Catalan "Déu n'hi do" and Conventional Implicatures in Exclamatives

This paper presents a formal semantic analysis of the Catalan interjection 'Déu n'hi do' (DND,henceforth) and its interactions with exclamative sentences. The analysis of DND in a nutshell is that (1) it has the lexical meaning of weakening and not of intensification, contrary to previous approaches in the literature and (2) it changes the semantic type of the exclamative sentence it precedes, turning a set of propositions into a proposition. Since DND-exclamatives can syntactically embed in more contexts than bare exclamatives, they provide evidence that part of the meaning of exclamatives is conveyed through a Conventional Implicature (CI). Finally, the syntactic distribution and semantic behavior of DND-clauses in embedded contexts can be explained by the interaction between the asserted and the CI meaning

Asymmetries between interpretation and production in Catalan pronouns

The literature on Romance null-subject languages has often postulated a division of labor between Null and Overt pronouns: Nulls prefer to retrieve an antecedent in subject position, whereas Overts prefer an antecedent in a lower syntactic position (Carminati, 2002). However, recent research on English pronouns (Rohde and Kehler, 2014) has shown grammatical function alone cannot explain pronoun interpretation. According to these models, pronoun interpretation and production are sensitive to different sets of factors and, instead of being mirror images of each other, are related probabilistically in a Bayesian fashion. This paper tests this model with Catalan data from two discourse-completion experiments to study the grammatical and pragmatic factors that affect the interpretation and production of Null and Overt pronouns. Our main result is that both Null and Overt pronouns present asymmetries regarding their interpretation and production: (1) the production of Null pronouns is affected mainly by grammatical factors (they are subject-biased), but their interpretation is also influenced by pragmatic factors (in particular, rhetorical relations), and (2) while Overt pronouns have a strong interpretation bias towards the object, the data indicates that they are not the preferred form to refer to the object

The Realization of Information Focus in Catalan

Answers to wh-questions are the most widespread method to elicit information focus. When studying the syntax of focus, however, this method is problematic because the most natural answer to a wh-question is often a fragment that only includes the focus. This problem has led to considerable controversy in the literature about the position in which information focus is realized, particularly for Spanish, but also for Catalan. In order to enhance the naturalness and reliability of the question-answer test, we designed an experiment with a new elicitation technique (i.e., questions with a delayed answer) in which some material is inserted between the question and the point in which the participant is asked to answer the question, so that the Catalan participants would spontaneously utter a full sentence instead of a fragment, without being explicitly instructed to do so. The material of this production experiment was then adapted in a rating experiment on the acceptability of preverbal and postverbal information foci in Catalan. The results of this second study confirm the findings of the production experiment: postverbal focus is always preferred over preverbal focus, both in the case of subjects and objects

"Ho sabíeu, això?" La dislocació a la dreta en català

The goal of this paper is to describe right-dislocation in Catalan from a quantitative and qualitative corpus. Right-dislocation is the non-canonical construction in which a pronoun in the main clause is coreferential with a final noun phrase. Although right-dislocation is very frequent in Catalan, especially in oral language, it has been little studied.                                                         The corpus consists of 93 right-dislocations, coded according to three parameters. The main focus of analysis is the type of information found in right-dislocation and the motivations for this construction. The analysis compares right-dislocation with other rhetorical alternatives that the speaker might have used to convey the same information: a sentence with a pronoun and without a displaced constituent or a sentence with a canonical order.                                                             I argue that right-dislocation in Catalan is a means to structure information and to create the necessary pragmatic and semantic effects needed in the context. Keywords: Catalan, pragmatics, right dislocation, information packaging, information structure

Preface

The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club, the graduate student organization of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from the NWAV conference and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. The current PWPL series editors are Lukasz Abramowicz, Sudha Arunachalam, Loren Delfs, Aaron Dinkin, Aviad Eilam, Keelan Evanini, Michael Friesner, Jonathan Gress-Wright, Kyle Gorman, Catherine Lai, Laia Mayol, Giang Nguyen, Maya Ravindranath, Tatjana Scheffler, and Joshua Tauberer. We thank the Graduate Students Association Council of the University of Pennsylvania for financial support. This volume contains the proceedings of the 30th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, held from February 24-26, 2006, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

