The Meaning of Topic and Focus: The 59th Street Bridge Accent (Routledge Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 3)

219 Pages·1997·1.34 MB·English

by  Daniel Büring

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title: The Meaning of Topic and Focus : The 59th Street Bridge
Accent Routledge Studies in German Linguistics ; 3
author:
publisher: Taylor & Francis Routledge
isbn10 | asin:
print isbn13: 9780203448014
ebook isbn13: 9780585452937
language: English
subject Focus (Linguistics) , Grammar, Comparative and general--
Topic and comment, Intonation (Phonetics) , Semantics,
Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax.
publication date: 1997
lcc: P299.F63B87 1997eb
ddc: 415
subject: Focus (Linguistics) , Grammar, Comparative and general--
Topic and comment, Intonation (Phonetics) , Semantics,
Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax.
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Page i
THE MEANING OF TOPIC AND FOCUS
The 59th Street Bridge Accent
Daniel Büring’s study provides an illuminating and highly original account of the complex interaction of
intonational phenomena, semantics and pragmatics. Based on examples from German and English, and
centred on an analysis of the fall-rise intonation contour, a semantic interpretation for two different pitch
accents—Focus and Topic—is developed. The effects of these accents, some on sequences of sentences and
others on single sentences follow from the given treatment. The account is based on Montagovian possible-
word semantics and Chomskian generative syntax.
The theory allows for a maximally tripartite information structure, consisting of (an optional) Sentence-Topic,
Background and Focus. Both Focus and Sentence-Topic correspond to distinct tone sequences in the sense
of Pierrehumbert’s decompositional theory of pitch accents. Rooth’s treatment of Focus is adopted and
supplemented with a theory of Sentence-Topic interpretation, which consists of topic effect on the
appropriateness conditions and topic implicatures.
Among the phenomena discussed are:
• question-answer congruence
• contrastive topics
• topic implicatures
• focus-affected readings of adnominal quantifiers
• scope ambiguity resolution involving QNPs, negation, and adverbial clauses
Daniel Büring is Assistant Professor of German linguistics at the University of Cologne.
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Page ii
ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN GERMAN LINGUISTICS
Series Editors: König and Auwera
1 NEGATIVE CONTEXTS
Collocation, polarity and multiple negation
Ton van der Wouden
2 WHEN-CLAUSES AND TEMPORAL STRUCTURE
Renaat Declerck
3 THE MEANING OF TOPIC AND FOCUS
The 59th Street Bridge Accent
Daniel Büring
4 ASPECTUAL GRAMMAR AND PAST-TIME REFERENCE
Laura A.Michaelis
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Page iii
THE MEANING OF TOPIC AND FOCUS
The 59th Street Bridge Accent
Daniel Büring
London and New York
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Page iv
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1997 Daniel Büring
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Büring, Daniel.
The 59th Street Bridge accent: on the meaning of topic and focus
/Daniel Büring.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Focus (Linguistics) 2. Grammar, Comparative and general—Topic
and comment. 3. Intonation (Phonetics) 4. Semantics. 5. Grammar,
Comparative and general—Syntax. I. Title.
P299.F63B87 1997
425–dc21 97–3703
CIP
ISBN 0-203-44801-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26993-4 (OEB Format)
ISBN 0-415-16897-X (Print Edition)
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Page v
CONTENTS
Preface vii
List of abbreviations x
Introduction 1
1 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS 13
1.1 Syntax 13
1.2 Semantics 18
1.3 Appendix: translation—formal account 25
2 FOCUS AND DISCOURSE 28
2.1 Focus and information structure 28
2.2 An in-situ theory of focus 36
2.3 Questions and answers 40
2.4 Focus projection 44
2.5 Appendix: contextual narrowing down 47
3 THE 59TH STREET BRIDGE ACCENT 53
3.1 Focus and Topic 53
3.2 The semantics of S-Topics—an informal account 65
3.3 Appendix 1: topic semantics—formal account 75
3.4 Appendix 2: notes on other analyses 79
3.5 Appendix 3: are S-Topics really Foci? 83
4 QUANTIFIERS AS S-TOPICS 88
4.1 Strong readings for weak quantifiers 88
4.2 Proportional readings 98
4.3 Appendix 1: more thoughts about implicit Topics 107
4.4 Appendix 2: other approaches to Focus-affected readings 109
5 THE GREAT SCOPE INVERSION CONSPIRACY 119
5.1 Data and claim 119
5.2 The analysis of all…not 121
5.3 Must…not 126
5.4 The impact of lexical choice 133
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Page vi
5.5 Scales 136
5.6 Impossible sentences 139
5.7 Appendix 1: Jackendoff’s analysis 142
5.8 Appendix 2: other analyses 144
6 THE UNIVERSAL DISAMBIGUATOR 148
6.1 S-Topics and NP readings 148
6.2 More scope ambiguities with negation 152
7. SUMMARY 169
Notes 174
References 194
Index 202
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Page vii
PREFACE
The present work started out as an exploration of a comparatively minor syntactic phenomenon, the relative
position and structure of sentence negation in German. The reader will notice that this book has very little to
say about negation and extremely few things about syntactic structure. In the rare cases where phenomena
from the realm of this earlier inquiry enter the focus of this work, my conclusions will be quite diametrically
opposed to the ones I drew then (as documented in Büring 1994b). Instead of negation my main concern
came to be with adverbial quantification, indefinite NPs and their interplay with sentence intonation, in
particular Focus. I felt that a proper understanding of these factors must lie at the beginning of any work on
the free word order phenomena around negation. Again it might be noticed that nothing about adverbial
quantification is said in this book. Likewise my rare comments on indefinites—in particular indefinites in
