Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantic Content

219 Pages·1998·6.07 MB·English

by  Eva Hajičová

TOPIC-FOCUS ARTICULATION, TRIPARTITE STRUCTURES,
AND SEMANTIC CONTENT
Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy
Volume 71
Managing Editors
GENNARO CHIERCHIA, University ofM ilan
PAULINE JACOBSON, Brown University
FRANCIS J. PELLETIER, University ofA lberta
Editorial Board
JOHAN V AN BENTHEM, University ofA msterdam
GREGORY N. CARLSON, University ofR ochester
DAVID DOWTY, Ohio State University, Columbus
GERALD GAZDAR, University of Sussex, Brighton
IRENE HElM, MIT., Cambridge
EWA N KLEIN, University ofE dinburgh
BILL LADUSAW, University of California at Santa Cruz
TERRENCE PARSONS, University of California, Irvine
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
TOPIC-FOCUS ARTICULATION,
TRIPARTITE STRUCTURES, AND
SEMANTIC CONTENT
edited by
EVA HAJICOVA
Faculty ofM athematics and Physics,
Charles University,
Prague, Czech Republic
BARBARA H. PARTEE
Department ofL inguistics,
University ofM assachusetts at Amherst,
Amherst, M.4, U.SA.
and
PETRSGALL
Faculty ofM athematics and Physics,
Charles University,
Prague, Czech Republic
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.Y.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5116-5 ISBN 978-94-015-9012-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9012-9
Printed on acid-free paper
02-0999-150 ts
All Rights Reserved
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1998
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................ ix
1. Introduction................................. I
1.1 Objectives .................................. 1
1.2 Background ................................. 2
1.3 Plan of the work .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 7
2. Towards an investigation of the relation between topic-focus
articulation and tripartite structures ................. 13
2.1 Tripartite structures: background ................... 13
2.2 Tripartite structures and topic-focus structure ........... 20
2.2.1 Background .............................. 20
2.2.2 Which constructions are focus-sensitive? ............. 24
2.2.3 Connecting topic-focus structure and domain selection to
anaphora, presupposition, and context-dependence .......... 26
2.2.4 Topic-focus articulation and its significance in both pragmatic
and dynamic semantic interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.2.5 Formalization of three basic examples .............. 30
2.3 TFA , the anchoring of sentences in context, and semantics ... 54
2.3.1 TFA, communicative dynamism, and contextual boundness 54
2.3.2 The semantic relevance of TFA .................. 60
2.3.3 Systemic ordering of kinds of complementations ........ 66
2.3.4 TFA, presupposition, and reference ............... 70
2.3.5 Hierarchical CD and projectivity ................. 72
2.3.6 Contrastive topic and left dislocation ............... 74
2.3.7 Summary ............................... 75
3. Remarks on common background and shared assumptions ... 79
3.1 Linguistic meaning ............................. 80
3.2 Compositionality ......................... . . . . . 87
4. Obstacles to joint work .......................... 91
4.1 Initial view of obstacles from BHP's perspective .......... 91
4.2 Initial obstacles from HS's perspective ................ 93
v
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
4.3 The partial ordering of communicative dynamism vs. recursive
branching structure ............................ 95
4.4 The attachment of only and other focalizers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
4.4.1 HS's view ............................... 99
4.4.2 BHP's view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 100
5. Dialogue, progressing towards a common basis for discussion 103
5.1 Notions of topic and comment, background and focus, and
scope .................................... 103
5.1.1 "Topic-comment" and "background-focus": two distinctions
or one? ................................... 103
5.1.2 Focus, scope, and background. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 106
5.2 "Focus-sensitivity", "focalizers": views of what they are. . .. 114
5.2.1 What is focus-sensitivity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
5.2.2 Issues in the order of explanation and the hypothesizing of
silent focus and/or abstract focalizers ................. 118
5.3 The issue of universality/parochiality of TFA . . . . . . . . . .. 120
6. Some hypotheses proposed and examined ............. 129
6.1 Initial hypotheses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
6.2 Discussion of some problematic cases ................ 134
6.2.1 Embedded focus and proxy focus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 134
6.2.2 The focus of a focalizer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
6.2.3 Taglicht's examples ........................ 138
6.2.4 Other specific cases ........................ 143
6.2.5 Focalizer within a noun group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 146
6.2.6 Summary .............................. 147
6.3 Focalizers in the topic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
6.3.1 Focus of a focalizer within topic ................ 149
6.3.2 Local focus within topic may bear phrasal stress . . . . . . . 155
6.3.3 Recursivity ofTFA vs. reoccurring focus of a focalizer within
topic . . . . . . . . .'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 159
6.4 Focalizer as the only element of focus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 161
6.5 Conclusions ................................ 161
6.5.1 Hypotheses reconsidered ..................... 163
6.5.2 With or without NP-attachment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 166
6.5.3 Review of examples ........................ 167
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
7. Future directions 171
7.1 Sentence structure and cognitive content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
7.2 Recursivity of TFA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
7.3 Communicative dynamism as a linear or partial ordering .. . 173
7.4 The nature of focus-sensitivity ................... . 174
7.5 Dependency vs. constituency and categorial grammar . . . . . . 176
7.6 Other issues open to further discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
References .................................... 179
List of abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Name index .................................... 199
Subject index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When preparing the final version of the manuscript, the authors benefitted
greatly from the opportunity to employ and react to comments from several
colleagues who read the first version. We would like especially to thank
