Delaying dispreferred responses in English: From a Japanese perspective

This article employs conversation analysis to explore the interpenetration of grammar and preference organization in English conversation in comparison with a previous study for Japanese. Whereas varying the word order of major syntactic elements is a vital grammatical resource in Japanese for accomplishing the potentially universal task of delaying dispreferred responses to a range of first actions, it is found to have limited utility in English. A search for alternative operations and devices that conversationalists deploy for this objective in English points to several grammatical constructions that can be tailored to maximize the delay of dispreferred responses. These include the fronting of relatively mobile, syntactically ?non-obligatory? elements of clause structure and the employment of various copular constructions. A close interdependence is observed between the rudimentary grammatical resources available in the two languages and the types of operations that are respectively enlisted for the implementation of the organization of preference

A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Pseudo-cleft constructions in Swedish talk-in-interaction : Turn projection and discourse organization

In this study we present an interactional linguistic analysis of pseudoclefts in Swedish based on audio and video recordings of everyday and institutional conversations, resulting in a collection of 100 instances. There is variation in the degree to which pseudo-cleft constructions are syntactically integrated: from fully integrated biclausal constructions (cleft clause + copula verb + main clause) to non-copular variants and further to variants in which the cleft-clause is followed by an indeterminate stretch of discourse. The construction's functional properties have to do with projecting actions and generating discourse events, e.g. showing that the initial part has an important turn-projecting function by disclosing the speaker's stance towards the issue at hand. Pseudo-cleft constructions are recurrently employed for marking discourse shifts, e.g. from a positive to a negative stance. Prosodic organization brings unity to the overall construction of clefts and visual cues can be used to convey significant processing activity by the speaker during the production of a pseudocleft. Our data from institutional interaction shows that pseudoclefts are heavily used by the expert rather than lay participant, thus contributing to the creation of institutional roles and social order. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Peer reviewe

The syntactic and discursive status of c’est comme ça que (this is how) in spoken and written French

International audienceThe syntactic and discursive status of c'est comme ça que (this is how) in spoken and written French Abstract Several recent studies devoted to French clefts involving a pronominal/adverbial morpheme such as pour ça (for that), là (there), ainsi (like this), alors (then) and comme ça (like this) demonstrate that these are likely to behave in two distinct ways, one of them being somewhat "non-prototypical" in comparison with the most commonly described narrow focus clefts. The subject of our article is to deepen the examination of the specific c'est comme ça que sequences (lit: it is like this that, "this is how"), since they have not yet received detailed attention as to their use in modern French. The 8.600.000 word corpus which was used indicates that such forms are considerably more frequent in spoken than in written data. After recalling some of the major syntactic characteristics of clefts, we will suggest that two distinct types of c'est comme ça que sequences must be identified: the first type corresponds to the most prototypical clefts endowed with a "contrastive" effect related to the expression of manner; the second type, which will be described in greater detail, cannot be viewed as a cleft but rather as a specific discourse connector, which speakers mostly use in narrative texts, in order to introduce a consequence of the set of facts previously mentioned

Cleft sentences, construction grammar and grammaticalization

This thesis examines the structure and function o f the English //-cleft configuration within the fram ework o f construction grammar. M y analysis begins with the claim that //-clefts are a subtype o f specificational copular sentence. After identifying problems with previous accounts, I outline my own, original analysis o f specificational NP be NPsentences. I argue that specificational meaning involves an asymmetric predication relation and is dependent upon the inherent semantics o f definite noun phrases (rather than syntactic movement). I treat nominal predication set theoretically, as a semantic relation between mem bers and sets. I claim that specificational meaning is brought about by a reinterpretation o f the class-membership relation involving definite NP predicates, whereby the referent is identified as the unique member o f a restricted and existentially presupposed set.As a m em ber o f the family o f specificational copular sentences, the //-cleft inherits properties from the more basic construction. From this, it follows that //-clefts should also involve a nominal predication relation, containing a definite NP predicate. This leads me to argue in favour o f a non-derivational extraposition-from-NP analysis o f //-clefts, in which the pronoun it and the cleft clause (analysed here as a restrictive relative) function together as a discontinuous definite description. M y analysis improves on similar accounts o f this type in two ways. First, since my analysis explains the role that definite descriptions play in the creation of specificational meaning, I am able to explain, rather than simply identify, the numerous similarities between it-clefts and definite noun phrases. Second, my analysis o f specificational sentences as involving a nominal predication relation allows for a straightforward account o f the relationship between specificational and predicational it-clefts.The thesis also examines the historical development of the //-cleft construction. I show that (a) much of the it-cleft’s structure is reminiscent of an earlier stage of the language and (b) the construction has become increasingly schematic and productive over time, sanctioning instances which override inheritance from the more basic specificational schema. In this way, the historical evidence provides an explanation for the it-cleft’s idiosyncratic properties. Together, my synchronic and diachronic analyses add up to a maximally explanatory account of the it-cleft construction

Information structure: theoretical perspectives

Under embargo until: 2022-09-12This chapter discusses the terminology commonly used in the information structure literature: in particular, topic, focus, contrast, and emphasis. An important component of our discussion is the impact of the visual-gestural modality on the syntactic and prosodic encoding of information structure. Kimmelman argued that in RSL and NGT, doubling is also used for information structure-related functions, but proposed that the functions of doubling are better described as foregrounding. Information structure is a field of linguistics covered in numerous books and articles. Information structure in sign languages has also been investigated almost from the first days of sign linguistics; however, as is often the case, most of the available studies focus on a very small number of sign languages, and among these, American Sign Language is the one most prominently represented. The chapter aims to theoretical research, It discusses the few available experimental or psycholinguistic studies on information structure in sign languages.acceptedVersio

The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically “superior” wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g., What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g., Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure, while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty