Discourse Functions

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.24 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Katalin É. Kiss

Keyword(s):

Sentence Structure ◽

Focus Position ◽

Verb Movement ◽

Left Edge ◽

Logical Subject ◽

Discourse Functions

The chapter first summarizes the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the topic–comment structure in the Hungarian sentence. It describes the topic as a constituent external to the extended verbal projection, binding an empty argument in the comment, derived by topic movement or base-generated in situ. The topic functions as the logical subject of predication. Then the chapter discusses the focus–background articulation of the comment. The Hungarian sentence structure contains a designated focus position at the left edge of the comment. The focus elicits verb movement. The Hungarian focus construction, expressing exhaustive identification, is analysed as a predication structure both syntactically and semantically. It is claimed to represent specificational predication, with the background determining a set, and the focus referentially identifying its members.

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Preposition stranding versus pied-piping: Negative Shift of prepositional complements in dialects of Faroese

Nordlyd ◽

10.7557/12.232 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 36 (2) ◽

pp. pp

Author(s):

Eva Engels

Keyword(s):

Linguistic Variation ◽

Font Size ◽

Verb Movement ◽

Left Edge ◽

Negative Shift ◽

Preposition Stranding ◽

Main Verb ◽

Cyclic Linearization ◽

Finite Verb

In Faroese, Negative Shift of a prepositional complement is subject to variation across dialects, as well as to variation across speakers of the same dialect as regards preposition stranding and pied-piping. In particular, Negative Shift of a prepositional complement is possible for all speakers in the presence of a main verb in situ, stranding the preposition. Only if the main verb undergoes finite verb movement does dialectal and inter-speaker variation arise. In Icelandic, in contrast, the choice between preposition stranding and pied-piping during Negative Shift seems to be independent of verb position and to be lexically determined by the verb-preposition combination instead.         These asymmetries will be accounted for within Fox and Pesetsky's (2003, 2005) cyclic linearization model, which requires non-string-vacuous movement to proceed through the left edge of Spell-out domains, deriving cross-linguistic variation as to Negative Shift from differences in the availability of these left-edge positions. Thereby, pied-piping is considered a last resort strategy, possible only if the prepositional complement cannot undergo Negative Shift on its own due to the unavailability of the relevant left-edge position.

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Echo Questions in the Minimalist Program

Linguistic Inquiry ◽

10.1162/ling.2010.41.1.131 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 41 (1) ◽

pp. 131-148 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Nicholas Sobin

Keyword(s):

Minimalist Program ◽

Wide Scope ◽

Verb Movement ◽

Question Formation ◽

Scope Assignment ◽

Echo Questions

English echo questions present numerous challenges to the analysis of interrogatives, including (a) simple wh-in-situ (You saw who?); (b) apparent Superiority violations (What did who see?); (c) apparent verb movement without wh-movement (Has Mary seen what?); and (d) requisite wide scope only for echo-question-introduced wh-phrases (underlined in these examples—only who in What did who see? is being asked about). Such apparently contrary features may be explained in terms of independently necessary scope assignment mechanisms and a complementizer that subordinates the utterance being echoed and “freezes” its CP structure. No norms of question formation are violated.

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On Wh-questions in Persian

The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique ◽

10.1017/s000841310001793x ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 46 (1-2) ◽

pp. 41-61 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour

Keyword(s):

Focus Position ◽

Wh Questions ◽

Focus Movement

AbstractThis article explores wh-questions in Persian and examines how the “clausal typing hypothesis” and the “focus-fronting analysis” fare with respect to Persian wh-questions. It is shown that Persian wh-questions involve obligatory movement of wh-phrases to a preverbal focus position. This movement is different from syntactic wh-movement in that it does not involve movement of the wh-phrase to [Spec, CP], whose trigger is a [+wh] feature in C. Thus, in terms of the typology of wh-questions, Persian is neither a syntactic wh-movement nor a wh-in-situ language; rather, it should be classified with languages such as Aghem, Basque, Hungarian, Kirundi, and Serbo-Croatian, in which wh-phrases have been argued to undergo focus movement. It is shown that Persian does not seem to share the properties of Serbo-Croatian, another focus-fronting language. Some possible explanations are provided and the theoretical implications are discussed.

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Changing EPP parameters

10.1093/oso/9780198759522.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Lieven Danckaert

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

Clause Structure ◽

Verb Movement ◽

Modal Verbs ◽

The Core ◽

History Of ◽

Parametric Change ◽

T Domain ◽

The Way

This chapter starts with a description of the core facts concerning the VPAux/AuxVP alternation in the history of Latin. In the case of modal verbs and infinitives, there is a clear decline of the head-final order VPAux, whereas Late Latin BE-periphrases surprisingly prefer this order. Against the backdrop of these observations, the discussion then turns to the analysis of Classical and Late Latin clause structure. It is proposed that during the transition from Classical to Late Latin, a major parametric change took place related to the way the clausal EPP-requirement is satisfied. In the earlier grammar (‘Grammar A’), the entire VP undergoes A-movement to the high T-domain, resulting in the characteristic VPAux word order. In the later grammar (‘Grammar B’) the EPP-requirement is met by means of verb movement, with the VP staying in situ. In this grammar VPAux-orders are derived through roll-up movement, which is incompatible with the VOAux-pattern.

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Structural change in Catalan discourse

Studies in Language ◽

10.1075/sl.38.2.01for ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 38 (2) ◽

pp. 237-274 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Montserrat Forcadell ◽

Jaume Llopis

Keyword(s):

Structural Change ◽

Sentence Structure ◽

Television Production ◽

Intimate Link ◽

Structural Innovation ◽

The Way

For the function of theme-rheme mapping onto sentence structure, Catalan right-dislocation, a syntactically-based operation, is being replaced by in situ accent-shift, a prosodic strategy. This structural innovation found in the data analysed is probably triggered by a calque from English and Spanish, which uses a prosodic variant. The occurrences found in the corpus (oral television production from non-spontaneous, supervised genres) indicate that the phenomenon is occurring unnoticed by language advisors. By showing that a non-standard prosodic strategy alien to the Catalan inventory has increased over the two periods studied, it is proved that the (structural) calque is making progress. The frequency of the occurrence of this calque may pave the way for its acceptance as a valid Catalan resource among Catalan speakers, as the intimate link between prosody and syntax in Catalan is blurred.

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Adversative Discourse Markers in Kurdish Literary Texts

English Language Teaching ◽

10.5539/elt.v12n1p154 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 154

Author(s):

Paiman Hama Salih Sabir ◽

Hoshang Farooq Jawad

Keyword(s):

Discourse Markers ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Sentence Structure ◽

Discourse Particles ◽

Discourse Coherence ◽

Pragmatic Markers ◽

Contemporary Novels ◽

Discourse Functions ◽

Different Characteristics ◽

Discourse Connectives

Discourse Markers are one of an uninvestigated aspect of language in old and modern Kurdish linguistics, that has not been given due attention, neither by native nor non-native researchers. On this ground, it is hoped that the present study sheds light on this almost entirely ignored aspect of the language and this study is meant to be a systematic treatment of this group of lexical items known as Discourse Markers (henceforth, DMs), more specifically one category of them; Adversative DMs. DMs are words, phrases and even clauses that enhance discourse coherence and are found in all languages, as tapped on by researches and investigations. Numerous terminologies are utilized to refer to such group of markers by different researchers in English and other languages, such as ‘Discourse Particles, Cue Phrases, Small Words, Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Connectives… and even they are defined differently. It is postulated that DMs are meaningless and lay outside the domain of sentence structure. Likewise, lexical expressions that have different grammatical functions such as ‘and, also, but, or, simultaneously, at the same moment …etc, can also function as DMs to connect the previous utterance with the upcoming discourse segment. The current investigation endeavors to answer certain specific questions: first, the extents to which DMs are operated in literary texts; second, discourse functions DMs implement. Thirdly, the word categories DMs are derived from, and to which extent Halliday and Hassan (1976)’s framework is applicable to Kurdish DMs? For achieving the aims, the researchers analyzed one of the contemporary novels of a famous novelist entitled ‘Xezlenûs w Bâxekâni Xejâł”. By applying Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework and also by taking insights from Fraser (2009), DMs are categorized into different classes. One of which is Adversative DMs, which are the concern of the present study. For obtaining the frequency of each marker, the data are scrutinized manually, since there are no corpus analysis tools that can facilitate such measurements. The study concludes that Adversative DMs are frequently used in selected Kurdish literary texts and that they are similar to those found in English in terms of derived grammatical categories, taxonomy, and they have different characteristics in terms of form, position and discourse functions. Withal, it has been arrived that Adversative DMs are of different kinds analogous to those investigated in English by Halliday and Hassan (1976).

