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In this paper, we investigate two pairs of structures in German and English: German Weak Pronoun Left Dislocation and English Topicalization, on the one hand, and German and English Hanging Topic Left Dislocation, on the other. We review the prosodic, lexical, syntactic, and discourse evidence that places the former two structures into one class and the latter two into another, taking this evidence to show that dislocates in the former class are syntactically integrated into their 'host' sentences while those in the latter class are not. From there, we show that the most straightforward way to account for this difference in 'integration' is to take the dislocates in the latter structures to be 'orphans', phrases that are syntactically independent of the phrases with which they are associated, providing additional empirical and theoretical support for this analysis — which, we point out, has a number of antecedents in the literature.
This paper examines substantive noun phrases in Niuean, a Polynesian language of the Tongic subgroup with VSO word order, isolating morphology, and an ergative case system. We describe the allowable orderings of elements in the Niuean noun phrase, which include certain variations in the placement of numerals and the genitive possessor, then we provide a phrasal movement analysis for these variations, treating first the possessor variation, then the numeral variation. Parallels will be drawn between the derivation of nominal and sentential word order.
In this paper I argue that there are three distinct constructions in Modern German in which a 'topic constituent' is detached to the left: (left-)dislocated topic ('left dislocation'), (left-)attached topic ('mixed left dislocation'), and (left-)hanging topic ('hanging topic'). Presupposing the framework of Integrational Linguistics, I provide syntactic and semantic analyses for them. In particular, I propose that these constructions involve the syntactic function (syntactic) topic, which relates the topic constituent to the remaining part of the sentence. Dislocated and attached topic constituents function in addition as a strong or weak (syntactic) antecedent of some resumptive 'd-pronoun' form.
Dislocated topic, attached topic, and hanging topic are in turn contrasted with 'free topics'. Being sentential units of their own, the latter are syntactically unconnected to the following sentence. In particular, they are not topic constituents.
In the wake of Kayne's Antisymmetry Hypothesis and Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), there has been much fruitful research attempting to adjust syntactic analyses to those permitted by Kayne's restrictive system. In doing so, analyses which at first seem counter-intuitive may tum out to provide solutions to old problems. Two cases in point are the analysis of Malagasy involving extensive Remnant Movement [henceforth RM1 described in Rackowski & Travis (2000), Pearson (2001), and elsewhere; on the one hand, and the analysis of Hungarian and Dutch verbal clusters in Koopman & Szabolcsi (2000) [henceforth R&T, Pearson, and K&Sz].
The original motivation (in part) for examining L&Sz and subsequently R&T was that it is the extensive use of iterated RM which increases the computational complexity of languages generatable in Stabler's "Strict Minimalist Grammar" formalism over that of context-free grammars. It has also been noted that allowing extraction from complex specifiers created by Merge (as opposed to Move) increases the level of complexity even further (lens Michaelis, p.e.). Both R&T and K&Sz make extensive use of RM; R&T allow extraction from complex specifiers, while K&Sz do not. Although the specifiers in both cases are created by Move, not Merge, we nevertheless feel that there is enough intrinsic linguistic interest in trying to limit extraction possibilities to pursue the comparison of these two systems with regard to this point.
The German word also, similar to English so, is traditionally considered to be a sentence adverb with a consecutive meaning, i.e. it indicates that the propositional content of the clause containing it is some kind of consequence of what has previously been said. As a sentence adverb, also has its place within the core of the German sentence, since this is the proper place for an adverb to occur in German. The sentence core offers two proper positions for adverbs: the so-called front field and the middle field. In spoken German, however, also often occurs in sentence-initial position, outside the sentence itself. In this paper, I will use excerpts of German conversations to discuss and illustrate the importance of the sentence positions and the discourse positions for the functions of also on the basis of some German conversations.
The aim of this paper is to investigate Rizzi's (2001) recent claim that in combien constructions full movement correlates with a specific or D-linking interpretation of the nominal (see also Obenauer, 1994) while the in-situ option corresponds to focus of the noun. On the one hand, it is argued that the notion of specificity or D-linking for the raised nominal is too strong while on the other hand it is shown that the stranded nominal is not a focus, but a topic, albeit of a special kind. It is also argued that there is a dedicated postverbal position for this kind of topic and that the nominal has all the properties of an incorporated nominal: it is interpreted as an asserted background topic. In the final part of the article, some time is spent discussing the pragmatics and the modality involved in discontinous structures, and showing that the stranded nominal is interpreted inside the VP/below the event variable.
Speakers have a wide range of noncanonical syntactic options that allow them to mark the information status of the various elements within a proposition. The correlation between a construction and constraints on information status, however, is not arbitrary; there are broad, consistent, and predictive generalizations that can be made about the information-packaging functions served by preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions. Specifically, preposed constituents are constrained to represent discourse-old information, postposed constituents are constrained to represent information that is either discourse-new or hearer-new, and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preposed constituent be at least as familiar as that represented by the postposed constituent (Birner & Ward 1998). The status of inferable information (Clark 1977; Prince 1981), however, is problematic; a study of corpus data shows that such information can be preposed in an inversion or a preposing (hence must be discourse-old), yet can also be postposed in constructions requiring hearer-new information (hence must be hearer-new). This information status – discourse-old yet hearer-new – is assumed by Prince (1992) to be non-occurring on the grounds that what has been evoked in the discourse should be known to the hearer. I resolve this difficulty by arguing for a reinterpretation of the term 'discourse-old' as applying not only to information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, but rather to any information that provides a salient inferential link to the prior discourse. Extending Prince’s notion in this manner allows us to account for the distribution of noncanonically positioned peripheral constituents in a principled and unified way.
The syntax and semantics of the resumptive dependency in hungarian focus-raising constructions
(2004)
Previous work (Gervain, forthcoming) has established that focus-raising may be derived by two strategies in Hungarian. One of them is the traditional movement derivation, the other a resumptive dependency created between the focus constituent base-generated in its matrix focus position and a phonologically null resumptive pronoun in the corresponding argument position in the embedded clause. However, the previous account (Gervain, forthcoming) does not give a detailed description of the nature of this resumptive dependency. The present work aims to address this question. More specifically, by providing a series of empirical tests, it attempts to determine whether the dependency is purely syntactic in nature, i.e. obligatory variable binding, or whether a semantic option is also available, i.e. coreference between the focus constituent and the resumptive pronoun. Thus, it provides new insights into the ongoing debate about the nature of resumptive pronouns.
The claim advanced in this paper is that the presence of a left-dislocated element together with a resumptive clitic in Bulgarian is a special case of argument saturation with implications for the focus structure of the clause, while contrast involves discontinuous focus (contrastive topics/foci) with no clitics present in the derivation. Contrastive topic/focus constructions in Bulgarian can be united on the view that they involve (sets of) ordered pairs where the higher element is valuing a contrastive feature (cf. OCC in Chomsky 2001) while the element in the VP is a non-contrastive topic or focus. The contrastive feature participates in wh-structures but not in clitic-left-dislocated structures where pairing between arguments is 'accidental'.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.