Information Structure and Agreement

382 Pages·2013·3.09 MB·English

by  Victoria Camacho-Taboada

Information Structure and Agreement
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today (LA)
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General Editors
Werner Abraham Elly van Gelderen
University of Vienna / Arizona State University
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Advisory Editorial Board
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University of Konstanz University of Lund
Cedric Boeckx Ian Roberts
ICREA/UB Cambridge University
Guglielmo Cinque Lisa deMena Travis
University of Venice McGill University
Liliane Haegeman Sten Vikner
University of Ghent University of Aarhus
Hubert Haider C. Jan-Wouter Zwart
University of Salzburg University of Groningen
Terje Lohndal
Norwegian University of Science
and Technology
Volume 197
Information Structure and Agreement
Edited by Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández,
Javier Martín-González and Mariano Reyes-Tejedor
Information Structure
and Agreement
Edited by
Victoria Camacho-Taboada
Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández
Javier Martín-González
Mariano Reyes-Tejedor
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Information structure and agreement / Edited by Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel L.
Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González, Mariano Reyes-Tejedor.
p. cm. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, issn 0166-0829 ; v. 197)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax. 2. Grammar, Comparative and
general--Topic and comment. 3. Contrastive linguistics. 4. Focus (Linguistics)
I. Camacho Taboada, María Victoria, editor of compilation. II. Jiménez-
Fernández, Ángel, editor of compilation. III. Martín-González, Javier, editor of
compilation. IV. Reyes-Tejedor, Mariano, editor of compilation.
P291.I34 2012
415--dc23 2012037032
isbn 978 90 272 5580 8 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7302 4 (Eb)
© 2013 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Information structure, agreement and CP 1
Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández,
Javier Martín-González & Mariano Reyes-Tejedor
The complementiser system in spoken English: Evidence from broadcast media 11
Andrew Radford
‘Phasing’ contrast at the interfaces: A feature-compositional approach to Topics 55
Mara Frascarelli & Francesca Ramaglia
The alternation between improper indirect questions and DPs containing
a restrictive relative 83
Gabriela Matos & Ana Maria Brito
Referentiality in Spanish CPs 117
Carlos de Cuba & Jonathan E. MacDonald
Binding at the syntax-information structure interface 141
Karen Lahousse
Deriving “wh-in-situ” through movement in Brazilian Portuguese 175
Mary Aizawa Kato
On ‘focus movement’ in Italian 193
Valentina Bianchi
Clause-typing by [2] – the loss of the 2nd person pronoun du ‘you’
in Dutch, Frisian and Limburgian dialects 217
Gertjan Postma
Degree phrase raising in relative clauses 255
Adam Szczegielniak
Low, high and higher applicatives: Evidence from Pazar Laz 275
Balkız Öztürk
On richness of tense and verb movement in Brazilian Portuguese 297
Sonia Cyrino
 Information Structure and Agreement
Vocalic adjustments under positional markedness in Catalan and other
Romance languages 319
Jesús Jiménez & Maria-Rosa Lloret
On sloppy readings, ellipsis and pronouns: Missing arguments in Catalan Sign
Language (LSC) and other argument-drop languages 337
Josep Quer & Joana Rosselló
Index 371
Information structure, agreement and CP
Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández,
Javier Martín-González & Mariano Reyes-Tejedor
Information structure (IS) deals with how information is presented in discourse.
Traditionally, two articulatory levels have been distinguished (Rizzi 1997; Zubizarreta
1998): (1) Topic + Comment; (2) Presupposition + Focus. In the canonical structure
of the sentence the topic usually coincides with the subject, whereas the focus very
frequently falls upon the verb phrase or one of its elements. However, the canoni-
cal word order may change in the syntactic component when discourse functions are
played out by constituents other than the unmarked elements. Discourse processes
which involve a rearrangement of word order are topic/focus fronting, clitic left dis-
location or scrambling. Reordering of sentence constituents in these processes are
motivated by a special need to highlight an element whose unmarked position is not
informationally prominent.
