Lot Dissertation Series 330

473 Pages·2013·3.91 MB·English

Finding focus
a study of the historical development of focus
in English
Published by
LOT phone: [phone]
Trans 10
3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected]
The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl

Cover illustration: Sharon Komen
ISBN: 978-94-6093-112-3
NUR 616

Copyright © 2013 by Erwin Ronald Komen. All rights reserved.
Finding focus
a study of the historical development of focus
in English

Proefschrift

ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor
aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. mr. S.C.J.J. Kortmann,
volgens besluit van het college van decanen
in het openbaar te verdedigen op dinsdag 25 juni 2013
om 10.30 uur precies

door

Erwin Ronald Komen
geboren op 8 september 1960
te Utrecht
Promotor: Prof. dr. Ans van Kemenade

Copromotor: Prof. dr. Bettelou Los (University of Edinburgh)

Manuscriptcommissie:
Prof. dr. Antal van den Bosch
Prof. dr. Helen de Hoop
Prof. dr. Johanna Nichols (University of California, Berkeley)
Prof. dr. Ann Taylor (University of York)
Prof. dr. Suzanne Winkler (University of Tübingen)
Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge those who have made it possible for me to do the
research described in this dissertation. Top on the list is God, whom I thank for his
24/7 support, for health and for moments of inspiration, which I happened to have
especially in the mornings.
Bettelou Los has supported and encouraged me from the very beginning. She has
always been there with her encyclopaedic knowledge of articles and with her insight
into the English language. It was she who coined the term “Inert” for one of the five
referential categories in the Pentaset. Professor Ans van Kemenade has not only
provided expert supervision, but also demonstrated her creativity with words by
introducing a new Dutch verb, “zeezakken”, which derives from the computer
program “Cesac” (the predecessor of “Cesax”). I am grateful to both Bettelou and
Ans for introducing me to the intriguing world of English historical linguistics.
I shared an office with Gea Dreschler, Rosanne Hebing, Sanne van Vuuren and
Meta Links, who have made working at Radboud University a pleasure, and I have
enjoyed many a lunch talk with Astrid Bracke, Griet Coupé and Nynke de Haas. My
other colleagues at the English language department have always made me feel part
of the group. I have enjoyed getting to know Janine Berns, with whom I have been
organising a series of inter-departmental talks.
Gea, Rosanne, Bettelou, as well as Monique Tangelder and Lieke Verheijen
were involved in annotating some of the texts used in this research. Sándor
Chardonnens helped me understand several Old English passages. Carlos
Gussenhoven introduced me to tone and intonation and then helped me analyze the
grammar of Chechen intonation. Eva D’hondt gave helpful suggestions concerning
the computational linguistics side of my research. Helen de Hoop, Robert Van
Valin, Frans van der Slik, Petra Hendriks, Ann Taylor, and Alice Harris have
contributed through their teaching. I have consulted with Pieter Muysken on several
occasions, as well as with Frans van der Slik, who I first met when we got stuck in
the elevator.
I am grateful for the feedback I have received on the various articles I have
written over the years. Much of the feedback was given anonymously, but I have
enjoyed closer interaction with fellow-linguists at several workshops: Kristin Bech,
Marco Corniglio, Hanne Eckhoff, Kristine Eide, Rik van Gijn, Jeremy Hammond,
Dag Haug, Vadim Kimmelman, Dejan Matić, Svetlana Petrova, Susan Pintzuk,
Saskia van Putten, Eva Schlachter, Gerold Schneider, Mark de Vries, Eirik Welo
and Hedde Zeijlstra.
Many thanks to Antal van den Bosch, Helen de Hoop, Johanna Nichols, Ann
Taylor and Suzanne Winkler for agreeing to be on the manuscript committee, for
taking the time to read this book and for the feedback I have received so far.
ii
Several colleagues from SIL-International have indirectly contributed to my
research. Mick Foster laid the foundations for my interest in corpus linguistics. John
Clifton was one of the first to help me in my academic writing efforts. Linda
Humnick, one of my SIL supervisors, read several of my papers, helped me with her
enthusiasm and shared her deep insight. Stephen Levinsohn demonstrated his
practical approach to information structure and discourse analysis, and much of what
I do in chapter 4 is directly inspired by his excellent and helpful scholarly work.
My children Irina, Benjamin, Sharon and Ariel listened to my ideas, and even
though I did not always manage to get them across successfully, I appreciate their
input. Sharon was my partner in entering the world of the mental models, and I’ve
made good use of the High school graduation project on the brain which Irina did a
few years ago.
My wife Liesbeth has always been there with support and enthusiasm, and my
appreciation of her cannot be captured adequately enough in words.
I gratefully acknowledge the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
(NWO) for funding the four-year research project I have been part of (project no.
360-70-370).
Abstract
A vital skill for anyone who wants to communicate in written form is the
manipulation of word order to convey emphasis in such a way, that a reader
understands what is focused. Word order is influenced, and sometimes dictated, by
syntax, but also by the desire to start off with what is known, and introduce new
matters only in relation to that background. This dissertation addresses the question
how syntax relates to information structure in general by investigating the
development of constituent focus and presentational focus in English against the
background of its changing syntax, while part of the analysis is substantiated by data
from present-day Chechen.
