scholarly journals The secret life of focus exponents, and what it tells us about fronted verbal projections

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kordula De Kuthy ◽  
W. Detmar Meurers
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Natural Explanation ◽  
Complex Word ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definiteness Effect ◽  
Focus Projection

The paper investigates a complex word order phenomenon in German and the interaction of syntax and information structure it exemplifies: the occurrence of subjects as part of a fronted non-finite constituent and particularly the so-called definiteness effect excluding (many) definite subjects from this position. We explore the connection between focus projection and the partial fronting cases and show that it is the subject of those verbs which allow their subject to be the focus exponent that can be included as part of a fronted verbal constituent. In combination with the observation by Webelhuth (1990) that fronted verbal constituents need to be focused, this provides a natural explanation of the definiteness effect in terms of the information structure requirements in these sentences. Interestingly, the generally ignored exceptions to the definiteness effect are predicted by our analysis; we show that they involve definite noun phrases which can bear focus, which allows them to be part of a fronted verbal constituent. Finally, building on the integrated grammatical architecture provided in De Kuthy (2002), we formulate an HPSG theory which captures the interaction of constraints from syntax, information structure and intonation.

The syntax, information structure, and prosody of German ‘VP’-fronting

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-283
Author(s):  
Vera Lee-Schoenfeld ◽  
Anya Lunden
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
High Tone ◽  
New Information ◽  
Verb Phrases ◽  
Vp Fronting ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Right ◽  
Definiteness Effect

Abstract This paper explores fronted verb phrases in German, drawing attention to the difference between passive/unaccusative VPs and fronted agentive vPs. While both kinds of verb phrases have been discussed in the literature as being frontable, it has been largely overlooked that fronted vPs typically come with a certain kind of post-fronting context and a rise-fall or bridge-contour intonation, which is characteristic of I-topicalization. We observe that, unlike VPs, agentive vPs essentially need to be I-topics, with a high tone at the right edge of the fronted domain, in order to be frontable. Given the special context required for fronted vPs, the situation described by the vP does not contain new information but must already have been under discussion and is now being commented on. We present the results of two experimental studies and appeal to the thetic/categorical distinction to offer a new angle on the definiteness effect that has been associated with fronted verb phrases. We propose that a subject-containing fronted vP is associated with a thetic rather than the default categorical judgment, which means that the fronted subject and predicate form only one information-structural unit (a topic) rather than two (topic and comment). Contributing to the literature on theticity, we observe that, unlike in non-fronting thetic statements, the subject in fronted vPs cannot be a true definite. We attribute this to clashing intonation restrictions on theticity in non-fronting constructions versus theticity in just the fronted portion of a sentence.

scholarly journals Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese

Languages ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Jidong Chen ◽  
Bhuvana Narasimhan ◽  
Angel Chan ◽  
Wenchun Yang ◽  
Shu Yang
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Late Development ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Order Preference

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

scholarly journals Subject case alternation in negated existential, locative, and possessive clauses in Latvian

Kalbotyra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Andra Kalnača ◽  
Ilze Lokmane
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Semantic Type ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Nominative Case ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Adverbial Modifiers ◽  
Strict Rule ◽  
Negative Form

[full article and abstract in English] The goal of this article is to analyse the alternation between the genitive and nominative cases in Latvian. As the alternation between genitive and nominative cases is possible in all clauses in which the verb būt ‘to be’ is used as an independent verb, this article examines existential, locative, and also possessive clauses, while also demonstrating that distinguishing these clause types is problematic for Latvian utilising the criteria given in the linguistic literature. Clauses containing the negative form of būt ‘to be’, i.e. nebūt, form the foundation of those selected for this study, as only in these sentences the genitive/nominative alternation can be seen for the subject in Latvian. There are only fragmentary descriptions of existential clauses as a unique semantic type, primarily in connection with the function of the verb būt ‘to be’ and the problems associated with distinguishing its independent and auxiliary meanings. Word order in existential, locative, and possessive clauses has, until now, been examined in connection with typical clause expanders – adverbial modifiers and the dative of possession as well as the information structure of the clause. At the same time, case choice for objects in negative existential clauses has traditionally been one of the most studied themes regarding language standardisation. In order to determine which factors affect the choice of either the genitive or nominative case, a corpus study was done analysing 979 examples: 882 with a genitive subject and 97 with a nominative subject. It was found that a connection exists between the definiteness of the subject, word order, and case choice; however, this manifests only as a tendency rather than as a strict rule.