From the beginning of Generative Grammar, information structure has played
an important role in the study of language. Chomsky (1971) assumes the distinction
focus/presupposition. Emonds (1969) holds that topicalization and focalization
are transformations. This proposal has been inherited (in some form or another)
by the different reformulations which have arisen in the history of Generative
Grammar. Natural languages vary as to the device that they use to convey a spe-
cific discourse interpretation. Thus, some languages employ phonological strategies
more frequently than others, whereas other languages prefer to use syntactic and
morphological resources (Kiss 1995; Miyagawa 2010). Several accounts have tried
to locate the connection between syntax and discourse/pragmatics: at the syntax-
phonology interface (Zubizarreta 1998, 2010; Fanselow & Lenertová 2011), at the
syntax- pragmatics interface (López 2009) or directly in the syntax (the cartographic
approach, Rizzi 1997 et seq.). In this way, the Complementiser Phrase (CP) domain
is crucially involved in the manifestation of Information Structure in natural lan-
guages. Following Chomsky’s (2008) idea that Universal Grammar sets no specific
link between syntax and Information Structure, current theory submits that syntax
has no access to it and that movement to the left periphery is motivated by an edge
feature in the CP system (Fanselow & Lenertová 2011).
As for Agreement, Information Structure has also been a crucial notion through-
out the history of Linguistics and has played a significant role in the different versions
2 Victoria Camacho-Taboada et al.
of Generative Grammar. Traditionally, agreement has not only been used to signal
morphological and syntactic relations, but also to motivate syntactic operations.
Proposals like Pollock (1989), Kayne (1989), Ritter (1991) and Shlonsky (1994)
brought about the postulation of various agreement projections in verbal, nominal
and clausal domains. Agreement was applied to other phenomena like Case relations
and it was crucial in accounting for both overt and covert movement triggered by
feature checking in Spec-head configurations (Sportiche 1995, among many others).
In current Minimalist terms, the notion of agreement has its distinct operation
“Agree” whereby a probe receives a morphological value from an available goal (e.g.
Chomsky 2000). As with Information Structure, the CP domain is also fully involved
in Agreement relations.
The present volume consists of thirteen contributions on these topics. Some
chapters focus on the syntax of information structure in relation with the position
occupied by different constituents in the CP domain and prominence phenomena at
word level. Other chapters deal with the notion of agreement and its role in the syntax
of specific constructions such as applicatives, correlatives, types of CPs, and others.
The results are based on the study of several languages including English, German,
Dutch, Frisian, Limburgian, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, S panish,
Catalan, Italian, French, Polish, Pazar Laz, Japanese, Spanish Sign Language, Catalan
Sign Language and American Sign Language.
There are an important number of chapters in this book which focus on Infor-
mation Structure. Within a cartographic framework and dealing with information
structure and the structure of CP is Andrew Radford’s The complementiser system in
spoken English: Evidence from broadcast media. The author explores the syntax of dis-
located topics, fronted topics, focus preposing and modal adverbs in relation to the
different positions that complementisers can occupy in English. Using data from live
unscripted British radio and TV broadcasts, Radford makes a distinction between
complementiser-first (C1) and complementiser-second (C2) in spoken English. He
analyses the occurrence of that in subordinate declaratives, wh-interrogatives, rela-
tives, correlatives, adverbial clauses, etc., and also in root clauses (wh-exclamatives,
modal adverbial clauses, and clauses introduced by an adjunct, dislocated topic, or
focalised constituent).
Radford makes the observation that in authentic English the complementiser
that can occur in different positions relative to other constituents which sit in the CP
area. Interestingly, that can even be repeated (recomplementation). Adopting a carto-
graphic approach to the CP region (Rizzi 1997; Haegeman 2010), the author claims
that the complementiser that is a maximally underspecified complementiser which
simply marks finiteness and so serves to introduce a subordinate finite clause. There-
fore, this conjunction can, in principle, lexicalise any head on the periphery of a finite
clause (whether Sub, Force, Top, Foc, or Fin).
Information structure, agreement and CP 3
Andrew Radford claims that C1 structures are different from C2 structures in
many respects. Indeed, C1 is never found in root clauses in English. Following
Casanto and Sag (2008), the author assumes that complementisers are used for
processing p urposes in the sentence and concludes that C2 structures are only used
when there is a comparatively ‘long’ constituent preceding the complementiser.
Frascarelli & Ramaglia’s paper, ‘Phasing’ contrast at the interfaces: A feature-
compositional approach to topics, establishes a parallelism between CP phases and
DP phases in relation with phonological marking. For the authors IS is crucially
connected with prosody. They make a clear connection between the traditional
partition of utterances in terms of topic and focus (based on the notion of givenness)
and the corresponding split in sentences and nominals.