Emmon Bach, Christine Bartels, Elena Benedicto, Kai von Fintel, Roger
Higgins, Joachim Jacobs, Hans Kamp, Eva Koktova, Alice ter Meulen, Jaro
slav Peregrin, Elisabeth Selkirk, Mark Steedman, and Satoshi Tomioka, whose
remarks have inspired us in many points, and, last but not least, to the
anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, who have given us many valuable
comments. We are grateful to Kathleen Adamczyk, Lynne Ballard, Libuse
Brdickova and Kv eta KraIikova for their help in production support and in the
administration of various aspects of our project. Our special thanks go to
Tomas Hoskovec, who has devoted enormous efforts to formatting the final
camera-ready copy.
Research for this book was supported in part by two grants from the
International Research and Exchanges Board (lREX) to Partee to spend two
semesters at Charles University engaged in this research collaboration; IREX
administered these grants with funds provided by the National Endowment for
the Humanities, the United States Information Agency, and the United States
Department of State which administers the Title VIII Program. This publica
tion is based also in part on work sponsored by the U. S. -Czechoslovak
Science and Technology Joint Fund in cooperation with the U.S. National
Science Foundation and the Czech Ministry of Education under Project Num
ber 920-58, 1992-95, "Semantics of English and Czech Sentence Structure and
Word Order: Contributions to a Theory of Formal Semantics and Information
Structure", Eva Hajicova, Principal Investigator and Barbara Partee, U.S.
Co-Partner. In the final stages of the work on the manuscript, Hajicova
profited from her stay at the University of Leipzig, made possible by a
research award from Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.
Our discussions and joint work were made easier by many-sided support
from the University of Massachusetts, especially for sabbatical leaves to Partee
in 1989-90 and in the spring of 1995, and from Charles University, its Facul
ties of Mathematics and Physics and of Philosophy, with its Vilem Mathesius
Center. None of the supporting organizations is responsible for the views
expressed.
ix
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 OBJECTIVES
The main objective of this joint work is to bring together some ideas that have
played central roles in two disparate theoretical traditions in order to con
tribute to a better understanding of the relationship between focus and the syn
tactic and semantic structure of sentences. Within the Prague School tradition
and the branch of its contemporary development represented by Hajicova and
Sgall (HS in the sequel), topic-focus articulation has long been a central object
of study, and it has long been a tenet of Prague school linguistics that
topic-focus structure has systematic relevance to meaning. Within the formal
semantics tradition represented by Partee (BHP in the sequel), focus has much
more recently become an area of concerted investigation, but a number of the
semantic phenomena to which focus is relevant have been extensively investi
gated and given explicit compositional semantic-analyses. The emergence of
'tripartite structures' (see Chapter 2) in formal semantics and the partial simi
larities that can be readily observed between some aspects of tripartite
structures and some aspects of Praguian topic-focus articulation have led us
to expect that a closer investigation of the similarities and differences in these
different theoretical constructs would be a rewarding undertaking with mutual
benefits for the further development of our respective theories and potential
benefit for the study of semantic effects of focus in other theories as well.
The project of attempted synthesis of ideas from two theories that have
had substantial development with relatively little contact naturally requires
considerable preparatory work to better understand each other's theories and
to identify the points of initial agreement and disagreement, and then to reduce
disagreements where possible and work out the consequences of the disagree
ments that inevitably remain. In the beginning of our collaborative efforts we
encountered obstacles stemming from our differing views both on some of the
fundamental properties of sentence structure and on the dividing line between
what is considered part of linguistic meaning and what is considered to belong
to some non-linguistic cognitive level of interpretation.
In trying to bridge the different traditions, we find ourselves in a situ
ation probably experienced by many other researchers, especially those who
2 CHAPTER 1
have started out on one side or the other of what is in some respects a substan
tial theoretical divide. It seems to us useful in this context to present our work
partly as a dialogue. We hope that this articulation of our progress in working
through our differences may be helpful to a larger community.
1.2 BACKGROUND
In this section, we very briefly sketch some of the main points of our back
ground theories (about which more will be said in subsequent chapters) and
some of issues we wish to address. In Section 1.3 we summarize the plan of
the remaining chapters of the book.
As in many linguistic theories, also in the approach of HS an interface
level of linguistic structure is being elaborated on which the irregularities of
the outer shape of sentences are absent (including synonymy and at least the
prototypical layer of ambiguity). 1 This underlying level of tectogrammatics2
differs from most other predicate-argument levels, and partly also from the
standard view of Logical Form, in several ways, three of which appear to be
among the most relevant:
(i) the tectogrammaticallevel is conceived of as one of the layers of lan
guage structure, in which no devices created in the metalanguage of logic
(prenex operators and variables with parentheses indicating their scopes)
are present,
(ii) the core of sentence structure is viewed as based on the dependency
relation (between heads and their complementations) rather than on con
stituent structure, and
This approach is intended as a continuation of the syntactic theories of European
structural linguistics, especially of the Prague School.
2
The intent here is to offer as theory-neutral a term as possible, realizing that this is a
domain where theory-neutrality is well-nigh impossible, for a syntactic description that is sup
posed to serve as the syntactic side of the syntax-semantics interface; this is the underlying
syntactic representation in HS's theory, the analysis tree in Montague grammar or categorial
grammar, the single syntactic tree in GPSG, the level of LF in GB, etc. In what follows we
will sometimes refer to it as the interface representation.