Additive particles, prosodic structure and focus sensitivity in Hungarian

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kata Balogh ◽  
Corinna Langer
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
General Level ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Sensitive Analysis ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Additive Particles ◽  
Additive Particle ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Standard Semantic

Abstract The main aim of this article is to investigate the prosody-information structure interface in the analysis of the Hungarian additive particle is ‘also, too’. We present a prosodic study of narratives, collected through guided elicitation, and provide a prosodic basis for a focus-based analysis of is. Standard formal semantic approaches to the interpretation of additive particles regard additive particles as focus sensitive, hence the associate of the particle is focal and the focus interpretation (in terms of alternatives) is a significant part in its semantics. This view is considered crosslinguistically valid, although the discussion mostly concerns English. In Hungarian, the focus sensitivity of the additive particle is not directly transparent and needs more elaboration. In the relevant literature, the issue of focus marking with respect to the additive particle is has been insufficiently studied or merely stipulated. In this article, we argue for the importance of a more elaborate study of the prosody-information structure interface in the analysis of Hungarian additive particles. Accordingly, we provide data and its analysis to support our core argument and claims. Our study contributes to the overall understanding and analysis of is and to the general claims about focus marking and focus types in Hungarian. We aim to complement the standard semantic analyses by providing a prosodic analysis supporting the focus-sensitive analysis of is instead of merely stipulating an association with focus. On a more general level, we show that the various readings of additive particles can be explained by taking the prosodic patterns of the relevant constructions into account.

scholarly journals When (not) to Look for Contrastive Alternatives: The Role of Pitch Accent Type and Additive Particles

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-778 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Braun ◽  
Yuki Asano ◽  
Nicole Dehé
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Pitch Accent ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Additive Particles ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Additive Particle

This study investigates how pitch accent type and additive particles affect the activation of contrastive alternatives. In Experiment 1, German listeners heard declarative utterances (e.g., The swimmer wanted to put on flippers) and saw four printed words displayed on screen: one that was a contrastive alternative to the subject noun (e.g., diver), one that was non-contrastively related (e.g., pool), the object (e.g., flippers), and an unrelated distractor. Experiment 1 manipulated pitch accent type, comparing a broad focus control condition to two narrow focus conditions: with a contrastive or non-contrastive accent on the subject noun (nuclear L+H* vs. H+L*, respectively, followed by deaccentuation). In Experiment 2, the utterances in the narrow focus conditions were preceded by the unstressed additive particle auch (“also”), which may trigger alternatives itself. It associated with the accented subject. Results showed that, compared to the control condition, participants directed more fixations to the contrastive alternative when the subject was realized with a contrastive accent (nuclear L+H*) than when it was realized with non-contrastive H+L*, while additive particles had no effect. Hence, accent type is the primary trigger for signaling the presence of alternatives (i.e., contrast). Implications for theories of information structure and the processing of additive particles are discussed.

Topic and Focus Marking in Chinese

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiya Chen ◽  
Peppina Po-lun Lee ◽  
Haihua Pan
Keyword(s):  
Range Expansion ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Pitch Range ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Topical Information

This chapter reviews how the two important notions of information structure—topic and focus—are encoded in Chinese. It first describes the properties of syntactic constructions (e.g.shi/shi . . . de, lian–dou/ye) and semantic particles (e.g.cai, jiu, dou, and zhi) for focus marking. It then discusses how Chinese, a topic-prominent language, conveys topical information via different structures such as base-generated topics, dangling topics, and moved topics. Finally, it provides an overview of how prosodic structure and prominence cues (e.g. pitch register raising, pitch range expansion, and lengthening) complement and enhance focus and topic marking in a variety of Chinese dialects, and how such prosodic reflexes of information structure are constrained by their characteristic sound structures. Lacunae for the studies of focus and topic in Chinese are also identified as important questions for future research.

