Future conditionals in Lycian

Lycian funerary inscriptions, being overall legal statements regarding the correct management of the tomb after the death of its owner, comprise many future conditional clauses consisting of two types, paratactic and hypotactic. In the latter a preposed relative clause precedes a resumptive main clause, while in the former two adjoining main clauses are interpreted as protasis and apodosis without any obligatory subordinator. In the last case, the general rule is that some constituent pertaining to the preceding prohibition clause against unauthorized burial undergoes left dislocation, the contrastive topic pointing to the conditional character of the sentence. The lack of an overt subordinator in the paratactic type - the odd modal particle e͂‘if’ is at best optional - points to an archaism in Lycian, as opposed to Hittite and Luwian. This paper aims at providing a critical description of the future conditionals in the corpus, accounting for how they are formed and used.

Ellipsis requires syntactic and semantic identity. Evidence from Fragment Questions in Spanish

Based on novel data from an understudied type of ellipsis in Spanish-which I refer to as Fragment Questions-I argue for the need of both semantic and syntactic identity conditions to license ellipsis. In particular the TP is subject to syntactic identity, and the domain above that is subject to semantic identity. Fragment Questions are elliptical sentences interpreted as wh-questions. They have a follow-up meaning and, unlike other types of sentential ellipsis, they require a wh-phrase to go unpronounced, although there's no explicit wh-question or wh-phrase in the antecedent. In this paper, I analyze Fragment Questions as the result of ellipsis of a wh-question from which a Contrastive Topic has moved.

The role of focus marking in disjunctive questions: A QUD-based approach

Disjunctive questions are ambiguous: they can either be interpreted as polar questions (PolQs), as open disjunctive questions (OpenQs), or as closed alternative questions (ClosedQ). The goal of this paper is to show that the difference in interpretation between these questions can be derived via effects of focus marking directly. In doing so, the proposal brings out the striking parallel between the prosody of questions with foci/contrastive topics on the one hand and that of alternative questions on the other. Unlike previous approaches, this proposal does not rely on structural differences between AltQs and PolQs derived via ellipsis or syntactic movement. To show how this works out, an account of focus and contrastive topic marking in questions is put forward in which f-marking in questions determines what constitutes a possible answer by signaling what the speaker's QUD is like. By imposing a congruence condition between f-marked questions and their answers that requires answers to resolve the question itself as well as its signaled QUD, we predict the right answerhood conditions for disjunctive questions.

« Et le chien aussi i’ regarde »

Résumé Cette étude propose une analyse de la particule additive aussi en français L2 d’apprenants avancés ayant l’allemand comme L1. En nous basant sur un corpus de récits oraux, élicités à l’aide d’une histoire en images, nous étudierons l’expression des liens additifs aux niveaux du répertoire lexical, de la syntaxe et de la structure informationnelle. Il sera montré que les apprenants manifestent non seulement une forte tendance à se servir de la particule aussi afin d’exprimer les relations additives, mais qu’ils sont en outre très enclins à marquer par des procédés syntaxiques les caractéristiques de la structure informationnelle lorsque l’élément auquel aussi est associé, son domaine d’application (DdA), représente un topique contrastif (« contrastive topic »). Ces caractéristiques de la production en L2 sont interprétées comme le résultat des efforts fournis par les apprenants pour construire une narration cohérente en surface, grâce à des moyens explicites qui présentent un avantage procédural d’un point de vue cognitif.

Focus and contrastive topic in questions and answers, with particular reference to Turkish

Much recent research has recognized the importance of focus and contrastive topic in assertions for discourse coherence. However, with few exceptions, it has been neglected that focus and contrastive topic also occur in questions, and have a similar role in establishing coherence. We propose a framework of dynamic interpretation based on the notion of Commitment Spaces that show that a uniform interpretation of focus and contrastive topic is possible. The algebraic representation format is rich enough so that a separate introduction of discourse trees is not necessary. The paper discusses these phenomena for Turkish, a language with an explicit focus marker for polar and alternative questions, which distinguishes focus from contrastive topic.