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México frente a Madrid : aspectos fonéticos del habla de los taxistas en dos capitales hispanas
(1994)
When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions.
Fronting of an infinite VP across a finite main verb - akin to German "VP-topicalization" - can be found also in Czech and Polish. The paper discusses evidence from large corpora for this process and some of its properties, both syntactic and information-structural. Based on this case, criteria for more user-friedly searching and retrieval of corpus data in syntactic research are being developed.
This paper describes the creation and preparation of TUSNELDA, a collection of corpus data built for linguistic research. This collection contains a number of linguistically annotated corpora which differ in various aspects such as language, text sorts / data types, encoded annotation levels, and linguistic theories underlying the annotation. The paper focuses on this variation on the one hand and the way how these heterogeneous data are integrated into one resource on the other hand.
The paper explicates the notions of topic, contrastive topic, and focus as used in the analysis of Hungarian. Based on distributional criteria, topic and focus are claimed to represent distinct structural positions in the left periphery of the Hungarian sentence, associated with logical rather than discourse functions. The topic is interpreted as the logical subject of predication. The focus is analyzed as a derived main predicate, specifying the referential content of the set denoted by the backgrounded post-focus section of the sentence. The exhaustivity associated with the focus and the existential presupposition associated with the background are shown to be properties following from their specificational predication relation.
The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-learning infants from 4 to 14 months
(2007)
The aim of the present study was to elucidate in a study with 4-, 6-, 8-, and 14-month-old German-learning children, when and how they may acquire the regularities which underlie Focus-to-Stress Alignment (FSA) in the target language, that is, how prosody is associated with specific communicative functions. Our findings suggest, that 14-month-olds have already found out that German allows for variable focus positions, after having gone through a development which goes from a predominantly prosodically driven processing of the input to a processing where prosody interacts more and more with the growing lexical and syntactic knowledge of the child.
The paper investigates focus marking devices in the scarcely documented North-Ghanaian Gur language Konkomba. The two particles lé and lá occur under specific focus conditions and are therefore regarded as focus markers in the sparse literature. Comparing the distribution and obligatoriness of both alleged focus markers however, I show that one of the particles, lé, is better analyzed as a connective particle, i.e. as a syntactic rather than as a genuine pragmatic marker, and that comparable syntactic focus marking strategies for sentence-initial constituents are also known from related languages.
This paper deals with the conditions under which singular definites, on the one hand, and universally quantified DPs, on the other hand, receive interpretations according to which the sets denoted by the NP-complements of the respective determiner vary with the situations quantified over by a Q-adverb. I show that in both cases such interpretations depend on the availability of situation predicates that are compatible with the presuppositions associated with the respective determiner, as co-variation in both cases comes about via the binding of a covert situation variable that is contained within the NP-complement of the respective determiner. Secondly, I offer an account for the observation that the availability of a co-varying interpretation is more constrained in the case of universally quantified DPs than in the case of singular definites, as far as word order is concerned. This is shown to follow from the fact that co-varying definites in contrast to universally quantified DPs are inherently focus-marked.
Face-to-face communication is multimodal. In unscripted spoken discourse we can observe the interaction of several “semiotic layers”, modalities of information such as syntax, discourse structure, gesture, and intonation. We explore the role of gesture and intonation in structuring and aligning information in spoken discourse through a study of the co-occurrence of pitch accents and gestural apices. Metaphorical spatialization through gesture also plays a role in conveying the contextual relationships between the speaker, the government and other external forces in a naturally-occurring political speech setting.
Elke Kasimir´s paper (in this volume) argues against employing the notion of Givenness in the explanation of accent assignment. I will claim that the arguments against Givenness put forward by Kasimir are inconclusive because they beg the question of the role of Givenness. It is concluded that, more generally, arguments against Givenness as a diagnostic for information structural partitions should not be accepted offhand, since the notion of Givenness of discourse referents is (a) theoretically simple, (b) readily observable and quantifiable, and (c) bears cognitive significance.
A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness of special sentences, called Wide Focus Partial Fronting (WFPF), which consist of only one prosodic phrase and a unique initial accented argument, are reported on here. The results help us to decide between different models of German prosody. The absence of pitch height difference on the accent of the sentence speaks in favor of a relative model of prosody, in which accents are scaled relative to each other, and against models in which pitch accents are scaled in an absolute way. The results also speak for a model in which syntax, but not information structure, influences the prosodic phrasing. Finally, perception experiments show that the prosodic structure of sentences with a marked word order needs to be presented for grammaticality judgments. Presentation of written material only is not enough, and falsifies the results.
The semantics of ellipsis
(2005)
There are four phenomena that are particularly troublesome for theories of ellipsis: the existence of sloppy readings when the relevant pronouns cannot possibly be bound; an ellipsis being resolved in such a way that an ellipsis site in the antecedent is not understood in the way it was there; an ellipsis site drawing material from two or more separate antecedents; and ellipsis with no linguistic antecedent. These cases are accounted for by means of a new theory that involves copying syntactically incomplete antecedent material and an analysis of silent VPs and NPs that makes them into higher order definite descriptions that can be bound into.
This paper discusses the use of XSLT stylesheets as a filtering mechanism for refining the results of user queries on treebanks. The discussion is within the context of the TIGER treebank, the associated search engine and query language, but the general ideas can apply to any search engine for XML-encoded treebanks. It will be shown that important classes of linguistic phenomena can be accessed by applying relatively simple XSLT templates to the output of a query, effectively simulating the universal quantifier for a subset of the query language.
In order to investigate the empirical properties of focus, it is necessary to diagnose focus (or: “what is focused”) in particular linguistic examples. It is often taken for granted that the application of one single diagnostic tool, the so-called question-answer test, which roughly says that whatever a question asks for is focused in the answer, is a fool-proof test for focus. This paper investigates one example class where such uncritical belief in the question-answer test has led to the assumption of rather complex focus projection rules: in these examples, pitch accent placement has been claimed to depend on certain parts of the focused constituents being given or not. It is demonstrated that such focus projection rules are unnecessarily complex and in turn require the assumption of unnecessarily complicated meaning rules, not to speak of the difficulties to give a precise semantic/pragmatic definition of the allegedly involved givenness property. For the sake of the argument, an alternative analysis is put forward which relies solely on alternative sets following Mats Rooth´s work, and avoids any recourse to givenness. As it turns out, this alternative analysis is not only simpler but also makes in a critical case the better predictions.
In this paper we compare the behaviour of adverbs of frequency (de Swart 1993) like usually with the behaviour of adverbs of quantity like for the most part in sentences that contain plural definites. We show that sentences containing the former type of Q-adverb evidence that Quantificational Variability Effects (Berman 1991) come about as an indirect effect of quantification over situations: in order for quantificational variability readings to arise, these sentences have to obey two newly observed constraints that clearly set them apart from sentences containing corresponding quantificational DPs, and that can plausibly be explained under the assumption that quantification over (the atomic parts of) complex situations is involved. Concerning sentences with the latter type of Q-adverb, on the other hand, such evidence is lacking: with respect to the constraints just mentioned, they behave like sentences that contain corresponding quantificational DPs. We take this as evidence that Q-adverbs like for the most part do not quantify over the atomic parts of sum eventualities in the cases under discussion (as claimed by Nakanishi and Romero (2004)), but rather over the atomic parts of the respective sum individuals.
Japanese wh-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the wh-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of Multiple Spell-Out in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a wh-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and wh-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out.
Prosodic focus in Vietnamese
(2007)
This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis.