Focus as a grammatical notion: A case study in autism

Proper identification of the focus of an utterance is essential for discourse to proceed adequately. But how does the hearer identify the focus intended by the speaker? It is well-known that the focal constituent carries prosodic prominence, usually pitch accent. The question at the heart of this paper is how the hearer associates such accents with the notion focus. Is there a deductive step involved or is this an automated, grammatical process. I investigate the issue from a psycholinguistic perspective. In particular, I carried out a case study with an autistic speaker. I argue that given the general communicative breakdown associated with autism, the fact that this speaker uses focus adequately shows that focus is more than a domaingeneral communicative device. It must be a notion encoded in the grammar. If correct, such psycholinguistic evidence helps solidify the foundations of theoretical linguistic notions such as focus

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)

The syntax-phonology mapping of intonational phrases in complex sentences: a flexible approach

In this paper, we extend to complex sentences the proposal that the notion of clause in Align/Match constraints related to the syntax-prosody mapping of the intonational phrase should be determined in each language (and each construction) by making reference to the highest syntactic phrase whose head is overtly filled by the verb (or verbal material) (Hamlaoui & Szendrői 2015). We propose that while root-clauses have a privileged status from the syntax-toprosody mapping perspective, all clauses are equal in the prosody-to-syntax mapping. In the spirit of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 2005), we bring in extragrammatical motivation for the proposed mapping principles from parsing and learnability. This allows us to account for the fact that, whereas in many languages like Bàsàá (Bantu) and Hungarian (Finno-Ugric), only root clauses normally map onto intonational phrases, additional intonational phrase edges can be found under the pressure of high-ranked prosodic, processing or information-structural requirements. This is the case with Hungarian embedded foci and Bàsàá embedded topics where, we argue, embedded ι edges are meant to satisfy StressFocus and AlignTopic, respectively. In languages where embedded clauses seem to map onto their own intonational phrases more generally, such as Japanese or Luganda, further independent constraints should be evoked

Radical pro drop and the morphology of pronouns

We propose a new generalization governing the crosslinguistic distribution of radical pro drop (the type of pro drop found in Chinese). It occurs only in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or some other nominal feature. Other types of languages cannot omit pronouns freely, although they may have agreement-based pro drop. This generalization can for the most part be derived from three assumptions. (a) Spell-out rules for pronouns may target nonterminal categories. (b) Pro drop is zero spell-out (i.e., deletion) of regular pronouns. (c) Competition between spell-out rules is governed by the Elsewhere Principle. A full derivation relies on an acquisitional strategy motivated by the absence of negative evidence. We test our proposal using data from a sample of twenty languages and The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005)

Are focus and givenness prosodically marked in Kinyarwanda and Rwandan English?

In this paper, we are interested in whether systematic variations in pitch, intensity and duration can be observed as a function of the focused or discourse-given status of a constituent in Kinyarwanda (Bantu JD61), and a relatively recent variety of “New English” in contact with this Bantu language. Kinyarwanda is a tone language, in which the information-structural notion of focus has been reported to be expressed through changes in word order, with focus appearing clause-finally (Kimyeni 1988, Ndayiragije 1999, Ngoboka 2016). In contrast, Standard English is well-known for the prosodic boost associated with narrowly focused words and the prosodic reduction of post-focal items. Cross-linguistically, the prosodic expression of focus and givenness is progressively becoming considered a marked feature. Zerbian (2015) predicts that it should not be found in a second language (L2), or a contact variety, if it is not already present in the first language of a speaker or a group of speakers. Our study finds no evidence that information focus, exhaustive focus or givenness systematically affect the prosody of Kinyarwanda. We also find no systematic effect of information structure in the variety of English spoken by our Rwandan participants, confirming that this is probably an area of English that is difficult to acquire

Acquisition of focus marking in European Portuguese – Evidence for a unified approach to focus

Recent literature on the syntax-discourse interface in Romance languages indicates that the word order variation found in these languages correlates with the position of nuclear stress. For instance, in Romance languages allowing subject-verb inversion, it has been claimed that the subject is clause-final, because this is the position where nuclear stress falls (Zubizarreta 1998, Costa 1998, Ordóñez 1997, among others). The nature of focus marking across languages is subject to a lively debate. According to some authors, focus-marking is subject to parametric variation, in the sense that some languages mark focus syntactically, while others do it prosodically (Horvath 1986, Rizzi 1997). Under this view, if a language marks focus syntactically, as many Romance languages do, additional prosodic effects are coincidental. In other words, syntactic marking is sufficient for encoding focus information, and prosody plays no role. According to other authors, focus is universally marked by prosodic prominence. In case syntactic effects are associated with focus, they are a direct consequence of the prosodic organization of the language (Reinhart 1995, Szendroi 2001). The goal of this paper is to investigate whether children make the distinction between syntactic marking and prosodic marking of focus. Since there is variation in focus-marking, children have to find out which strategy is used in their language, and, therefore, in the course of development, it is expected that they will make mistakes both in the production and comprehension of focus. In fact, initial results confirm the problematic status of focus-marking in different languages (Crain et al. 1994). There is reason to believe that the characteristic properties of the acquisition of focus may shed light on the theoretical debate with respect to the parametric nature of focus-marking. If focus marking was truly parametric, we would expect that children who acquire language with syntactic focus marking fail to comprehend marked word orders. In languages where focus is marked only prosodically, the expectation is that they initially fail to comprehend cases of prosodic markedness. Crucially, in a language such as European Portuguese, in which both strategies co-exist in some constructions, children are expected to fail on both. Therefore, children’s mastery of word order and stress in focus contexts provides a good testing ground for the comparison between the two approaches to focus

Complete loss of case and gender within two generations: evidence from Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish

Yiddish was the everyday language spoken by most Central and East European Jews during the last millennium. As a result of the extreme loss of speakers during the Holocaust, subsequent geographic dispersal, and lack of institutional support, Yiddish is now an endangered language. Yet it continues to be a native and daily language for Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews, who live in close-knit communities worldwide. We have conducted the first study of the linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish spoken in the community in London’s Stamford Hill. While Krogh (in: Aptroot, Aptroot et al. (eds.) Leket: Yiddish studies today, Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf, pp 483–506, 2012), Assouline (in: Aptroot, Hansen (eds.) Yiddish language structures, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp 39–62, 2014), and Sadock and Masor (J Jew Lang 6(1):89–110, 2018), investigating other Hasidic Yiddish-speaking communities, observe what they describe as morphological syncretism, in this paper we defend the claim that present-day Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish lacks morphological case and gender completely. We demonstrate that loss of morphological case and gender is the result of substantial language change over the course of two generations: while the case and gender system of the spoken medium was already beginning to undergo morphological syncretism and show some variation prior to World War II, case and gender distinctions were clearly present in the mental grammar of both Hasidic and non-Hasidic speakers of the relevant Yiddish dialects at that stage. We conclude the paper by identifying some of the language-internal, sociolinguistic and historical factors that have contributed to such rapid and pervasive language change, and compare the developments in Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish to those of minority German dialects in North America