‘Not’ in focus:

This paper investigates the interaction of focus and negation in the Bantu language Zulu (Nguni; S42). I discuss four strategies that are used to negate transitive sentences in Zulu. The default strategy, in which an object marker is added to the negated verb, expresses polarity focus by dislocating the object-marked object from the VP-focus domain. In the second strategy, no object marker occurs, and focus falls on the object or the VP. I show that in this strategy, negation typically associates with the focus and is not part of the presupposition, and I argue that this is responsible for a (hitherto unexplained) additional contrastive inference that speakers report with this negation strategy. The third strategy, a cleft, is used to remove the focused object from the scope of negation; as a result, negation can associate with the presupposition. In the fourth strategy, the object noun loses its augment and is interpreted as a negative polarity item (NPI). Based on a proposal by Lahiri (1998), I argue that in negated sentences with NPI-objects, focus is placed on an implicit cardinality predicate which is associated with the semantic representation of the indefinite NPI-object.

SUBJECT POSITION AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN L2 SPANISH

This study investigates the acquisition of the constraints regulating subject position in the L2 Spanish spoken by English native speakers and provides a representational account following the premises of the Multiple Grammars (MG) model. The acceptability of preverbal and postverbal subjects is compared considering different discursive contexts (i.e., broad focus, Verbal Phase [VP] focus, and subject focus). Three groups (i.e., native speakers, intermediate learners, and advanced learners), with 28 subjects each, took part in the study. Findings show that advanced speakers behave in a more nativelike manner than intermediate learners. Learners, nonetheless, are not capable of blocking the acceptability of preverbal subjects in those contexts in which native speakers disfavor them and show high productivity levels of underspecified L2 rules that lead them to accept postverbal subjects in infelicitous contexts (e.g., VP focus). These results are consistent with MG, the representation model proposed by Amaral and Roeper (2014), because an acquisition path can be described using simple rules with lexical or pragmatic restrictions, which may be targetlike. Optionality can be explained considering that L1 and L2 rules coexist and are never deleted, simply assigned different productivity levels or blocked.

An Experimental Study on the Effect of Argument Structure on VP Focus

It has been claimed that a focused word may project its focus to a syntactic constituent larger than the focused item, under what are known as Focus Projection principles (Selkirk 1995; Rochemont 1998). Engdahl and Vallduvi (1996) rejected this purely syntax-based approach and proposed considering the interactions between the grammatical function and the types of an argu-ment. Chung, Kim, and Sells (to appear) applied Engdahl and Valduvi's theory to Korean and claimed that in Korean only a theme argument, but not an oblique argument (1.O or Locative PP), can project its focus to the Verb Phrase. This paper examines how VP focus is realized in Korean and tests Chung et al.'s claim that the types and the order of arguments can affect the focus projec-tion (especially 'VP focus'). The results show that there is no sensitivity to argument type, word order, or the length of VP in projecting the domain of focus to VP in Korean. Regardless of these factors, VP focus was prosodically marked by boosting the prominence of all words inside the VP, with the VP-initial word being the most prominent. Our data suggest that focus projection rules can be eliminated as proposed in Buring (2003).