The role of intonation in processing left- and right- dislocations in French.

International audienceThis study attempts to determine the effects of intonation morphemes in French on the processing of simple reversible sentences containing a dislocated element. Synthetic speech stimuli were used. Subjects (80 children aged 5.0 and 6.0 and 48 adults, all monolingual, native French speakers) generally processed the sentences better when they retained the standard subject-verb-object order characteristic of most French utteranccs. When that ordcr was not maintained, appropriate intonation promoted the correct attribution of roles in sentences with 8 dislocated object. The on-line analysis of adult response timing suggested that intonation morphemes serve as processing instructions for these subjects, guiding them in deciding whether to express their answer immediately or to delay responding

Investigating phrasing levels in French : Is there a difference between nuclear and prenuclear accents?

The goal of this paper is to determine whether there is a formal difference between high-ending nuclear (IP-final) and prenuclear accents in French. We compared the different accentual and phrasal categories by analyzing, among the other things, the tonal and temporal characteristics of their tonal targets as well as durational characteristics of the target syllables. The hypothesis tested is that nuclear accents differ from prenuclear ones in terms of formal characteristics of the tonal movement which cannot be explained, for instance, by invoking the presence or absence of an upcoming tone. We show that both alignment and scaling differences can be found between the two accents types, thus motivating a contrastive phonological analysis. The implications for a hierarchy of prosodic levels will also be discussed

Information structural notions and the fallacy of invariant correlates

In a first step, definitions of the irreducible information structural categories are given, and in a second step, it is shown that there are no invariant phonological or otherwise grammatical correlates of these categories. In other words, the phonology, syntax or morphology are unable to define information structure. It is a common mistake that information structural categories are expressed by invariant grammatical correlates, be they syntactic, morphological or phonological. It is rather the case that grammatical cues help speaker and hearer to sort out which element carries which information structural role, and only in this sense are the grammatical correlates of information structure important. Languages display variation as to the role of grammar in enhancing categories of information structure, and this variation reflects the variation found in the ‘normal’ syntax and phonology of languages

On Left and Right Dislocation: A Dynamic Perspective

The paper argues that by modelling the incremental and left-right process of interpretation as a process of growth of logical form (representing logical forms as trees), an integrated typology of left-dislocation and right-dislocation phenomena becomes available, bringing out not merely the similarities between these types of phenomena, but also their asymmetry. The data covered include hanging topic left dislocation, clitic left dislocation, left dislocation, pronoun doubling, expletives, extraposition, and right node raising, with each set of data analysed in terms of general principles of tree growth. In the light of the success in providing a characterisation of the asymmetry between left and right periphery phenomena, a result not achieved in more wellknown formalisms, the paper concludes that grammar formalisms should model the dynamics of language processing in time.Articl

Information structure in linguistic theory and in speech production : validation of a cross-linguistic data set

The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind

Catalan pronominalization and information structure: the role of primary accent

Certain aspects of Catalan pronominalization cannot be described without taking into account how informational content is mapped onto sentence structure. In this paper, some data previously considered in the literature (mainly from Todolí's 'Els pronoms') will be (re)analyzed considering the effects of information packaging articulation in Catalan in order to provide a more unified account. Information structure requirements are relevant for the analysis of the restrictions on pronominalization since, in Catalan, position in sentence structure reflects the pragmatic import of constituents. Viewing clitic binding as a result of a thematization procedure allows for a wider and more coherent approach to pronominalization, since proforms substitute not only for thematic material that is omitted but also for thematic material that is located in dislocated slots

Variation at the Interfaces in Ibero-Romance. Catalan and Spanish Prosody and Word Order