Pragmatics for Latin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

Ergativity in Tibeto-Burman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shobhana Chelliah
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Contrastive Topic ◽  
Alignment Analysis ◽  
Focus Marking

A number of Tibeto-Burman languages exhibit morphological ergative alignment, while others clearly do not. In these languages, matters of information structure determine core argument marking. Specifically, both A and S marking may be used to indicate topic, contrastive topic, broad focus, and/or contrastive focus. It is most often A or S, not P, that is assigned such status and between A and S, it is most often A that takes marking. Preference for topic or focus marking on A creates the impression of ergative alignment, but an ergative alignment analysis is untenable as S may be marked under the same conditions and with the same morpheme as A. Considerations of discourse-level clause interpretation in Tibetan, Meitei, and Burmese show that information structure not transitivity determines A and S marking. The presence or absence of marking based on information structure is characterized as “unique differential marking”, distinguishing it from the differential marking observed in ergative and accusative alignment systems.

Information Structure and Presupposition

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjell Johan Sæbø
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
The Core ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Core Points ◽  
The Relationship

This article surveys and discusses the core points of contact between notions of information structure and notions of presupposition. Section 1 is devoted to the ‘weak’ presuppositional semantics for focus developed by Mats Rooth, describing its properties with regard to verification and accommodation and showing that it can successfully account for a wide range of phenomena. Section 2 examines the stronger thesis that focus–background structures give rise to existential presuppositions, and finds the counterarguments that have been raised to carry considerable weight. Section 3 looks into the relationship between Givenness and run-of-the-mill presuppositions, finding that this relationship is looser than might be expected, mainly because a presupposition may be in need of focus marking instead of givenness marking.

scholarly journals Generating Tailored, Comparative Descriptions with Contextually Appropriate Intonation

2010 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael White ◽  
Robert A. J. Clark ◽  
Johanna D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Prediction Models ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Generation Process ◽  
Expert Evaluation ◽  
Unit Selection ◽  
Prosodic Structures ◽  
Prosody Prediction ◽  
Surface Realization

Generating responses that take user preferences into account requires adaptation at all levels of the generation process. This article describes a multi-level approach to presenting user-tailored information in spoken dialogues which brings together for the first time multi-attribute decision models, strategic content planning, surface realization that incorporates prosody prediction, and unit selection synthesis that takes the resulting prosodic structure into account. The system selects the most important options to mention and the attributes that are most relevant to choosing between them, based on the user model. Multiple options are selected when each offers a compelling trade-off. To convey these trade-offs, the system employs a novel presentation strategy which straightforwardly lends itself to the determination of information structure, as well as the contents of referring expressions. During surface realization, the prosodic structure is derived from the information structure using Combinatory Categorial Grammar in a way that allows phrase boundaries to be determined in a flexible, data-driven fashion. This approach to choosing pitch accents and edge tones is shown to yield prosodic structures with significantly higher acceptability than baseline prosody prediction models in an expert evaluation. These prosodic structures are then shown to enable perceptibly more natural synthesis using a unit selection voice that aims to produce the target tunes, in comparison to two baseline synthetic voices. An expert evaluation and f0 analysis confirm the superiority of the generator-driven intonation and its contribution to listeners' ratings.

Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo

Linguistics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Grubic ◽  
Agata Renans ◽  
Reginald Akuoko Duah
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Academic Press ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Information Focus ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Crosslinguistic Variation ◽  
Background Construction ◽  
Focus Strategies