The paper shows that phonological prominence is not by nature related to
the notions of givenness or newness; on the contrary, in their analysis what is not
expected in the Topic portion (new information) is prosodically marked in this
domain, whereas what is not expected in the Comment (given information) is also
phonologically marked. Following Krifka (2007), the authors identify two clear parts
in the Comment, namely focus and background. The information conveyed by the
background will be phonologically marked. This accounts for the occurrence of unfo-
cused material in the Comment, for “second occurrence Focus” and for answers to
multiple wh-questions.
As for the Topic portion, Frascarelli & Ramaglia assume that the given part in
the Topic section is phonologically unmarked. However, given the typology of topics
in terms of Aboutness-Topics, Contrastive-Topics and Given-Topics (Frascarelli &
Hinterhölzl 2007), and based on Information Structure-related features such as
contrast and given, the authors propose that some focussed material can be identified
within the topic section and will thus be phonologically marked.
Perhaps the most appealing point in their proposal is the syntactic implemen-
tation that the authors make with respect to Information Structure. Provided that
phonological markedness is determined by the relative position of unexpected infor-
mation within a phase, it is clearly shown that the informationally relevant constituents
are prosodically marked in the head or edge of CP and DP phases. This implies that
Chomsky’s Phase Impenetrability Principle has an impact on Information Structure
and Phonology.
Gabriela Matos and Ana Brito’s contribution, The alternation between improper indi-
rect questions and DPs containing a restrictive relative, examines the properties of improper
indirect interrogative constructions and determines DPs containing a restructure relative
the semantic type of predicates involved in them in Spanish and European Portuguese.
IS-related grammatical features are taken to influence the syntax of the constructions
under discussion. The authors also offer an explanation as to why these wh-clauses alter-
nate with relative clauses. Following Keenan and Hull (1973) and Moreno Cabrera (2002),
4 Victoria Camacho-Taboada et al.
they propose that improper interrogatives and relatives are instances of how the same
phenomenon can be conveyed by different syntactic strategies across languages: embed-
ded interrogative sentences (i.e. Finnish), relative clauses (i.e. some Melanesian and
Austronesian languages) or both of them (i.e. English and Spanish).
According to Matos and Brito, this parametric variation would be lexically
restricted. The predicates of both structures are assertive cognitive definite p redicates
(Hinzer & Sheenan to appear) that can select a D-linked wh-CP/ForceP (in a
cartographic perspective) or a relativized DP headed by a definite D, respectively.
Both complement types are full phases which show a high referential level and display
similar features: 〈wh/operator〉 and 〈specific〉. Still, they are not semantically equiva-
lent since the identification of the involved entity in improper indirect interrogatives,
though assumed as known by the speaker, is not discovered, while in headed relative
clauses it is revealed by its antecedent.
The (non-)availability of an extra CP layer plays a central role in de Cuba and
MacDonald’s paper, Referentiality in Spanish CPs. Bringing together evidence from
wh-movement and referentiality, and using data mostly from Spanish embedded
clauses, they hold that factive verbs take structurally less complex complements,
namely plain CPs, because of their referential nature. On the other hand, non-factives
take non-referential cPs, which embed a referential CP. They base their proposal on the
syntactic asymmetries observed in extraction phenomena between these two kinds of
complements, under the assumption that more structure allows for the possibility of
accommodating extracted elements. In order to explain the wh-island effects shown
by non-referential-que embedded constructions, the authors elaborate on Suñer’s
(1991, 1993) distinction between indirect-questions and semi-questions by proposing
that the presence of a question operator in non-referential cPs is responsible for the
intervention effects. They also offer a characterisation of referentiality whereby only
referential complements are part of the common conversational ground. Finally, they
claim that a non-referential que may be the spellout of a distinct speech act operator in
cP, which is associated with an initial attempt at introducing a proposition or question
into the common ground.
Another look at Information Structure is provided by Karen Lahousse’s paper
Binding at the syntax-information structure interface. Binding Theory has stood
through the history of Generative Grammar as one of the most controversial
components of grammar (Cecchetto 2000; Higginbotham 1980 & Reinhart 1983).
Karen Lahousse shows that binding connectivity effects are heavily influenced by the
information s tructure status of the constituents. She argues that Heycock and Kroch’s
(2002) analysis on the basis of focus-reconstruction at LF does not account for all the
empirical evidence in cleft sentences and reverse clefting. Lahousse claims that bind-
ing effects cannot be accounted for only on the basis of focus reconstruction into the
ground. As counter-evidence to Heycock and Kroch’s analysis of binding connectivity,