We are grateful to Joan Borràs-Comes for kindly providing us with the map that appears in Figure 1. Alba Chacón, Verònica Crespo-Sendra and Marianna Nadeu deserve a special mention for having participated unselfishly as narrators of the short picture stories presented in a PowerPoint slide show. We also thank participants, and people that helped us to get in contact with potential participants: Gotzon Aurrekoetxea, Mercedes Cabrera, Verònica Crespo-Sendra, Irene de la Cruz, Gorka Elordieta, Leire Gandarias, Miriam Rodríguez, Paco Vizcaíno. This research has been funded by the project FFI2011-23829/FILO awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.En aquest estudi investiguem la interacció entre l'ordre de mots i la prosòdia a l'hora d'expressar la modalitat i diferents construccions de focus en una sèrie de dialectes del català i de l'espanyol. Hem analitzat un corpus obtingut mitjançant dues tasques: a) una tasca de producció dissenyada per obtenir diferents construccions de focus mitjançant parells de pregunta-resposta amb petites històries presentades a partir de figures i b) la metodologia de la tasca de compleció del discurs. Les dades recollides s'han analitzat prosòdicament i sintàctica. Les nostres dades confirmen que en català i en espanyol la prominència entonativa tendeix a recaure al final de l'oració, però això és del tot cert només en les declaratives de focus ample, ja que la prominència principal pot recaure a l'inici de l'oració en les declaratives de focus informatiu en català oriental i en espanyol del País Basc o restar in situ tant en les declaratives de focus informatiu com en les de focus contrastiu (especialment en valencià o espanyol). Quant a la modalitat interrogativa, podem fer una distinció important entre les llengües que poden presentar inversió del subjecte-verb en les interrogatives directes (valencià i espanyol) i les llengües que no (català oriental). En català oriental el subjecte apareix dislocat.In this study we investigate how word order interacts with prosody in the expression of sentence modality and different focus constructions in different varieties of Catalan and Spanish. We analyze a corpus obtained by means of two tasks: a) a production test designed to elicit different focus constructions by means of question-answer pairs from short picture stories and b) the Discourse Completion Task methodology. The collected data were prosodically and syntactically annotated. Our data confirm that in Catalan and Spanish the intonational prominence tends to be located in clause-final position but this is completely true only for broad focus declaratives, since the main prominence can also fall on clause-initial position in Eastern Catalan and Basque Spanish informational focus declaratives or remain in situ in both informational and contrastive focus declaratives (especially in val_cat or Spanish). As for interrogative modality, an important distinction is made between languages that can present subject-verb inversion in direct questions (val_cat and Spanish) and languages that cannot (Eastern Catalan). In Eastern Catalan the subject is dislocated

The Movement Nature of Left Dislocation

Since Ross's first formulation of Left Dislocation (LD) as a movement rule (Ross (1967, ch. VI)), a number of people have challenged his analysis, proposing instead that the lefthand constituent be base-generated (Postal (1971); Hirschbuhler (1974; 1975); Rodman (1974); Van Riemsdijk and Zwarts (1974); Gundel (1975)). Before briefly considering some of their arguments and alternative proposals, which I will argue focus on a quite different construction, I will present what I take to be rather strong evidence in favor of a movement analysis, for at least a large class of sentences in at least some languages. All of the arguments I offer below have the following form: (1) There is some rule operating on NPs that ordinarily displays either a governor or a trigger or a controller to the left of the affected NP. (2) In our "LD" data the affected NP appears to the left of such a governor (or trigger, or controller) rather than to its right. (3) Were we not to posit a movement rule that applies (we must assume) after the relevant rule has operated gn the NP, we would be compelled to state the same restrictions twice, as if they were independent ones, thus missing a basic regularity.

Left-dislocation revisited

This is a revised and much expanded version of a paper presented for the XVIII AEDEAN Conference (Alcalá de Henares, December 1994)The aim of this paper is to provide syntactic evidence that left-dislocated NPs (LDs) do not belong inside the structure of the sentences with which they are usually associated. It is argued here that the relationship between LDs and these sentences is merely a semantic one of co-reference and that, therefore, no formal, structural liaison exists between them. The analysis that contemplates the left-dislocated constituent as a sister of a lower clausal node inside the highest S node is consequently abandoned in favour of a discourse-oriented interpretation. According to this, left-dislocation is best seen as involving structurally independent co-referential units in discourse

The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody: A Study of Italian Clause Structure

This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression is systematically affected by the syntactic expression of discourse-givenness. The proposed analysis disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by the most productive operations affecting discourse given phrases at the right periphery, namely right dislocation and marginalization. On this basis, it shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that instances of left-peripheral focalization only arise when focus obligatorily evacuates a larger right-dislocating phrase, giving rise to a distribution of leftward-moved foci that generalizes well beyond the cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In its final chapter, the book examines the syntax–prosody interface, showing how focalization in situ and other key properties follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta’s (1998) analysis of p-movement and the role of prosody in shaping syntax. Overall, this book offers an evidence-backed radical departure from current views of focalization based on a fixed focus projection at the left periphery of the clause. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date