Focus particles

The goal of this chapter is to reconnect with the research agenda of the “classic” studies on the so-called Focusing Modifiers (such as E. also, only, even) by tackling questions related to the intension (i.e. the defining properties) and the extension (i.e. the inventories) of the category. Since very few classic studies are devoted to Focusing Modifiers in more than one language, these issues are particularly pressing to address in a cross-linguistic perspective. In the present chapter, these questions will be discussed on the basis of data belonging to four languages of two distinct families: two Germanic – English and German – and two Romance languages – French and Italian.

In this study, we investigated how Mandarin-speaking children and adults interpret focus structures like Zhiyou Yuehan chi-le pingguo 'Only John ate an apple ' and Shi Yuehan chi-de pingguo 'It is John who ate an apple '. We found that children tended to associate focus operators zhiyou ' only ' and shi ' be ' with the verb phrase (VP), whereas adults uniquely associated them with the subject noun phrase (NP). To account for this difference, we propose that children initially treat focus operators as adverbials, thus ending up associating them with the VP. In order to assess our proposal, we examined children's understanding of zhiyouconstructions with negation, like Zhiyou Yuehan meiyou chi pingguo ' Only John didn't eat an apple '. It was found that children, like adults, consistently associated the focus operator with the subject NP in this construction. The findings have an important bearing on language learnability, since negation assists children in reaching the adult-like interpretation.

The present study is intended as a further contribution to our knowledge of the origin of the Lithuanian connective tačiaũ „but, however, yet‟. Of two existing so far etymologies we speak in explanation of Pranas Skardžius. In his opinion tačiaũ traces back to the combination of deictic pronoun tat „this, that‟ and postponed particle jau, strictly speaking jau functioning as an „emphatic assertion of identity‟. Typological data presented below support such a possibility.

This study investigates the usage of the pragmatic focus particles even and still in Nigerian English (NigE). A comparison of ICE-Nigeria and ICE-GB showed diverging frequencies of both particles across different registers between the two varieties of English and a significantly higher overall usage of even in NigE. Qualitative analyses revealed that even has acquired a wide range of new pragmatic meanings in NigE, such as emphatic, affirmative, particularising and epistemic meanings, and that still can be used to express promises and predictions. It is shown that these usages mirror meanings of the equivalents of even and still in the Nigerian languages Yorùbá and Igbo; their spread across a wide range of speakers in Nigeria attests to the status of even and still as nativised structures rather than learner errors.

Focus marking in Indian English (IndE) with adverbs such as only, also, and too has been investigated recently by several authors. Based on the Indian and British sections of the International Corpus of English, this article argues that usage of also in IndE differs significantly from British English (BrE). Also often follows its focus immediately, has developed a presentational use, and is often used in negative contexts, corresponding to either. All these innovations are shown to be more frequent in spoken and informal than in written and formal language, respectively. Finally, evidence for substrate influence from Indo-European and Dravidian languages is presented.

The current study investigates presupposition-satisfying dependencies from the point of view of discourse processing. Using the presupposition trigger also as a case study, I ask to what extent the distance spanned by the trigger and the prior discourse content that satisfies the presupposition of also influences comprehenders’ interpretation of the discourse — specifically, whether comprehenders have a bias toward satisfying presuppositions using material in the discourse that is closer rather than more distant.

Two offline experiments and one Visual World eye-tracking experiment provide evidence in favor of a locality bias in presupposition satisfaction. The findings support sensitivity to both linear distance and distance in terms of hierarchically structured discourse representations, consistent with an interpretation system that tracks both structure-insensitive information about discourse mention, and structured representations of larger discourse units.

This paper discusses the focusing function of the so-called focusing adverbs. Based on Italian
data, drawn mainly from authentic linguistic corpora, I will provide evidence of the fact that,
despite their name, focusing adverbs are not always focusing. They can have a weak, a strong
or an anti-focusing effect. The different focusing effects of these forms will be accounted for
by showing that they are determined modularly by the interplay of prosodic, syntactic and
informational factors.

In this paper I examine the multifunctional enclitic =go in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Avar. By means of a semantic map I show that its central function is the expression of emphasis and/or contrast. Other uses are the expression of identity, scalar additivity, reflexivity (including local and long-distance reflexives, emphatic reflexive uses), the marking of indefinite pronouns and adverbs, and the derivation of cardinal numerals and converbs. The paper also advances a hypothesis about the origin of =go and argues that it goes back to the copula -ugo. The use of the copula in cleft constructions gave rise to the emphatic/contrastive function, and all other uses can be viewed as extension of this function.

This paper discusses distributional differences between the two additive particles also and too on the basis of corpus evidence. Three hypotheses are explored: (i) also and too are characteristic of different registers or styles, (ii) the use of also and too is sensitive to structural properties of the 'added constituent', and (iii) the use of the two particles depends on the distribution of 'added material' over the sentence. The discussion centres around the question to what extent corpus-based methods are appropriate to test these hypotheses. While hypothesis (ii) can straightforwardly be tested (and confirmed), the other two hypotheses pose methodological challenges of different types. Corpus-based test procedures are outlined for both hypotheses and preliminary results are given, but it is pointed out that specific types of questions could be answered more easily by applying common elicitation procedures.

In this article, I present evidence for an information-structural basis for linguistic variation in a German multiethnolect, Kiezdeutsch. Using data from word order variation and new particle usages in Kiezdeutsch, I show that variation that seems random from a morphosyntactic point of view, can be motivated by systematic choices at the level of information structure. I argue that this points to an interaction of softer grammatical constraints with more direct options to realise informationstructural preferences, and discuss this interaction from the point of view of linguistic architecture.

Classical Latin displays negative particles, like neque / nec and ne…quidem 'neither, not even', that can express sentential negation while at the same time narrowly focusing on some constituent of the clause. These particles are multifunctional elements that can express various types of focus (additive or scalar) and, in the case of neque / nec, also have a coordinative and a discourse-structuring function. In this work I investigate the complex interplay of semantic and syntactic factors that govern their distribution and interpretation. I single out the structural and meaning-related contextual conditions favoring the additive or the scalar interpretation, and I propose an analysis of the complex internal structure of the particles. I also discuss the diachronic implications of my analysis, in particular with respect to the role played by the Romance continuations of nec.

The goal of this paper is to offer a cross-linguistic analysis of the most commonly occurring additive focus adverbs used in Italian, French and English – namely 'anche', 'aussi' and 'also' – on the basis of a corpus of written texts. The corpus used in this paper consists of comparable online news in Italian, French and English amounting to approximately 750000 words. In line with previous findings, our results show that there are important quantitative and qualitative differences between It. anche, Fr. aussi and E. also. These items differ not only in their overall frequency of use but also in the specific syntactic configurations in which they occur when they associate with the Subject of a canonical sentence. These differences are partly enhanced by the fact that this paper concentrates on a non-prototypical configuration, i. e. on the cases in which the canonical Subject coincides with a new entity while the Predicate is maintained.

The information structure of an utterance in a text is influenced by the relations that link the information given by the utterance and the global amount of information already available in the text and in the discourse model built by the speakers. According to Dimroth (2002), we can distinguish relations of 'aboutness', concerning the status of the information units within an utterance in terms of topicality / focality; and relations of 'contrastiveness', concerning the status of the information units of an utterance with respect to previous utterances in terms of new vs. old; change vs. maintainance of information. By 'information configuration' of an utterance (with respect to a previous one) we mean the relations of "contrastiveness" that link the information units of an utterance to those of a previous one, as in Dimroth et al. (in press).

1. Introduction This paper offers an account of how information structure is expressed in the Nakh-Daghestanian languages. The focus of this paper is on word order and focus particles which can be regarded as the most important means of manipulating the information structure because they are to varying degrees employed in all languages of the family. Other means such as a special cleft-like focus construction (cf. Xaidakov 1986, Kazenin 2002), the opposition between certain verb forms (cf. Sumbatova 2004), the use of so-called 'predicative particles' (Kalinina & Sumbatova 2007), or intonation are either not very prominent or restricted to a subset of the languages. Nakh-Daghestanian languages are located in the eastern part of the Caucasian mountains. Most of the languages are found in Russia, but some speech communities live in Azerbaijan and Georgia. Only the larger languages (e.g. Chechen, Ingush, Avar, Lezgian) are regularly written. The majority of the Nakh-Daghestanian languages are oral languages used as primary means of everyday communication. Much of the data on which this paper is based comes from originally oral texts that have been collected and/or analyzed by the authors and thus lack references. All remaining examples originate from texts that have been published by other researchers. The aim of this paper is to present a typologically oriented study of the expression of topic and focus via word order and the use of particles. We employ the standard information structure-related terms— topic, focus 2 , contrast, pragmatic presupposition and assertion — that are widely accepted in typological and theoretical literature on information structure (cf. Vallduví 1992, Erteschik-Shir 1997, Krifka & Musan 2012 and many other works). Our specific understanding of these terms is following Lambrecht (1994). We show that topics are placed at the edges of clauses, often depending on the activation status of the topical referent. Focus is usually verb-adjacent and can precede or occasionally follow the verb. Focus particles express narrow focus, which precedes the verb. They represent additional means of emphasizing single words within focused phrases. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present a description of topic and focus positions and the impact of different words orders on the information structure of clauses. In Section 3 we give an account of the major focus particles. Section 4 analyzes the interaction of focus particles and focus marking by means of word order and Section 5 contains the conclusion.

