211–4, 217–8, 320–1, 325, 328 Basaa 796 Basque 186–7, 190, 200–2, 429, 432, 436–7 Belarusian 729, 732 Bemba 427 Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) 719, 727–30 Brazilian Sign Language (LSB) 825, 828–9 British Sign Language (BSL) 817 Bulgarian 722, 724, 727–30 Buli 321, 327 Bura 300, 326, 333
Fijian 425 Finnish 356–7, 429, 431–2, 528–9 Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) 817–8 Fongbe 151–2 French 215–6, 320, 322–3
Cantonese 747 Catalan 81, 428 Cayuga 425 Chi Mwi:ni 212–3 Chicheŵa 212–4, 218, 320–1, 323–4 Chinese see Mandarin Chinese Chishona 211–2 Chitumbuka 217 Coos 425 Croatian see Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) Czech 720–1, 724–5, 727–9 Danish 595, 626, 633, 637–8 Dutch 300, 336, 427, 429, 433, 439, 622, 627–1, 633, 637 Duwai 333
Georgian 432 German 71–3, 197, 199, 285–6, 320, 323, 329, 336, 338, 341–2, 348, 351, 355, 357, 428–9, 430, 457, 464–9, 471–4, 477–82, 494–6, 498, 530–1, 534–5, 590, 593–6, 621–40 German Sign Language (DGS) 822, 825, 829–31 Greek 428–9, 432, 437, 686–708 Guaraní 69 Gungbe 150, 328, 334, 433 Gùrùntùm 321, 329, 334 Hausa 326–7, 334 Hdi 328 Hebrew 328 Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) 817–8, 820, 822, 824, 829 Hungarian 69, 72, 221–2, 287–8, 322–4, 336, 423, 427–9, 432–3, 435–6 Icelandic 622, 625, 627, 633, 635, 637–8, 641 Ishkashim 330 Israeli Sign Language (ISL) 817, 822 Italian 203–9, 215–6, 221, 288–9, 426, 428, 430, 432, 436–7, 446, 596
966 Language Index Japanese 81, 84, 320, 323, 357, 425, 427, 433, 470, 499, 593, 595 Jordanian Sign Language (LIU) 828 Kabiye 328 Kimatuumbi 212–3 Kinande 791 Kiswahili /Swahili 211, 791 Konni 321 Korean 69, 73, 425, 432, 433 Lahu 85 Luganda 794–6, 803, 809–810 Macedonian 724, 728–9 Malayalam 429 Manado Malay 336, 356 Mandarin Chinese /Chinese 357, 429, 469–7 1, 473–7, 536, 595, 733, 738, 740, 747 Medumba 321, 328, 334 Mocheno 621, 625, 627, 629, 631, 640 Ngandi 425 Ngizim 333, 429 Nłeʔkepmxcin (Thompson River Salish) 319, 322, 324–326 Northern Biscayan Basque (NBB) 186, 200–2 Northern Sotho 217–8 Norwegian 300, 621, 626–7, 637–8, 641 Old French 505–6 Old High German 509–10, 516–7
Romanian 429 Russian 429, 432, 711–7, 719, 721–3, 728–30 Russian Sign Language (RSL) 817, 822, 827, 829 Serbian see Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) Serbo-Croatian 436 Sesotho 211 Shanghai Chinese 746–9, 751 Sicilian 432, 437 Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) 817, 818–21, 824, 827–31 Slovak 729 Slovenian 724, 726, 728–9 Somali 429 South Margi 301 Spanish 286, 300, 426, 429, 431–2 St’át’imcets 336 Swahili see Kiswahili /Swahili Swedish 449–62, 612, 627, 633, 636–8 Taiwanese 747 Tangale 330, 429 Tzozil 82 Ukrainian 723, 729–30 Vata 328 Warlpiri 425 Western Bade 429 Wolof 321–2, 325
Polish 723, 725, 728–30 Portuguese 286–7
Yiddish 621–2, 624, 629–31, 634–5, 638, 641 Yoruba 328, 334
Quechua 425
Zulu 433, 792, 799–800, 805, 809, 811
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