Focus and Background in Romance Languages (Studies in Language Companion Series)

Focus and Background in Romance Languages

Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS) This series has been established as a companion series to the periodical Studies in Language.

Editors Werner Abraham University of Vienna

Michael Noonan †

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Editorial Board Joan Bybee

Christian Lehmann

Ulrike Claudi

Robert E. Longacre

Bernard Comrie

Brian MacWhinney

University of New Mexico University of Cologne Max Planck Institute, Leipzig University of California, Santa Barbara

William Croft

University of New Mexico

Östen Dahl

University of Stockholm

Gerrit J. Dimmendaal University of Cologne

Ekkehard König

Free University of Berlin

University of Erfurt

University of Texas, Arlington Carnegie-Mellon University

Marianne Mithun

University of California, Santa Barbara

Edith Moravcsik

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Masayoshi Shibatani

Rice University and Kobe University

Russell S. Tomlin

University of Oregon

Volume 112 Focus and Background in Romance Languages. Edited by Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob

Focus and Background in Romance Languages Edited by

Andreas Dufter Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich

Daniel Jacob Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romanistentag (30th : 2007 : Vienna, Austria)   Focus and background in Romance languages / edited by Andreas Dufter, Daniel Jacob.        p. cm. (Studies in Language Companion Series, issn 0165-7763 ; v. 112)   Summary: Papers presented at a workshop, Focus and background in Romance languages,  convened during the 30th Romanistentag, in Vienna, Austria, 23-27 September 2007. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1.  Romance languages--Congresses.  I. Dufter, Andreas. II. Jacob, Daniel. III. Title. PC11.R65   2007 440--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 0579 7 (hb; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8952 0 (eb)

2009007669

© 2009 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Preface Introduction Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob

vii 1

Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses Jeanne Aptekman

19

Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish Lisa Brunetti

43

Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance Andreas Dufter

83

Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

123

Fronting and verum focus in Spanish Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal

155

Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition Estelle Leray

205

Major constituent order, information packaging, and narrative  structure in two Middle French texts Claude Muller

239

Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives Edgar Onea and Klaus von Heusinger

281

Verb placement in Old Portuguese Esther Rinke

309

Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses Vieri Samek-Lodovici

333

Index

359

Preface

This volume emerged out of a workshop “Focus and Background in Romance Languages” that we convened during the 30th Romanistentag, the Biannual Meeting of the association of romanicists in the German speaking countries. The meeting took place in Vienna, Austria, 23–27 September 2007, gathering some six hundred specialists in Romance languages and literatures. Our workshop featured two invited speakers, Manfred Krifka (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin & Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin) and Claude Muller (Université de Bordeaux-3 & CNRS: UMR CLLE-ERSS). In addition, fifteen papers were accepted for presentation in the workshop. Rather than merely assembling these papers into one single traditional proceedings volume, we decided to seize the opportunity to launch two book projects. First, a collective volume exploring fundamental theoretical and empirical aspects of the interfaces between syntax, information structure and discourse structure in varieties of Romance (Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds). 2009. Syntaxe, structure informationnelle et organisation du discours dans les langues romanes [Studia Romanica et Linguistica]. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang). Second, the present book, which is more specifically concerned with focus–background structure in Romance languages and its significance for formal and functional theories of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. For this volume, we solicited elaborated versions of those papers that in our opinion are of the greatest relevance for both romanicists and linguists with a more general interest in focus. In addition, we invited supplementary contributions from experts in Europe and America. We would like to thank the participants of the workshop for stimulating discussions and their open-mindedness towards different theoretical frameworks and strategies of linguistic inquiry. Thanks are also due to all contributors for their cooperation, commitment and diligence. Furthermore, we are greatly indebted to our anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions for improvements, and to Neil Huggett and Stephen Laker for meticulously checking the language and style of parts of the manuscript. We wish to express our special debt of gratitude to Werner Abraham for readily offering the renowned Studies in Language Companion Series as a potential place of publication, for accepting the manuscript for publication without any delay of time, and for his unfailing support throughout the book project. Last not least, many thanks to the editorial staff of John Benjamins, in particular Kees Vaes, for their professional guidance and help in the preparation of the volume. Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob Munich and Freiburg, on New Year’s Day of 2009

Introduction Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München / Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Albeit under various terminological guises, Romance linguistics has been interested in questions of focus–background structure since its inception. Starting out from a survey of some early observations about focus-related grammatical facets of Romance languages (Section 1) and of early theoretical concepts of information structure (Section 2), this introduction aims to provide a frame of orientation, signalling points of convergence and divergence between the different theoretical approaches to information structure and works of a more empirical nature. Thereafter, Section 3 will zoom in on basic concepts and issues dealing with the more recent theory of focus. In doing so, this section will seek to situate the included contributions briefly within the field of focus-related inquiry.

1.

Early observations about focus in Romance language scholarship

Some relevant remarks on focus can be found as early as in the Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen by Friedrich Diez, published from 1836 onwards, which was to lay the foundation for comparative investigations into the grammar of Romance languages and dialects. In particular, Diez mentions fronting of non-subject constituents and clefting as syntactic devices available for achieving emphasis (Nachdruck or Hervorhebung, Diez 1844: 288 and 424), moreover hinting at the possibility of foregrounding subjects in declarative clauses by means of subject-verb-inversion. Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, author of the second landmark nineteenth-century grammar of Romance languages, conceives constituent order as a “fight” (Kampf) between grammatical and “affective” factors (1899: 760–761). Among the latter group, Meyer-Lübke observes a tendency for the most “important” or most “noteworthy” element to occur in sentence-final position. In addition, Meyer-Lübke notes that whenever grammatical and affective principles of linearization enter into conflict, the choice between canonical and non-canonical ordering variants is regulated in language-particular ways. To our minds, Meyer-Lübke’s suggestions have a ­remarkably modern flavour, foreshadowing optimality-theoretic thinking about grammar as a specific ranking of competing constraints.



Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob

With the rise of national philological schools and traditions in Europe, approaches to focus-related alternations of sentence form become more variegated. In his monograph on Italian syntax, Fornaciari (1881) observes a tendency for “the most ­important” constituent to be positioned at the left or the right edge of the clause. According to Fornaciari, Italian enjoys the greatest syntactic flexibilities among all Romance languages. The author takes this to be an asset of Italian, for which he gives credit to the great literary figures of the past, as, in his opinion, their exemplarity contributed significantly to preserve the freedom in constituent ordering inherited from Latin. In France, by contrast, it is precisely the diachronic rigidification of subject–verb–object basic constituent order, and the decline of flexible sentence accents from Middle to early Modern French, which receive laudatory comments by linguists until way into the twentieth century (cf. Wartburg 1934: 221–222), thus perpetuating the view of a langue analogique, current in the rationalist metalinguistic reflexion of Enlightenment (cf. Bossong 2001; for an early reference to fixed word order in French cf. Ramus 1572: 182). At the same time, empirical investigations of the modern literary language demonstrate that quite a few rearrangement possibilities continue to be solidly attested, some of them obviously serving to single out and highlight subjects, objects or adjuncts of various semantic sorts (Blinkenberg 1928). Today’s thriving research into the grammar of informal spoken French and its specific information structuring devices (see the seminal work by Lambrecht 1994) has its precursors in works such as Bally’s (1909) Traité de stylistique française or Frei’s (1929) Grammaire des fautes. Frei describes a number of other non-standard constructions which achieve foregrounding, often with exclamative overtones, of individual constituents. In a similar vein, Bally offers interesting observations on dislocations and their capacity to modify what we would now call the focus–background partition of the utterance. Later, in his Linguistique générale et linguistique française (1932), Bally tried to apply his distinction between thème and propos, originally designed as a distinction between syntactic units of various hierarchic levels, for explaining the structure of sentences with left dislocated constituents. Moving on to Spanish, we find a remarkable tension in prescriptive judgements: On the one hand, to the extent that word order is treated at all in descriptive grammars, these continue to echo Correa’s (1625) claim that the most “natural” ordering of major constituents in this language is subject–verb–object. On the other hand, grammarians cannot avoid to acknowledge that deviations from this basic serialization are pervasive in both written and spoken varieties of Spanish. The considerable amount of variability in linear order is argued to be motivated by factors such as “smoothness, elegance or liveliness of expression” by the ­ authoritative grammar of the Real Academia (“suavidad, elegancia, ó viveza de la expresión”, Real Academia Española 1771: 234), which arguably blocked out more impartial linguistic descriptions for quite a long time. Unsurprisingly, therefore, traditional grammars of Spanish and other scholarly Hispanicist works are often lacking informational structural reflections during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see the surveys in Neumann-Holzschuh 1993 and Casielles Suárez 2000). At best, one can find an occasional mentioning of “emphasis” as a determinant of constituent



Introduction

order (Salvà 1830/1835: 117; Bello 1847/1988: II, 582), and passing remarks on focusing achieved by the fronting of constituents to initial position without clitic doubling (Cejador y Frauca 1905: 519, 523–524). For Portuguese, a historical grammar which includes some consideration of focus-related syntactic rearrangements is Dias (1918). Dias improves earlier descriptions in his chapter on “emphatic constructions” in that he not only mentions non-subject fronting, clefting and subject–verb inversion in this context, but also recognizes that not all instances of postverbal subjects in declarative sentences serve to highlight the subject constituent (pp. 324–329). More particularly, Dias’ discussion of the relationship between predicate type and informational distribution in verb–subject declaratives anticipates much recent work on presentative and thetic constructions.

2.

Early theories about information structure

The above remarks, which can only provide a very superficial glance of pre-structuralist observations about focus–background markings in Romance languages, suffice to show that a representative overview of these empirical insights would constitute a daunting task, since they are scattered in the grammatical literature as well as in philological commentaries and treatises on stylistics. Even so, it should have become clear that the ideas of the Prague School work on Functional Sentence Perspective fell on fertile soil in the field of Romance studies (to a greater extent than earlier proposals about the so-called “psychological subject”, cf. Paul [1880] 1975: 124; Gabelentz 1891: 378). Praguian theory, originally developed against the backdrop of salient grammatical contrasts between Czech and English, capitalizes on the communicative status of discourse referents and propositions and its impact upon sentence form (see Mathesius 1929; Firbas 1957, 1964; Daneš 1964). In its simplest version, Functional Sentence Perspective proposes a binary partition of sentence tokens into theme and rheme, notions adapted from Ammann (1928: 3) to designate constituents encoding ‘old’ and ‘new’ semantic content, respectively. Later refinements of the theory abandoned this dichotomous view of informational status in favour of a graded dimension of communicative dynamism, and explored the interrelatedness of information distribution with lexical content, context and intonation ­(Firbas 1971, 1992). In continental European linguistics, these Prague School concepts soon found their way into the study of sentential variants within Romance language scholarship (cf. Dubský 1960 for an early application to Spanish), and have inspired empirical scrutiny of the syntax–pragmatics interface for decades (cf. Raible 1971; Alisova 1972: 130–153; Contreras 1976; Blumenthal 1980: 158– 168; Bossong 1980 and passim; Wandruszka 1982; Combettes 1983; Reyes 1985; Stammerjohann (ed.) 1986; Rothenberg 1989, to mention but a few). In much subsequent literature, the theme–rheme organization has been related to what has standardly been referred to as the topic–comment structure, a terminology coined





Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob

by ­Hockett (1958). In the English-speaking academia, it is principally through the work of scholars such as Bolinger or Halliday that information structure came to figure prominently on the research agenda of functionally oriented linguists (see Bolinger 1954, 1954/1955; Halliday 1967/1968). Undoubtedly, both Praguian and non-Praguian functionalist frameworks have informed a rich body of literature, which continues to be of great relevance for anybody interested in the formal encodings and interpretive consequences of focus. Having said this, we believe that most of the earlier works suffer from conflating into a single dimension (e.g. theme– rheme) aspects of information distribution that can, and should, be distinguished on both theoretical and empirical grounds. From very early on, even the followers of the Praguian terminology felt the need for further precision, insisting on the distinction between the textual dimension of the theme-rheme-dichotomy (“old” or “given” information vs. “new” information) and a sentence-internal dimension (captured in terms of “aboutness”: “what is said” vs. “about what something is said”, cf. e.g. Gülich & Raible 1972). In fact, even in the writings of some Prague School functionalists, one can find occasional side remarks suggesting such distinctions (cf. below). Chafe (1976), in his seminal article on “Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view”, establishes as many as six different levels of what he calls “information packaging”. However, from these, only two have been retained in most modern approaches to information structure. One reason is that Chafe’s starting point was not the sentence as a whole, but the informational status of noun phrases. Of course, there is a categorical difference between the informational status of a nominal or pronominal expression encoding a discourse referent – an entity of type e in Montagovian terms –, and the distribution of information within clausal and sentential units of discourse, i.e., expressions denoting propositions (of Montague’s type t). While it is well-known that the cognitive status of a discourse referent determines its encoding in systematic ways (Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski 1993), we follow Reinhart (1981) and Vallduví (1992: 16–21) in maintaining that such choices among alternative referring expressions do not fall within the purview of information packaging. The reason for this is straightforward: Unlike other carriers of information, including acoustic and visual paralinguistic signals, linguistically encoded information is inevitably processed and stored in a propositional format. This does not imply, of course, that speakers invariably need to utter a complete proposition in order to successfully convey a piece of information to their addressees. Nonetheless, hearers must be able to suitably integrate subpropositional input which is intended as informative into an open proposition. This open proposition, in turn, may be specified by a preceding explicit question, or it can be furnished by what von Stutterheim & Klein (2002) have called the quaestio, the implicit question which a stretch of discourse is designed to answer. More often than not, unfortunately, notions such as rheme have been applied indiscriminately to designate both linguistic expressions introducing ‘new’ referents and those parts of a sentence in which ‘new’ information is communicated.



Introduction

On the other hand, the given/new-distinction in itself needs to be differentiated: As pointed out most lucidly by Gundel (1988), at least two different notions of newness are at stake in much of the earlier literature on Functional Sentence Perspective. An occurrence of a referential expression at a given point in discourse can be assessed as new or old in discourse, given the preceding linguistic context, without consideration of the interlocutors’ discourse representation or knowledge base at the time of utterance. Evaluating a linguistic expression as conveying new information, by contrast, requires access to the addressee’s cognitive state. In other words, it is only addressee-newness that directly pertains to the linguistic transfer and management of information between communication partners, and thus to information structure narrowly defined. In the next section, we will move on to a more articulated conception of information structure, where focus–background becomes a dimension in its own right.

3.

Basic aspects of focus–background structure

Even when we choose to adopt a restrictive notion of information structure as applying only to propositional content, more than one dimension of packaging needs to be distinguished. As we said, even in Praguian functionalism it was acknowledged early on that grammatical signals of emphasis are organized in ways which cannot be reduced to the theme–rheme dimension (Sgall 1967: 208; see also Daneš 1984: 14). Notions such as emphasis, foregrounding, or center of information, have been associated with what is called focus following the lead of Halliday (1967/1968) and ­Chomsky (1971). The start for a systematic separation of different levels of information packaging was Chafe (1976). From the more recent attempts to give more analytic reconstructions of the dichotomies mentioned above, Féry & Krifka (2008) retain three principal distinctions: (1) ±givenness (defined as a feature indicating whether the entity denoted is present in the discursive common ground mutually shared by the interlocutors); (2) topic vs. comment (where topic is the address of the common ground where the information conveyed in the comment has to be stored) and (3) focus vs. background, where focus is defined in terms of alternatives. The idea that focus is the part of an utterance which makes a choice within a range of alternative semantic values that are of relevance to communication partners in the local context of discourse has been worked out in formal detail by Alternative Semantics (Rooth 1985, 1992), where the “ordinary meaning” of the focalized element contrasts with a set of alternatives (“alternative meaning”). Seen from such a perspective, the dimensions of topic–comment and focus–background are conceived of as being logically independent. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility of certain language-particular or cross-linguistic preferences and constraints in the alignment between the focus–background partition of sentences and the two other distinctions mentioned above. In any event, we maintain that such





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correlations, instead of being an apriori, still have to be established explicitly, partly on empirical grounds. In principle, nothing even prevents an expression which occurs in a sentence to be simultaneously marked as being part of both the topic and the focus domain, to mention but one controversial issue (see Aptekman, this volume, for further discussion). The theory of Alternative Semantics does not include an explicit theory of how the set of alternatives that is relevant in the local stretch of discourse can be computed from discursive and contextual givens. As far as we can see, formal linguists have generally refrained from tackling this issue. The tacit consensus seems to be that this task lies entirely outside the scope of grammar, and must be relegated to a more general theory of cognition. The contribution by Onea & von Heusinger (this volume) deals with this view. As this contribution endeavours to show, grammatical aspects (viz. the gender of a noun) do have a bearing for the computation of alternative focus values in certain non-standard varieties of Romanian. On the interpretive side, Chomsky (1971) and many of his followers have taken it for granted that the non-focus part of a sentence token – the background in the terminology used in this volume – lies outside the scope of assertion or other illocutionary operators and therefore contains information that is presupposed. However, the identification of background and presupposition does not seem to be maintainable when we adopt the classical notion of presupposition. In his monograph on word order in Spanish, Contreras (1976) gives the following example (1): (1) ¿Qué aprendiste hoy, Pedrito? Aprendí que dos y dos son cuatro. ‘What did you learn today, Pedrito? – I learnt that two and two is four.’  (Contreras 1976: 3) The subordinate clause in Pedrito’s answer is the focus part by virtue of providing the information solicited by the preceding question. At the same time, it is presupposed since it is subordinated under a factive predicate. At the very least, therefore, the presupposed part and the non-focus part of a sentence need not coincide in any case. Conversely, the focus domain need not be aligned with illocutionary scope (though see Beyssade et al. (forthc.) for a recent defense of the view that focus–background structure is reducible to illocutionary semantics). Nonetheless, the alleged close association between background and presupposition has recently been refined and reinstated by Geurts & van der Sandt (2004), who argue that each background portion of a sentence gives rise to an existential presupposition. Despite its initial attractions, this view has come under severe attack in a number of peer commentaries. These critics argue, for instance, that presuppositions generated by focus behave differently from standard cases of presupposition with respect to choice of antecedents (Büring 2004), as well as compositionality and projection (Kratzer 2004). In this volume, we will therefore remain neutral as to the triggering of presuppositions by non-focal parts of a sentence and stick to the more innocent notion of background as the complement notion of focus. Much work, of both generative and functionalist-typological



Introduction

origin, has been spent on sorting out different types of focus, mainly based on different kinds of semantic and pragmatic inferences. While Dik et al. (1980) introduce a sixway typology of focus functions in order to account for the differential acceptability of alternative focus-marking strategies in different contexts, the most widely accepted proposals distinguish only between two principal subtypes of focus, known as identificational and information focus, respectively (É. Kiss 1998; see also Rochemont 1986; Campos & Zampini 1990). Whereas the latter type acts as a default, identificational focus is the special case, involving reorderings and licensing additional inferences. Perhaps the most important subcase of identificational focus is contrastive focus (see Isac 2003 for the distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive identificational foci and their grammatical relevance in Romanian). The occurrence of contrastive focus has been associated with systematic deviations from neutral sentence accent position and realization, designated syntactic positions and movement types as well as specific quantificational interpretations. In cases of contrastive focus, an inference is triggered that there is at least one salient alternative which could not be substituted for the contrastively focused part of the sentence salva veritate. A sentence such as PETER I met, with contrastive focus on the object, strongly invites the inferences that Peter was the only person whom the speaker met (exhaustivity) and that there is at least one salient alternative to Peter in the local context of discourse whom the speaker could have been expected to meet, but in fact did not. Much of what can be found under headings such as “emphatic constructions” in traditional Romance descriptive grammars in fact contains similar insights into these constructions. In particular, focus fronting appears to be restricted to contrastive foci in the majority of Romance language varieties, and is perceptible in a subtype of verb-second declaratives as early as in Classical Latin (Devine & Stephens 2006: 172–179). At the same time, evidence from Romance languages has also been adduced to argue that the distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive foci is less clear-cut than has been taken for granted in much syntactic work (cf. Brunetti 2004, this volume; and Samek-Lodovici 2006, this volume, all on focus in Italian). An alternative line of thought surmises that contrast is not directly related to either focus–background or topic–comment structures (Molnár 2002, 2006; Neeleman et al. 2007). Such a view has no problem in acknowledging the observation that topic constituents may establish salient contrast relations without exhibiting properties of typical focus elements. Several of the contributions to this volume explore the semantic and pragmatic inferences which focus may generate, such as exhaustivity, contrast or unexpectedness (Brunetti, this volume; Dufter, this volume; Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal, this volume; Onea & von Heusinger, this volume). Information structure, as a relation of the utterance to the Common Ground, is often considered as a pragmatic feature of a sentence, independent from the truth value-semantic, propositional structure of the utterance. However, it has been recognized since Jackendoff (1972) that at least some occurrences of focus have quantificational impact. The clearest cases are the so-called focus particles such as only or also (König 1991). These operators take the focus domain as their scope, in such a way that ­different focus domains result in different quantificational, and, thus, in





Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob

different truth conditions. Now, as Rooth (1985) shows, focus particles may be associated with different focus domains even within the same linear order of elements in a sentence, giving rise to truth-conditional differences in interpretation. In such cases, it is typically prosodic cues that prevent ambiguities. In a cross-linguistic perspective, these focus particles also exhibit interesting differences with respect to their positional variability and association potential. To the best of our knowledge, such language-specific properties of focus particles have received comparatively little attention beyond Germanic languages. A notable exception is the case study presented in Leray (this volume), who studies the acquisition of focus particles in children growing up bilingually in German and French. In contrast to earlier research on this topic, Leray argues that both languages provide essentially the same adjunction possibilities. This being so, differences in syntactic complexity cannot be held responsible for the fact that the bilingual children under study consistently preferred the German ordering pattern over the alternative pattern in French even in their French linguistic productions. As Leray’s discussion makes clear, these findings have theoretical implications well beyond the field of language acquisition. More generally, differences in prosodic and syntactic flexibility, both across and within the Germanic and Romance language families, have immediate repercussions for focus marking strategies and are a promising point of departure for typological comparison (see e.g. the contributions in Schwabe & Winkler (eds) 2007; especially Abraham 2007 and Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007 and references cited there). In contrast to the semantic and/or pragmatic definition to which we adhered in the previous paragraph, Chomsky (1971: 200) specified the focus part of a sentence as a “phrase containing the intonation centre” and offered arguments in favour of analysing focus–background partitions on the syntactic surface rather than at the level of deep structure. This combination of prosodic and syntactic criteria leaves us with an important problem of underspecification: in prototypical cases at least, focus accents may only target single syllables, whereas the syntactic domain of focus can be considerably larger and even comprise the entire sentential unit. One may thus expect at best an inclusiveness constraint such that the prosodic exponent of focus must be contained inside the expression that is to be interpreted as focus. This underspecified relationship between focus accent position and the actual domain of focus has been discussed in terms of focus projection rules (see Contreras 1976 for an early account of Spanish). Subsequently, however, the interrelationship of focus accent position and potential focus domains has become a major object of controversy (see Winkler & Göbbel 2002 for an excellent summary). These complications notwithstanding, accent-based definitions of focus can still be found in more recent literature (see Rooth 1996), and prosodic manifestations of focus have even been considered the most basic marking device from a universalist perspective (Roberts 1998; though see Costa & Figueiredo Silva 2006 for a dissenting view). Nonetheless, other scholars have warned against identifying focus as a language-independent informational category with any specific prosodic exponent (Krifka 2006). We will only mention three observations from Romance varieties to illustrate the type of complications lurking behind the as-



Introduction

sumption of a straightforward focus–accent correspondence: To begin with, Modern French stands out from the rest of the Romance languages in indicating primarily the boundaries of focus domains instead of accenting what has been analysed as the domain’s prosodic head (Féry 2001). In spoken French at least, focusing and backgrounding strategies are therefore closely associated with operations such as phrasing or ‘dephrasing’ of sentential subparts. The more general lesson to draw from this is that languages may choose at least between head-marking and edge-marking strategies in their prosodic signals of focus–background structure. But even in varieties of Romance languages that do have focus accents, focus–background structures may not only be constrained by accent position, but also by accent type. While the position of pitch accents signalling verb phrase focus and postverbal object focus is the same, D’Imperio (2002) argues that their phonological makeup may differ in southern forms of Italian such as the Napolitan pronunciation of the standard language: In the first case, we find a rising accent pattern, whereas object focus is invariably indicated by falling pitch. A third objection comes from Madrid Spanish: As shown by Face (2001), different focus domains (and possibly functions) are not only marked by categorically different melodic events, but also by non-discrete phonetic cues such as pitch range. In any event, grammarians’ received conceptions about focus accents may well turn out to be overly simplistic when confronted with the intriguing complexities of Romance prosodic systems. To account for phonological and semantic consequences of focus, Jackendoff (1972), elaborating upon Chomsky’s (1971) remarks, introduces a focus feature [F] into phrase structural descriptions. Perhaps the most important argument in favour of a syntactic representation of focus comes from so-called weak crossover effects, which have been taken as evidence for an operator–variable representation of focus at the level of Logical Form (Chomsky 1976), and inspired analyses in terms of covert movement (but see Costa 2000 for a critique, based on data from European Portuguese). In some languages, focus appears to be closely associated to some designated structural position in the sentence. On the basis of Hungarian data, Brody (1990) introduces focus as a functional category into syntax. For foci that occur in the left sentence periphery, Rizzi (1997) proposes a detailed projectional skeleton which includes a non-recursive focus projection FocP. This so-called cartographic account has inspired a great deal of reactions. A number of modifications have been proposed (Benincà 2001; Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007), while others have denied the viability of the cartographic approach altogether, proposing less choosy landing sites for movement into the left periphery (Zubizarreta 1998; Neeleman et al. 2007, see also the state-of-the-art overview in Szendrői 2006). The contributions by Brunetti (this volume) and Leonetti & ­Escandell-Vidal (this volume) offer empirical investigations into the information structural consequences of moving constituents into the left periphery in Italian and Spanish. Brunetti argues that sentences headed by fronted focus constituents typically present information that runs counter to the shared beliefs of interlocutors. In a similar vein, Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal make a strong case for the existence of a third subtype beside focus and topic fronting in Spanish. This third type involves fronting



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of a constituent which is neither a good candidate for focus or topic status but signals verum focus, i.e. focus on the polarity, or the truth value, of the entire sentence (Höhle 1982, 1992). The analysis of Samek-Lodovici (this volume) for focus constituents that appear to be fronted in Italian treads a different path: According to this author, such sentences do not result from the leftward movement of focus constituents, but rather from a rightward backgrounding displacement of non-focal material (see Vallduví 1991 and Longobardi 2000 for similar analyses of apparent focus fronting in Catalan and Italian, respectively). The importance of such analyses lies in the fact that they shed new light on the relation between focus and its prosodic and syntactic manifestations. In fact, research into focus has repeatedly provoked theoretical controversies about the organization of grammar as a whole. As we have noted above, focus has been treated as an annotation to phrase structures in earlier generative syntax, as a feature which in turn feeds into the phonological and semantic components. More recently, however, the general viability of such a conception of grammar has been questioned, since there are arguments for assuming that at least some kinds of syntactic movement in Romance languages are driven by prosodic properties rather than the other way round (Zubizarreta 1998). Given this, the design of grammatical theory must allow for bidirectionality in the syntax–phonology interface. In more radical departures from earlier generative T-model conceptions of grammar, the assumption that the mapping of phonology and semantics is mediated by syntax has been abandoned altogether. We will mention but two pieces of evidence for such a view that have been adduced from Romance languages: For Spanish, it has been argued that the position of subject constituents is determined by intonational constraints rather than by inherent grammatical or lexical properties, probably more so than in other Romance languages (Büring & Gutiérrez-Bravo 2001; Gutiérrez-Bravo 2005; though see Fant 1984 for a different view). In a similar vein, Romanian has been argued to obey to some kind of default rule for the placement of nuclear accent (Göbbel 2003). Since deaccenting is not generally permitted in Romanian, scrambling within the verb phrase may help to ensure the intended focus–background partition by placing a constituent in a deaccentuated position, thus acting as a functional counterpart to deaccenting in flexible intonation languages. One has to bear in mind that, syntactic focus movement options notwithstanding, the Romance languages have been classified as permitting only “weak word order flexibility” in the typological literature (Sornicola 2006: 403). In any event, Romance languages turn out to differ considerably in their division of labour between in situ focus marked by prosody alone and displacements into and away from designated syntactic, and possibly prosodic, focus positions. A second rearrangement option that has been related to focus marking (respectively to foregrounding) in Romance since Diez (1844) is subject–verb inversion (see Belletti 2001; Lahousse 2005, for recent theoretical implementations of this idea). Postverbal subject position was quite frequent in medieval stages of Romance, which show an inclination towards verb-second orderings in declaratives (most notably perhaps in Galloromance). The possibility of postverbal lexical subjects as a focalizing strategy has been retained to different degrees in the individual language histories. As



Introduction

already noted in Section 1, Modern French imposes by far the most severe restrictions on postverbal subjects in declarative clauses, but even here there is one clearly distinguishable subtype of verb–subject inversion which unambiguously achieves focus on the postverbal lexical subject expression (Lahousse 2005, 2006). For linguists interested in the diachrony of information packaging, French constitutes a particularly interesting field of syntactic inquiry, since the change from the Old French flexible verb-second syntax towards a more rigid subject–verb–object basic order is inevitably concomitant with changes in focus marking strategies. The syntax of Middle French, a period which roughly encompasses the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, has sometimes been dismissed as merely reflecting a rather unorderly state of transition, with great variation even within texts of similar provenance and genre. The contribution by Muller (this volume) scrutinizes two texts from this period and identifies a number of determinants for subject position. Most importantly, the choice between preverbal and postverbal placement of lexical subjects is not only constrained by information status and the focus–background partition, but fulfils additional textual functions in terms of organizing narrative structure. The diachrony of major constituent ordering is also at issue in the contribution by Rinke (this volume). Rinke compares subject positions in Old Portuguese texts from the thirteenth century to Modern European Portuguese and finds that in both stages, postverbal lexical subjects have to be analysed as being part of the information focus domain. At the same time, Rinke argues that Old Portuguese texts do not warrant an analysis along the lines put forth for Germanic verb-second languages. Her conclusion is that the postverbal placement of subjects is motivated by essentially the same factors in the medieval period than in contemporary European Portuguese. While Rinke’s contribution thus indicates areas of diachronic stability in the focus marking strategies of Portuguese, Kato & Ribeiro (this volume) set out to pinpoint and motivate areas of change within the same language. Their contribution is devoted to cleft sentences, another classic topic in the literature on syntactic focus marking devices. In European languages, clefts have been demonstrated to show a skewed distribution, such that their frequency of occurrence declines from west to east (Miller 2006). Syntactically, clefts have been considered a showcase of constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar (see Lambrecht 2004, on French), or at least as disposing of some special focus feature in the cleft copula (Camacho 2001, on Spanish). Modern Portuguese, both in its European and in its Brazilian varieties, appears to be particularly fond of clefting. Couched in formal syntactic terms, Kato & Ribeiro’s analysis identifies several grammatical changes affecting the cleft types from Old to Modern Portuguese, viz. the appearance of an additional focus position in the low IP area and, in Brazilian Portuguese, variable copula deletion and complementizer deletion. Kato and Ribeiro connect these changes to the information packaging capacities of the different cleft types. Another contribution on clefts is Dufter (this volume). Drawing on data from a multilingual parallel corpus, Dufter examines the translational equivalents of English it-clefts in German and in four Romance languages – French, Italian, Spanish, and European Portuguese. Results show considerable

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­differences in clefting propensity, which are argued to be due, at least partially, to differences in other parts of the grammar that affect information packaging strategies. Except for clefts, complex sentences continue to be a somewhat neglected topic of research into information structure. The contribution by Aptekman (this volume) is a case study of conditionals in French. After refining Haiman’s (1978) argument for the topic status of the protasis, Aptekman takes stock of the large gamut of pragmatic types available in those conditional sentences where the most prototypical element si ‘if ’ acts as subordinator. In particular, the author argues that the topic status of the si-clause does not necessarily prevent this clause from being targeted by focus as well, particularly in cases where the protasis follows the apodosis. In conclusion, the ten contributions gathered in this volume document that research into focus–background structure in Romance language scholarship is vibrant. First, progress has been achieved in the tradition of Romance descriptive grammars: Several of the grammars on the market today dedicate separate sections to overviews of focus-marking devices (see, for French Riegel, Pellat & Rioul 1994: 425–433; ­Wilmet 1998: 463–464; for Italian Salvi & Fanelli 2004: 303–306; for Spanish Zubizarreta 1999; for Catalan Vallduví 2002; for Portuguese Mira Mateus et al. 1984: 344–359; Travaglia 1999; for Galician Álvarez & Xove 2002: 76–80 and for Romanian, Gorăscu 2005). Second, and perhaps more importantly, a wealth of empirical data is now available, and has been the object of research, from present-day standard languages as well as from dialects and other non-standard varieties, from older periods as well as from first and second language acquisition. These data still hold surprises for linguists interested in the interpretive consequences of focus (Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal, this volume; Onea & Heusinger, this volume) and for those who seek to understand how sentential focus–background structure engages into the organization of text and discourse (Aptekman, this volume; Muller, this volume), including the various developmental stages in language acquisition (Leray, this volume). Cleft constructions, arguably a privileged means for explicitly coding the focus–background partition, continue to be the object of a good deal of syntactic and semanto-pragmatic investigation (Dufter, this volume; Kato & Ribeiro, this volume). Focus-driven departures from canonical subject–verb–object orderings likewise attract a considerable deal of syntactic attention (Brunetti, this volume; Rinke, this volume), and more recently, there is a growing awareness that some surface orderings traditionally considered to result from focus movement can more satisfactorily be re-analyzed as involving a syntactic operation of backgrounding (Samek-Lodovici, this volume). In sum, then, this volume is an invitation to pursue in studying focus in Romance languages, improving upon existing descriptive accounts in a theoretically informed way, and improving the general theory of focus by drawing upon an exceptionally rich and varied set of linguistic data.



Introduction

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Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses Jeanne Aptekman

CNRS – Université Paris 3

This article investigates information structure in French SI-clauses (‘IF-clauses’) via the analysis of two primary questions: (i) Are conditionals topics (Haiman 1978), that is, can the protasis be seen as a topic in all conditional constructions? (ii) If so, what does that mean in terms of focalization? In the first part, our aim is to characterize the kinds of topic and focus relations found in French conditional constructions. More specifically, our analysis of SI-clauses distinguishes between four types of use (enunciative, hypothetical, concessive, and comparative). Still, all uses share an invariant instructional meaning by establishing a transitional frame which signals epistemic neutrality towards what is expressed by the apodosis. In the second part of the discussion, our aim is to show that what we call a transitional frame can be understood as a topic, following the definitions of Chafe (1976) and Haiman (1978). We argue that this analysis is plausible for all four usage types, even in cases in which the protasis is at the same time the focus of the conditional construction.

1.

Introduction

French SI-clauses can appear in a variety of different uses, as the following examples show, and some of them (such as (5)) are very specific to French: (1) Si tu as besoin de quoi que ce soit, je suis chez moi. ‘If you need anything, I’m at home.’ (2) Si ces vacances étaient agréables, ça aurait quand même été mieux avec un peu plus de soleil. ‘(Even) If these holidays were nice, it would have still been better with a little more sun.’ (3) S’il ne vient pas c’est qu’il dort. Lit. ‘If he does not come, it is that he’s sleeping.’ ‘If he does not come, then he must be sleeping.’

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(4) Mon mari, si je peux encore l’appeler comme ça, a quitté le domicile conjugal il y a plusieurs mois. ‘My husband, if I can still call him that, left home a few months ago.’ (5) Si Julie a l’air en pleine forme, j’ai trouvé Jean un peu fatigué. Lit.: ‘If Julie seems in very good shape, Jean looks tired.’ ‘While Julie seems in very good shape, Jean looks tired.’ However, we do think that there is a common (basic) instruction expressed in all SIclauses, a hypothesis we will defend in Section 2. In Section 3, we will discuss how this instructional meaning can be interpreted in terms of topic status, by reviewing Haiman’s (1978) position on conditionals.

2.

Classification

2.1

Methodology

2.1.1 Two hypotheses In this section on classification we will consider two related hypotheses. The first one deals with the notion of polysemy and claims that there is continuity between the different uses of SI. What allows us to consider its meaning as continuous is the fact that in some cases different interpretations are possible without being mutually exclusive. Example (6) illustrates this point: (6) Si les débuts sont difficiles, les étapes suivantes seront plus faciles. (i) ‘As difficult as the beginnings are, the following steps will be easier.’ (ii) ‘While the beginnings are difficult, the following steps will be easier.’ (iii) ‘Even if the beginnings are difficult, the following steps will be easier.’ In French, this example can be understood as expressing contrast or concession. In the first case, the speaker compares the protasis and the apodosis (cf. the interpretations in (i) and (ii)), while in the second one the sentence involves a hypothesis that corresponds to the last condition for the acceptance of the apodosis, which is expressed by the possibility of a paraphrase in even if. In fact, we do not have to decide between these two interpretations. On the contrary, the example can be understood as involving merely a relation of comparison between two different moments, or as expressing a kind of (thwarted) entailment between the protasis and the apodosis. The salient point is that these two interpretations coexist, which seems to suggest the existence of a continuum between them. We do not consider the meaning of (6) to be ambiguous, but believe that it has to be interpreted as representing the meeting point of two different uses. Rather than a hindrance, we consider the possibility of such meeting points as a benefit for the meaning of SI. This is the kind of phenomenon we want to deal with via the notion of continuity in meaning.



Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses

The second hypothesis considers SI from an instructional point of view. Following the cognitive grammar conception of SI as a space builder, we want to ask two questions: (i) What kind of spaces does SI build? (ii) Which elements affect the construction of these spaces? Furthermore, we propose to understand SI as an underdetermined form whose specification depends on various, though mostly predictable contextual factors. We do not mean to understate these contextual effects but, by means of an extensive corpus study, aim to understand what makes them possible.

2.1.2 Corpus study We have based our analysis on a large written corpus of literary texts and essays. In addition, we complemented these references with individual readings, including newspapers, novels, internet blogs and websites. With respect to this corpus study, three points are to be highlighted. First, the aim of the analysis was not to elaborate statistics on SI uses. Second, for each occurrence of SI we decided to include only the sentence in which it appears. Naturally, such a procedure occasionally leads to ambiguities which may be solved by examining the respective context. Yet, the inclusion of context would have confronted us with another significant methodological problem, that is, to determine the limits of the relevant context. As a delimitation of this kind poses many difficulties – e.g., the relevant context for solving an ambiguity may range between a single sentence and the totality of a novel – we decided to focus only on the sentence which contains the SI-clause. Thirdly, most sentences we have analized tend to be complicated and, as already stated, sometimes ambiguous. In such cases, a number of elements influence the interpretation of SI. These elements can be seen as causing interferences, and we do not claim that in all examples the meaning is created only via SI. Rather, we believe that SI makes it possible for these uses to be produced and understood. We regard SI as providing a common instruction concerning these uses, which is then modified by the other features of the sentence (lexical elements, tense and aspect, particular syntactic constructions, etc.). By grounding our analysis on a set of attested utterances, our aim is to determine which factors favor which interpretations of SI. The ambiguous examples correspond to cases where a larger context is required and in which these elements – although working as a set of clues – do not allow us to pick out one single interpretation, indicating that more elements would be necessary in order to isolate a definite use of SI. This approach enables us to highlight the continuity at work between different uses of SI. We have studied this set of conditional constructions containing SI-clauses by examining three types of criteria. Criteria of the first type directly relate to aspects of surface form, such as the presence of specific syntactic constructions, the choice of tenses, and the position of the protasis within the conditional sentence. The second type of criteria comprises semantic features of the conditional sentences which are considered to partially determine the meaning of the respective sentence. Thirdly, we have investigated a number of additional aspects of utterance meaning, such as possible paraphrases, reformulations and epistemic stance, or speaker involvement in the protasis, which, arguably, cannot be deduced directly from the syntactic surface

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form. Within the studied set of criteria two appear as fundamental, that is, speaker involvement in the protasis and the nature of the semantic link between protasis and apodosis. Our notion of speaker involvement is similar to the concept of epistemic stance developed by Fillmore (1990a) and adopted in Dancygier & Sweetser (2005). What Dancygier and Sweetser call epistemic stance corresponds to the “speaker’s mental association with or dissociation from the world of the protasis (P)” (pp. 43–44). They argue that IF carries a neutral epistemic stance, and that it is compatible with a negative epistemic stance, usually in examples using distanced verb forms which express, according to the authors, a mental dissociation from what is being said. By contrast, IF is incompatible with a positive epistemic stance. In French, for instance, the use of the past tense in the protasis plays the role of a distance marker, whether temporal or epistemic. We agree with Dancygier and Sweetser on the idea that SI (like IF) seems to hold off what is expressed in the protasis, which seems incompatible with a positive epistemic stance. That is the reason why Dancygier and Sweetser argue that IF, unlike since or when, does not determine in itself a (positive) epistemic stance. However, we believe that French SI-clauses are also compatible with a positive epistemic stance. To justify this claim, two different arguments are to be developed. The first argument runs as follows: In the examples (7), (8) and (9) below, three different epistemic stances can be discerned. In fact, in (7), the speaker seems to accept the protasis as true and we say that the epistemic stance is positive. In (8), the involved apodosis is neither being accepted nor refused and we regard the epistemic stance as neutral. In (9), the speaker presents the protasis as not true (the speaker is afraid) and we will say that the epistemic stance is negative. (7) S’il est venu, c’est qu’il savait que Sophie était là. ‘If he came, it is that/because he knew Sophie was there.’ (8) Si je gagne au loto, je m’achèterai une voiture. ‘If I win the lottery, I’ll buy a car.’ (9) Si j’étais moins effrayé, j’irais moi-même. ‘If I was less afraid, I would go myself.’ To support our second argument we will consider the comparative uses of SI that seem specific to French, as in (10a). By reformulating this example with what ­Dancygier and Sweetser call distanced verb forms we obtain (10b) and (10c). However, these new examples seem to have lost the comparison meaning completely, becoming hypothetic, or, at least, sequential. . Even if there are some clues for these features, as we will show. . This term is adopted from Pander Maat & Degand (2001), Degand & Pander Maat (2003). . Usually, in English and French, past tenses can play this role: when they do not express a temporal distance, they may express an epistemic distance.

Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses



(10) a. b. c.

Si Julie est charmante, Jean, lui, est odieux. ‘While Julie is charming, Jean is execrable.’ Si Julie est charmante, Jean, lui, sera odieux. *‘While Julie is charming, Jean will be execrable.’ ‘If Julie is charming, Jean will be execrable.’ ‘Julie being charming, Jean will be execrable.’ Si Julie était charmante, Jean, lui, serait odieux. *‘While Julie was charming, Jean would be execrable.’ ‘If Julie was charming, Jean would be execrable.’ ‘Julie being charming, Jean would be execrable.’

Hence, it follows that (10b) is not equivalent to (10a), as it involves a sequential interpretation which is absent in (10a). In this sequential interpretation the protasis is not presented as attested, and we deduce that this is precisely the reason why a comparative interpretation is impossible in (10b) and (10c). We believe that comparative uses need to refer to an epistemic stance that should be more or less positive, due to which we argue for the possibility of a positive epistemic stance in French SI-clauses. We still acknowledge the fact that this speaker’s positive involvement in the protasis is less convincing than a negative one, since there are no linguistic forms that correspond to this epistemic position of the speaker, contrary to the negative cases. Yet, an example like (10) seems to justify that this positive epistemic stance be taken into account within the limits we have set, that is, by considering the fact that SI minimizes the positive stance. Notwithstanding, we do not suppose that the presence of SI necessarily involves any epistemic stance, and we do agree with Dancygier and Sweetser on the fact that the positive speaker involvement in the protasis cannot be attributed exclusively to the presence of SI, which does not mark any specific involvement. The second criterion we want to present is the nature of the link between the protasis and the apodosis, which seems to provide the best clues for distinguishing between the different SI uses. This relation can take on many forms and in the following we will refer to this variety of forms by using the generic term “articulation”.  Let us examine the following examples: (11) S’il vient, je serai ravie! ‘If he comes, I’ll be delighted!’ (12) Si tu as besoin d’aide, je m’appelle Jeanne. ‘If you need help, my name is Jeanne.’ (13) Si Jake et Chuckie sont les personnages centraux du roman, ce serait faire injure à McLiam Wilson d’oublier la palette d’individus tous plus extravagants les uns que les autres. (Internet book review of McLiam Wilson’s Eurêka Street)

. This notion is close to that of enchaînement used by Culioli (1990–1999) for conditionals.

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‘If Jake and Chuckie are the main characters of the novel, it would be an insult to McLiam Wilson to forget about the range of characters each one more excessive than the next.’ (14) Si Sophie est gentille, Marc est insupportable. ‘While Sophie is nice, Marc is awful.’ In (11), this relation takes on the form of an entailment; in other words, what is expressed in the protasis seems to lead to what is expressed in the apodosis. But the same relation is not expressed in the other examples, even if SI always sets up a link. Consequently, we have adopted a rather broad notion of articulation in order to express the similarly broad idea that the protasis (or what is expressed in the protasis) facilitates the enunciation (or the realization) of the apodosis, even if this happens unexpectedly. The aim is to determine what kind of possibility is at stake, that is, which relation types SI allows between the protasis and the apodosis. Thus, in (11), the protasis activates what is expressed by the apodosis, while in (12) the enunciation of the protasis makes the enunciation of the apodosis possible (or relevant). In (13), there seems to be a contrast between the protasis and the apodosis, while in (14) the apodosis seems to be presented as occurring in spite of the protasis. Based on these different articulation types between protasis and apodosis, four usage classes for French SI-clauses are to be distinguished in the next subsection.

2.2 Four classes of use Our classification of SI-clauses in French distinguishes between four types of use: enunciative, hypothetical, concessive, and comparative. We use our articulation relation criteria to distinguish between them. We then isolate four types of possible articulation relations for French SI-clauses, which correspond to the four types we want to isolate. These types are the following: – The protasis makes the enunciation of the apodosis possible (relevant or acceptable). This applies to the enunciative cases (cf. (12)). – What is expressed by the protasis activates what is expressed by the apodosis, in a factual or inferential way. These uses are hypothetic (cf. (11)). – In some other cases, the sentence seems to point to an implicit entailment from the protasis to the apodosis in order to express that even if P, Q. The protasis is then understood as an ineffective cause, or as a limiting condition for the apodosis. These uses are concessive, and what is expressed by the protasis gives way to what is expressed by the apodosis, despite the implicit entailment which is thwarted (cf. (13)). – It is sometimes difficult to see an entailment at work, and the SI seems to present as parallel what is expressed by the protasis and what is articulated by the apodo-



Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses

sis. The epistemic stance associated with the protasis in these cases is positive, and we will refer to them as comparative (cf. (14)).

2.2.1 Enunciative uses The enunciative uses of SI express discourse conventions. In these uses, the enunciation of the protasis makes the enunciation of the apodosis possible. Enunciative uses come in two different forms: Either the protasis provides a condition for the acceptance of the apodosis – i.e., accepting the protasis is a condition for acknowledging the apodosis as true (metalinguistic and metadiscursive uses) – or the protasis makes the enunciation of the apodosis relevant (speech-act uses). These uses correspond to cases in which the protasis sets up a restrictive frame for the enunciation of the apodosis. The scope of this restriction can vary: it can be a single term in the apodosis, or the whole clause. It can also set up a relevant frame for the enunciation of the apodosis (in the speech act sentences). Metalinguistic reservation about a term in the apodosis. In cases in which the protasis expresses a metalinguistic reservation about a term used in the apodosis, the enunciation frame set up by the protasis consists in a conventional agreement on the fact that the use of such a term can be hazardous. This frame seems to emphasize a single word, as if it was put in quotation marks. (15) Mais l’immanence en mouvement est, si l’on peut dire, athéisme provisoire. (Albert Camus, L’homme révolté) Lit. ‘But immanence in motion is, if one can say so, provisional atheism.’ (16) Carmen avait de la vie sa philosophie qui n’était pas amère, elle acceptait son sort, si l’on peut dire, d’un pied léger et elle se défendait farouchement de tout attachement qui aurait nui à son humeur. (Marguerite Duras, Un barrage contre le Pacifique) Lit. ‘Carmen had her own philosophy of life, which was not bitter, she accepted her destiny, if one can say so, fleet-footedly, and she defended herself fiercely against any attachment which would have been harmful to her mood.’ (17) Le reste, si l’on peut parler de reste quand il est question d’une jeune fille, baignait dans le flot gris de la robe, sauf les galets des coudes, des épaules et des genoux. (Hervé Bazin, La mort du petit cheval) ‘The rest, if one can speak of a rest when speaking about a young girl, was swimming in the grey flood of the dress, except for the pebbles of the elbows, the shoulders and the knees.’ Metalinguistic reservation on the whole apodosis. In cases in which the protasis expresses a reservation about the whole apodosis, the scope of the apodosis is restricted by the protasis, which has to be true in order for the apodosis to be considered as true as well. Thus, the protasis provides an exceptive frame for the enunciation of the apodosis that marks the limits of its scope:

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(18) Il manquait de conscience et, si l’on excepte son amitié pour Robert, il n’avait pas de fidélité. (Georges Bataille, L’Abbé C) ‘He lacked conscience and, except for (lit. if one excepts) his friendship with Robert, he had no fidelity.’ (19) Ils le sont, effectivement, si l’on fait abstraction du commerce des conserves de poissons: en effet, le commerce des conserves de légumes, fruits et viandes, est largement bénéficiaire. (Report on L’Industrie des conserves en France, 1950) ‘They are like this, effectively, if one abstracts away from the trade of canned fish: indeed, the business of canned vegetables, fruit and meat is largely profitable.’ (20) Si j’en juge par ton intérieur, tu ne dois pas gagner lourd. (Hervé Bazin, La mort du petit cheval) ‘If I judge you by your interior, you probably don’t earn a lot.’ Of course, our aim is not to argue that this exceptive meaning is created by SI, being aware of the fact that other terms and constructions also contribute to this interpretation. Nonetheless, we think that the protasis can provide an interpretation frame for the apodosis, as is the case in the usage class we will consider next. Metametaphoric and Dancygier & Sweetser’s metalinguistic uses. Dancygier and Sweetser isolate “metalinguistic uses” (22) and analyze them distinctly from uses which they consider to be “metametaphoric” (23). We argue that these two classes have to be understood within the enunciative uses as both setting up a frame that consists in a translation convention, or, more precisely, a mapping convention, within which the apodosis has to be interpreted. (21) Si nous parlions anglais, tu serais mon cousin, mais si nous parlions espagnol, tu serais mon oncle. ‘If we were speaking English, you would be my cousin, but if we were speaking Spanish, you would be my uncle.’ [In English, the word for the father’s cousin is ‘cousin’, while in Spanish the word is ‘uncle’.] (from Dancygier & Sweetser 2005) (22) Si les transports publics sont la vie d’une ville dynamique, Vancouver est dans le coma. ‘If public transport is the lifehood of a dynamic city, Vancouver is in a coma.’ (from Dancygier & Sweetser 2005) Traditional speech act conditionals. We consider as enunciative such speech act uses like Austin’s (1961) famous example: (23) Si tu as soif, il y a de la bière dans le frigo. ‘If you are thirsty, there is beer in the fridge.’



Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses

In such cases, the protasis builds a relevant frame for the apodosis’ enunciation. The protasis expresses a condition that if the situation formulated in the protasis turns out to be true, it is worthwhile for the speaker to provide the relevant information expressed by the apodosis. Here, the truth of the main clause does not depend on the truth of the SI-clause. On the contrary, the apodosis expresses something the truth of which persists, no matter what the truth conditions of the protasis are. In these uses, there is no restriction regarding the truth conditions, though a restriction on the relevancy conditions for the information expressed by the apodosis.

2.2.2 Hypothetic uses We would like to make a distinction between these enunciative uses and the hypothetic ones, in which the protasis is presented as activating the apodosis. However, such an activation can be concrete (in facts) or inferential (in thoughts). We will refer to the first case in terms of prospective hypothetic uses, while in the second one we will talk about inferential hypothetic uses. Prospective hypothetic uses. In this category we include prospective conditionals that involve a prediction by presenting the protasis as potential or possible, cf. (24) and (25): (24) S’il fait beau nous irons nous promener. ‘If it is sunny, we will take a walk.’ (25) Si je gagnais au loto, j’achèterais une voiture. ‘If I won the lottery, I would buy a car.’ Inferential hypothetic uses. Here we want to gather the uses that do not have a prospective value but in which the protasis still activates the apodosis, even if this takes place in an intangible way. We include in this class the hypothetic-deductive uses (cf. (26) and (27)) that express a prediction which is neither temporal nor prospective, but deductive, as well as uses usually considered as explicative (De Vogüe 1986) or epistemic (Dancygier & Sweetser 2005) (cf. (28) and (29)). (26) Si ABC est un triangle rectangle, alors le carré de son hypoténuse est égal à la somme des carrés de ses deux autres côtés. ‘If ABC is a right triangle, the area of the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the areas of the two squares on the legs.’ (27) Si un triangle ABC a le carré de son hypoténuse égal à la somme des carrés de ses deux autres côtés, c’est que c’est un triangle rectangle. ‘If a triangle is such that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the two squares on the legs, it is that ABC is a right triangle.’ (28) Ecoute, Antoine, tu diras tout ce que tu veux, moi je sors pas de là: si tu obliques, tu vas pas tout droit! (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Les gommes, 1952)

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‘Listen, Antoine, you can argue as long as you want, but it is clear to me: If you tilt, you don’t go straight!’ (29) S’il lui apporte des croissants le matin, c’est qu’il l’aime! ‘If he brings her croissants in the morning, then he loves her.’ (Dancygier & Sweetser 2005) The explicative uses seem to involve a backtracking reasoning, just like the epistemic conditionals emphasized by Dancygier and Sweetser. But this backtracking reasoning, implicitly referring to a canonical order in reasoning, does not make sense in the cases in which the reasoning seems to be analytic. That is the reason why we want to analyze these explicative uses together with the inferential values, rather than separately. A note on iterative uses. Hypothetic uses often involve iteration. The hypothesis depends on whether or not the protasis is actually (in the present case) verified, although we assume that every time it is verified the apodosis is verified as well. Since they are grounded on verified events of the past, these uses involve a statistic understanding rather than a predictive one, as in (30) and (31): (30) Si je ralentissais, il ralentissait lui aussi. Lit. ‘If I slowed down, he slowed down as well.’ ‘Whenever I slowed down, he slowed down as well.’ (31) S’il y a de la lumière dans sa chambre, (c’est qu’) il est déjà rentré. ‘If there is light in his room, (it means that) he’s already back.’ These examples do not call for a new class within the hypothetic uses. On the contrary, they are compatible with either prospective uses (30) or inferential ones (31).

2.2.3 Concessive uses The third class we want to isolate comprises concessive uses of SI. In such cases, what is expressed in the protasis (P) allows for the apodosis to express its meaning (Q), despite an implicit entailment from P to not-Q which is thwarted. The protasis sets up a frame in which, unexpectedly and in contradiction with the implicatures of P, Q stands as in (13), repeated below for convenience: (13) Si Jake et Chuckie sont les personnages centraux du roman, ce serait faire injure à McLiam Wilson d’oublier la palette d’individus tous plus extravagants les uns que les autres. (Internet book review on McLiam Wilson’s Eurêka Street) ‘If Jake and Chuckie are the main characters of the novel, it would be insulting to McLiam Wilson to forget about the range of characters each one more excessive than the next.’ The concessive uses of SI involve a scalar interpretation (Fauconnier 1975a, 1975b, 1976; Ducrot 1980), indicating that the condition expressed by the protasis is beyond the acceptable conditions a priori suitable for the apodosis. Therefore, the conces-



Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses

sive uses of SI involve uses that are common in any concessive construction (bien que ‘­although’, quoique ‘although’, mais ‘but’ in French and although or while in English). To understand the concessive meaning of these uses, both speaker and listener have to share this background in which the implicit entailment from P to not-Q is situated. It can also be expressed by some concessive markers, such as même ‘even’ in the protasis, or cependant ‘although’ or malgré ‘despite’ in the apodosis. This implicit relation can be expressed by using what Culioli (1990–1999) calls a préconstruit notionnel (lit. ‘notional preconstruction’). In concessive uses, the speaker asserts two propositions that exclude each other in terms of the notional preconstruction they involve, and, at the same time, indicates that he or she is aware of this contradiction. The concessive relation allows for the coexistence of two elements that were supposed to be incompatible.

2.2.4 Comparative uses This class takes into account contrastive or adversative uses (De Vogüe 1986), as well as uses that express a comparison without involving a contrast, as in (32): (32) Je ne nie point que si vingt métiers font la misère, vingt aventures font la solitude. (Hervé Bazin, La mort du petit cheval) ‘I do not deny that just as twenty jobs generate misery, twenty adventures give rise to loneliness.’ Comparative sentences seem to connect two propositions without putting them in an inferential relationship. That is the reason why they differ from the concessive uses: they do not refer to an implicit (thwarted) entailment, but create a parallel between the protasis and the apodosis by placing them both on a common scale. The contrast can then be built semantically via the opposition between the terms in the protasis and the terms in the apodosis. We then associate these adversative uses with non-adversative comparison uses, as in (33) and (34), in which the scale is a priori the same in both the protasis and the apodosis (see Figures 1 and 2, respectively): (33) Si Julie est insupportable, Charles est charmant. ‘If Julie is awful, Charles is charming.’ (34) Si Julie est insupportable, Charles est pire encore. ‘If Julie is awful, Charles is even worse.’ Yet, the scale does not have to be the same in the protasis and in the apodosis, and comparative uses build up this common scale by creating a mapping (Dancygier & Sweetser 2005) between the protasis and the apodosis, as in (32) above. In this example, the relation between the number of jobs and the poverty degree has to be put parallel with the relation between the number of adventures and the degree of . See Martin (1987), Culioli (1990–1999), Filippi (1998), Filippi-Deswelle (1999).

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Figure 1

Figure 2

l­oneliness. An analogy is set up between these two relations. The common scale is then the relation between a number X of activities and the (negative) state that results from it. In such cases, the protasis and the apodosis are put on the same scale. However, this scale is neither sequential nor inferential, but qualitative.

2.3

A general hypothesis on SI-clauses

2.3.1 Transitional frames Based on this classification, we would like to introduce our general hypothesis on ­ SI-clauses, namely that SI builds a frame in the protasis within which the apodosis has to be understood. We believe that each kind of articulation relation between protasis and apodosis corresponds to a specific kind of frame built by the apodosis, which may be put as follows: – In the enunciative uses, the protasis sets up an enunciative frame for the apodosis that can take on four different forms: it can be (i) a conventional agreement regarding the hazardous character of a term in the apodosis, (ii) a scope restriction for the apodosis which, if not accepted, makes the apodosis false, (iii) a translation convention (metalinguistic and metametaphoric conditionals), or (iv) a relevance frame within which the apodosis has to be understood (speech act conditionals).

. Such cases in which the scale is neither the protasis nor the apodosis are more easily described in terms of blending (Fauconnier & Turner 1996, 2002).



Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses

– In the hypothetic uses, this frame works as an activation (actual or inferential) frame. In the concessive uses, it corresponds to a limiting condition, i.e., it establishes a scalar construction. Finally, in the comparative uses, a common scale which facilitates the understanding of both protasis and apodosis is set up in the frame. Here, the notion of scale is different from the one used in scalar constructions. In any case, we consider this frame to be a transitional one. What we mean by transitional is that this frame is built for a momentary purpose. It is supposed to hold for one sentence only, even if it may persist in a subsequent portion of the respective text. In fact, the enunciative uses provide a momentary convention for the discourse at work. In the hypothetic uses, the transitional character of such a frame has to do with the hypothetical status of the protasis. The hearer is asked to momentarily consider a situation that activates what is expressed in the apodosis. The concessive frames are close to the hypothetic ones, but are even more unstable due to the fact that the protasis expresses a limiting condition. The comparative uses set up a frame that is useful only for the sentence expressed, even if it can possibly be followed up in subsequent sentences, as these come up with their own scale of comparison. Moreover, at least two other observations tend to confirm the transitional character of the frame. First, it is always possible to cancel what is said in the protasis. Second, by looking at SIclauses within a larger context, we can see that the frame built up in the SI-clauses is not supposed to be used in the following discourse.

2.3.2 Transitionality and the possibility of cancelling the protasis The transitionality of such a frame is reinforced by the fact that it is almost always possible to add a cancellation clause like mais j’en doute ‘but I doubt it’, ce dont je ne suis pas sûr ‘which I am not sure’, mais je ne le ferai pas ‘but I won’t’, etc., after the protasis:  (35) Si jamais tu as besoin d’aide, ce qui m’étonnerait, je suis chez moi. ‘If ever you need help, which would surprise me, I’m at home.’ (36) S’il ne vient pas, ce qui m’étonnerait, c’est qu’il dort. ‘If he doesn’t come, which would surprise me, he is sleeping.’ (37) Si Charles est charmant, ce qui déjà est discutable, Julie est insupportable. ‘If Charles is charming, which is questionable, Julie is awful.’ (38) Si Paulette et Gustave sont mes amis, ce qui reste à prouver, ils ne m’ont (pourtant) pas beaucoup aidée. ‘If Paulette and Gustave are my friends, which still has to be proved, they were not a great help.’

. We would like to point out the fact that it seems difficult in only two cases that are concessive and comparative uses, when a positive epistemic stance seems to be associated with the protasis.

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In any case, the protasis momentarily restrains the background or points to a part of it, and such a momentary hold can be highlighted.

2.3.3 Transitionality and the closure of the frame in subsequent sentences The transitionality of the frame built up by SI-clauses also seems to be confirmed by looking at these clauses within a larger context, as in the following examples (we have numbered the individual sentences for convenience): (39) (1) Il me semble que (a) si je portais la main sur cette gorge d’une si ferme rondeur, (b) je la trouverais froide comme du marbre! (2) Non, mon ami, le sang ne court pas sous cette peau d’ivoire, l’existence ne gonfle pas de sa rosée de pourpre les veines et les fibrilles qui s’entrelacent en réseaux sous la transparence ambrée des tempes et de la poitrine. (Honoré de Balzac, Le chef d’œuvre inconnu) ‘(1) It seems to me that (a) if I put my hands on this throat of such a firm roundness, (b) I would find it cold as marble! (2) No, my friend, there is no blood circulating beneath this ivory skin, existence does not fill its purple dew into the veins and little fibers that are intertwining under the amber transparency of the temples and the chest.’ In (39), the SI-clause 1a introduces a frame for the understanding of the apodosis 1b. But 1a does not constitute an adequate frame for the second sentence that follows up the theme introduced in 1b (je la trouverais froide comme du marbre ‘I would find it cold as marble’), which is then continued in the next sentence. Thus, the frame set up in 1a does not seem to stand after the enunciation of 1b, and holds only for the apodosis. In fact, the same sequence can be understood even if the protasis is only implicitly present, as in (39’):  (39’) (0) Parfois j’imagine que je pose la main sur elle. (1) Il me semble que je la trouverais froide comme du marbre! (2) Non, mon ami, le sang ne court pas sous cette peau d’ivoire, l’existence ne gonfle pas de sa rosée de pourpre les veines et les fibrilles qui s’entrelacent en réseaux sous la transparence ambrée des tempes et de la poitrine. ‘(0) Sometimes, I imagine that I put my hand upon her. (1) It seems to me that I would find her cold as marble! (2) No, my friend, there is no blood circulating beneath this ivory skin, existence does not fill its purple dew into the veins and little fibers that are intertwining under the amber transparency of the temples and the chest.’ Of course, this is not always the case. Let us examine the following example:

. The conditional construction of the verb trouverais refers to an implicit hypothesis.



Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses

(40) (1) (a) Si quelques fanfarons bouffis d’eux-mêmes croient trop tôt à l’avenir, (b) ils ne sont gens d’esprit que pour les sots. (2) A ce compte, le jeune inconnu paraissait avoir un vrai mérite, si le talent doit se mesurer sur cette timidité première, sur cette pudeur indéfinissable que les gens promis à la gloire savent perdre dans l’exercice de leur art, comme les jolies femmes perdent la leur dans le manège de la coquetterie. (3) L’habitude du triomphe amoindrit le doute, et la pudeur est un doute peut-être. (Honoré de Balzac, Le chef d’œuvre inconnu) ‘(1) (a) If some self-important boasters believe in the future too early, (b) they are intelligent people only for the silly. (2) Seen from that perspective, the young stranger seemed to have a real merit, if talent must be measured by that initial timidity, by that indefinable decency which people destined to glory manage to loose in exercising their art, like the pretty women loose theirs in the game of vanity. (3) The habit of triumph reduces uncertainty, and decency is perhaps an uncertainty.’ In (40), it seems that 1a provides a concessive or maybe an explicative frame, depending on the interpretation, as made explicit in the reformulations in 1’ and  1’’: (1’) Même si quelques fanfarons bouffis d’eux-mêmes croient trop tôt à l’avenir, ils ne sont gens d’esprit que pour les sots. ‘Even if some self-important boasters believe too early in the future, (b) they are intelligent people only for the silly.’ (1’’) Si quelques fanfarons bouffis d’eux-mêmes croient trop tôt à l’avenir, c’est qu’ils ne sont gens d’esprit que pour les sots. ‘If some self-important boasters believe too early in the future, it is because they are intelligent people only for the silly.’ However, what is used as background for sentence 2 is not the frame provided in 1a, but the entire sentence 1. Therefore, it is not that 1a is superfluous (as may be implied in (39)), but only that it is added in the context, just like 1’, so that together they can provide a theme for the following discourse. Let us examine a third example: (41) (0) C’est à la suite des néfastes journées de juin 1848, que troublé et navré, jusqu’au fond de l’âme, par les orages extérieurs, je m’efforçai de retrouver dans la solitude, sinon le calme, au moins la foi. (1) (a) Si je faisais profession d’être philosophe, (b) je pourrais croire ou prétendre que la foi aux idées entraîne le calme de l’esprit en présence des faits désastreux de l’histoire contemporaine; (2) mais (a) il n’en est point ainsi pour moi, et (b) j’avoue humblement que la certitude d’un avenir providentiel ne saurait fermer l’accès, dans une âme d’artiste, à la douleur de traverser un présent obscurci et déchiré par la guerre civile.  (George Sand, La petite Fadette)

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‘(0) It was after the harmful days in June of 1848 that, troubled and broken to the bottom of the soul by the exterior storms, I struggled to regain in solitude, if not my calm, then at least my faith. (1) (a) If I confessed to being a philosopher, (b) I could believe or pretend that the faith in ideas makes the mind calm in the presence of disastrous facts of contemporary history; (2) but (a) this is not the case with me, and (b) I humbly admit that the certainty of a providential future would not be able to close the access, in an artist’s soul, to the grief of going through a present darkened and torn up by civil war.’ This example is interesting because it manifests a cancellation of 1a in sentence 2, since 2a is the negation of 1a. All these examples show that the protasis frame is generally not supposed to hold for the next sentences, and is usually closed right after the end of the sentence in which the SI-clause appears. This seems particularly important with regards to the epistemic neutrality, an essential characteristic of SI-constructions.

2.3.4 Transitionality and epistemic neutrality The transitionality of the frame built in the protasis is very important, since it certifies in itself the a priori epistemic neutrality at work in SI-clauses towards the protasis. Indeed, if it is true that the protasis can be presented as more or less known or verified (cf. examples (7) to (10) in Section 2.1.2), this would support our idea that the positive or negative epistemic stance of the protasis is never due to the SI itself, and, on the contrary, seems to be diminished by the SI-clause, which holds off what is expressed in the protasis. The transitionality at work in SI-clauses points in the same direction, reinforcing the impression that the speaker is never totally involved in the protasis. Summing up what has been stated so far, we consider SI-clauses as setting up a transitional frame that can be characterized as a momentary restriction of the background. This understanding of SI-clauses as frames or restricting backgrounds is close to the notion of topic with which Haiman (1978) associates conditionals. That is the reason why we want to investigate the relationship between our understanding of SI-clauses and basic concepts of information structure, in particular topic and focus. In the following section, we want to clarify the notions of topic found in the respective literature, and examine whether the transitionality at work in SI-clauses is compatible with a protasis as a topic.

3.

SI-clauses and topics

Our objective here is to examine the relation between SI-clauses and topics. In order to do so, we need to clarify the notion of topic, explaining which definition of this term we will use.

Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses



3.1

How to define a topic?

The notion of topic has been the subject of much debate. It has been described as referring either to what the speakers are talking about or what the discourse is about, as setting up a starting point for the following discourse, or even as indicating that what is said in the topic does not carry any new information and is already known. In any event, it seems difficult to agree on a single definition. However, we can broadly classify the topic criteria as they are used in the literature into two main approaches. In the first approach, topics are considered as referring to what the discourse is about,10 while in the second approach, topic expressions have to refer to already known information (Chafe 1984). These two approaches are particularly difficult to put in relation since they are typically associated with very different theoretical backgrounds.11 The concept of topic is generally conceived in opposition to other notions of information structure, such as comment (if topic means what the discourse is about, the comment refers to what you say about it) or focus (if topic means what is already known, then the focus is the new information). Within this great variety of definitions for topic, interesting is the one developed by Lambrecht (see Lambrecht 1994 and earlier works). Lambrecht analyses topic as what we talk about, while also taking into account the aspect of relevance. Then, topic is that about which it is relevant to say something. On the basis of his analysis of languages with a topic marker, Chafe (1984) criticizes the confusion made between topic and aboutness. He proposes to think of topic from a cognitive perspective, in which givenness corresponds to the mental representation of what the speaker assumes is present in the mind of the listener. It is this conception of topic that is relevant to Haiman’s (1978) definition. Haiman argues that “the topic represents an entity whose existence is agreed upon by the speaker and his audience. As such, it constitutes the framework which has been selected for the following discourse”.12 According to Chafe, “the topic sets a spatial, temporal or individual framework […] which limits the applicability of the main predication to a certain restricted domain” (Chafe 1976: 50). In the remainder of this article, we will adopt a Chafian definition of topic status.

. For detailed analyses, see Robert (1993), Nølke (1994) and contributions in Charolles & Prévost (eds) (2003). 10. See Lambrecht (1994). We consider this definition of topic very close to Halliday’s (1994) that sees topics as starting points for the following discourse. 11. However, they are not incompatible, as highlighted in Prévost (2001). 12. Haiman (1978: 585). A critique of this position is presented in Reinhart (1981).

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3.2

Protases as topics

The definition of topics as delimiting background seems to be close to our definition of the protasis frame. Indeed, we have defined the protasis as a frame that limits the applicability of the main predication to a certain restricted domain, which corresponds to Haiman’s definition of topic. Moreover, this definition does not contradict the transitionality feature we defined for the frame set up by the protasis. In fact, the established frame is a priori useful for the sentence only, due to the dynamicity of discourse that possibly updates the background in each sentence. Then, however, we are no longer considering the background as common ground, i.e., what the speaker considers to be present in the hearer’s mind. On the contrary, we think of it as a mild modification of this common ground, or as an emphasis of a part of it. Another problem worth noting has to do with the opposition between topic and focus. Indeed, the notion of topic we use here seems to be understood in relation with (or in opposition to) the notion of focus. In this understanding, the topic, being part of the common ground, cannot be the focus, thought of as the new information. Yet, if we look at some cases of postposed protases, it seems that such a postposition involves an accentuation of the protasis which, by virtue of being emphasized, appears to be the focus of the sentence, as well as the new, relevant information: (42) S’il est là, je ne viendrai pas. ‘If he is there, I will not/won’t come.’ (43) Je ne viendrai pas s’il est là. ‘I won’t come if he is there.’ (44) Même si je dois y passer la nuit, j’y arriverai. ‘Even if it takes me the whole night, I will make it.’ (45) J’y arriverai, même si je dois y passer la nuit. ‘I will make it even if it takes me the whole night.’ In (42) and (44) the protasis is placed at the beginning of the sentence. It can be seen as resuming the context, as well as a topic in Haiman’s sense. But in (43) and (45), the protasis is postposed and seems to be focalized, as (i) it supplies new information and (ii) can be seen as the most important/relevant information of the sentence. Then, the protasis can be focalized and does not seem to have a preponderant role as a topic if we admit a strict opposition between topic and focus. Haiman’s (1978) position which presents conditionals as topics – if convincing with respect to contrasting topics (by showing how they do not really transmit new information) – then does not seem to explain these cases of postposed protases, which could provide a counterexample to his conception of conditionals as topics (see also Charolles 2003 for discussion).

Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses



The absence of postposed protasis examples might be explained by the fact that Haiman grounds his analysis on interrogative cases, emphasizing the proximity between a conditional like (46) and examples such as (47). (46) S’il vient, je resterai. ‘If he comes, I will stay.’ (47) Viendra-t-il? Je resterai. ‘Will he come? I will stay.’ This is precisely what Ford & Thompson (1986) criticize in Haiman’s work. They argue that while his position goes along well with conditional constructions in which the protasis precedes the apodosis, it is less accurate concerning postposed protases. According to Ford and Thompson, in cases of postposition, the protasis does not manifest any clear connection neither with the preceding discourse nor with the following discourse (Ford & Thompson 1986: 370). Thus, they claim that Haiman’s position would have to be limited to cases in which the protasis is preceding the apodosis. In the following we will examine this argument.

3.3

The protasis as a topic and focalization effects: An answer to Ford & Thompson

We believe that seeing the protasis as a topic in Chafe’s sense of a delimiting background is not contradictory to the presence of focalization effects on the protasis. Indeed, in cases of postposed protases, we do have such focalization effects on the protasis, while it still works as a delimiting background. The background cannot generally be identified with the common ground, but rather corresponds to the scope of the apodosis. The protasis then maintains its delimiting role. What allows the focalization on the protasis while it is used as a background is actually the possibility of delimiting a frame a posteriori, especially in spontaneous speech. In such cases, the protasis reduces the scope of the apodosis, by providing a condition a posteriori that makes it possible, relevant or enunciable. Focalization and alternatives. We can define the focus based on the notion of alternatives. Based on such an approach to focus, focalization indicates the possibility of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions (Rooth 1992). According to Rooth (1992), the semantic effects of focus are due to the introduction of a set of alternatives that contrasts with the ordinary semantic meaning of a sentence. Indeed, in (48), Sue is the only person Mary likes within the set of all persons Mary could or would like, and that is what leads to the focalization on Sue: (48) Mary only likes Sue.

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Based on this idea, we can run tests for the cancellation (or relevancy) of the alternative in conditionals, as in the following examples: (49) S’il fait beau, nous irons nous promener. Ou alors nous ferons du bateau. ‘If it is sunny, we will take a walk. Or we will sail.’ (50) ?Nous irons nous promener s’il fait beau. Ou alors nous ferons du bateau. ?‘We will take a walk if it is sunny. Or we will sail.’ (51) Nous irons nous promener s’il fait beau. Sinon, on fera autre chose. ‘We will take a walk if it is sunny. Otherwise, we will do something else.’ If we consider that the second part of the first sentence is focalized in these examples,13 then only this part can support an alternative, as in examples (49) to (51). We will then use this convention for the remainder of our discussion. However, two remarks need to be made. First, we are conscious of the fact that the postposition of the protasis does not necessarily entail a focalization on the protasis and that the intonation plays a certain role in such a focalization. Second, we do agree on the fact that there are other ways of marking focus. Yet, as a convention, and since we are working with a written corpus, we will consider the postposition of the protasis a sufficient condition for focalization on the protasis. Using this convention, we will now show how SI-clauses can accept a focalization in the protasis. In the following examples of speech act conditionals, we will consider that the answer of the listener responds to the focalized part: (52)

A: B: ‘A: B:

Il y a de la bière dans le frigo, si tu veux. Non merci, ça va. There is some beer in the fridge, if you want. No thanks, I’m good.’

(53)

A: B: ‘A: B:

Il y a de la bière dans le frigo, si tu veux. ?Ok, mais je n’ai pas soif. There is some beer in the fridge, if you want. Ok, but I am not thirsty.’

(54)

A: B: ‘A: B:

Si tu veux, il y a de la bière dans le frigo. Ok, mais je n’ai pas soif. If you want, there is some beer in the fridge. Ok, but I am not thirsty.’

(55)

A: B: ‘A: B:

Si tu veux, il y a de la bière dans le frigo. ?Non merci, ça va. If you want, there is some beer in the fridge. No thanks, I’m good.’

13. We highlighted the part we want to consider as focalized, although it is not clear in the written sentences which is the focalized clause.



Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses

Hence, in speech act SI-clauses, it seems easy to focalize on the protasis. Nonetheless, the protasis keeps being a condition for the interpretation (or for the enunciation) of the apodosis. In cases in which the protasis follows the apodosis, the protasis provides a limiting frame for the scope (or the relevance) of the apodosis, correcting a posteriori its initial scope within a spontaneous discourse that is being updated in the course of its enunciation, as in (56) and (57): (56) Le livre dont je t’ai parlé est sur la table. Enfin, si ça t’intéresse … ‘The book I told you about is on the table. Well, if it interests you …’ (57) Le livre dont je t’ai parlé est sur la table, si ça t’intéresse … ‘The book I told you about is on the table, if it interests you …’ The point here is that the speaker is not sure how interested the listener is in the book, and it is this doubt on which the focalization effect centers. Nonetheless, the listener’s interest provides a frame for uttering information about the book’s location. Such cases of (postposed) focalized protases are present in hypothetic uses (58), while they do not seem to prevent the protasis to act as an activation frame or a delimiting background: (58) J’achèterai une voiture si je gagne au loto. ‘I will buy a car if I win the lottery.’ In concessive uses of SI-clauses, the sequence order is very rigid when même ‘even’ is missing. We then need the presence of a concessive marker in order to postpose the protasis or to insert it within the apodosis.14 When the (marked) protasis is postposed, through a focalization on the protasis, what is really emphasized is the coexistence relation between the protasis and the apodosis. This does not negate the fact that the protasis plays the role of a frame, but stresses the fact that this frame contradicts (in its implications) with the apodosis. Thus, in (59), the focus is on the absurdity of the situation. (59) Je n’ai le droit de le dire à personne, même si au fond tout le monde s’en fout … ‘I am not allowed to tell anybody, even if nobody cares after all …’ In comparative uses, the crucial aspect is that an element in the background is pointed at, and may then be used as a comparison point. The linear order of the protasis and the apodosis is therefore rigid: the protasis provides the comparison point, and the apodosis is focalized. Such rigidity could be explained by the fact that SI is not usually a comparison marker. Then, in order to change the focalization value of a comparative SI-sentence, the speaker merely has to change the protasis for the apodosis, as in (60) 14. It seems hard to explain such a rigidity, and it is not the purpose of this paper. It might be that the opposition between the apodosis and the implicatures of the protasis is easier to notice in that order.

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and (61). Here, the frame always seems to be different from the focalized part, while this is due to the rigidity of these symmetric constructions. (60) Si Julie était charmante, Jean était insupportable. ‘If Julie was charming, Jean was awful.’ (61) Si Jean était insupportable, Julie était charmante. ‘If Jean was awful, Julie was charming.’ Focalized frames. The vital point here is that being focalized is not incompatible with being a transitional frame, as we defined SI-clauses. And since the role of SI-clauses can be understood as delimiting the activated background for the apodosis, we may say that Ford and Thompson’s objection is not valid, as it is indeed possible to focus on the established delimitation. However, one remaining problem needs to be mentioned. What allows for such focalization effects to take place is precisely the fact that the kinds of frames or backgrounds we have been discussing are transitional ones, that is, they are not ‘real’ backgrounds but limited contexts, selected parts of the background, and their purpose is not to stand for the whole discourse. They are topics within the perspective of the very sentence they appear in, and not discourse topics. And they do not easily become discourse markers.

4.

Conclusion

The present analysis of French SI-clauses has focused on the articulation link between the protasis and the apodosis. It sets up an instructional core meaning of SI as introducing a frame whose transitionality ensures an epistemic neutrality towards the protasis. Under such premises, SI-clauses can be considered as delimiting backgrounds, that is, as topics under a definition of topic status along the lines of Chafe (1976) and Haiman (1978). Yet, this conception of SI-clauses as topics does not prevent them from being focalized, especially in cases in which the protasis follows the apodosis. On the contrary, SI-clauses provide a good example for the relevancy of such an understanding of topics in terms of delimitation (of a background or a domain), while also serving as an illustration for cases of focalization on (parts of) the background. To sum up, SI-clauses take us beyond a strict opposition between focus and topic (at least at the sentence level), and facilitate the establishment of a strict distinction between sentence topics (that can be transitional and focalized) and discourse topics (that are neither transitional nor focalized).



Topicalization and focalization in French SI-clauses

References Austin, J. L. 1961. Ifs and cans. In Philosophical Papers, J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock (eds), 153–180. Oxford: OUP. Chafe, W. L. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Subject and Topic, C. N. Li (ed.), 25–55. New York NY: Academic Press. Chafe, W. L. 1984. How people use adverbial clauses. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, C. Brugman & M. Macaulay (eds), 437–449. Berkeley CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Charolles, M. 2003. De la topicalité des adverbiaux détachés en tête de phrase. In Charolles & Prévost (eds), 11–49. Charolles, M. & Prévost, S. (eds). 2003. Adverbiaux et topiques [Special issue of Travaux de Linguistique 47]. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck. Culioli, A. 1990–1999. Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation. 3 Vols. Paris: Ophrys. Dancygier, B. & Sweetser, E. 2005. Mental Spaces in Grammar. Conditional Constructions [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 108]. Cambridge: CUP. Degand, L. & Pander Maat, H. 2003. A contrastive study of Dutch and French causal connectives on the Speaker Involvement Scale. In Usage-based Approaches to Dutch, A. Verhagen & J. van de Weijer (eds), 175–199. Utrecht: LOT. De Vogüe, S. 1986. La conjonction “si” et la question de l’homonymie. Bulletin de linguistique appliquée et générale [Besançon] 13: 105–189. Ducrot, O. 1980. Les échelles argumentatives. Paris: Minuit. Fauconnier, G. 1975a. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6(3): 353–375. Fauconnier, G. 1975b. Polarity and the Scale Principle. In Papers from the 11th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, R. E. Grossman, L. J. Sen & T. J. Vance (eds), 188–199. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Fauconnier, G. 1976. Remarques sur la théorie des phénomènes scalaires. Semantikos I–3: 13–36. Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. 1996. Blending as a central process of grammar. In Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, A. Goldberg (ed.), 113–130. Cambridge: CUP. Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. 2002. The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York NY: Basic Books. Filippi, C. 1998. La relation de concession: Étude contrastive de though en anglais et de bien que, même si et encore que en français. Linguistique contrastive et traduction 4: 25–60. Filippi-Deswelle, C. 1999. Etude énonciative de if et though antéposés. LINX 41 (Thematic issue L’hypothétique, A. Trévise (ed.)), 75–91. Fillmore, C. J. 1990a. Epistemic stance and grammatical form in English conditional sentences. In Papers from the 26th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, M. Ziolkowski, M. Noske & K. Deaton (eds), 137–162. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Fillmore, C. J. 1990b. The contribution of linguistics to language understanding. In Proceedings of the First Symposium on Cognition, Language and Culture, A. Bocaz (ed.), 109–128. Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Chile. Ford, C. E. & Thompson, S. A. 1986. Conditionals in discourse: A text-based study from English. In On Conditionals, E. C. Traugott, A. Ter Meulen, J. Snitzer Reilly & C. A. Ferguson (eds), 353–372. Cambridge: CUP. Haiman, J. 1978. Conditionals are topics. Language 54(3): 564–589.

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Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd edn. London: Edward Arnold. Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics]. Cambridge: CUP. Martin, R. 1987. Langage et croyance. Les “univers de croyance” dans la théorie sémantique. Bruxelles: Mardaga. Nølke, H. 1994. Linguistique modulaire: de la forme au sens. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters. Pander Maat, H. & Degand, L. 2001. Scaling causal relations and connectives in terms of speaker involvement. Cognitive Linguistics 12(3): 211–245. Prévost, S. 2001. La postposition du sujet en français aux XVème et XVIème siècles. Analyse sémantico-pragmatique. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Reinhart, T. 1981. Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica 27(1): 53–93. Robert, S. 1993. Structure et sémantique de la focalisation. Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris 88: 25–47. Rooth, M. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1): 75–116.

Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish Lisa Brunetti

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

This paper analyzes the discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish. I aim to show that the peculiarity of fronted focus is that the focus is unambiguously identifiable in the sentence, making the antecedent of the focus variable accessible even (1) when it is not explicitly present in the previous context or not easy to recover, namely in contrastive contexts; (2) when the focus goes against shared knowledge among the interlocutors; and (3) when the focus answers an implicit question or a question located in a rather distant position within the specific discourse.   By means of corpus data, I also intend to show that fronted foci are frequently quantified expressions, expressions of predicative qualification, demonstrative pronouns, and expressions associated with focus sensitive particles. I will explain how these expressions are compatible with the discourse functions of fronted foci.

1.

Introduction

Consider the boldfaced sentences in (1)–(2), taken from a corpus of spontaneous conversations in Spanish (1) and Italian (2).

. I thank Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal for comments, and the anonymous reviewer for useful criticisms. I presented a previous version of this paper at the seminar of the Laboratoire Parole et Langage in Aix-en-Provence: I thank the audience for their comments and questions. I finally thank Tom Rosario for checking my English. The analysis and any possible errors are my full responsibility. . Interruptions, repetitions, and other typical imperfections of spontaneous speech have been mostly eliminated for the sake of simplicity and for space reasons. Dots between square brackets indicate the cuts I have made, which can also include speech turns.

44 Lisa Brunetti

(1) Spanish UEL: […] el argumento está muy bien, el Shakespeare este, es un tío […] listo. ‘The plot was very good; that Shakespeare, he is a smart guy.’ OÑO: Lo mismo, le pagan de guionista, en Hollywood, una pasta. ‘They probably pay him a lot as a script writer in Hollywood.’ UEL: Si se enteran de lo bien que escribe, pues seguro que le fichan. ‘If they realized how good he is at writing, they’d hire him no doubt.’ OÑO: Seguro que le fichan para Hollywood; [un Oscar] se lleva, vamos. an Oscar refl he.takes really ‘They’ll hire him in Hollywood, no doubt; he’ll get an Oscar, I bet.’ [efamdl20] (2) Italian a. De Niro [...] sa imporre solo se stesso, come un certo tipo di personaggio, e basta; cioè, in tutti i film che ho visto si comporta e agisce sempre allo stesso modo [...]; cioè, lui, sul set, può essere solo in quel modo [...] ‘De Niro […] can only impose himself, as a certain type of character, and that’s all; that is, in all movies I’ve seen, he always behaves and acts in the same way […]; that is, on set he can only be that way […]’ b. Ed [in questo] sta la sua bravura. and in that stays the his skill ‘And that is his strong point.’ [ifamdl01] These sentences are characterized by a non-canonical word order: the direct object in (1) and the indirect object in (2) occupy a sentence initial, preverbal position instead of their canonical post-verbal position, and the subject occupies a post-verbal position rather than the canonical preverbal one. Furthermore, instead of a descending intonation with main prominence at the end, which is typical of Italian and Spanish canonical sentences, main prominence (indicated with capital letters) falls on the displaced element (delimited by square brackets). In these languages, main prominence – the so-called nuclear accent – is associated with the focus or part of the focus (see Zubizarreta 1998, 1999; Cinque 1993, among others). Therefore, from a pragmatic point of view, these sentences have a focus–background structure. As observed in the description made by Benincà, Frison & Salvi (1988 [2001]) and Salvi (1988) (among others) for Italian, these constructions are further characterized syntactically by the absence of a resumptive clitic pronoun inside the clause, which



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 45

distinguishes them from the so-called ‘Clitic Left Dislocation’ (cf. (3a) vs. (3b)). Still, unlike a Clitic Left Dislocation, not more than one element can be fronted (see (4)). (3) Italian a. [Tuo fratello] ho visto. your brother I.have seen ‘(It’s) your brother (who) I have seen.’ b. Tuo fratello, l’ ho visto. your brother him.cl I.have seen ‘(As for) your brother, I have seen him.’ (4) Italian *[Mio figlio], [una poesia] ha scritto.   my son a poem has written Instead, these constructions have some characteristics in common with wh-interrogatives; i.e., the verb tends to be adjacent to the displaced element (cf. (5a) and (5b)). (5) Italian a. *Che cosa Giorgio porta?   that what Giorgio brings b. *[Il dolce] Giorgio porta.   the cake Giorgio brings The Spanish construction has the same properties. The following examples from ­Zubizarreta (1999) show that the fronted element is not resumed by a clitic inside the clause (6a); it has to be adjacent to the verb (6b); and no more than one element can be fronted (6c). (6) Spanish a. [El diario] (*lo) compró Pedro. the newspaper it.cl bought Pedro b. *[El diario] Pedro compró. the newspaper Pedro bought c. *[La manzana], [a Eva], le dio Adán.   the apple to Eve to.her.cl gave Adam . Benincà calls this construction ‘topicalization’, but as noted by Salvi (1988), the term is inappropriate and misleading: the displaced element does not have a topic (that is, thematic) function, but rather it is the focus of the sentence. . In effect, multiple fronting seems to be possible in certain cases. In Brunetti (2004: 91–92) I analyze them as cases of incorporation of two foci into one. . In Brunetti (2004: 39–40), this tendency is related to the discourse-linking properties of the fronted element.

46 Lisa Brunetti

Zubizarreta also points out that the fronted element can be separated from its sentence by several intermediate sentences (7a). The same is true for Italian (7b): ­although pragmatically rather odd, the sentence is syntactically adequate. (7) a. b.

Spanish [Manzanas] me aseguran que dijo María que compró Pedro. apples me.cl they.ensure that said María that bought Pedro ‘It’s apples that they ensure that María said that Pedro bought.’ Italian [Mele] mi confermano che abbia detto Maria che Pietro apples to.me.cl they.confirm that has said Maria that Pietro ha comprato. has bought ‘It’s apples that they confirm that Maria said that Pedro bought.’

Finally, the fronted element in both languages is subject to island constraints: it cannot be grammatically related to a position inside a relative clause (8), an adverbial clause (9), or a subject clause (10): (8) a. Spanish *[A Pedro] conocemos la mujer que traicionó.   to Pedro we.know the woman who betrayed b. Italian *[Paolo] conosciamo la donna che tradì.   Paolo we.know the woman who betrayed (9) a. Spanish *[A Pedro] terminamos la tarea antes de llamar.   to Pedro we.finish the assignment before to call b. Italian *[Paolo] finiamo il compito prima di chiamare.   Paolo we.finish the assignment before to call (10) a. Spanish *[A Pedro] sorprendió a todo el mundo que María haya invitado.   to Pedro amazed to all the world that María has invited b. Italian *[Paolo] ha sorpreso tutti che Maria abbia invitato.   Paolo has amazed everybody that Maria has invited Which exact position the fronted element occupies lies beyond the scope of this article. The word ‘fronting’ itself is a descriptive term and does not mean that the focused element has been moved syntactically. Given the syntactic properties presented above, most accounts propose that the fronted focus occupies an A’ position (see Rizzi



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 47

1997, a.o.); however, a different account has been proposed where the focused element stays inside the clause and the background moves to a right dislocated position (see Samek-Lodovici 2006, this volume). The pragmatic analysis of fronted foci that I am presenting in the following paragraph is compatible with both analyses. As we will see, what is crucial for pragmatic purposes is that the focus constituent be distinguishable from the background constituent.

2.

The discourse functions of fronted focus constructions

The focus–background order is quite rare in Italian and Spanish. Pragmatically speaking, the most neutral configuration is a topic–comment one, where the topic is a referential element either given in the discourse or as being part of the interlocutors’ shared knowledge, and expresses what the sentence is about, while the comment is the information provided by the sentence about the topic. In the most unmarked case, the topic is represented by the preverbal subject and the comment coincides with the predicate (the verb followed by the other arguments, cf. (11a)). Contrarily, in a focus–background configuration, the informative part – the left peripheral focus – is (generally) a referential element, typically represented by an argument of the verb, while the information already shared by the interlocutors – the background – coincides with the predicate and the remaining arguments (cf. (11b)). (11) Italian a. [Paolo]Topic [ha dato un bacio a Maria]Comment Paolo has given a kiss to Maria ‘Paolo, he gave a kiss to Maria.’ b. [Un bacio]Focus [ha dato Paolo a Maria]Background a kiss has given Paolo to Maria ‘Paolo gave Maria a kiss.’ Given that in this paper I analyze sentences with a focus–background order, in the same group I will include those sentences which, although syntactically canonical (in the sense that they display a subject–verb–object (SVO) order), are prosodically noncanonical, because the preverbal subject bears main prominence (cf. io ‘I’ in the Italian corpus example below). (12) Italian A: “[...] forse più che egoista sono individualista”. ‘Rather than selfish, I would say I am an individualist.’ B: Ho detto: “No, [io] sono individualista, tu invece sei egoista”. I.have said no   I am individualist you instead are selfish ‘And I said: “No, I am an individualist, you are just selfish”.’ [ifamcv21]

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Both Benincà, Frison & Salvi (1988 [2001]: 150) and Zubizarreta (1999: 4240) define the pragmatic function of a fronted focus as the denial of an explicit or implicit part of the context in which it is inserted. In other words, a fronted focus provides a piece of information that contrasts with (or corrects) a previous one in the context. I argue that contrast can also occur between the information provided by the fronted focus and an implicitly assumed belief, given the interlocutors’ shared knowledge of the world. In that case, the information provided by the focus is felt to be unexpected. Finally, as already observed in Brunetti (2004), the fronted focus can simply answer a question. The question, however, has either to be implicit or not present in the immediately preceding discourse, as we will see below. In Brunetti (2009a, 2009b) I claim that the pragmatic function of a fronted focus construction is related to the fact that the background in post-focal position is a tail in the sense of Vallduví (1992, 2002). I assume a tail to be background material which requires an antecedent in the context, and argue that the antecedent must be a shared belief among the interlocutors. In this paper, I put forward that such a definition – reformulated within an Alternative Semantics framework – can also apply to pre-focal material. In fact, I argue that it is possible to explain the difference between pre- and post-focal material without assuming that they are two inherently different background types. The difference between them would then be due to the fact that pre-focal material is not unambiguously interpreted as background, while post-focal material is. According to the Alternative Semantics framework (Rooth 1985, 1992), a sentence containing a focus other than its semantic value has an additional ‘focus semantic value’, which is a set of propositions obtainable from the semantic value of the sentence by substituting the position which corresponds to the focus. For instance, in a sentence like (13a) where a book is the focus, the set of propositions is of the kind displayed in (13b). (13) a. I gave a book to John. b. Focus semantic value: {I gave a book to John, I gave a cd to John, I gave a cookie to John, etc.} Obviously, not all potential alternatives of the focus semantic value are relevant in the context in which the sentence is uttered. In fact, Rooth proposes that the focus value has to be restricted by a pragmatic process. Rooth’s idea is that focus interpretation introduces a free variable whose antecedent is a discourse object which is either a subset or an element of the focus semantic value. The antecedent is fixed by the context and determines what pragmatic function the focus has: contrast, correction, answering a question, etc. Consider for instance (13). The antecedent of the focus variable must be an element or a subset of the focus value I gave x to John. Therefore, the antecedent can . For the idea that fronted focus conveys unexpected information see also Vallduví (1992) for Catalan and Matić (2003) for Albanian, Serbo-Croatian and Modern Greek.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 49

be a sentence of the type in (14a) – in which case (13a) will be in contrast with it – or it can be a wh-question of the type in (14b) – in which case (13a) has the function of answering that question. (14) a. You gave John a magazine. b. What did you give to John? A fronted focus is expected to behave like any other focus. Nevertheless, a fronted focus has an additional property with respect to other foci, which has to do with the way Italian and Spanish – as well as other European languages – mark the focus domain linguistically (more precisely, prosodically). In these languages, focus interpretation projects from the focused element, bearing the nuclear accent, up through the main syntactic branching of the sentence, which is to the left (cf. Cinque 1993; Reinhart 1995, 2006; Zubizarreta 1998). Focus extension is therefore ­ambiguous if the constituent bearing the nuclear accent is embedded in larger constituents along the main syntactic branching. The most ambiguous case is when the nuclear accent is placed on the most embedded element of the sentence. For instance, the extension of the focus in (15B), with the nuclear accent on Maria, may be any of the extensions given in square brackets, as shown by the fact that the sentence may answer any of the questions in (15). (15) Italian A: A chi ha dato un bacio, Paolo? ‘Who did Paolo kiss?’ A’: Che cosa ha fatto, Paolo? ‘What did Paolo do?’ A’’: Che cosa è successo? ‘What happened?’ B: [Paolo [ha dato un bacio [a Maria]Focus]Focus]Focus Paolo has given a kiss to Maria ‘Paolo gave a kiss to Maria.’ It is clear that when a sentence has a narrow focus which is low, the sentence can be misinterpreted as having a wider focus or as being fully focused, and the context must help disambiguating the information structure. On the contrary, if the narrow focus is high and precedes the background, given that focus projects to the left, the post-focal background cannot be interpreted by any means as part of the focus. In other words, since the right edge of the focus is marked, the linguistic material following it cannot be but background. This means that a focus-before-background order in a sentence is not ambiguous. The extension of the focus does not have to be recovered from the context, like in (15). The focus is identifiable by means of the sentence alone. Note that given Rooth’s definition of the focus semantic value and of the antecedent of the focus variable (cf. (13) and related discussion), the narrower the focus, the more constrained and therefore semantically defined is the antecedent. For

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i­ nstance in (15B), if the focus is a Maria, the antecedent will be of the type Paolo gave a kiss to x, whereas if the focus is the whole verb phrase, the antecedent is of the less specific type Paolo R-ed. Consequently, the antecedent of the variable introduced by a narrow focus is harder to find in the context than that of a variable introduced by a wide focus, because the context has to be more specific. As a result, when the focus extension is ambiguous, a listener will tend to interpret the focus as wide by default, unless an explicit and easily accessible antecedent for the narrow focus variable is provided by the context. A fronted focus, however, is not ambiguous, so the listener cannot interpret it as wide by any means. The listener is then forced to look for an antecedent of the narrow focus variable, even when the context does not seem to contain it at all. In case of a context that does not provide it explicitly, the listener will make inferences in order to retrieve the antecedent implicitly. The idea that the peculiarity of a fronted focus is its unambiguous identification is compatible with an idea concerning the interaction between syntax and information structure presented in recent work by Neeleman & van de Koop (2007). Assuming that the focus moves to the left periphery, they propose that focus movement occurs in order to facilitate a transparent mapping between syntax and information structure. In fact, by displacing the focused element to the left, the focus–background partition of the sentence is perfectly reflected in the constituent structure, because focus and background are represented by two continuous constituents: (16) [ XP [ txp ]] | focus background In my analysis, the syntax–information structure transparent mapping – whether triggered by focus movement or by other syntactic operations, such as right dislocation of the background – makes the listener understand that, independently from any cues from the context, the focus of the sentence is narrow and corresponds to the fronted element. The unambiguous characterization of the focus extension makes a fronted focus construction a better answer to a question whenever the question is implicit or not salient. The content of the implicit question can in fact be recovered from the focus semantic value of the answer, and the non-salient question can be retrieved by matching its content with that of the focus semantic value of the answer. For the same reason, a fronted focus typically occurs in contrastive/corrective contexts. Unlike question-answer pairs, contrasting sentences are not tied to each other by a congruence requirement. Which part of the previous discourse a speaker wants to contrast (or correct) is not necessarily predictable from the context. The possibility to identify the focus independently from the context helps the listener find the antecedent of the focus variable and therefore to identify the contrasted part. Finally, the unambiguous interpretation of the fronted focus is required when the sentence contrasts an implicit belief that is assumed by the interlocutors given their shared knowledge of the world.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish

The focus value tells the listener what the form of the antecedent is, so the listener can recover that implicit belief. The analysis just presented can be compared with Prince’s (1999) analysis of fronted foci in Yinglish, a variety of English spoken by Jewish communities in the US with a Yiddish linguistic background. Yinglish has inherited from Yiddish the possibility to front the focus – a construction generally not accepted in standard English. Prince argues that a fronted focus sentence is possible if the information in the background – what she calls the ‘open proposition’, namely the proposition formed by substituting the focused element with a variable – is already known to or at least plausibly inferable by the listener. For instance in (17), the fronted focus is acceptable because it is considered to be a well known fact in the Yiddish community that sons ask parents to buy them things, so the open proposition ‘my son wants x’ is already part of the listener’s knowledge store. (17) A: Hello, Mrs. Goldberg. How’s everything? How’s your son? B: Oy, don’t ask. [A sportscar] he wants – that’s all I was missing. Within an Alternative Semantics framework, the definition of background as an open proposition can be assigned to background in any construction with ­ narrow focus (cf. (13)). As I have explained, a fronted focus construction additionally implies that the narrow focus is unambiguously identified, because focus marking (by means of the nuclear accent) projects to the left (which is true also for English, cf. Reinhart 1995, 2006). Thus, in (17), it is not simply the case that the fronted focus is used because the proposition ‘my son wants x’ is already part of the listener’s knowledge store – which is expected if that part is the background. Rather, the fronted focus is used because the sentence does not directly answer speaker A’s question, so the antecedent of the focus variable is not directly recoverable from the question but has to be inferred. With a fronted focus construction, the listener knows what the focus semantic value is and hence what must be the antecedent for the focus variable. The listener infers that a proposition of the type ‘my son wants x’ is present in the common ground. More precisely, I would like to suggest that the interlocutors share an implicit question of the type ‘What does your son want?’. That implicit question, which Jewish mothers ask each other when they talk (and complain) about their sons, constitutes the antecedent of the focus variable. A construction similar to a fronted focus but much more constrained with respect to the antecedent is a cleft. Like a fronted focus construction, a cleft has an initial narrow focus (the clefted element) followed by background material. Nevertheless, as already observed by Benincà, Frison & Salvi (1988 [2001]), clefts occur in a smaller number of contexts: while a fronted focus is possible in all contexts in which a cleft is possible, the opposite is not true. An anonymous reviewer has made an analogous observation for the data presented in this paper, noting that some fronted focus sentences could be replaced by the corresponding cleft, while some others could not. The reviewer suggests that this fact be an indication that we are dealing with two ­different

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fronted focus constructions. I argue instead that a uniform analysis can be maintained. Benincà, Frison & Salvi observe that the displaced element of a cleft ­cannot be a quantifier (cf. (18)). Also, a cleft cannot be used as an answer to a negative polarity question such as (19): (18) Italian a. A: Hai fatto qualcosa? ‘Did you do anything?’ B: [Tutto] ho fatto. / *E’ tutto che ho fatto. everything I.have done   is everything that I.have done ‘I did everything.’   ‘It’s everything that I did.’ b. A: Tu vuoi invitare Giorgio. ‘You want to invite Giorgio.’ B: [Nessuno] voglio invitare. / *E’ nessuno che voglio invitare. nobody I.want to.invite   is nobody that I.want to.invite ‘I want to invite nobody.’ ‘It’s nobody that I want to invite.’ (19) Italian A: Ti a detto nessuno che dovevo partire? ‘Did anybody tell you that I had to leave?’ B: [Franco] me l’ha detto / *E’ Franco che me l’ha detto. Franco to.me.cl it.cl has said   is Franco that to.me.cl it.cl has said ‘Franco told me that.’   ‘It’s Franco who told me that.’ These data suggest that the antecedent of the clefted element is a (semantically determined) existential presupposition. For instance in (19), the cleft triggers the presupposition that someone exists who told speaker B about speaker A’s departure. As ­Benincà, Frison & Salvi explain, the question containing the negative polarity item does not trigger the same presupposition of existence, so it cannot provide an antecedent for the focus of the cleft. Focus fronting, on the contrary, simply implies that there is a proposition in the previous discourse (explicitly or implicitly given) or in the interlocutors’ shared knowledge, which can serve as antecedent for the focus variable. The proposition can either be an element of the focus semantic value (e.g., cases of contrast/correction, unexpected information), or it can be a sub-set of the focus semantic value (e.g., a question). In any case, it does not need to presuppose that someone exists who ‘told the speaker about it’. A fronted focus construction may in . Although the difference is not clear-cut. See Brunetti (2004: 70–72) for examples where a cleft with a quantifier is acceptable. . There is ample discussion in the literature on the difference between semantically vs. pragmatically determined presupposition. See for instance the debate on the Special Issue of Theoretical Linguistics (2004), where different authors comment on Geurts & van der Sandt’s paper ‘Focus interpretation’.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish

some contexts require an antecedent that is compatible with the presupposition triggered by a cleft. For instance, a presupposition of existence that someone (else) has the same property as the fronted focus is generally compatible with contrastive contexts. Indeed, in contrastive contexts a cleft can typically replace the fronting. In other contexts, however, the implication triggered by the fronted focus may not be compatible with the semantic presupposition of the cleft, which therefore cannot be used there. In the following paragraphs, I present the two speech corpora from which my data has been retrieved, and provide corpus examples of the different pragmatic uses of fronted foci. In Section 4, by means of my data, I will also present certain linguistic properties of fronted foci. We will see that some linguistic expressions tend to occur more often than others in a fronted position, and that their frequency is related to the discourse functions of fronted foci.

3.

The data

The data I will discuss is taken from two oral corpora. The first corpus is the C-ORALROM (Cresti & Moneglia 2005), which consists of monologues, dialogues, and conversations with varying degrees of spontaneity in different Romance languages. I have only considered a selection of dialogues and conversations with a rather high level of spontaneity in Italian and Spanish. For Italian, I have considered: – – – –

10 conversations and 11 dialogues that took place in a family/private environment, 3 conversations and 3 dialogues that took place in a public environment, 3 private telephone conversations, 1 conversation on the radio.

The total for Italian is 45,500 words of about five and a half hour of speech. For Spanish, I have considered: – 10 conversations and 21 dialogues that took place in a family/private environment, – 9 dialogues that took place in a public environment. The total is 59,800 words of about five hours of speech. The reasons that led me to exclude some recordings were either the low quality of the sound, which affected the detection of a focal accent in the left periphery, or speakers using an excessively marked language variety, either geographically or because of the age of the speakers. In other words, I tried to gather a quite uniform set of data from a corpus rather characterized by a large variation of registers and styles. The examples taken from this corpus are labeled with a sequence of letters followed by a number. The first letter indicates the language (i for Italian, e for Spanish). The next set of letters indicates whether the speech takes place in a family/private environment (fam) or in a public environment (pub), and whether it is a dialogue (dl) or a conversation (cv). The number identifies the specific recording.

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The other corpus is the Nocando corpus, which I have compiled myself. This corpus consists of oral narrations in Italian, Spanish, Catalan, English and German. The speech data were obtained by asking native-speakers to narrate a story based on the pictures of three textless books by Mercer Mayer. Mayer’s books had been previously used in linguistic research to elicit child and adult oral narrations (see Berman & Slobin 1994; Strömqvist & Verhoven 2004). They describe the adventures of a boy and his pet frog. Each recorded story lasts between two and nine minutes approximately, depending on the speaker. I examined the narrations of fifteen Italian speakers and eight Spanish speakers, with a total of about 26,800 words for Italian and about 17,200 words for Spanish. The examples taken from this corpus are indicated with iNoc (for Italian) and eNoc (for Spanish), followed by the narrator’s name. The number of fronted foci found in the Italian corpus is 60, and in the Spanish corpus 28. In addition, in the Spanish corpus I found 48 cases of polarity (fronted) focus which I will discuss separately. If we exclude those cases, the phenomenon is much less common in Spanish than in Italian. In the following paragraphs, I will present some of these data in order to show more clearly the different discourse functions of fronted foci.

3.1

Examples of contrast or correction

The Italian example in (12), repeated below, is a typical case of fronted focus expressing contrast. The speaker is talking about a conversation she had been engaged in with a third person. She is quoting her interlocutor’s words (12a) and her own reply (12b). The interlocutor had said that he is an individualist. The speaker had replied that it is her (and not him), who is an individualist. The proposition the speaker challenges is explicitly expressed by the interlocutor’s utterance. (12) Italian a. “[…] forse più che egoista sono individualista”. ‘Rather than selfish, I would say I am an individualist.’ b. Ho detto: “No, [io] sono individualista, tu invece sei egoista.” I.have said   no I am individualist you instead are selfish ‘And I said: “No, I am an individualist, you are just selfish”.’ [ifamcv21] Note that the fronted focus sentence is preceded by No, …. The negative particle indicates that the speaker denies the truth of the previous sentence, and the subsequent fronted focus sentence makes it clear where the falsity lies. What the speaker denies . The corpus was created within the project Nocando, Construcciones no-canónicas en el discurso oral: estudio transversal y comparativo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (principal investigator Enric Vallduví), funded by the Spanish Secretaria de Estado de Universidades e Investigación del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, n. I+D HUM2004-04463.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish

is the identity of the individual with the property of being individualist. The possibility to unambiguously identify the focus makes it easier to interpret the sentence as a clarification of what part of the previous sentence has to be corrected. Still, a low focus like (20) is equally acceptable, because the initial negation gives a clue of the contrasting function of the subsequent sentence.10 (20) No, individualista sono io, tu invece sei egoista. no individualist am I you instead are selfish ‘No, I am individualist, you are just selfish.’ The example below shows a case where the contrasted proposition can implicitly be derived from the context. Some friends are talking about the Italian actor Massimo Troisi. Previously in the conversation, various films he starred in were discussed. Some people had made positive comments on such movies. GIA then introduces a new film, Il postino. With the subsequent utterance, containing a demonstrative fronted focus referring to Il postino, GIA intends to compare that film with the other films already introduced in the conversation. More precisely, he implies that his appreciation of Il postino contrasts with previous statements of appreciation of different movies made by other speakers. (21) Italian GIA: FAB: GIA:

“Il postino”... C’era Troisi? ‘“The mailman”… Was Troisi (starring) in it?’ Sì. ‘Yes.’ Vedi: [quello] mi è piaciuto di Troisi. you.see that to.me.cl is pleased of Troisi ‘See, it is that film of Troisi’s that I liked.’ [ifamcv12]

Note that in this example, if the fronting did not occur (see (22)), the focus of the sentence would likely be held to be the whole verb phrase (mi è piaciuto quello) because the verb piacere ‘to be pleasing’ is not explicitly given in previous discourse. The fronting makes it clear that the focus is just quello ‘that’, so it forces the listener to look for an antecedent of the type ‘I liked x’, and consequently to contrast that (movie) with other movies. (22) Italian GIA: Vedi, mi è piaciuto quello, di Troisi. you.see to.me.cl is pleased that of Troisi ‘See, I liked that one of Troisi’s.’ 10. The low focus is also acceptable because it is a subject, and a construction with a final subject is syntactically marked.

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An example of correction is given in (23). The speaker is correcting a statement she made earlier in the conversation. She talked about the special events that an Indian restaurant offers on different days of the week, and said that on Saturday night the event that will take place is horoscope reading. Then the conversation focused on horoscope reading, and after 24 exchanges, the speaker corrects that former statement by saying that it is the fortune teller who is there on Saturday, not horoscope reading. The fronted focus allows the listener to easily recover the proposition that has to be corrected which was uttered far back in the discourse. (23)

Italian No, scusami, [la cartomante] c’è, i’sabato sera. no excuse.me the fortune.teller there is the Saturday night ‘No, sorry, on Saturday night there is a fortune teller.’ [ifamcv26]

Another example of correction is given below, once again from Italian. The focus is a temporal noun phrase: giovedì ‘Thursday’. FRA corrects PAO’s (in this case, explicit) assumption that FRA has already started working at the library. (24) Italian PAO: Ma te oggi c’ ha’ fatto? Se’ stata qui? [...] Ah, t’ha cominciato alla Nazionale! ‘But what did you do today? Were you here? […] Ah, you started working at the State library!’ FRA: Giovedì, [giovedì] comincio. Thursday Thursday I.start ‘It’s on Thursday, it’s on Thursday that I’ll start.’ [ifamdl12] PAO wants to know what FRA did on that day, and after asking a direct question (Ma te oggi c’ha’ fatto? ‘But what did you do today?’), she guesses an answer by saying that FRA started to work at the State library. FRA is expected to say what she did on that day, and particularly to confirm whether she started to work at the library or not. Imagine now that FRA’s reply was (25), with a low focus. (25) Italian FRA: Comincio giovedì. I.start Thursday ‘I’ll start on Thursday.’ The sentence would be interpreted as fully focused, because an antecedent of the type ‘I’ll start on day x’ is not given in prior discourse. But a fully focused sentence would sound pragmatically odd, because the information ‘I’ll start to work on Thursday’ is not an answer to ‘What did you do today?’. (25) may be interpreted as narrow-focused



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish

(and therefore be more coherent) if it is preceded by a negation (No, comincio giovedì). In fact, the negation denies the correctness of PAO’s conjecture, so the subsequent sentence is understood as a clarification of where the mistake lies. In (24), thanks to the fronting, the focus is unambiguously ‘Thursday’, so PAO knows that she has to look for an antecedent of the type ‘FRA starts working on day x’, and hence she can make the inference that FRA’s reply is intended to oppose ‘Thursday’ against ‘today’, namely that FRA is not confirming her conjecture and is further specifying where the mistake lies.

3.2

Examples of unexpected information

The literature recognizes that the pragmatic function of a fronted focus is to contrast its value with another value present in the context. We have seen that a fronted focus is indeed useful in contrastive contexts because it helps to recognize the contrasting function of the focus (cf. for instance (24)). However, in some cases the contrastive effect may be easily recognizable even with a low focus (cf. (20)). A contrastive interpretation is then not necessarily tied to the fronted position of the focus. On the other hand, in the set of contexts that I am going to present, contrast is not visible unless the focus is fronted. In these contexts, the focus contrasts a belief shared among the interlocutors, taken from their shared knowledge of the world (knowledge of how things are, of how a certain event occurs, of the properties that a certain entity has, etc.). Since the antecedent of the focus variable cannot be found in the discourse context, if the focus is not fronted, the listener cannot easily identify its antecedent. If the focus is fronted, the antecedent is identifiable independently from the context, so if not present in the context, the listener will look for it elsewhere, and this precisely in the interlocutors’ common ground. Given that the fronted focus contrasts with the knowledge shared by the interlocutors, the information it provides is felt to be unexpected.11 Consider again (2), repeated below. In the preceding discourse, MIC says that any role De Niro plays is strongly affected by his personality, that De Niro basically always plays himself. Given that acting is a skill where a person pretends to be someone else, MIC’s observation may lead the listener to conclude that De Niro is not a good actor. This fact justifies the fronted focus: contrary to what the listener is led to infer, it is precisely the fact that De Niro always represents the same character that makes him a good actor. The focus in questo ‘in this’ refers to the fact that De Niro always plays the same character in his movies.

11. Matić (2003) unifies the notions of ‘contrast’ and ‘unexpectedness’ by defining contrast as going against the listener’s expectations. The two effects can be set apart if we take into account where the antecedent is found: either in previous discourse (contrast) or in the shared world knowledge (unexpectedness). There are also some midway cases though: when the information of previous discourse has become a new piece of shared knowledge or belief among the interlocutors, and the fronted focus sentence goes against the expectations deriving from it. See examples (29) and (42).

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(2) Italian a. De Niro […] sa imporre solo se stesso, come un certo tipo di personaggio, e basta; cioè, in tutti i film che ho visto si comporta e agisce sempre allo stesso modo […]; cioè, lui, sul set, può essere solo in quel modo […] ‘De Niro […] can only impose himself, as a certain type of character, and that’s all; that is, in all movies I’ve seen, he always behaves and acts in the same way […]; that is, on set he can only be that way […]’ b. ed [in questo] sta la sua bravura. and in that stays the his skill ‘and that is his strong point.’ [ifamdl01] If the focus was low (see (26)), no effect of unexpected information would be conveyed by the sentence. In fact, the focus value ‘his strong point is x’ does not have an antecedent in the discourse, so the sentence would likely be interpreted as fully focused. (26)

Italian E la sua bravura sta in questo. and the his skill stays in that ‘And his strong point is that.’

With focus fronting, on the contrary, the focus value necessarily is ‘his strong point is x’, so if the context does not provide an antecedent of that sort, the listener will look for it among the beliefs shared by the interlocutors (in (2), such a belief is that he should, as an actor, be able to perform many different characters). The fact that the antecedent is part of the interlocutors’ shared knowledge gives rise to unexpectedness. Further examples of unexpected information will be given in Section 4, where different types of focus-fronted expressions are presented.

3.3

Examples of answers to questions

It is generally assumed in the literature (cf. Benincà, Frison & Salvi 1988 [2001]; Rizzi 1997; Zubizarreta 1998, 1999, etc.) that a fronted focus cannot answer a wh-question. The explanation given is that a fronted focus is inherently contrastive. In Brunetti (2004, 2009a) I provide some evidence that the contrastive interpretation of a fronted focus is not obligatory. As the data below furthermore show, the problem is not that a fronted focus answers a question, but that it answers an immediately preceding question. If the question is far back in the discourse or is implicit, it is not only possible but even necessary that the answer have a fronted focus. In fact, the fronting helps to find the antecedent of the focus variable (the question) by providing the exact extension of the focus.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 59

Consider (27). The speaker wants to relate to her friends a funny thing that somebody said on TV. She starts her story by stating that she heard someone saying a funny thing, but she does not recall who this person was. She hesitates, trying to remember, and eventually utters the fronted focus sentence where she says who she thinks he was. (27) Italian a. L’ho sentito alla televisione da uno… ora non mi ricordo come si chiama… ‘nsomma… ‘I heard it said on TV by a guy… now I don’t remember his name… anyway…’ b. [un politico dei DiEsse] mi sembra che fosse. a politician of.the DS to.me.cl seems that he.was ‘I think he was a politician of the DS party.’ [ifamcv23] The construction is licensed by the fact that the listeners share with the speaker an implicit question about the identity of the person. The question is induced by the speaker’s words which precede the sentence: the listeners understand that the speaker wants to say who this person is, but is hesitating because she cannot remember. Focus fronting is also favored by the fact that the semantic content of the non-focused part is minimal: the content of the implicit question representing the antecedent is minimal as well, namely, the question simply asks who that person is, and therefore it is easy to recover. The Italian example in (28) shows a fronted focus sentence that answers a question uttered far back in the discourse. The focus is the nominal expression quaranta bianchi ‘forty whites’. The speaker (WOM, a goldsmith’s employee) is about to leave the goldsmith’s atelier to go buy some material. The antecedent for the focus variable is the question that the woman asks at the beginning of the discourse segment (fammi vedere quanti ne servono ‘let me see how many we need’). Five exchanges follow between the woman and the goldsmith (AND), after which she answers her own former question with a fronted focus sentence. The fronting allows the listener to interpret the sentence as the answer to that previously asked question. (28) Italian WOM: AND: WOM: AND: WOM:

Okay, se lui ce li ha sfusi… Fammi vedere quanti ne servono. ‘Ok, if he has them unpacked… Let me see how many we need.’ Sì. ‘Ok.’ Ma non credo che ce li ha sfusi. ‘But I doubt he has them unpacked.’ Questo grigio, dove l’hai preso? ‘This grey one, where did you take it from?’ Dieci, dieci… mah, un mi ricordo, comunque sento. […] ‘Ten, ten… er, I don’t remember; in any case I’ll ask.’

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WOM: a. b.

Io sento dove vado, intanto dal Celerini, e poi dipende dove devo andare. ‘I’ll ask wherever I go: first at the Celerini’s, and then, depending on the place I have to go.’ Dieci, venti, trenta, quaranta… [quaranta BIANCHI] ten twenty thirty forty forty whites mi servono, all’incirca. to.me.cl are.needed at.the about ‘Ten, twenty, thirty, forty… it’s forty white ones that I need, roughly.’ [ifamcv28]

In (29) the fronted focus is a verb phrase: ir a nadar ‘to go swimming’. BEA starts that conversation segment by commenting on the importance of having leisure activities. The two speakers then start talking about what activity they could do after their aerobics class ends. After considering prospective aerobic classes available in different gyms, BEA concludes that she would like to go swimming. Since the discussion had only focused on aerobics until then, BEA’s statement is coherent in the discourse only if we interpret it as referring to the general topic of finding a leisure activity, and in particular as an answer to an implicit question of the type ‘What leisure activity would you like to do when the aerobics class ends?’, which is recoverable from the part of conversation reported in (29).12 (29) Spanish BEA: No está mal tener actividades de ocio […] ‘It’s not bad to have leisure activities.’ VIT: Sí, como el aerobic, por ejemplo. ‘Yes, like aerobics, for instance.’ BEA: a. Que se nos acaba. Tendremos que buscarnos otra cosa, no? [...] ‘which is about to end. We’ll have to look for something else, don’t you think?’ […] b. Sí que nos tendremos que buscar algún sitio… a mí sí que me apetece seguir... ‘We definitely should look for some place… I do want to con- tinue…’ c. [Ir a nadar] me gustaría. to.go to swim to.me.cl would.please ‘I would like to go swimming.’

12. Alternatively, we could interpret the antecedent as ‘I would like to go to the aerobics class’, and the fronted focus sentence would go against the expectations created by the previous discourse (see previous footnote).



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish

Finally, the sole case in the two corpora where a fronted focus sentence answers an explicit question is given below. The example is in Spanish and the focus is la energía solar ‘solar energy’. (30) Spanish ALM: Y ahora mismo, cuál es la que menos oposición tiene por parte de la gente? ‘And right now, which is the one that encounters less opposition by the people?’ JAV: Yo no sé cuál será, probablemente [la energía solar] I not know which will.be probably the energy solar  será la que menos oposición tenga. will-be the.one that less opposition has ‘I don’t know which one; probably solar energy will encounter less opposition.’ [epubdl03] The reason for a full fronted focus answer is not clear to me. I suggest that it depends on the fact that JAV reformulates ALM’s question before uttering his answer, and the reformulated question is elliptical (la que menos oposición tiene ‘the one that encounters less opposition’ is missing). It may be the case that the elliptical question legitimates a full answer rather than just a fragment answer (la energía solar).

3.3.1 Request of confirmation A sub-set of fronted focus constructions with an implicit question as antecedent are those that ask for confirmation about some piece of information expressed by the focus. The sentence can either be a declarative followed by a tag question (…no?, see (31)) or a yes/no question (see (32)). The implicit (wh-)question is precisely the one concerning the piece of information the speaker is not sure about. In the Spanish example in (31), NIV and her husband are going to rebuild part of their apartment. RIC asks for confirmation that the part they are going to renovate is the kitchen. Since NIV has been talking about the building work (la obra), and since the interlocutors know that this work is being done in NIV’s apartment, it is easy for the listener to retrieve from the sentence with the fronted focus cocina ‘kitchen’ an implicit question of the type: ‘What rooms of your apartment are you going to remake?’. (31) Spanish NIV: […] y el sábado viendo […] cosas para la obra […] ‘And Saturday looking at […] things for the building work.’ TER: La vais a hacer ya, por fin? […] ‘So you are going to do it, in the end?’ NIV: Sí, ya lo tenemos. ‘Yes, we are on it already.’

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RIC:

[Cocina] ibais a hacer, no? kitchen you.were.going to do no ‘It’s the kitchen you are going to remake, right?’ [efamcv14]

In the Italian example in (32), the conversation takes place one more time at the goldsmith’s atelier and AND (the goldsmith) is describing to a worker how the jewel has to be cut. AND wants to point out that the faceting on the jewel does not have to be on the entire surface but that the lower part has to be smooth. DOM’s utterance is for DOM to check whether he understood correctly. More precisely, DOM asks for confirmation about the place where the faceting has to be done. The implicit question then is ‘Where does the faceting have to be done?’. (32) Italian AND: DOM:

Poi qui, non liscio, ad esempio: qui una limata, una sfaccettatura, come questa […] qui, una limata, cioè: partire liscio… ‘Then here, not smooth; for instance: here you file it, you make a facet, like this one […] here, a filing, that is: starting smooth…’ Ah, [solo sul basso] iniziano ad esserci le ah only on.the low start to be.there the sfaccettature? facets ‘Ah, so it’s only in the lower part that the faceting begins?’ [ifamcv28]

In his analysis of fronted focus constructions in Serbo-Croatian, Albanian and Modern Greek, Matić (2003) proposes that in the majority of cases focus evokes a binary set of alternatives. He also argues that certain phrases such as quantifying phrases, sentence adverbials of polarity, ‘only’-phrases, given their intrinsic meaning, trigger a binary set of alternatives when focused. A confirmation yes/no question is another case where, for Matić, focus is inherently binary: the two alternatives are the sentence with fronted focus, and its counterpart with opposite polarity. If Matić was right, then the antecedent of the fronted focus would not be a wh-question but rather the proposition with opposite polarity. I argue instead that when a yes/no question has a narrow focus, the speaker does not simply want to know whether his assertion or the one with opposite polarity is correct, but also what the value of the focus is in case his assertion is not correct. In other words, what the speaker is really doing is asking an implicit wh-question and at the same time trying to guess a possible answer. As for the other cases that Matić mentions, I only consider sentences with focus on the polarity as truly binary. They will be discussed in Section 4.5.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 63

4.

Types of fronted foci

In the corpus data I have collected, fronted foci tend to be linguistic expressions with certain characteristics. A classification of the expressions preferably occurring in a fronted position is presented below. I follow rather closely the one done by Matić (2003) for his study of fronted foci in Serbo-Croatian, Albanian and Modern Greek, although my classification is shorter and less detailed.13 Also, I have added point e., which is not present in Matić’s list. Fronted foci with additive particles are in fact largely present in my data (as already observed in Brunetti 2009a). (33)

a. b. c. d. e.

Quantified expressions Predicatives of qualification Demonstrative pronouns Focal expressions associated with ‘only’ and ‘just/precisely’ Focal expressions associated with ‘also/even/not even’

The presence of the linguistic expressions listed in (33) will be explained on the basis of the pragmatic functions of fronted foci (contrast/correction, unexpected information, answering a question).

4.1

Quantified expressions

Eight cases of fronted quantifiers are present in Italian and two in Spanish. The two Spanish sentences have a particular chiasmus structure and will be discussed apart (Section 4.1.1). Italian quantifiers are tutti ‘all’ and nessuno ‘nobody’, and six out of the eight examples are subjects. We can assume that in Italian and Spanish, despite the freedom of word order which characterizes these languages, subjects tend to stay in a preverbal position whenever possible. However, a preverbal subject position is interpreted, in most contexts, as a topic position (see beginning of Section 2). Considering that nonreferential expressions such as ‘all’ and ‘nobody’ are not possible topics, it could be the case that quantified subjects are more acceptable in a preverbal position because they cannot possibly be mistaken for topics.14

13. Matić’s corpus is very different from mine, both from a quantitative and a qualitative point of view. It is a very large written corpus (about 15,000 clauses per language), whose sources are daily journals, ladies’ and teenagers’ magazines, samples of narrative prose writing, and three translations of the same English novel. Despite this diversity, the similarity with my data is striking, so the classification is also useful to describe my data. 14. See Endriss (2006) for an account of the restrictions on different types of quantifiers as topics.

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More generally, I propose that focused quantifiers that express an extreme value in a scale of quantities, such as ‘all’ and ‘nobody’, are frequently fronted because they provide unexpected information. The alternative set introduced when the focus is a quantifier is a set of quantities. For instance, focus on ‘all’ introduces an alternative set of the type {all, some, few, one, etc.}. When the antecedent is not given in the discourse, the listener looks for an antecedent in the interlocutors’ shared knowledge. The antecedent is a quantity that is expected, because it is part of the shared knowledge. If the fronted focus is ‘all’ or ‘nobody’, the quantity will be (respectively) lower and higher in a scale of quantities than the extreme value expressed by the focus, and that extreme value is unexpected with respect to the quantity assumed by the interlocutors as antecedent.15 Some examples are given below. In the Italian one in (34), the speaker says that his professor of physics was very good. He also says that the professor used to give very low grades. Then he states with a fronted focus sentence that none of the students were against him. Such a statement is unexpected, because students usually dislike professors who give low grades. So the implicit assumption at the moment of the utterance, shared by the interlocutors considering their knowledge of the world, is that all or at least some students were against the professor. What is particularly unexpected is the fact that among the students none – that is, the smallest possible amount in a scale of quantities – was against the professor. (34) Italian a. Io ho avuto un professore bravissimo di fisica [...] e lui era veramente bravo [...] e infatti, nonostante la bassezza dei voti che metteva [...] ‘I had a very good physics professor […] and he was really good […] and in fact, despite his low grades […]’ b. [nessuno] ce l’ aveva con lui nobody cl it.cl had with him ‘nobody had it in for that.’ [ifamcv23] In the Italian example in (35), the speaker is contrasting a shared belief that men usually hook up with young, pretty women. Cuban men, the speaker says, try to hook up with women of any kind. The antecedent is not explicitly given in the discourse, but is clearly recoverable from the interlocutors’ shared knowledge of the world, and it is also hinted at by what the speaker says before, namely that Cuban men try to hook up with foreign middle-aged women. Note that loro ‘they’ is not part of the focus, but is a pre-focal left dislocated subject.

15. On the fact that the alternatives to these fronted foci are ordered in a degree scale, see also Matić (2003: 288–289).



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(35) Italian a. Così fanno gli omini cubani con le signore italiane. ‘And so do Cuban men with Italian ladies.’ b. [...] le straniere d’una certa età, che le vanno lì; ‘middle age foreigners who go there;’ c. loro [con tutti] provano, capito. they with everybody try understood ‘They try (to hook up) with anybody, you know.’ [ifamdl16] The Italian example in (36) is taken from a meeting of the city council. The speaker is a council member who is inviting the other members to vote against a certain proposition. He first uses an impersonal construction (bisogna votar contrario ‘it is necessary to vote against’), and then he makes clear that he does not mean that only his party members have to vote against, but rather that everybody has to, as the proposition is bad not just from the point of view of his political convictions, but from any perspective. With the fronted focus sentence the speaker intends to contrast a potential implicit belief that he was only speaking for his party members. By saying that his invitation to vote against is not a matter of political partiality (36b), the speaker suggests that he is contrasting that potential implicit belief, which constitutes the antecedent for the focus variable in (36c). (36) Italian a. Io penso bisogna votar contrario, a questo punto; I think it.is.necessary to-vote against at this point b. ma ma non è una questione di politica, di colore, eh? but but not is a matter of politics of color c. [Tutti quanti] dobbiamo votar contrario. all so.many we.must to.vote against ‘I think we have to vote against, at this point; but it’s not a matter of politi- cal color, you see? Everybody has to vote against.’ [ipubcv04] Quantifiers may also be used in contrastive contexts. An example is (37). The fronted focus sentence has a contrasting alternative in the discourse, when MIC says: ‘I have to impose my ideas’. In particular, the subject ognuno ‘everybody’ is in contrast with io ‘I’, namely, the speaker challenges the interlocutor’s statement by saying that it is not him alone who wants to impose his ideas, but everybody. (37) Italian MIC: È chiaro, perché io devo imporre le mie idee [...] se credo nelle mie idee. ‘Of course, as I have to impose my ideas […] if I believe in my ideas.’

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MAR: [Ognuno] vuole imporre le sue idee, però… each.one wants to.impose the his ideas but ‘Anyone wants to impose their own ideas, but…’ [ifamdl01] Matić (2003) also gives examples of comparative and metaphorical quantification, such as ‘like a thunder’, ‘in waves’ etc, of which I have not found any in my corpus. We must note that even in Matić’s corpus these fronted foci occur only in Modern Greek, and this language appears to have a syntactically fossilized fronted focus construction, which therefore occurs in a larger set of contexts than in Albanian and Serbo-Croatian, where the construction is pragmatically, not syntactically motivated. Italian and Spanish behave more like Albanian and Serbo-Croatian than Modern Greek.

4.1.1 Chiasmus constructions The two fronted quantifiers that I have found in the Spanish data are inserted in special constructions that deserve some attention. The examples are reported below. The quantifiers are un poco de todo ‘a little bit of everything’ and todo el mundo ‘everybody’. (38) Spanish Fuimos […] a despedirnos y eso, y ya nos vinimos; pero bueno, no sé, nos cundió bastante, la verdad, porque… para ir un día y medio, vimos a todo el mundo, [a todo el mundo] vimos. to all the world we.saw ‘We went […] to say goodbye and all, and then we left; but well, I don’t know, we actually did a lot, as… in just a day and a half, we saw everybody, it’s everybody that we saw.’ [efamcv05] (39) Spanish ANT: […] ahí están los mejores traductores o…[…] o simplemente es una clase especializada? ‘Is it the case that the best translators are there, or it is simply a special- ized class?’ OLG: Pues, hay un poco de todo, eh? [Un poco de todo] empieza a haber.   a little of everything it.starts to have ‘Well, there’s a little bit of everything, you know? It’s a little bit of every- thing that we are starting to have.’ [epubdl11] In both cases, the fronted focus sentence is preceded by a canonical sentence with the same meaning. In (38), the two sentences (vimos a todo el mundo and a todo el mundo vimos) are identical except for their word order. In (39), the background of the fronted



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 67

focus sentence is slightly more informative than the background of the canonical sentence (instead of hay ‘there is’, the speaker says empieza a haber ‘is starting to be’). This chiasmus construction has also been observed for French by Abeillé, ­Godard & Sabio (2008), who report the following example from a spontaneous speech corpus: (40) French a. Mon père il va m’acheter un petit mouton. my father he goes to-me.cl to-buy a little sheep b. [Un petit mouton] il va m’acheter. a little sheep he goes to.me.cl to.buy ‘My father is going to buy me a little lamb; a little lamb he’s going to buy me.’ [Corpaix: Agenet, Gr3,6] These scholars use the construction as evidence that the fronted element is not focused, because it is not informative in the discourse. I propose, on the contrary, that it is precisely the fact that the two sentences have two different information structures which legitimates the repetition. The former is an all-focus sentence, and the latter is a focus-background sentence. The focus-background sentence indicates that the speaker intends to highlight one part of the previous statement by uttering it again as focus. Since a fronted focus does not need the context to be recognized, that part is interpreted as focus even against the expectations created by the context (in this case, the full-focus sentence). Re-focussing that part makes the listener infer that the information provided by it is particularly important with respect to the rest of the sentence. The reason of its importance may be that the focus value goes against implicitly assumed expectations. For instance, in (38) the antecedent of the focus variable could be the implicit assumption that the speaker and her friends saw few people, because the speaker says that they did not spend much time in that place. Finally in (39), the repetition of the sentence is further justified by the fact that the background is slightly different. The sentence does not just say that there is a little bit of everything, but that there starts to be a little bit of everything. In order to highlight the phrase un poco de todo, the speaker could have just uttered it again, without the post-focal background. The function of the background here resembles one of the functions of Clitic Right Dislocation: it provides some additional attributive meaning that is not present in its antecedent (cf. Ziv & Grosz 1993 for English and Mayol 2002 and Villalba 2007 for Catalan).16 In (39), the speaker provides additional information concerning the status of the event, namely the fact that it is in its initial state. 16. For instance in (i), the referent of ‘my dog’ is recovered by the right dislocated epithet the mangy old beast: (i) I took my dog to the vet yesterday. He is getting unaffordable, the mangy old beast. See Brunetti (2006, 2009b) for an explicit parallelism between the discourse function of right dislocation and that of the post-focal background in fronted focus constructions.

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4.1.2 Further scalar effects Further examples in the corpus, although not quantifiers, are worth mentioning at this point because they display, as quantifiers do as well, the effect of introducing a measure which represents the extreme of a scale. In (41), the fronted focus is the temporal expression domattina ‘tomorrow morning’. (41)

Italian [Domattina], se mi rendo conto che... che non è giusto, cioè, ci tomorrow if refl I.realize that that not is right that.is of.it.cl ripenso. I.rethink ‘Right away, if I realize that I’m wrong, I’ll give it a rethink.’ [ipubcv01]

The speaker is arguing with her interlocutor, and she strongly disagrees with him, but she wants him to know that she has no prejudice against his opinions. She says that if she realizes that she is wrong, she is ready to change her mind ‘the morning after’, where the morning after is considered as a very short time, basically meaning ‘immediately’. The speaker contrasts her utterance with an implicit belief shared by the interlocutors that people are unwilling to change their minds and don’t do so immediately, and that the morning after is an exceptionally short time to change one’s mind, in a scale of possible times. By uttering (41), the speaker wants to emphasize the fact that she has no problem admitting she is wrong, if this turns out to be the case. In the Spanish example (42), the fronted focus is a prepositional phrase indicating a time: a las nueve y media ‘at nine thirty’. (42) Spanish a. […] estuvimos un rato y nos fuimos, porque […] nos queríamos levantar a las ocho o las nueve para venirnos… ‘We stayed a little and then we left, because we wanted to get up at eight or nine to leave…’ b. [a las nueve y media] nos levantamos al final. ‘at half past nine we got up, in the end.’ [efamcv05] PAT’s discourse preceding the fronted focus sentence is all about her vain attempt to have her friends get up approximately at eight o’clock. PAT says that her insistence on having everybody get up early did not bear any fruit and she concludes that they eventually (only) managed to get up at nine thirty. The fact that they got up at nine thirty is unexpected, given the expectations generated by the previous discourse. ‘Nine thirty’



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 69

is considered by the speaker as a high value in a scale of times in which these people could have got up in the given circumstances.17

4.2 Predicatives of qualification A small group of fronted elements with partly similar characteristics and functions as the group of quantifiers is that of predicatives of qualification. In Matić’s corpus they usually indicate a subjective judgment. This is also the case of the examples reported in (43) and (44), which are copula sentences with a nominal predicative. In (43), the speaker is quoting a character in the story who is negatively judging the frog’s behavior. The character says that the frog is made of stone, meaning that he is very insensitive. (43)

Italian Ma che cuore ha? Un cuore di pietra, [una rana di pietra], sei. but what heart has a heart of stone a frog of stone you.are ‘But what a heart does he have? That’s a heart made of stone, you are a frog made of stone!’ [iNoc Caterina]

In (44), the speaker is making an ironic comment about the tendency of RIC to always be in a hurry and short of time, calling him ‘the timeless man’. (44) Spanish RIC: Es que no tengo tiempo, tengo otras cosas que hacer, y siempre lo voy dejando… ‘The problem is that I have no time, I have other things to do, and I always postpone it…’ TER: [El hombre sin tiempo] es. the man without time is ‘He is the timeless man.’ [efamcv14] These two subjective comments can be considered as cases of unexpected information. The implicit antecedent is a less strong qualification than the one attributed by the speaker to the frog in (43) and to RIC in (44), which are in fact hyperbolic statements. The listener assumes that the sentence is uttered as in contrast with the weaker statement. In addition to this explanation, I suggest that the characteristics of the post-focal material favor the fronting as well. When a nominal predicative is fronted, the material that follows the focus is just the copula verb. As I already observed above, a copula is semantically light and therefore more easily recoverable than a richer 17. This is a case where the previous discourse contains a shared belief among the interlocutors. See Footnote 10.

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background. Finally, in (43), it is possible that the sequence of linguistic expressions which are uttered by the speaker favors focus fronting. The speaker first asks a rhetorical question (Ma che cuore ha? ‘What a heart does he have?’), answered by the fragment un cuore di pietra ‘a heart made of stone’. The fragment is then followed by the fronted focus sentence Una rana di pietra sei ‘A frog made of stone, you are’. The speaker seems to correct herself by changing ‘a heart made of stone’ into ‘a frog made of stone’. Then, in order to give the new expression a grammatical role, she adds the copula verb post-focally. The two Spanish examples below are copula sentences with an adjectival predicative. In (45), the fronted focus is the adjective contaditos, which means ‘scarce’, ‘limited in number’. The speaker’s point is that polite schoolchildren are extremely rare, rarer than one might expect. (45) Spanish a. y hay mucho problema con eso; yo los míos son grandecitos, pero educación no tienen ninguna; ‘and there are many problems because of that; mine are rather old, but still, they have no manners at all’ b. [contaditos] los tienes con educación: siete por clase…   few them.cl you.have with manners seven per class ‘There are really few who behave: seven per class...’ [efamdl15] Note here that the subjective comment is a quantity: the speaker thinks that there are extremely few polite pupils in each class. The antecedent to this quantity will be a more expected (in this case, higher) quantity in a scale, analogous to what we have seen above for quantifiers. On the other hand, (46) is an example of contrast. The interlocutors are talking about a logo that CHI is creating. Earlier on in the conversation, NEN had asked CHI why he colored the logo yellow. CHI replies that the color is orange, and NEN insists that it is dark yellow. So NEN is contrasting CHI’s claim that the logo is orange. Note that eso ‘that’ at the beginning of NEN’s utterance is not part of the focus, but rather a pre-focal (left-dislocated) subject. (46) Spanish CHI: Este es naranja, ¿qué amarillo? ¿Dónde has sacado tú el amarillo? ‘This is orange, what yellow are you talking about! Where did you see yellow?’ NEN: Eso [amarillo oscuro] es, esto no es naranja. that yellow dark is this not is orange ‘That is dark yellow, not orange.’ [efamcv08]



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish

4.3 Demonstrative pronouns Six fronted demonstratives are present in the Italian corpus (of which four are subjects), and seven in the Spanish corpus (of which three are subjects). While in Italian I found examples with quello ‘that’, questo ‘this’, and the dialectal (Tuscan) deictic costì ‘there’ (denoting a place close to the listener and far from the speaker), in Spanish I only found cases with eso, ‘that’ (denoting a referent close to the listener and far from the speaker). The presence of demonstrative pronouns can be explained as follows. We have seen that a fronted focus is used in contexts where the referent of the focus is already known, as shown clearly by the chiasmus constructions in (38) and (39). The strategy there was to first introduce the referent of the focus, and then to focus it again and front it in a subsequent sentence. Just like with quantified expressions, the speaker first introduces the referent, and then uses the fronted focus device just to highlight the referent again, but instead of repeating the whole phrase she uses a demonstrative pronoun. Two examples of demonstrative fronted foci are (2) and (21). Another example is (47) below. PAT and MIG have just bought an apartment. With her first utterance, ROS intends to emphasize the fact that her friends will soon be owners of an apartment. PAT’s reply mitigates ROS’s enthusiasm with ironic words that are made clearer by MIG’s subsequent statement. PAT and MIG’s point is that they won’t be owners until they pay the entire mortgage, which will take a long time. (47) Spanish ROS: ¡Jo! y luego ya vais a ser propietarios, ahí. ‘Wow! And then you are going to be owners, there.’ PAT: Sí, propietarios de una mierda. yes owners of a shit ‘Sure! Owners of a shit!’ ROS: hhh PAT: [De eso] vamos a ser propietarios. of that we.are.going to be owners ‘That’s what we are going to be owners of!’ MIG: Propietarios de una hipoteca. ‘Owners of a mortgage.’ [efamcv01] PAT first introduces the referent which she intends to contrast with the apartment (a shit). Then she utters a fronted focus sentence with the same referent, represented by a demonstrative pronoun. The fronted focus does not identify that referent again, but is left with the sole function of contrasting it with an alternative referent in the discourse.

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Matić (2003) notes that another context in which a demonstrative occurs is when the fronted focus sentence expresses a conclusive note to prior discourse. In my data, this case is exemplified by (48) (Spanish), where ese ‘that one’ refers to what the speaker has said in (48a), namely that Raquel does not realize what a stupid person her friend is. (48) Spanish a. Pero el problema es que Raquel no es consciente de que ella es una gilipollas. ‘But the problem is that Raquel is not aware that she is a jerk.’ b. [Ese] yo creo que es el problema. that I think that is the problem ‘That is the problem, I think.’ [efamdl04] The antecedent is not given in previous discourse, but is simply inferable as a conclusive statement that summarizes the previous discourse. The antecedent can, for instance, be interpreted as an implicit question (‘What is the problem?’).18 The interlocutors’ previous conversation was in fact an attempt to understand the negative aspects of the fact that their friends are going on a trip with a particularly annoying person. The negative aspect – the problem – is what the speaker says in (48a), and is referred to in (48b) by the demonstrative.

4.4 Focus sensitive particles Matić (2003) says that in the three languages of his corpus, the focus sensitive particles ‘only’ and ‘just/precisely’ are often associated with a fronted focus. The same is true for Italian but not for Spanish, at least in my data. In this language, the only focus particles associated with the six fronted foci found are additive particles ­(también ‘also’, hasta ‘even’) or their negative counterpart (tampoco). In Italian, additive particles like anche, pure ‘also’, persino ‘even’, or their negative counterparts (neanche, nemmeno, neppure) are also very common. In effect, they are more frequent than the other particles. Out of 29 fronted foci associated with a focus sensitive particle, 24 are associated with additive ones. The expression associated with the particle is mostly the subject (23 cases), so the word order is not marked; only the position of the focal accent is. In Spanish, four of the six fronted foci are subjects. The large presence of subjects might be due to the following reason. A preverbal subject in a sentence with a normal intonation is interpreted as the topic of a topic–comment structure. In order to

18. Within a model of discourse such as the one proposed by Roberts (1996), an implicit question summarizing the previous discourse would be the most general (hierarchically, the topmost) ‘question under discussion’ among those that form the structure of that discourse segment.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 73

be focused, it has to be placed in a post-verbal position (cf. Pinto 1997; Belletti 2001, among others). However, the argument that is adjacent to a focus particle is expected to be focused, so a subject associated with a focus particle may stay in its canonical preverbal position without the risk of being interpreted as a topic. The presence of the particle favors a focus interpretation of the subject, despite its preverbal position. Focus particles trigger a presupposition that there is (or there is not) an alternative value for which the proposition holds. More precisely, additive particles imply that there is an alternative value for which the proposition holds (cf. König 1991, among others). ‘Only’ and other restrictive particles imply that there is no alternative value for which the proposition holds (cf. Roberts, submitted). The antecedent of the variable introduced by a focus is constrained by the semantics of the particle. When a fronted focus is associated with an additive particle, the context must provide an antecedent stating that the proposition applies to some other entity (49a). In the case of restrictive particles, the context must provide an antecedent stating that the proposition applies to both the entity expressed by the focus and another entity (49b). (49) Italian a. [Anche a Maria] ho svelato il segreto. also to Maria I.have revealed the secret ‘I also told the secret to Maria.’ a.’ Antecedent: I revealed the secret to someone different from Maria. b. [Solo a Maria] ho svelato il segreto. only to Maria I.have revealed the secret ‘I only told the secret to Maria.’ b.’ Antecedent: I revealed the secret to Maria and to someone different from Maria. Focus particles in Italian and Spanish are adjacent and precede the focus (unless the focus is fronted, in which case certain particles can follow it), so the particle delimits the focus phrase to the left. Therefore, even if the focus is low, the sentence cannot be interpreted as fully focused, as the particle blocks projection of the focus further up. This means that the extension of the focus is not ambiguous, as in the other cases seen above. However, note that – like in normal cases of contrast and unlike question-answer pairs where focus extension is immediately predictable from the question (when the question is explicit and salient) – the context does not help predicting what the focus will be in a subsequent ­sentence and whether it will be associated with a focus particle. Even if the context provides an antecedent and the listener can predict the extension of the focus, he can hardly predict the restrictions on the antecedent imposed by the particle until the particle is uttered. For this reason, fronting with focus particles occurs in the great majority of contexts.19 19. The anonymous reviewer argues that the syntactic position of elements associated with focus particles is different from that of a fronted focus, at least from what we see in some languages

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Some examples are given below. Consider the Italian one in (50). The additive particle anche is associated with the focus la donna ‘the woman’. The implication triggered by the particle is that someone other than the woman felt like eating. The listener can infer from the context that such an individual is the frog, as the speaker says that the frog decides to go into the picnic basket (where supposedly food is stored). (50) Italian a. La rana decide di entrare nel cestino. […] the frog decides to enter in-the basket b. E contemporaneamente [anche la donna] aveva voglia di and at.the.same.time also the woman had desire to  mangiare un poco. eat a little ‘The frog decides to go into the basket, and at the same time, the woman too felt like eating a little.’ [iNoc Caterina] In (51), the additive particle pure (which can either precede or follow the focus) is associated with il gatto ‘the cat’. The implication triggered by the particle is that someone other than the cat is interested in the bottle. That individual is clearly the frog, of which the speaker had said before that it had grasped the bottle (cf. (51a)). (51) Italian a. Però la rana è […] un po’ più veloce, e zacata! Si prende il biberon. ‘But the frog is a little faster and zac! She grabs the bottle.’ b. [Il gatto pure] è un po’ interessato al biberon. the cat too is a little interested at.the bottle ‘Even the cat has some interest in the bottle.’ [iNoc Andrea] In the Spanish example in (52), the focus is associated with the particle tampoco ‘not even’, which can either precede or follow the focus. When it follows it, it bears main prominence. The focus expression is ahí ‘there’, and it contrasts with other places mentioned in the story from which the frog had been sent away. The implication triggered by the particle is that the frog is not loved in other places. The listener can infer it by the fact that the frog had to leave the other places.

(e.g. Hungarian). This can be true, given that focus particles trigger a presupposition that is more constrained than that triggered by the focus alone. My analysis, however, is not affected. In fact, when the focused element is fronted, sentences with focus-sensitive particles share with the other fronted focus sentences the fact that they display a focus-background structure, and the consequences of having such a structure are the same.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish

(52)

Spanish Bueno pues que la rana se tiene que volver a ir, y [ahí tampoco] la quieren. ‘So well the frog has to leave again, neither is she loved there.’ [eNoc Carmen]

Another Spanish example is (53). The particle is hasta ‘even’, which always precedes the focus, so the focus is los propios chinos ‘the very Chinese people’, and the accent falls on chinos. Hasta triggers the implication that the proposition holds for some values and that it is more likely that the property holds for such values than for the value expressed by the focus. In (53), the implication is that non-Chinese people usually give the English name ‘Beijing’ to the capital of China. This can be inferred from what PAS says in the preceding exchange. (53) Spanish ANA: Sí, es que allí todo el mundo habla de Shanjai. ‘Yes, because everybody there says ‘Shanjai’.’ PAS: [...] con la manía de Beiking en lugar de Pekín ‘and the mania of saying ‘Beiking’ instead of ‘Pekin’’ ANA: Es que allí [hasta los propios chinos] muchas veces is that there even the very Chinese many times  dicen ‘Beijing’. say ‘Beijing’ ‘The point is that even Chinese people themselves often say ‘Beijing’.’ [efamcv04] In the Italian example in (54), which is a part of a conversation between two siblings and their mother, ANT (the sister) says that MIC (the brother) is overconfident. Then the mother says that overconfidence is a hereditary fact, meaning that it is a common aspect of all members of the family. This statement invites MIC to claim that his sister is overconfident, too. The implication triggered by the particle is that there are other people who are confident apart from ANT. This implication can be inferred from ANT’s first utterance (lui è troppo presuntuoso…) or from what the mother says, namely that everybody in the family is overconfident. (54) Italian ANT: E poi lui è troppo presuntuoso perché io ci lasci stare… ‘And he is too overconfident for me to let it go…’ MAR: Va bene, in quanto alla presunzione, è un fatto ereditario di famiglia. ‘Well, as for overconfidence, it’s a hereditary fact.’ MIC: Sì. ‘It is.’ ANT: Eh, purtroppo, sì. ‘Eh, unfortunately it is.’

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MIC: [Anche lei] è presuntuosa, anche lei è presuntuosa. also she is overconfident also she is overconfident ‘She too is overconfident, she too is overconfident.’ [ifamdl01] The Italian example in (55) is the only example with ‘even’ (perfino). The speaker says that everybody was very happy, and then specifies that even the frog was happy. Since the frog is unlikely to be happy in those circumstances (the little frog she was jealous of has come back after being lost for some time), tutti ‘all’ in the first utterance may be interpreted by the listener as all but the frog. So the speaker feels obliged to explain that the frog is included in the set of happy people. The implication triggered by the particle is that there are other people who are happy and that these people are more likely to be happy than the frog. The first utterance in (55) clearly allows the listener to make such an inference. (55)

Italian Erano tutti contentissimi. Eh sì, [perfino la rana] era contenta. ‘They were all happy. Yes, even the frog was happy.’ [iNoc Caterina]

Finally, in (56), the focus is associated with the restrictive particle soltanto ‘only’. The speaker and her interlocutor are talking about certain changes that could be made to a law that regulates TV advertising in Italy if a proposal submitted for popular vote passed. The speaker explains that one change provides that the advertisements during a film on TV will be prohibited, except for the time slot between the first and the second half of the film. The speaker argues that this will make that single time slot more expensive than it is now, so only a few advertising agencies (the bigger and more powerful ones) would be able to buy a part of it. (56) Italian a. […] se lo spazio tra il primo e il secondo tempo […] costa di più ‘[…] if the slot between the first and the second part […] costs more’ b. perché non puoi… a questo punto è uno solo ‘because you cannot… at that point there’s just one’ c. per cui [soltanto poche pubblicità] possono comprarsi quello spazio lì. ‘then only few advertising agencies can buy that one slot.’ [ifamdl13] Since soltanto associates with poche pubblicità ‘few advertising agencies’, the implication triggered by the particle is that all, or many, advertising agencies will be able to buy a part of it. The implication can be inferred from the fact that the whole conversation was about the idea that the law aims at making life easier for all (even small) agencies.



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 77

4.5

Polarity focus

Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal (this volume) present another type of fronting in Spanish (existing also in Italian), which they call Verum Focus Fronting. The main formal difference with focus fronting is the fact that the fronted element does not bear the nuclear accent. In fact, according to Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal’s proposal, the fronted element is not focused: the fronting is a strategy to unambiguously identify the focus on the polarity of the sentence by eliminating the possibility to interpret the sentence as a topic–comment or a focus–background structure. Assuming as they do that focus on the polarity is a particular case of narrow focus (cf. Féry 2007), a verum focus fronting construction does in fact have, just like a focus fronting construction, a focus part and a background part: the polarity is the focus and the whole sentence is the background. However, unlike focus fronting, the focus–background partition is not lineally represented in the sentence. As Leonetti and Escandell-Vidal observe, a transparent representation of the focus–background order when focus is on the polarity is given by sentences introduced by Spanish sí que ‘yes that’. The focus is sí, representing the polarity, and the background is the entire sentence which comes after it. I found 48 of these constructions in the Spanish corpus. Sì che ‘yes that’ constructions exist in Italian as well, but none was found in the corpus, so this strategy is clearly not exploited in the same way as it is in Spanish. The difference is striking because Italian and Spanish share all other polarity focus constructions: focus on the ­auxiliary or on the verb, expressions like ‘it is true that’, and verum focus fronting.20 Two examples of sí que constructions are given below. (57) Spanish OLG: a. Porque una novela no me apetece traducir, ‘Because I don’t like to translate a novel’ b. pero sí que me apetece traducir un … but yes that to.me.cl appeals to-translate a … ‘but I do like to translate a…’ ANT: … un libro de lo que sea. ‘… a book of no matter what.’ [epubdl11] (58) Spanish ANT: Y eso cómo se repercute en la factura del traductor? [...] ‘And how does this affect the translator’s salary?’ OLG: […] normalmente lo que ocurre es que al mal traductor […] no se le vuelve a llamar […]; al que eh no es demasiado malo […] 20. Matić (2003) also presents cases of fronted adverbials denoting the polarity of the sentence, such as ‘really’, ‘without doubt’, ‘with certainty’, etc. There weren’t any such expressions in my corpus, neither in Spanish nor in Italian.

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pues a.lo.mejor sí que se le descuenta un well probably yes that pass to.him.cl deducts a  porcentaje, de la traducción que ha hecho. percentage of the translation that has done ‘Usually what happens is that the bad translator is not contacted again; if he is not too bad, well in that case, perhaps it is the case that a per- centage is deducted from the translation that he did.’ [epubdl11]

The focus semantic value of a sentence with a polarity focus is made of two alternatives: the positive and the negative form of the sentence. Since there are just two alternatives, the antecedent is automatically retrievable from the focus value: it is the remaining alternative of the set. Given that the characteristics of the antecedent are already known, the link between it and the context can be looser. The examples above show that. Consider (57): The speaker – a translator – says that she does not like to translate novels. Then she says that she does like to translate a book about no matter what. The antecedent for the focus variable (the positive polarity) cannot be but the negative polarity (that she does not like to translate a book). The negative proposition is implicitly recoverable from the fact that the speaker has said that she does not like to translate novels. The listener can infer that the speaker does not like to translate books in general, and the sí que sentence contradicts that inference. Since the listener knows what the antecedent has to look like, the inference is easy to make. In (58), the antecedent with opposite polarity (the assertion that the translator’s salary is not reduced) is inferable from the context in the following way. OLG first answers ANT’s question by saying that the translator is usually not contacted again if he has done a bad job. So OLG implies a negative answer to ANT’s question: it is not the case that the translator’s salary is reduced. Then OLG additionally says, by means of the sí que construction, that translators who are not too bad may indeed see their salary reduced. OLG’s statement then contrasts with her previous implicit answer to ANT’s question.

5.