Lo scopo di questo lavoro è duplice: descrivere il funzionamento dell'avverbio soprattutto all'interno del testo, in particolare all'interno dell'Enunciato e, in base al comportamento osservato, fare luce sul modo in cui si costruiscono gli Enunciati del testo scientifico, e più precisamente di due sottotipi di testo scientifico scritto: il testo scientifico specialistico e il testo scientifico divulgativo o semi-divulgativo. A differenza delle loro proprietà sintattico-semantiche, ormai ben note, le proprietà testuali degli avverbi focalizzanti -anche, proprio, soprattutto, ecc. -sono meno conosciute. Si sa però che, a differenza di quanto suggerisce il loro nome più usuale, essi non hanno (sempre) una funzione focalizzante in senso pragmatico-testuale: da soli, essi non bastanocome l'intonazione e certi costrutti sintattici (si pensi per esempio alla frase scissa o pseudoscissa) -a creare un Fuoco all'interno dell'Enunciato. In questo lavoro vedremo infatti che soprattutto ha anche una funzione defocalizzante. Per quanto riguarda invece la descrizione dei due tipi di scrittura scientifica presi in considerazione, vedremo che essi si caratterizzano per una testualità diversa, che si può cogliere con i concetti di 'semplicità/complessità informativa' e che questa diversa testualità costituisce a sua volta il parametro principale che regola la comparsa dell'avverbio soprattutto all'interno delle Unità Minimali dell'Enunciato.

This paper compares the expression of information structure in the three indigenous language families of the Caucasus (West Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestanian and Kartvelian) by means of the concepts of focus, contrast, topic and givenness. I concentrated on constituent order and the use of particles, thereby largely ignoring other formal means such as intonation. When comparing all three Caucasian language families we can see a number of parallels in the way information structure is expressed.
First of all, there are obvious (and expectable) similarities in the constituent order at the clause level. All three language families show a clear preference for SOV, but other orders are, in general, possible, whereby Ubykh and Laz are more rigid than the other languages (which might be due to Turkish influence on both languages). The major focus position is preverbal, but postverbal focus is also attested and although focal items are frequently positioned in adjacency to the verb this is not a strict requirement. All three language families allow for verb-initial order for presentational focus in introductory statements of narratives.
By contrast, at the phrasal level we find a sharp difference between West Caucasian with its prenominal and postnominal modifiers as well as nominal complexes on the one hand side and Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian language on the other hand side. Only the latter two families make use of postnominal modifiers for emphasis, contrast or focus, although their syntactic status as belonging to the preceding head noun and forming one NP with it is rather doubtful.
The second major parallel is the existence of cleft-like and pseudo-cleft constructions that normally express constituent focus. Although the exact syntactic nature of these constructions has been investigated only for a handful of languages and their status as genuine cleft constructions is rather doubtful, we can generalize that these constructions have a bipartite structure without necessarily being biclausal and make use of subordinate clause structures that are otherwise found in relative clauses. Cleft-like and pseudo-cleft constructions are commonly found in WH-questions, in particular in West Caucasian and a number of Nakh-Daghestanian languages (e.g. Ingush, Avar, Udi). In general, the extent of use of these constructions varies from family to family, but they seem to be most frequent in West Caucasian because they represent the default strategies for the formation of content questions.
The third similarity concerns the frequent use of enclitics and suffixes for information-structuring purposes, but also dedicated focus particles in some languages. In a great number of languages, modal markers, interrogative markers, additives, scalar-additives, discourse markers, and markers with grammatical meaning (person, tense, negation, etc.) are used as focus-sensitive particles and usually placed after the item they scope over or after the head of the phrase.