Focus on Russian Scope: An Experimental Investigation of the Relationship between Quantifier Scope, Prosody, and Information Structure

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania Ionin ◽  
Tatiana Luchkina
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
Quantifier Scope ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Russian Speakers ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scope Reading ◽  
The Relationship

An experimental investigation of quantifier scope in Russian SVO and OVS sentences, in which the factors of word order, prosody, information structure, and indefinite form are manipulated, shows that native Russian speakers have a preference for surface scope under neutral prosody, though this preference is more pronounced with odin ‘one’ indefinites than with dva ‘two’ indefinites. Furthermore, contrastive focus on the fronted object QP in OVS order is found to facilitate the inverse scope reading, but contrastive focus on the subject in SVO order is not. These findings have implications for the syntactic analysis of noncanonical word order in Russian ( Bailyn 2011 , Slioussar 2013 ) and support the link between contrastive focus and scope reconstruction in Russian ( Ionin 2003 , Neeleman and Titov 2009 ).

scholarly journals The Interaction of Input and UG in the Acquisition of Verb Movement in a Dialect of Norwegian

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.61 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit R. Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Information Value ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Early Production ◽  
The Subject

In this paper it is argued that a principle of information structure provided by Universal Grammar (UG) may interact with input in the acquisition of word order. In a study which investigates three children from the age of approximately 1;9 to 3 acquiring a Northern dialect of Norwegian, it has previously been shown that word order patterns in certain types of wh-questions which are sensitive to subtle distinctions in the information value of the subject (given vs. new) are acquired extremely early (Westergaard 2003a). This paper presents a study of the same children’s topicalization constructions, and it is shown that, although these patterns of information structure do not appear in the input, the children nevertheless show traces of these patterns in the non-target forms that they occasionally produce. Thus, in their very early production of topicalization constructions the children seem to be guided by a word order principle based on information structure, which could be taken as support for this as a word order preferred by UG.

scholarly journals Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 617-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowena Garcia ◽  
Jeruen E. Dery ◽  
Jens Roeser ◽  
Barbara Höhle
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Close Link ◽  
Patient Voice ◽  
Initial Preference ◽  
Order Preference ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
The Subject

This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children’s agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults’ lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle take longer to be acquired.

scholarly journals A corpus-based analysis of scrambling in Japanese in terms of anaphoric and cataphoric co-referencing

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 39-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Satoshi Imamura
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Grammatical Relations ◽  
Japanese Word ◽  
Topic Shift ◽  
Reverse Relationship ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Shed Light

In Japanese, word order changes do not affect the grammatical relations between constituents, allowing both SOV and OSV word order. Although it has been assumed that the choice of word order is determined by information structure, it is unclear how OSV is related to information structure. In order to shed light on this issue, this article investigates the usage of OSV under the framework of the Givónian approach, using a corpus-based method. First, the study demonstrates that the object is informationally older than the subject in OSV while there is a reverse relationship between the object and the subject in SOV. Second, the study reveals that the referents of the subject both in SOV and OSV tend to be carried over to the following sentences. Consequently, I conclude that OSV correlates with the ‘topic shift’ from the referent of the scrambled object to that of the subject. Therefore, OACCSV is selected when the writer intends to start a new discourse and continues writing about the referent of the subject after OACCSV appears.

scholarly journals ON THE WORD ORDER OF SIMPLE SENTENCES IN TELEUT

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Денис Михайлович Токмашев
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Simple Sentence ◽  
Linear Distribution ◽  
Indirect Object ◽  
Basic Word ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Simple Sentences