quantificational and generic contexts—will be apt to bemuse all those who have ever spent more than a late
night’s thought on the issue. The reason for this is that in the course of working on quantification and
intonation I found it necessary to become clear about the (at least) two rather different ways in which
intonation figures in connection with semantic interpretation, two different ways which—in blatant ignorance
of the terminological state of the field—I chose to refer to as Topic vs. Focus.
Once this separation was done, I found that a number of rather puzzling effects connected with intonation
and interpretation promised to fall into place in quite a natural way. So I started exploring these phenomena,
most of them well documented in the literature, under the general perspective of the effects of Topic
marking. In working through this set of seemingly rather disparate phenomena I tried to shape and confirm
the description and ultimately the theory of Topic and its effects. This book is the result of this trial. It
constitutes a first step towards establishing the foundations for a theory which is related to a class of
phenomena whose understanding is regarded as a crucial prerequisite for analysing, for example, the data
around word order and negation (in German).
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Page viii
This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation as submitted at Tübingen University in December
1995. In the meantime some parts of it have been published, or have served as the basis for publications,
elsewhere: the main body of Chapter 5 is identical to an article that appeared in Linguistics and Philosophy
(1997) (also in the SALT V proceedings); substantial parts of Chapters 3 and 4 will cause a sense of déjà vu
to those who read a paper called ‘Topic’ in The Focus Book. Chapter 4 is also the basis for my SALT VI
paper, whereas I cannibalized Chapter 6 for a paper in the proceedings of the 1995 Amherst Workshop on
Focus. See, maybe you don’t have to read on!
It is my pleasure to take the opportunity and thank all those who—for some reason or other—must take
their share of responsibility for the emergence of this work: at Cologne University, Jürgen Lenerz and Priya
Bondre-Beil, who introduced me to linguistics and taught me syntax, and all those others from the ‘open
door & hot coffee group’: Horst Lohnstein, Robert Kemp, Anne Rivet, Susann Siebert. Working in Cologne is
and always was great fun.
Out in the linguistic world many colleagues and friends helped me to shape my ideas on various topics (and
Topics), some of which stand out for being always ready to discuss and willing to share their data and
insights: Regine Eckardt, who first got me to think about raising accents, and who spend half a night helping
me calculate through an example of mine; Gerhard Jäger, to whom I owe much inspiration, and whose
instant e-mail replies keep amazing me; Inga Kohlhof, for helping me to tell real problems from Other
People’s Problems and telling me she never believed a word; Renate Musan, and Hubert Truckenbrodt, who
both started each of their multi-paged comment mails with the words ‘I only have time for a few brief
comments right now…’. I profited greatly from every minute of discussion with you.
Being a student in the US, even for a short period, was an experience completely beyond everything a PhD
student could ever hope to experience in Germany. I would like wholeheartedly to thank my fellow students
at Brandeis University and MIT in 1992 for making me feel like a proper part of their classes and parties. As
enjoyable as the parties was the teaching of Jane Grimshaw, Irene Heim, Alan Prince and Joan Maling. Ray
Jackendoff deserves special mention, for making it possible for me to go there, for giving me a hard time in
every private or public discussion, and most of all for his warm and amicable ways. At the time I was in
Brandeis I didn’t know that his work would be among the most relevant to my dissertation topic (though that
would have been a good guess anyway), but I am sure (or at least hope) his writing and teaching influenced
the present work deeply.
Special thanks go to Arnim von Stechow, who one day got a call from somebody he had never seen,
immediately agreed to provide that person
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Page ix
with semantic help, and finally became the supervisor of my thesis. Hopefully, at least some of his expertise,
offered in office hours, at late-night dinners, and pub visits eventually percolated into this work. I enjoyed
every minute of discussion and talk with you (stets Ihr Diener!).
Many people besides those already mentioned generously helped me with comments and data at one
occasion or another, among them: the members of my thesis committee, Hans Bernard Drubig, Marga Reis,
and Mats Rooth; Sigrid Beck, Joachim Jacobs, Bill Ladusaw, Andre Meinunger, Cécile Meyer, Gereon Müller,
Manfred Krifka, Jonas Kuhn, Manfred Kupffer, Orin Percus, and Wolfgang Sternefeld. Thank you all, and
those I have forgotten: forgive me!
Writing the present work presumably wouldn’t have been possible without regularly recharging my batteries
with friends, who all had regularly to suffer through the presence of an absent-minded linguist: Janine, Julie,
Make, Tellsque, Zimbo, and my fellow musicians Holger and Sebastian in Cologne, the Essen people, my
parents and sister.
Though they didn’t have any impact on the original version of this work I cannot at this time close my
acknowledgements without mentioning all the marvellous crowd—students and fellow teachers—from the
Olomouc summer schools, for two times three great weeks: Danke! Dĕkuji!
Finally, very special thanks to Katharina Hartmann, a wonderful coworker and friend, who has influenced my
linguistic and non-linguistic life in ways too numerous to mention here. Thanks for everything!
This book is dedicated to the memory of Janine, whom I miss.
Daniel Büring, Köln am Rhein, January 1997
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