Abstract This paper discusses the relation between focus marking and focus interpretation in Akan (Kwa), Ga (Kwa), and Ngamo (West Chadic). In all three languages, there is a special morphosyntactically marked focus/background construction, as well as morphosyntactically unmarked focus. We present data stemming from original fieldwork investigating whether marked focus/background constructions in these three languages also have additional interpretative effects apart from standard focus interpretation. Crosslinguistically, different additional inferences have been found for marked focus constructions, e.g. contrast (e.g. Vallduví, Enric & Maria Vilkuna. 1997. On rheme and kontrast. In Peter Culicover & Louise McNally (eds.), The limits of syntax (Syntax and semantics 29), 79–108. New York: Academic Press; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007b. In place – Out of place: Focus in Hausa. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form, 365–403. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.; Destruel, Emilie & Leah Velleman. 2014. Refining contrast: Empirical evidence from the English it-cleft. In Christopher Piñón (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 10, 197–214. Paris: Colloque de syntaxe et sémantique à Paris (CSSP). http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss10/), exhaustivity (e.g. É. Kiss, Katalin. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74(2). 245–273.; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007a. Exhaustivity marking in Hausa: A re-evaluation of the particle nee/cee. In Enoch O. Aboh, Katharina Hartmann & Malte Zimmermann (eds.), Focus strategies in African languages: The interaction of focus and grammar in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic (Trends in Linguistics 191), 241–263. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.), and existence (e.g. Rooth, Mats. 1999. Association with focus or association with presupposition? In Peter Bosch & Rob van der Sandt (eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives, 232–244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.; von Fintel, Kai & Lisa Matthewson. 2008. Universals in semantics. The Linguistic Review 25(1–2). 139–201). This paper investigates these three inferences. In Akan and Ga, the marked focus constructions are found to be contrastive, while in Ngamo, no effect of contrast was found. We also show that marked focus constructions in Ga and Akan trigger exhaustivity and existence presuppositions, while the marked construction in Ngamo merely gives rise to an exhaustive conversational implicature and does not trigger an existence presupposition. Instead, the marked construction in Ngamo merely indicates salience of the backgrounded part via a morphological background marker related to the definite determiner (Schuh, Russell G. 2005. Yobe state, Nigeria as a linguistic area. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 31(2). 77–94; Güldemann, Tom. 2016. Maximal backgrounding=focus without (necessary) focus encoding. Studies in Language 40(3). 551–590). The paper thus contributes to the understanding of the semantics of marked focus constructions across languages and points to the crosslinguistic variation in expressing and interpreting marked focus/background constructions.

Restrictions on addition: children's interpretation of the focus particles auch ‘also’ and nur ‘only’ in German

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRAUKE BERGER ◽  
BARBARA HÖHLE
Keyword(s):  
School Age ◽  
Focus Particles ◽  
Focus Particle ◽  
Additive Particles ◽  
Sentence Interpretation ◽  
Additive Particle

ABSTRACTChildren up to school age have been reported to perform poorly when interpreting sentences containing restrictive and additive focus particles by treating sentences with a focus particle in the same way as sentences without it. Careful comparisons between results of previous studies indicate that this phenomenon is less pronounced for restrictive than for additive particles. We argue that this asymmetry is an effect of the presuppositional status of the proposition triggered by the additive particle. We tested this in two experiments with German-learning three- and four-year-olds using a method that made the exploitation of the information provided by the particles highly relevant for completing the task. Three-year-olds already performed remarkably well with sentences both with auch ‘also’ and with nur ‘only’. Thus, children can consider the presuppositional contribution of the additive particle in their sentence interpretation and can exploit the restrictive particle as a marker of exhaustivity.

scholarly journals Phonological phrasing and ATR vowel harmony in Akan

Phonology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Kügler
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Vowel Harmony ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
General Process ◽  
Sensitive Analysis ◽  
Serial Verb Constructions ◽  
Internal Structures ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Serial Verb ◽  
Phonological Phrase

This paper examines phonological phrasing in the Kwa language Akan. Regressive [+ATR] vowel harmony between words (RVH) serves as a hitherto unreported diagnostic of phonological phrasing. In this paper I discuss VP-internal and NP-internal structures, as well as SVO(O) and serial verb constructions. RVH is a general process in Akan grammar, although it is blocked in certain contexts. The analysis of phonological phrasing relies on universal syntax–phonology mapping constraints whereby lexically headed syntactic phrases are mapped onto phonological phrases. Blocking contexts call for a domain-sensitive analysis of RVH assuming recursive prosodic structure which makes reference to maximal and non-maximal phonological phrases. It is proposed (i) that phonological phrase structure is isomorphic to syntactic structure in Akan, and (ii) that the process of RVH is blocked at the edge of a maximal phonological phrase; this is formulated in terms of a domain-sensitive CrispEdge constraint.

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