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Echo questions in Brazilian Portuguese

DELTA Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada ◽

10.1590/1678-460x2019350104 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 35 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Mary A. Kato

Keyword(s):

Brazilian Portuguese ◽

Declarative Sentence ◽

Focus Position ◽

Echo Questions

ABSTRACT Brazilian Portuguese (BP) can have the wh-element in-situ with two types of sentence intonation: (a) the rising intonation of a yes/no question, in which case it is interpreted as an echo question, and (b) the falling intonation, similar to that of a declarative sentence, in which case it is interpreted as an ordinary question. Kato (2013) analyzed the falling intonation type as a fake wh-in-situ, with a short movement of the wh-element to a lower focus position, inspired by Miyagawa’s (2001) proposal for Japanese whereas the rising intonation type was analyzed in accordance with Kayne’s (1994) proposal, with the whole TP containing the wh-element moving to Spec of C. In this article we maintain the analysis of the wh-in-situ with falling intonation as a fake in-situ but analyze the echo question as a short yes/no indirect question. The languages used to support this analysis of BP are English, French, and Japanese.

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Eppur si muove!

Linguistic Variation Yearbook ◽

10.1075/livy.1.07mun ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 1 ◽

pp. 147-180 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Nicola Munaro ◽

Cecilia Poletto ◽

Jean-Yves Pollock

Keyword(s):

Sharp Contrast ◽

The Other ◽

Striking Difference ◽

Left Periphery ◽

Left Edge ◽

Comparative Syntax ◽

Wh Questions ◽

The Right ◽

The Town

This article offers a comparative syntax approach to wh-questions in French and Bellunese, a Northern Italian dialect spoken in the town of Belluno. A striking difference between the two languages, otherwise very closely related, lies in the fact that bare wh-words in root questions, which display obligatory subject clitic inversion (SCLI), must appear at the right edge of the sentence in Bellunese. In French on the other hand apparent in situ structures ban SCLI and do not accept que in sharp contrast with Bellunese. To make sense of these data we suggest that despite appearances wh-words in Bellunese do move to the left periphery, just as they must in French SCLI structures. This in turn requires that the remaining IP also move to the left periphery which should then be highly split. The minimal parameter distinguishing French and Bellunese, we claim, lies in the existence of a class of non assertive clitics in Bellunese, which have turned into interrogative markers. Their absence in French triggers obligatory wh-movement to a high operator position at the left edge of the CP domain. In this light it is suggested that French wh in situ questions also involves invisible remnant IP movement and wh movement to a truncated left periphery.

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The pragmatics of Spanish postposed wh-interrogatives

Folia Linguistica ◽

10.1515/flin-2018-0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 52 (2) ◽

pp. 283-317 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Malte Rosemeyer

Keyword(s):