The introduction (chapter 1) introduces the notion of “syntax” that I use as the
expression of grammatical functions and relations as well as the definition of default
word order. When the linguistic realisation of syntax is not possible through
morphology, a language resorts to using word order. Related to this view of syntax
is the hypothesis that changes in English syntax correlate with changes in focus:
where the syntax of English increasingly requires word order, focus needs other
ways to express itself.
Against the background of the latest developments in psycholinguistics, which
are related to the way in which humans process a text they read or a narrative they
hear (chapter 2), chapter 3 offers a working definition of focus. The three different
focus articulations (which differ due to the size of the domain in which the focus
occurs) can co-occur with points of departure, and word order in general is also
influenced by the “Principle of Natural Information Flow”. Chapter 4 introduces my
working hypothesis about the relation between syntax, pragmatics and text-
organization: any linguistic realization (including word order) can be seen as a
combination of (at least) these three factors. The chapter continues by touching upon
a change in English syntax that seems to have been the main trigger for the changes
in focus that come up later in this study. The syntactic change is the loss of the V2
system, which ultimately led to a reduction of three subject positions to just one. I
attempt to tease apart word order variation caused by syntactic and text-structural
factors from variation that relates to focus. The chapter contains a detailed analysis
of two texts (one from Old English and one from late Modern English), and finishes
with initial observations as to the changes that took place in the expression of
presentational and constituent focus. What chapter 4 also finishes with is the clear
realization that detailed analyses of individual texts does not give us the
generalizations in tendencies we are looking for, since they involve too little data
(which means that we either miss phenomena, or have too little examples of
phenomena to gain enough significance). This is why a corpus approach is called
for, and the planning and execution of this approach spans chapters 5-9.
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The corpus approach makes use of syntactically parsed texts, and enriches them
with a small set referential state primitives derived in chapter 5 using the semi-
automatic program Cesax described in chapter 6. The result of this enrichment
process is a set of texts in xml format, and chapter 7 describes how the texts can
effectively be searched for combinations of syntactic and referential information.
The main idea behind the corpus approach is that it should be possible, given the
syntactic and referential information, to determine the focus domains, and,
consequently, see if a clause contains presentational or constituent focus. This
strategy is used in chapter 8 to detect presentational focus, and we learn that Old
English expressed this kind of focus by putting the syntactic subject after the verb
(in the post-core slot), but this approach became increasingly infelicitous, and it was
taken over by the expletive there approach.
Chapter 9 tests a variety of potential diagnostics for constituent focus, and those
that pass the test are then used to see how the expression of this focus articulation
has changed over time. It appears that one important OE strategy, the use of the
clause-initial slot as one that could host contrastively focused elements, was
jeopardized by the same syntactic change that also led to a gradual but almost
complete loss in subject-auxiliary inversion. Constituent focus is often accompanied
by overt contrast in the form of an emphatic adverb (such as “only”) or local
contrast (“not X but Y”), and by watching the placement of these diagnostics we
saw that the it-cleft gradually took over as the method to express constituent focus.
This led to the question whether the it-cleft is a syntactic focusing device par
excellence.
The answer to the it-cleft question spans chapters 10-12, and starts with a
thorough definition of what can and what cannot be recognized as an it-cleft
construction. A subsequent review of the function of it-clefts as reported in the
literature brought to light several recent synchronic studies on Scandinavian
languages, which claim that the major function of the it-cleft lies in text-
organization. The synchronic study described in chapter 11 shows that Chechen, a
language that does not use prosody to signal focus, uses word order and wh-clefts
instead. Most striking is the fact that the language has an it-cleft construction, but
only uses it for text organization. The diachronic study of English in chapter 12
underscores the evolving picture. The first it-clefts in English were used almost
exclusively in text organization strategies, while their function as a constituent focus
device only evolved once the privileged clause-initial position for emphasis was
disappearing.
Chapter 13 looks back at the results found in the area of focus, arguing that focus
cannot be part of syntax, nor can syntax be part of focus, and that syntax depends on
referentiality. The most intriguing claim, perhaps, that this study results in is the
hypothesis that focus is “compositional” in nature: if having syntactic and referential
information about the constituents in a clause is sufficient to determine the focus
domain, and, consequently, the focus articulation of that clause, then the higher
order notion of focus can be seen as built up by syntax and referentiality. This claim
is only partly validated by the research described in this book, and further work
should seek to look into the hypothesis in more detail.
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