Типология порядка слов относится к слабо разработанной области тюркского синтаксиса. Телеутский язык относится к SOV-языкам левого ветвления. Глагол-сказуемое располагается в конце простого предложения, содержащего одну пропозицию, с непосредственно примыкающим к нему прямым дополнением. Позиция косвенного дополнения и обстоятельства может варьировать в зависимости от коммуникативной перспективы (информационной структуры) предложения. В придаточных клаузах порядок слов стремится к порядку в главных. Функционально порядок слов отвечает за линейную дистрибуцию вершины-сказуемого и его зависимых. Базовый порядок слов регламентирует дистрибуцию аргументов глагола без учета позиции адъюнктов. Семантические роли аргументов не влияют на их синтаксические функции и их позицию в предложении. Изменение SOV-порядка слов в телеутском языке возможно при изменении его информационной структуры, например, рематизации субъекта и тематизации предиката. На современном этапе под влиянием русского языка отмечается прагматически не обусловленное построение предложения по модели SVO. Word order typology can be referred to as a poorly developed area of Turkic syntax. The Teleut language belongs to the SOV-type of the left-branching languages. The predicate verb is located at the end of a simple sentence containing one proposition, with a direct object directly adjacent to it. The position of the indirect object and the adverbial may vary depending on the communicative perspective (information structure) of the sentence. The word order in the subordinate clause tends to copy that in the main clause. Functionally, the word order is responsible for the linear distribution of the predicate head and its dependents. The basic word order defines the distribution of verb arguments regardless of the adjuncts’ position. The theta roles of the arguments do not affect their syntactic functions and their position within a sentence. A change in the SOV-word order in Teleut may be concurred by its information structure, for example, when the subject and the predicate become focal and topical parts of the sentence respectively. At the present stage, the influence of Russian bringing about the pragmatically unconditioned SVO-pattern model is noted.

scholarly journals ЗА ЕДНА ТЕНДЕНЦИЯ В СЛОВОРЕДА В ЧАСТНИТЕ ВЪПРОСИ В СЪВРЕМЕННИЯ БЪЛГАРСКИ ЕЗИК / ON A TENDENCY IN THE WORD ORDER OF CONTENT QUESTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN

2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (PR) ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
IVAN DERZHANSKI
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Middle Position ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Auxiliary Verb ◽  
Over Time

The word order in content questions in Bulgarian is largely determined by the information structure of the sentence, whereby the wh-word most commonly assumes the position immediately preceding the verb and the subject is located after the verb. In recent years the author believes to have observed a growth in the frequency of content questions in which the subject precedes the verb, as is usual in declarative sentences. If this is the case, it may be due to the waxing influence of English, where an auxiliary verb usually precedes the subject in content questions (inversion), but the main verb retains its place after the subject. A study was conducted on a provisional corpus of 138 thousand content questions beginning with an initial adverbial wh-word защо ‘why’, как ‘how’, кога ‘when’ (докога ‘until when’, откога ‘since when’) or къде ‘where’ (докъде ‘up to where’, закъде ‘due where’, накъде ‘whither’, откъде ‘whence’) extracted from original Bulgarian as well as translated texts, mostly fiction. The material shows a tangible correlation between the source language of the translated texts and the frequency of inversion in content questions: it is most common in translations from Romanian and much rarer in translations from Turkish, with the original Bulgarian texts occupying a middle position. In the translations from English, which prevail in the corpus in terms of number, the frequency of questions without inversion increases over time. This supports the hypothesis about the influence of English on Bulgarian with respect to the word order in content ques-tions. Keywords: Bulgarian, interrogative sentences, word order

scholarly journals Predicationele en specificationele objectcomplementen in het Frans

1970 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Els Tobback
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Indirect Object ◽  
The Subject

In this article it is shown that the direct object complement and indirectobject complement of the French verbs of nomination élire andnommer function differently with regard to information structure. Thedirect object complement has the characteristics of the "predicate-focus"structures, whereas the indirect object complement can be considered tobelong to the "argument-focus" structures. This way it seems possible torelate the two types of object complement to the typology of subjectcomplements, the direct object complement corresponding to the predicationalsubject complement, and the function of the indirect objectcomplement being analogous to that of the specificational subject complement.It is shown, furthermore, that the word order potential (i.e. thepossible positions of the direct object constituent and the object complementconstituent) is different for both object complement types. Onceagain, a parallelism can be drawn with the subject complement sentences.

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