The Syntax Of Information Structure And The PF Interface

Focus movement to a left-peripheral position has been posited for both Hungarian and Italian. In this paper I argue against a unified cartographic treatment of focus movement, which analyses both as instances of movement to [Spec, Focus0]. I raise some theoretical issues for cartography, such as the proliferation of focus heads and the difficulties with accounting for optionality. Empirically, I show that a set of properties distinguish Hungarian and Italian left-peripheral focus movement suggesting a different syntactic analysis for the two constructions. Following Hamlaoui & Szendrői’s (2015) proposal for the syntax-prosody mapping of clauses, I show that Hungarian focus movement is prosodically motivated in that it is movement targeting the position that main stress is assigned to in the prosody. I show how the same proposal extends to right-peripheral and string-medial focus in Italian and heavy NP shift in English. I discuss the typological predictions of the that it follows from the proposal that left-peripheral focus movement is always accompanied by verb movement, while right-peripheral focus movement will target a position lower than the surface position of the finite verb. Finally, I propose that Italian left-peripheral focus movement is motivated by contrastivity. This accounts for the different characteristics of the two constructions: (i) that Hungarian, but not Italian, focus movement is accompanied by the movement of the finite verb; (ii) that Hungarian left-peripheral focus is prosodically unmarked, while Italian left-peripheral focus comes with marked prosody; and (iii) that Hungarian focus movement is pragmatically unmarked, in the sense that it can answer a wh-question, while Italian focus movement is explicitly contrastive (or perhaps even mirative or corrective)

Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch

Variation of pitch accent patterns in Hungarian

In Hungarian, focussed elements occur in certain syntactic positions. Because of this limitation, prominence marking by means of prosody is less salient than in languages where focus can be expressed by accent shift without changes in word order. In this study, we examined Hungarian utterances that were identical in their segmental structure, but differed with regard to their semantic and pragmatic interpretations. Our aim was to see to what extent prosodic prominence marking is used, and which pitch accent patterns can occur in different sentence positions in this language. We found that (1) deaccentuation of content words was relatively seldom, (2) accented words were often preceded by a break, (3) the number of accent distribution patterns was limited, as was the number of (4) pitch accent types in utterance-initial and -final position: initially, late peaks dominated, whereas in final position most accent tones were falling ones. We argue that these uniform patterns are probably due to neutralisation processes

Modeling information structure in a cross-linguistic perspective

This study makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with a specific focus on creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The present study first provides cross-linguistic findings in regards to information structure meanings and markings. Building upon such findings, the current model represents information structure within the HPSG/MRS framework using Individual Constraints. The primary goal of the present study is to create a multilingual grammar model of information structure for the LinGO Grammar Matrix system. The present study explores the construction of a grammar library for creating customized grammar incorporating information structure and illustrates how the information structure-based model improves performance of transfer-based machine translation

What we have learned from complex annotation of topic-focus articulation in a large Czech corpus

After a short summary of the theory of Topic-Focus Articulation (TFA) the present contribution documents on several examples illustrating the annotation of the basic features of TFA on a large corpus (the Prague Dependency Treebank) that corpus annotation brings an additional value to the corpus if the following two conditions are being met: (i) the annotation scheme is based on a sound linguistic theory, and (ii) the annotation scenario is carefully (i.e. systematically and consistently) designed. Such an annotation is important not only for the surface shape of the sentence but even more for the underlying sentence structure: it may elucidate phenomena hidden on the surface but unavoidable for the representation of the meaning and functioning of the sentence

An Overview of the State of Art in Article Acquisition

The process of learning a second or foreign language that is different from one's native language can often be challenging. Among the various difficulties that can arise within this process, one seems to be transversal and occurs very frequently when an adult speaker of an article-less language learns a second language with articles. Articles are among the most commonly used words in many languages, such as English, and the omission or incorrect use of articles can seriously affect communication in many cases. This subject has been approached differently by various scholars, who have proposed different models to explain the phenomenon. The aim of this article, therefore, is therefore to review different perspectives on the acquisition of articles by adult learners speaking L1 article-less languages. After a brief introduction to the key concepts, the twelve main hypotheses on article acquisition by L1 article-less adult learners are presented and discussed in chronological order. Both the most widely accepted hypotheses in the literature at present (e.g. the Fluctuation Hypotehesis) and the various hypotheses that have contributed significantly to the development of the different theories, such as Huebner's preliminary studies, are considered. By means of a chronological digression, it will thus be possible to obtain an overview of the state of the art of theories on the acquisition of L2 articles by native speakers of languages without articles

Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference