Anáforas reflexivas y doblado de clíticos en lenguas romances

In this paper I analyze the distribution of the reflexive construction se + a sí mismo in Romance (e.g., ‘Juan se peinó a sí mismo’). I propose that these structures are transitive. Concretely, I argue that in these cases the reflexive anaphor is the internal argument of the predicate, and that the obligatory presence of the clitic se is due to the general phenomenon of clitic doubling with pronominal objects. I show that this approach can account for some asymmetries between these constructions and simple se-reflexives regarding expletive insertion in French, proxy readings, comparative constructions, association with focus, and case distribution in causatives.

Additive particles, prosodic structure and focus sensitivity in Hungarian

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.

On the Nonexistence of Asymmetric DOM in Spanish

Kalin and Weisser (2019) observe that Spanish, among other differential-object-marking (DOM) languages, allows for what they call asymmetric DOM in coordination, that is, a DP coordinate structure in which an unmarked DP and a marked DP are conjoined. Given that coordinate structures are islands, asymmetric DOM challenges movement analyses for DOM. Yet we show that alleged cases of asymmetric DOM in Spanish do not involve DP-coordination; rather, they involve coordination of a larger structure plus TP-ellipsis. Evidence involves binding, extraction, fragment answers, and association with focus. We conclude that asymmetric DOM does not exist in Spanish, a fact consonant with movement analyses.

Prosodic Focus

This chapter provides an introduction to the phenomenon of prosodic focus, as well as to the theory of Alternative Semantics. Alternative Semantics provides an insightful account of what prosodic focus means, and gives us a notation that can help with better characterizing focus-related phenomena and the terminology used to describe them. We can also translate theoretical ideas about focus and givenness into this notation to facilitate a comparison between frameworks. The discussion will partly be structured by an evaluation of the theories of Givenness, the theory of Relative Givenness, and Unalternative Semantics, but we will cover a range of other ideas and proposals in the process. The chapter concludes with a discussion of phonological issues, and of association with focus.

On embedded contrastive focus in Mandarin Chinese

This article investigates the previously undocumented focus-sensitiveness of certain scope-bearing expressions in Mandarin, and argues that the syntactic effects of this property should be accommodated by a structure that involves multiple dependencies and inherited dependencies. At the empirical side, it is shown that in Mandarin, certain quantificational expressions as well as typical focusing adverbs have to occur at positions where they (i) c‑command and (ii) be as close as possible to the contrastive foci that they associate with. The similarity to the typical association-with-focus configurations is captured under a unified Agree analysis that incorporated previous variable-adjunction-site analysis for focusing particles in German, while the additional dependencies in these structures are accounted for by multiple Agree and feature inheritance. This analysis is compared with some alternative approaches, which do not have equal empirical coverage or require more complex theoretical assumptions.

Association with Focus

This chapter analyses the semantics of focus as it associates with a range of expressions including adverbial quantifiers, emotives, comparatives and superlatives, cardinals, exclusives, additives and negatives. Association with focus is treated as a grammatical rule and not as primarily due to contextual reasoning.

Pragmatics for Latin

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.

Binding into superlative descriptions

Attributive superlative adjectives are famously ambiguous between readings in which they compare elements of the description they modify, and readings in which they compare competitors to some description-external element of the sentence. The literature is braided with two analytical origin stories for these different interpretations. One strand of analysis attributes the difference in meaning to a difference in the compositional scope of the superlative morpheme. The other attributes the difference to a difference in how the superlative's implicit domain of quantification is resolved. Here, I present new data showing that pronouns in superlative descriptions have sloppy readings, akin to familiar cases of adverbial association with focus, and I argue that these readings are compatible with scope-taking analyses, but cannot be generated by any plausible variety of domain restriction.

Disentangling own: evidence from association with focus

The possessive marker <em>own</em> exhibits a complicated behavior that gives rise to a wide range of subtle meaning differences. Accordingly, the theoretical literature has proposed a number of different characterizations of this element. This paper uses (primarily) data from association with focus to disentangle the various effects that <em>own</em> gives rise to and argue that there are at least two distinct homophonous items; <em>own_R</em>, a reflexivizer that operates on a syntactically derived predicate, and <em>own_Poss</em>, a marker of strong/ inalienable possession. We provide a compositional analysis of examples with <em>own_R</em> that derives its distribution without the need to any item-specific principle of Binding Theory; obligatory reflexivization follows from the lexical semantics of <em>own_R</em>, and locality restrictions follow from independent restrictions on the formation of derived predicates in the syntax. We, thus, provide evidence for (i) the dissociation of reflexivization and locality, and (ii) the formation of complex predicates in the syntax.