The diachrony of Ancient Egyptian allows us to study the emergence of a few discourse markers. Two case studies show an evolution that traditional grammaticalization approaches would term counter- directional. They also illustrate the role played by formal analogy together with pragmatic inference in shaping specific outcomes of change. A model for describing the semantics of discourse markers is proposed, which can account for their polysemy in terms of an underspecified lexical core meaning and contextual parameters. Their characteristic function is seen as relating a discourse segment with some point of reference. The variation of the latter, especially its explicit or implicit character, results in different uses that are typical for such markers. The impact of the proposed approach on a grammaticalization analysis of discourse markers is briefly evaluated.

Languages vary in the ways in which words for conjunction and words for disjunction are interpreted in sentences with negation. To explain the cross-linguistic differences, we propose that words for conjunction and disjunction are interpreted as positive polarity items (PPIs) in some languages (e.g., Mandarin) but not in other languages (e.g., English). If this is correct, then languages should converge on the same intepretations when the polarity sensitivity of conjunction and disjunction is cancelled. One linguistic context that is known to cancel the polarity sensitivity of the English PPI some is in the predicate phrase of sentences with focus operators. We apply this diagnostic to the expressions for disjunction and conjunction in Mandarin and in English. The expectation is that universal principles of semantic interpetation will become operative when conjunction and disjunction words appear in the predicate phrase of focus operators. Since conjunction words and disjunction words are not analyzed as PPIs in this linguistic context, the meaning that is assigned to these words should be the same in all human languages, including child language. By investigating both adult and child English and Mandarin, we show that focus operators do indeed cancel the polarity sensitivity of conjunction words and disjunction words in typologically different languages, and this permits us to witness the invariant logical meanings assigned to these locial connectives in human languages.

The goal of this research is to describe the syntactic, prosodic, and morphophonological markers that are found in Catalan Sign Language (LSC) to express different informational structural notions. Moreover, it offers a first approach to the expression of exhaustivity in LSC through different structures, such as focus particles and cleft constructions.

Among (post-)colonial varieties of German, Namibian German is a particularly interesting case. It has a unique status compared to the other extraterritorial varieties as well as to those in the German-speaking area in Europe. First, it is based on a speech community with German ancestry who still live in Namibia today, which distinguishes it from such colonial varieties as Unserdeutsch in the South Pacific and makes it more similar to such German " language island " varieties as, e.g., Texas German in the United States or the German varieties still spoken in Brazil. Second, though, unlike language island varieties as well as other postcolonial varieties and more similar to those in Germany, Namibian German is linguistically vital. It is passed on to younger generations and is also used in public domains, supporting, e.g., register differentiation. Third, unlike most varieties in Germany, however, it is integrated in a setting of societal multilingualism, with speakers who routinely use two or more languages in addition to German in their daily lives, and with a broader context of high linguistic diversity, offering a wealth of language contact opportunities. In this paper, we describe this special status of Namibian German and present first results from a project that capitalises on this to investigate the (socio-)linguistic dynamics that this setting supports, affording us a spotlight on tendencies of language attitudes and language variation in contact situations of German.

RESUMEN El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar los ejemplos que se dan en las obras tradicionales del denominado καί estructural con el fin de determinar sus características desde una perspectiva más actual. Este es uno de los tipos de καί adverbial que se distinguen, pero, como veremos, se trata de una categoría compleja en la que, sobre la base de su aparición en una oración subordinada, se han mezclado al menos tres usos más o menos habituales de καί adverbial: aditivo, identificativo y corresponsivo. ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to analyse the examples of the so-called structural καί from a modern perspective. The examples are taken from the traditional grammars, in which this adverbial use of καί is usually distinguished. As it will be shown, this is in fact a complex category, established on the basis of its appearance in a subordinate clause and including three quite common uses of adverbial καί: additive, identificational and corresponsive. Cita sugerida: Jiménez Delgado, J. M. (2016). Categorías tradicionales y prágmatica: καί estructural. Synthesis, 23, e004. Recuperado de: http://www.synthesis.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/article/view/SYNe004 Esta obra está bajo licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.es_AR

This paper is focused on the concept of phraseolexical variation, meant as the existence of both lexical and phraseological alternatives to express the same meaning. After this first approach, we delve into the description of the use of the exclusive focus particles solo, solamente, nada más and nada más que by analyzing data extracted from a sociolinguistic corpus of spoken Spanish in the city of Granada (Spain). Our results conclude that there is a higher expressivity associated with the phraseological variants (nada más, nada más que) compared to the lexical ones due to different factors related to its sociolinguistic distribution. On the one hand, there is a social variable: the speakers’ educational level; on the other hand, we distinguish a pragmatic variable: the phraseological variant tendency to develop specific contextual effects.