Topic, Focus, and Exhaustive Interpretation

Lingua, 2011

The claim that focus evokes a set of alternatives is a central issue in several accounts of the effects of focus on interpretation. This article presents two empirical studies that examine whether this property of focus is independent of contextual conditions. The syntactic operation at issue is object-fronting in German, Spanish, Greek, and Hungarian licensed by contexts involving focus on the object constituent. This operation evokes the intuition that the fronted referent excludes some or all relevant alternatives. The presented experiments deal with the question whether this interpretative property obligatorily accompanies the operation at issue or not. The empirical findings show that in German, Spanish, and Greek this intuition depends on properties of the context and is sensitive to the interaction with further discourse factors (in particular, the predictability of the referent). Hungarian displays a different data pattern: our data does not provide evidence that the syntactic operation at issue depends on the context or interacts with further discourse factors. This finding is in line with the view that evoking alternatives is inherent part of constituent-fronting in this language.

In: G. Grewendorf & W.Sternefeld eds. Scrambling and Barriers. Amsterdam: Benjamins (p. 93-112), 1990

This paper analyzes the syntactic properties of sentences with a V-projection in clause initial position, so-called VP-topicalization. The analysis pursues two theoretic claims. First, it will be claimed that this construction provides an argument for a representational conception of Generative Grammar (cf. Koster 1987) and against the standard GB-model with derivation by movement. It will be shown that VP-topicalization defies a derivational analysis. Secondly, this construction provides evidence for the claim that in German the subject is internal to V-max. In section 2, the relevant syntactic aspects of the construction are introduced. Section 3 provides arguments that a movement analysis cannot capture the relevant generalizations. A representational account is presented in section 4, together with an explanation of the syntactic behavior described in section 2. Section 5 discusses some consequences of the representational account. Key words: VP-internal subject; movement paradox; VP topicalization, representational versus derivational accounts.

Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2008

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.

Rivista di Grammatica Generativa / Research in Generative Grammar (RGG) 41: 1–37, 2019

In this paper, I propose that the exhaustive interpretation associated with Hungarian Focus Fronting (FF) is a conventional implicature that belongs to the non-at-issue dimension of meaning and that is directly responsible for the syntactic displacement of the focus constituent. Following a cartographic approach, I defend the view that the interface properties that result from FF, including the associated implicatures at the semantic level, are directly encoded in the syntax in the form of active syntactic features which drive the movement of sentential constituents to dedicated functional projections. In the case of FF, more specifically, these features trigger syntactic movement and generate the relevant implicature. This proposal is based on the observation that, despite being a prominent one-and perhaps the most prominent-the exhaustive reading is not the only possible interpretation that can be associated with FF in Hungarian. Other meanings can be associated with FF in the relevant contexts and under the appropriate conditions, for example, a mirative import of surprise and unexpectedness that need not be exhaustive. From a crosslinguistic viewpoint, moreover, this account provides an explanation for the fact that the exhaustive reading associated with FF, especially in answers to questions, appear to be a language specific property of Hungarian.

Studies in Language, 2020

Focus and newness are distinct features. The fact that subconstituents of focus can be given or discourse-old has been pointed out in Selkirk (1984) and Lambrecht (1994). Nevertheless, when it comes to Sentence Focus, it is still common to equate Focus with newness, and to treat SF sentences as necessarily all-new. One of the reasons for such bias is that formally or typologically oriented descriptions of SF tend to analyze only intransitive ‘out of the blue’ SF utterances stemming from elicitation. Based on SF utterances in natural speech in Kakabe, a Western Mande language, the present study shows that in natural speech SF utterances are associated with a rich array of discourse strategies. Accordingly, the discourse properties of the referents inside SF are subject to variation and affect the implementation of the focus-marking. The study also shows how the discourse properties of referents define the distribution of the focus marker in Kakabe.

Lingua, 2010

2006

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2015

The paper raises the topic of what the functional and logical notion of subject is. It examines the syntax-semantic nature of Icelandic and Polish quirky subject constructions (subjectless clauses in which the initial DP bears oblique Case) with psych-verbs. Of main interest is the full vs. default agreement on V which nominative DPs and quirky subjects always trigger, respectively. We attempt to define the primitive notion of subject from two standpoints – its LF representation and how it is mirrored syntactically by the predication relation of the subject with respect to vP/VP and the proposition of the sentence in TP between the subject and T′. We discuss the semantic and configurational dependencies between quirky subjects and nominative DPs and vP and TP/CP. The paper investigates also the landing site for non-nominative initial DPs and argues for the Topic Phrase in the Left Periphery (Rizzi 1997) as a most natural candidate to host quirky subjects. Hopefully, the conclusions ...

This paper investigates the correlation between information structure and quantifier scope. It has often been noted that intonation seems to influence scope relations, yet noone has given a satisfactory account of this influence. I try to show that Quantifier Raising in a language like English depends on information structure, and thus indirectly on intonation, in much the same way as does DP scrambling in a language like German. I propose a theory where Quantifier Raising emerges as a side effect of a more general operation, covert in a language like English but overt in a language like German.

CLS, 1997