Educació en suport vital i ressuscitació 2021

L'impacte final de les guies per al suport vital depèn de la qualitat però també de l'ensenyament i l'aprenentatge que se'n faci, i del grau d'implantació. Pel que fa a la implantació, aquesta depèn dels recursos per portarles a la pràctica i de la seva difusió, però també de la factibilitat de l'aplicació de les recomanacions proposades. La interacció entre aquests tres aspectes, guies, formació i implementació, és el que es coneix com a fórmula de la supervivència d'Utstein. Aquest concepte ha rebut molta atenció els últims anys i ha motivat capítols específics en les guies 2021 del Consell Europeu de Ressuscitació (ERC)

Right-dislocation in Catalan: its discourse function and counterparts in English

This paper presents a corpus study of right dislocation (RD) in Catalan and discusses crosslinguistic differences of information packaging between English and Catalan. The Catalan corpus consists of 93 RDs which have been coded according to three parameters: (1) the point where the entity in the right-dislocated constituent had appeared in the discourse, (2) consequences of eliminating the right-dislocated constituent and (3) consequences of restoring the canonical order. I argue that RD in Catalan is a means to structure information in a coherent way by displacing old information from the main clause. Three main types of RDs can be found: (1) RDs which activate an entity which was no longer accessible in the discourse and make it highly salient, while still marking its discourse-old status; (2) RDs which make explicit an implicit, never textually mentioned, referent and places it in a discourse-old information position. (3) RDs referring to entities mentioned in the previous sentence. Such RDs convey an additional meaning, some “emotional content”, having to do with the expression of opposition or emphasis. Such emotional meaning can be characterized in terms of a conventional implicature. In order to analyse crosslinguistic differences, an English text and its Catalan translation have been used. The Catalan translation contained 42 instances of RD, while the English text contained none, which shows that the two languages use different strategies to encode information packaging. The Catalan translation uses RDs mostly in cases in which the English original repeats the same phrase in two consecutive utterances and in utterances which convey contrast or opposition

Pronouns in Catalan: Information, discourse and strategy

This thesis investigates the variation between null and overt pronouns in subject position in Catalan, a null subject language. I argue that null and overt subject pronouns are two resources that speakers efficiently deploy to signal their intended interpretation regarding antecedent choice or semantic meaning, and that communicative agents interact strategically in order to communicate the desired meaning with the most economical form possible. The mathematical framework of Game Theory is used to analyze this variation, since it is particularly suitable for modeling strategic interaction and choices. The Position of Antecedent Hypothesis, proposed by Carminati (2002) for Italian, states that null pronouns have a subject preference, while overt pronouns have a non-subject preference. I show that Catalan intersentential data conforms to the PAH whenever the subject is the link of the sentence. However, the PAH needs to be redefined once the topic-focus articulation of the sentence is taken into account: null pronouns have a subject preference regardless of whether the subject is acting as link of the sentence or not, while overt pronouns have a preference for low salience (non-subject, non-link) antecedents. These results point to a model in which salience is composed of several factors and different forms are sensitive to different factors. This data is modeled using games of partial information, in which information states represent different levels of salience. This model makes the prediction that the biases emerging from the PAH should be overridden if there are powerful enough contextual cues, which is borne out. The relative rates of null and overt pronouns vary greatly in different Romance varieties. I present two hypotheses to deal with this variation: one based on priming effects and the other on a grammatical change in progress. Finally, the relationship between contrastivity and overt pronouns is addressed. I argue that all instances of contrastive pronouns are Contrastive Topic markers, which trigger an uncertainty contrast interpretation, which can be coerced into an exhaustive contrast if there is a salient alternative in the discourse or in the context. I offer a game theoretical analysis of the pairing between forms and contrastive meanings