The article is an attempt to develop Francis and Michaelis’ (F&M) (2014, 2017) account of ‘relative clause extraposition’ (RCE) in English, in terms of a more discourse-oriented dimension. On the basis of a corpus study, these authors select certain constituent types, enabling a comparison between configurations with and without RCE orderings. The result is a ‘prototypical’ sequence of constituent types that is claimed to predict whether RCE is felicitous or not.

To further develop this analysis, the present article puts forward a three-way distinction, in terms of their degree of communicative dynamism, amongst presupposed (i.e. ‘grounded’) restrictive RCs, non-presupposed RRCs and ‘a-restrictive’ RCs (neither restrictive nor (strictly) non-restrictive). Only the non-grounded RCs result in a felicitous utterance when extraposed, since it is only such RCs that may realise a presentational function via RCE ordering. More generally, it is shown that the three main sentence-internal factors claimed by F&M to favour RCE derive from the thetic (‘all-new’) information-structure status of RCE-containing utterances: thus the key features highlighted are the expression-level reflection of the more basic Information Structure articulation involved in each case.

The results of a production experiment show that English speakers distinguish elements under contrastive focus from elements that are merely new in the discourse. A novel paradigm eliciting both contrastively focused and merely discourse-new elements in the same sentence avoids differences in information structure and pitch accenting in the context surrounding the target elements that were confounds in previous studies on the topic. Elements under contrastive focus show greater duration, relative intensity, and F0 movement with respect to other elements in the utterance than elements that are new in the discourse but not under contrastive focus. We argue that the phonetic differences revealed here cannot be explained in terms of systematic manipulation of pitch-accent type or phrasal boundaries, and should instead be analyzed as differences in phrase-level phonological prominence for contrastively focused and merely discourse-new elements.

Scalar additive operators, such as Engl. even, Fr. même, Germ, sogar, Sp. aun, and so forth, vary crosslinguistically in terms of their distributional behavior, in particular with respect to semantic and pragmatic properties of the sentential environment (scale-reversing vs. scale-preserving, negative vs. nonnegative). This article proposes a semantic framework for the crosslinguistic analysis of scalar additive operators and a typology based on that framework. Five major types of operators are distinguished and the distribution of these types in forty European languages is surveyed. The synchronic patterns found in the languages of the sample are interpreted in the light of historical developments in the domain of investigation, and implications for the division of labor between lexical meaning and sentential context are discussed.

This article introduces a new way to explain how information structure is signaled prosodically in English. I claim that METRICAL STRUCTURE plays a central role (Ladd 2008, Truckenbrodt 1995). Information structure (defined as in Steedman 1991 and Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) places strong constraints on the PROBABIILISTIC mapping of words onto metrical prosodic structure—that is, foci usually align with nuclear accents and theme/rheme units with prosodic phrases, and themes are less metrically prominent than rhemes. It is shown that focus position, scope, and pragmatic interpretation are then derived by manipulating EXPECTED PROMINENCE within metrical structure. Broadly, the more prominent a word than expected, the more likely a contrastive reading; the less prominent, the more likely a givenness reading. Both constructed and naturally occurring examples from the Switchboard corpus are used.

Two distinct negation markers compete in Malay/Indonesian verbal clauses. I argue that one (also used to negate nominal predicates) is a marker of ‘external’ (sentential) negation, while the other is a marker of ‘internal’ (predicate) negation. This contrast is demonstrated by striking differences in syntactic distribution and scopal properties. In verbal clauses the marker of predicate negation is the default, while the marker of sentential negation is allowed only in certain pragmatically determined contexts. These contexts include: (i) contrastive sentences, (ii) marked narrow focus, and (iii) metalinguistic negation. External negation in Malay is restricted to ‘root clauses’; I suggest that this is due to its echoic character.

In Japanese linguistics and elsewhere, the particle wa in its thematic use has been widely regarded as a paradigmatic instance of a ‘topic marker’. This work aims to demonstrate that, contrary to this received wisdom, most often thematic wa merely indicates the groundhood (the status as a nonfocus) rather than the topichood (the status as a topic) of the marked constituent, although it serves as a marker of contrastive topic in some configurations. In a root clause, as a rule, an explicit argument must be marked by thematic wa if it (i) is nonfocal and (ii) does not cooccur with an explicit, nonfocal sister argument less oblique than it. This implies that an explicit, nonfocal subject must be wa-marked, given that a subject is by definition the least oblique argument. Arguments marked by thematic wa despite not meeting this condition (e.g. a wa-marked object cooccurring with a wa-marked subject), as well as at least some instances of wa-marked adjuncts, are interpreted as contrastive topics. It is further pointed out, based on corpus data, that it is much more common for wa to indicate mere groundhood than topichood.