Information Structure ◽

Brazilian Portuguese ◽

Question Under Discussion ◽

Discourse Functions

Abstract This study analyzes the pragmatics of in-situ wh- and complex bare wh-interrogatives such as ¿de qué? ‘of what?’ in spoken Spanish, developing a typology of their discourse functions. The interpretation of such postposed wh-interrogatives depends on inference processes by the hearer that take as cues both the degree to which the interrogative proposition and the referent of the interrogative pronoun/adverb are cognitively accessible. This relationship follows from the fact that on the basis of the combination of the information states of the interlocutors (i.e. the degree of accessibility of the proposition and the referent of wh) with the information structure of this type of wh-interrogatives, the utterer of the wh-interrogative can predict the pragmatic effect of a given postposed wh-interrogative token in the hearer. I establish a hierarchy of the different discourse functions on the basis of their potential to change the current ‘Question under Discussion’ (QuD). In particular, the analysis demonstrates that postposed wh-interrogatives that realize or imply a challenge to a previous utterance by the addressee of the interrogative have weaker pragmatic conditions than other uses. Consequently, I theorize that these uses are crucial for our understanding of the expansion of the use of in-situ wh-interrogatives in languages such as French and Brazilian Portuguese.

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Parameters and micro-parameters in Arabic sentence structure

10.26686/wgtn.17006275.v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Kemel Jouini

Keyword(s):

Sentence Structure ◽

Verb Movement ◽

Feature Identification ◽

Standard Arabic ◽

Parametric Variation ◽

Functional Head ◽

Verb Agreement ◽

Feature Structure ◽

The Status ◽

Dependency Relations

My thesis deals with dependency relations in the structure of sentences in Arabic and how properties of verbal morphology and associated lexical items dictate how sentences are derived. I adopt the probe-goal-Agree Minimalist view that variation between languages (even those that are closely related, such as Standard Arabic and Tunisian Arabic) is due to the 'feature structure' of functional elements that enter into the derivation. In particular, the essential architecture of sentences expressing the dependency relations verbs and associated elements have with the 'functional' portion of sentences (i.e., tense/modality properties) is universal in that these dependency relations will be expressed on the basis of the same feature structure cross-linguistically. However, this architecture still allows for the kind of parametric variation that exists even between closely related languages. In this context, I am interested in the status of subject-verb agreement configurations, in both VSO and SVO word orderings, and wh- and other A’-dependencies in Standard Arabic (with comparisons to some modern spoken varieties of Arabic, where appropriate). The analysis is shown to extend to other V-raising languages of the Semitic/Celtic type with ‘basic’ VSO word ordering. A possible extension of the analysis to the V2 phenomenology is also discussed and the major role played by the raising of V-v to T and the raising of T to Agr(s) or T to Fin is highlighted. An important aspect of my analysis is a proper understanding of the dependency relations involved in the derivation of the relevant sentences where the role of the CP domain projections, verb-movement, feature identification and/or feature valuation along with clause type is essential for interpretation at the interface at the output of syntax. In this feature-based analysis of parametric and micro-parametric variation, I show that variation between typologically similar and typologically different languages is minimal in that it is limited to the interaction of feature combinations in the derivation of sentences. These feature combinations concern the feature structure of the T-node in relation to the position where T is spelled out at the interface. In particular, T raises to Agr(s) or to Fin in some languages and/or structures. Such raising processes are important in subject-verb agreement configurations cross-linguistically involving combinations of T-features and D-features, which would differ in interpretability (i.e., interpretable vs. uninterpretable) as the basis for feature valuation. Similar feature combinations also drive the raising processes in wh-dependencies with some F-feature (mainly related to ‘focus’) interacting with the T-features of Fin. I propose that two modes of licensing of these feature combinations are at work. The first mode of licensing is the basic head-head agreement relation. This agreement relation is the basis for verb-movement to the functional field above vP/VP in V-raising languages. The second mode of licensing is the Spec-head agreement relation, brought about by the Merge (internal or external) of D(P) elements in A-dependencies and the Merge of wh-elements in A’-dependencies. In dependency relations other than subject-verb agreement and wh-dependencies, I propose that the licensing of these feature combinations is strictly a question of ‘identification’ via head-head agreement whereby a feature on a functional head does not need to be valued, but it still needs to be ‘identified’ for the well-formedness of the C-(Agr[s])-T dependency. This is the case of the interpretable D-feature of the Top node in Topic-comment structures and the interpretable F-feature of the two functional head nodes, Mod(al) and Neg, in relation to the T-features of Fin in a V-raising language like Standard Arabic.

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