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (AP&L) claim that the knowledge attributed to children by the proponents of UG does not account for language acquisition, bringing evidence from several domains. In this response, we take issue with their claims with respect to two domains. In the case of categories, where distributional learning plays an important role, we argue that AP&L fail to recognize recent analyses showing that abstract representations yield better quantitative models for early child data. In the case of subjacency, we provide several empirical arguments against their claim that it can be reduced to some general discourse-pragmatic principles.

This article analyzes a certain class of misalignments found in contemporary Irish in the relation between syntactic and phonological representations. The mismatches analyzed turn on the phonological requirements of focus (VERUM FOCUS, in particular) and of ellipsis and on how the two sets of requirements interact. It argues that the phonological mechanisms of ellipsis can be overridden when the phonological requirements of F-marking need to be satisfied. The analysis requires a theoretical framework in which the postsyntactic computation is characterized by parallel and simultaneous optimization. In particular, it is argued that certain facets of ellipsis, morphophonology, and prosody are computed in parallel, as in classic optimality theory. The analysis also relies crucially on a kind of head movement (from specifier to a commanding head position) whose existence is predicted by current conceptions of phrase structure but which seems to be little documented.

This paper investigates the acoustic correlates of word-level stress and phrase-level focus-related prominence in Mankiyali, a highly endangered Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northwest Pakistan that utilizes a weight-sensitive stress system. Of the acoustic properties measured (duration, f0, intensity, spectral tilt, and vowel quality), duration was the only feature found to robustly and consistently correlate with word-level stress across syllable types. In contrast, phrase-level focus-related prominence corresponded to an amplification of all five acoustic features measured. Given that vowel duration serves a vital role in preserving lexical contrast in Mankiyali, these findings present difficulties for a strong version of the Functional Load Hypothesis, which claims that acoustic properties bearing a high functional load in a language will not be used to mark prominence. In addition, results support an analysis of Mankiyali’s stress system as having five distinct levels of weight, a pattern which is extremely rare, if not unattested, elsewhere in the world’s languages.

It has been shown in the literature that the preference or requirement for immediately preverbal focus placement, found in a number of languages (especially verb-/head-final ones), can result from different syntactic configurations. In some languages (e.g., in Hungarian), immediately preverbal foci are raised to a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb movement). In others (e.g., in Turkish), preverbal foci remain in situ, with any material intervening between the focus and the verb undergoing displacement), to allow for the focus–verb adjacency. We offer a unified account of the two types of preverbal foci, raised and in situ ones, based on their prosodic requirements. Specifically, we show that both types of foci require alignment with an edge of a prosodic constituent but differ in the directionality of alignment (right or left). Our analysis rests on bringing together two independent existing proposals, Focus-as-Alignment and flexible Intonational Phrase (ɩ)-mapping. We show that this approach makes correct predictions for a number of unrelated Eurasian languages and discuss some further implications of this approach.

This article presents a description of German schon and noch as nontemporal scalar focus operators. Both items operate in a scalar model of sufficiency and signal that the focus value yields a more informative proposition than all alternatives under consideration; that is, they are special cases of scalar additives. Where the two expressions differ is in the complementary perspectives they evoke. Schon relates to higher alternatives. Noch relates to lower alternatives, but brings about an inverse (i.e., antonymically ordered) scalar model. The use of schon and noch as scalar sufficiency operators is traced back to an amalgamation of two other uses of the same items. The descriptive findings contribute to the advancement of our cross-linguistic understanding of scalar focus operators and raise fundamental questions pertaining to the typological and theoretical status of scale reversal phenomena.*

The availability of preverbal focus in Romance is still the subject of controversy in the relevant literature. In this paper, we investigate the distribution of information focus in three Romance languages: Catalan, Spanish and Italian. The main goal is to understand if and to what extent information focus can occur preverbally in these three languages. To this end, we applied a new technique (Questions with a Delayed Answer) to elicit both production data and acceptability judgements. Our results show that preverbal foci are almost never produced in free speech under elicitation but are judged as acceptable by native speakers in rating tasks. The acceptability of preverbal foci, however, is subject to variation: they are more acceptable in Spanish but less so in Catalan and Italian. We interpret this difference across the three Romance languages in the light of the hypothesis formulated in Leonetti (2017), according to which Catalan and especially Italian are more restrictive than Spanish with respect to the mapping between syntax and information structure. While all languages resort to the dedicated word order with a more transparent information-structure partition for a focal subject (i.e. VS), Spanish is more permissive in also allowing a narrow focus interpretation of the subject in an SV order.