Conclusions

In this paper I have analyzed the discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish. Within an Alternative Semantics framework (Rooth 1992), I have assumed that the antecedent of the variable introduced by the focus is determined pragmatically, and I have analyzed the pragmatic strategies to determine the antecedent in sentences with a fronted focus. I have argued that a fronted focus is unambiguously identifiable, so its antecedent is recoverable even if not explicitly present in the discourse context. This favors the use of fronted focus in contrastive/corrective contexts, in contexts where the information is felt to be unexpected, and in contexts where the sentence answers an implicit or not salient question. In contrastive contexts, a fronted focus is used to help the listener understand that the sentence is uttered in contrast



Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish 79

with a previous one and what the contrasting parts are. The fronting preferably occurs when the contrasted proposition is far back in the discourse or is not explicitly given. In fact, the fronting identifies the focus and therefore facilitates the recovering of the antecedent for the focus variable. In contexts where the information is felt to be unexpected, the focus contrasts with an implicit belief shared among the interlocutors, taken from their world knowledge. That belief is recoverable only if the sentence disambiguates the focus. In fact, if the focused element is identified, the listener will search for the right antecedent for it and therefore, in absence of that antecedent in the discourse, she will infer it from the interlocutors’ shared knowledge. Finally, the fronted focus is used as an answer to a question when the question is not salient or is only implicitly recoverable. In fact, the extension of the focus of the answer allows the listener to recover the question. In this paper I have also shown that fronted foci are frequently – although not always – quantified expressions, expressions of predicative qualification, ­demonstrative pronouns and expressions associated with focus sensitive particles. These characteristics are compatible with the discourse functions of fronted foci described in the paper. Focused quantifiers like ‘all’, ‘nobody’ are fronted to provide unexpected information. The antecedent of the quantifier is in fact a quantity shared by the interlocutors, which is lower (or higher) with respect to the extreme value expressed by the quantifier in a scale of quantities. Predicatives of qualification expressing a subjective judgment can also be used to express an extreme value of a scale of judgments. I suggest that their fronting is facilitated by the fact that the post-focal predicate is just the copula and hence semantically light. Focused demonstrative pronouns occur in a fronted position because a speaker may first introduce a referent in a full-focus sentence, and then use the fronted focus just to highlight the referent again for pragmatic purposes. Since the referent is already given, a demonstrative pronoun is used the second time. Furthermore, a fronted focus is used with focus sensitive particles in order for the specific antecedent required by the particle to be immediately retrieved by the meaning of the particle itself. Sí que polarity sentences in Spanish are finally mentioned because they display an unambiguous focus–background structure, like other fronted focus constructions.

References Abeillé, A., Godard, D. & Sabio, F. 2008. Les constructions avec SN antéposé. Talk presented at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence. Belletti, A. 2001. ‘Inversion’ as focalization. In Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar [Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax], A. Hulk & J.-Y. Pollock (eds), 60–90. Oxford: OUP. Benincà, P., Frison, L. & Salvi, G. 1988 [2001]. L’ordine delle parole e le costruzioni marcate. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, L. Renzi, G. Salvi & A. Cardinaletti (eds), Vol. 1, 115–225. Bologna: il Mulino.

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Berman, R. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds). 1994. Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Brunetti, L. 2004. A Unification of Focus. Padova: Unipress. Brunetti, L. 2006. Italian background: Links, tails, and contrast effects. In Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium on Logic and Language, B. Gyuris et al. (eds), 45–52. Budapest: Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University. Brunetti, L. 2009a. On the pragmatics of post-focal material in Italian (left peripheral focus looked at from the other side). In Les linguistiques du détachement. Actes du colloque de Nancy (7–9 juin 2006) [Sciences pour la communication 87], D. Apothéloz, B. Combettes & F. Neveu (eds), 151–162. Bern: Peter Lang. Brunetti, L. 2009b. On links and tails in Italian. Lingua 119(5): 756–781. Cinque, G. 1993. A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic Inquiry 24(2): 239– 267. Cresti, E. & Moneglia, M. 2005. C-Oral-Rom. Integrated Reference Corpora of Spoken Romance Languages [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 15]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Endriss, C. 2006. Quantificational Topics. A Scopal Treatment of Exceptional Scope Phenomena. Doctoral dissertation, Universität Potsdam. Féry, C. 2007. Information structural notions and the fallacy of invariant correlates. In The Notions of Information Structure, C. Féry, G. Fanselow & M. Krifka (eds), 161–184. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam. Geurts, B. & van der Sandt, R. 2004. Interpreting focus. Theoretical Linguistics 30(1): 1–44. König, E. 1991. The Meaning of Focus Particles: A Comparative Perspective. London: Routledge. Leonetti, M. & Escandell-Vidal, V. This volume. Fronting and verum focus in Spanish. Matić, D. 2003. Topics, Presuppositions, and Theticity: An Empirical Study of Verb–subject Clauses in Albanian, Greek, and Serbo-Croat. PhD dissertation, Universität zu Köln. Mayol, L. 2002. “Ho sabieu això?” La dislocació a la dreta en català i anglès. Senior Thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Neeleman, A. & van de Koot, H. 2007. The nature of discourse templates. Ms, University College London. Pinto, M. 1997. Syntax and Interpretation of Inverted Subjects in Italian. PhD dissertation, OTS, Utrecht University. Prince, E. 1999. How not to mark topics: ‘topicalization’ in English and Yiddish. In Texas Linguistics Forum, Ch. 8. Austin TX: University of Texas. Reinhart, T. 1995. Interface strategies. OTS Working Paper. Reinhart, T. 2006. Interface Strategies. Optimal and Costly Computations [Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 45]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Rizzi, L. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar: Handbook in Generative Syntax, Haegeman, L. M. (ed.), 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Roberts, C. 1996. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In Papers in Semantics [OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 49], J.-H. Yoon & A. Kathol (eds), 91–136. Columbus OH: The Ohio State University Department of Linguistics. Roberts, C. Submitted. Only, presupposition and implicature. Journal of Semantics. Rooth, M. 1985. Association with Focus. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Rooth, M. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1): 75–116.



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Salvi, G. 1988. Italiano: sintassi. In Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, G. Holtus, M. Metzeltin & C. Schmitt (eds), vol. 4, 112–132. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Samek-Lodovici, V. 2006. When right dislocation meets the left-periphery. A unified analysis of Italian non-final focus. Lingua 116(6): 836–873. Samek-Lodovici, V. This volume. Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses. Strömqvist, S. T. & Verhoven, L. T. (eds). 2004. Relating Events in Narrative. Vol. 2: Typological and Contextual Perspectives. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Vallduví, E. 1992. The Informational Component. New York: Garland. Vallduví, E. 2002. Information packaging and dialog. Talk presented at EDILOG, Workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue. September 2002. University of Edinburgh. Villalba, X. 2007. La dislocació a la dreta en català i castellà, microvariació en la interfície sintaxi/pragmàtica. Caplletra: revista internacional de filología 42: 273–302. Ziv, Y. & Grosz, B. 1993. Right dislocation and attentional state. In The Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, R. Buchalla & A. Mittwoch (eds), 184–199. Jerusalem: Akademon. Zubizarreta, M. L. 1998. Topic, Focus, and Word Order [Linguistic Inquiry Monographs]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Zubizarreta, M. L. 1999. Las funciones informativas: Tema y foco. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, I. Bosque & V. Demonte (eds), vol. 3, 4215–4244. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.

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Clefting and discourse organization Comparing Germanic and Romance Andreas Dufter

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

This contribution studies the translational counterparts of English it-clefts in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Its empirical basis is  EUROPARL, a parallel corpus of European Parliament Proceedings. The overall findings suggest that cleft structures are preserved most often in French and Portuguese, somewhat less often in Italian and Spanish, and only in a fraction of cases in German. The contribution then surveys the literature on motivations for the use of clefts and offers an assessment of their explanatory potential with respect to the data under consideration. It argues that monofunctional characterizations of clefts as focusing devices fail to account for a range of additional discourse functions, which are constrained, but not fully determined, by grammatical properties, and can be conventionalized in language-particular ways.

1.

Introduction

The syntactic study of cleft structures is widely assumed to have originated in ­Jespersen’s (1927, 1937) work on English, where complex equational sentences headed by nonreferential it, as in (1a, b), are discussed at some length. Crucially, clefts systematically correspond to non-clefted clauses (1a’, b’), to which they are equivalent, at least with respect to truth-conditions and illocutionary force. It seems to be a lesser known fact, however, that counterparts of it-clefts in Romance languages had already been . A previous version of this paper was presented in June 2007 at the Munich LIPP-Symposium on syntax, information structure, text and discourse pragmatics. I am grateful to the participants of this meeting for their encouraging feedback and helpful suggestions. Furthermore, thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer. All remaining shortcomings are mine. . In the wake of Jespersen’s findings (1927, 1937), other cleft structures, all lacking a cleft pronoun it, were identified. Most important among these is the class of wh- or pseudo-clefts as in What I want is music (for structural descriptions, cf. Collins 1991: 26–34; Ward, Birner & Huddleston 2002: 1420–1424, among many others), and the class of demonstrative or th-clefts,

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identified long before Jespersen’s descriptions first appeared in print. With regard to French, Ayer (1876: 337) mentions the frequent use of biclausal “périphrases grammaticales” to highlight individual subparts of a sentence. The author illustrates this syntactic device with sentences such as (2a–c), all of which, he suggests, are marked variants of the simple clause in (2d). Notice that (2a-c) are introduced by a neuter pronominal ce ‘this’, which is reminiscent of the cleft pronoun it in English.

(1) English (Jespersen 1927: 88–89)



a. a.’ b. b.’

It is the wife that decides. The wife decides. It was the colonel I was looking for. I was looking for the colonel.

(2) French (Ayer 1876: 337)

a. b. c. d.

C’est votre cousin que j’ai rencontré hier par hasard à la promenade. it be-prs.3sg your-polite cousin that I have-prs.1sg meet.pst-ptcp yesterday by chance at the walk ‘It is your cousin I met yesterday by chance on a walk.’ C’est hier que j’ai rencontré par hasard votre cousin à la promenade. it be-prs.3sg yesterday that I have-prs.1sg meet.pst-ptcp by chance your-polite cousin at the walk ‘It is yesterday that by chance I met your cousin on a walk.’ C’est par hasard que j’ai rencontré votre cousin à la promenade hier. it be-prs.3sg by chance that I have-prs.1sg meet.pst-ptcp your-polite cousin at the walk yesterday ‘It is by chance that I met your cousin on a walk yesterday.’ Hier j’ai par hasard rencontré votre cousin à la promenade. yesterday I have-prs.1sg by chance meet.pst-ptcp your-polite cousin at the walk ‘Yesterday, I met by chance your cousin on a walk.’

In a similar vein, Fornaciari (1881) mentions the availability of complex sentences such as (3) in Italian for laying particular emphasis on a single major constituent. Bello (1847), probably the most insightful nineteenth-century grammar of Spanish, likewise dedicates a few paragraphs to “constructional variants” of simple sentences (“variedades de construcción”; 1847/1988: 514), citing, among several others, the example in (4). Since Italian and Spanish are both null subject ­languages, the absence of an overt cleft pronoun, which arguably has an expletive or quasi-argumental flavor, comes as no surprise.

as exemplified by That’s what I want (cf. Ball 1977; Calude 2007). Discussion in the present paper will be confined to English it-clefts and their German and Romance congeners.



Clefting and discourse organization

(3)

Italian (Fornaciari 1881: 383) Siete pur voi che parlavate dai palchi così arditamente. be-prs.2pl but you-pl that speak.pst.2pl of-the stage so boldly ‘But it is you who spoke so boldly from the stage.’

(4)

Spanish (Bello 1847/1988: 513) No son días de fe los en que vivimos. not be-prs.3pl days of faith the-masc.pl in that live-prs.1pl ‘It is not days of faith in which we are living.’

Following the lead of Ayer, Fornaciari and Bello, descriptive grammarians as well as syntacticians with more theoretical leanings have substantially refined the formal characterization of this class of complex clauses in Romance languages. By contrast, somewhat less scrutiny seems to have been given to the reasons why clefts are used. In fact, many syntactic analyses do not even feel the need to elaborate on the assumption that universally, clefts are special devices employed for highlighting purposes. Worded in slightly more technical terms, the received view is that clefts invariably mark focus on the clefted constituent, while backgrounding in some way – e.g. by virtue of marking as presupposed – the existential closure of the embedded open proposition (Chomsky 1971; É. Kiss 1998, 1999; Lambrecht 2001). However, at least since Prince (1978), corpus-based analyses have offered more fine-grained pragmatic characterizations of cleft sentences in English, distinguishing between a number of information-structural subtypes. Unsurprisingly perhaps, studies adopting a contrastive perspective turn out to be especially instructive in the attempt to come to grips with language-specific aspects of both the grammar and the pragmatics of clefts. Contributions to this comparative line of research include investigations of cleft structures in Germanic languages (Dyhr 1978; Andersson 1993; Kiese 1993; Königs 1997; Ahlemeyer & Kohlhof 1999; Johansson 2001; Huber 2002, 2006; Gundel 2002, 2006), within Romance (Metzeltin 1989; Sedano 2001; Gil 2003; Schöpp 2005; Van den Steen 2005), and across both language families (Thome 1978; Lipka 1982; Smits 1989; Grewendorf & Poletto 1991; Muller 2003; Gómez González & Gonzálvez-García 2005; Reichmann 2005; Hobæk Haff 2006; Miller 2006; Wienen 2006). Regrettably, however, authors focusing on functional differences in clefting typically do not strive to relate their findings to cross-linguistic variation in grammar. Conversely, comparative syntactic analyses tend to ignore the bearing which their observations might have on the differential usage of clefts cross-linguistically. The aim of the present contribution is to reconnect these two strands of inquiry. The contribution takes EUROPARL (EP), a multilingual corpus of European Parliament Proceedings, as its point of departure. Within this parallel corpus, it explores the translational equivalents of English it-cleft structures in five languages: German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Section 2 will introduce the corpus and the search strategy adopted, and report the quantitative findings. In Section 3, we will assess standard explanations for the use of clefts in light of the observed cross-linguistic differences in cleft frequency, before surveying the principal information-structural

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types of cleft occurrences. Following up on this, it will be argued in Section 4 that the standard view of a division of labor between clefting and alternative focus markings stands in need of revision. Most seriously, such a view falls short of accounting for a range of additional functions which clefts are able to fulfill in discourse and which can conventionalize in language-specific ways. By way of conclusion, Section 5 will summarize the discussion and point out some more general implications for the interface of syntax and information structure.

2.

English it-clefts and their counterparts in EUROPARL

International political institutions with two or more official languages have become an important source for designing parallel corpora. For linguists wishing to examine Germanic and Romance languages from a comparative vantage point, the multilingual proceedings of the European Parliament constitute a particularly attractive collection of data. In version three, the EUROPARL corpus has contents ranging from 1996 through 2006. All eleven languages that have enjoyed official status in the European Union since 1996 are included. Five of them belong to Germanic (English, Dutch, German, Danish, and Swedish), four to Romance (French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese), and two to neither branch (Finnish and Greek). For each language, the amount of text contained in the version two database totals up to forty-four million words. Although the corpus has been primarily set up to promote research into statistical machine translation (Koehn 2005), it is searchable in ways equally relevant to linguists with non-computational interests. What makes this database particularly useful for contrastive investigations is the fact that the results found in one language can be sentence-aligned with the translational equivalents in the other ten languages, or in any proper subset thereof. For the formulation of our own query searches, we accessed EUROPARL via the OPUS multilingual search interface (Tiedemann & Nygaard 2004). This interface permits the formulation of queries as regular expressions over attributes, and provides standard operators such as disjunction (|), a “match any word” wildcard ([]), the Kleene star (*), and search limit terms such as “within s”, to specify that no sentence-final punctuation mark may intervene within the sequence of expressions in the query string. These options, in turn, make it possible to search for English sentences which conform to specific syntactic templates, such as the one instantiated by it-clefts. Canonical instances of it-cleft structures begin with the cleft pronoun it, which is followed by a third person singular copula form. Next comes a clefted phrasal con-

. In version three of EUROPARL, speaker attribute tags are provided for many of the corpus texts. Most interestingly for our purposes, this mark-up information includes the original language in which the speech was delivered. All citations from EUROPARL in the present paper are identified by date and speaker identity.



Clefting and discourse organization

stituent of arbitrary category and size, and finally an embedded clause headed by a relative pronoun, relative adverb, or that. In Prince (1978: 883 n.1), this structural make-up is summarized in the formula It is/was Ci which/who(m)/that/Ø S–Ci, where Ci represents the clefted constituent, and S–Ci the embedded clause which follows the relativizer. Collins (1991: 34–36) develops this surface description somewhat further by including designated positions for negation and for adverbials, which optionally may occur within the matrix clause. Notice, however, that none of these modifications affects the linear ordering of the cleft pronoun it, the matrix copula, and the relative item. A second amendment to Prince’s schema suggested by Collins is the addition of when and where, and of relative pronouns headed by a preposition, to the set of available subordinators. According to some authors (Smits 1989: 299–300; Ball 1994b), even more relative-like items should be taken into consideration, specifically whose, what and how, since all of these occur, albeit marginally, as subordinating elements in it-clefts. All in all, this modified structural description translates into the query string given under (5): (5) Search string for English it-cleft candidates “It|it” “is|was” []* “that|which|who|whom|when|where|whose|what|how” within s

To be sure, the query string in (5) will fail to yield the totality of cleft candidates, because at least in the following cases, it-clefts will not be detected, or at best will be hit as a fluke: (i) if the cleft pronoun and the matrix copula are inverted (6a); (ii) if the matrix clause contains a complex, or epistemically qualified, form of the copula (6b); (iii) if the cleft relativizer is null. Such null relative items may occur with clefted objects, cf. (6c) and (1b) above, and with certain oblique arguments and adverbials: (6) It-clefts not systematically detected by the search string under (5) a. Is it they who will have to meet the cost?  [EP 01–09–05, Speaker 273, Spanish original] b. It must be they who call the shots in terms of rests and the distribution of working time. [EP 03–01–14, Speaker 46, Spanish original]

. Syntactically, the cleft “annex clause” (Quirk et al. 1985: 1387) introduced by that is Janusfaced, exhibiting both relative clause-like and complement clause-like properties. Nonetheless, for the sake of simplicity, and in conformity with most recent literature, we will refer to all subordinating elements in the embedded part of clefts as relative items. Traditional claims in the grammatical literature according to which that and null relative items are strongly preferred over wh-pronouns in it-clefts, are disproved, convincingly in our eyes, by Ball (1994b). . A fourth case not covered by the query string in (5) are cleft clauses in which the matrix copula form is reduces to ’s. However, this omission is without consequences, since the reduced variant is regularly avoided in the English EUROPARL proceedings.

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c. And it is this fundamental question we must tackle. [EP 98–03–10, Speaker 108, French original] After having conducted several supplementary queries, we may deduce that inversion of cleft pronoun and cleft copula, as well as complex copulas, occurs with very low frequency in the corpus. By contrast, null relativizers seem to constitute the largest group of it-cleft sentences which cannot be systematically searched in EUROPARL, given that null relativizers are not coded. These limitations notwithstanding, executing the query under (5) produces almost 60,000 results. In order to keep this host of search hits to a manageable size, we arbitrarily selected the first 3,000 it-cleft candidates for the subsequent analysis. Of course, all these candidates had to be checked individually, to eliminate cleft lookalikes such as It is a task that seemed almost insurmountable [EP 02–1–17, Speaker 35], with predicational instead of equational semantics, and lacking a monoclausal equivalent.

In the end, 459 English it-clefts were retained. Subsequently, we studied the translational counterparts of these sentences in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Notice first, that Italian and Portuguese permit, in certain cases at least, cleft sentences construed by means of non-finite subordination (Frison 1989: 201–206; Metzeltin 1989: 199), as is demonstrated by (7), whereas infinitival clefts are absent from German, French and Spanish: (7) EP 02–09–26, Speaker 13, English original E […] that it is Commissioner L. who is here this morning. Ger […] dass es heute Vormittag Kommissar L. ist, der bei uns weilt. that it today morning commissioner L. be-prs.3sg who at us stay- prs.3sg Fr […] que ce soit le commissaire L. qui se trouve ici ce matin. that it be-sbjv.3sg the commissioner L. who 3refl find-prs.3sg here this morning It […] che sia il Commissario L. ad intervenire in Aula stamattina. that be-sbjv.3sg the commissioner L. to intervene.inf in room this- morning . Cf. also Gómez González & Gonzálvez-García (2005: 162), who only find six complex copula forms within a total of 422 cleft clauses in their corpus. . In Collins’ (1991: 35) corpus study, it-clefts with a null relative make up 14.4% of all it-cleft occurrences.

. In English, the existence of it-clefts with non-finite embedded clauses is mentioned by Ward, Birner & Huddleston (2002: 1420). The authors give the example Is it Kim making all the noise? We have not been able to extend our query in order to systematically collect such sentences and evaluate them as cleft clause candidates. However, several queries for individual cases strongly suggest that clefting by means of non-finite subordination is definitely a minor option in English, at least in the EUROPARL corpus.



Clefting and discourse organization

Sp Pt

[…] que sea el Comisario L. quien esté aquí esta mañana. that be-sbjv.3sg the commissioner L. who be-sbjv.3sg here this morn- ing […] que seja o Senhor Comissário L. a estar presente esta manhã. that be-sbjv.3sg the sir commissioner L. to be.inf present this morning

A second aspect of syntactic variability worth mentioning is that in languages such as German, Spanish, or Portuguese, where constituent ordering in copula clauses enjoys some flexibility, this variation is directly reflected in clefts. In particular, the cleft constituent can, and sometimes has to, occur before the cleft copula, as is the case in the German version of (8), with obligatory verb-final syntax, and in the Spanish version, where the fronting of the clefted constituent is optional (notice that in (8), Portuguese maintains the canonical ordering where the copula comes first). (8) EP 02–03–14, Speaker 95, Swedish original E […] that it is Vladimir V. who has stopped economic reforms. Ger […] dass es Vladimir V. ist, der die Wirtschaftsreformen gestoppt hat. that it Vladimir V. be-prs.3sg who the economic-reforms stop-pst-ptcp have-prs.3sg Fr […] c’est bien Vladimir V. qui a mis un frein aux réformes économiques. it be-prs.3sg indeed Vladimir V. who have-prs.3sg put-pst-ptcp a brake to-the reforms economic It […] Dobbiamo […] individuare in Vladimir V. colui che ha bloccato le riforme economiche. have-to-prs.1pl identify.inf in Vladimir V. the-one that have-prs.3sg block.pst-ptcp the reforms economic Sp […] que Vladimir V. es quien ha frenado las reformas económicas. that Vladimir V. be-prs.3sg who have-prs.3sg brake.pst-ptcp the reforms economic Pt […] que foi Vladimir V. quem acabou com as reformas económicas. that be-perf.3sg Vladimir V. who finish-perf.3sg with the reforms eco- nomic

In the present study, tokens such as the German and Spanish versions in (8) were counted as counterparts of English it-clefts, irrespective of the relative ordering of the copula and clefted constituent. We only excluded from consideration those clefts in which the embedded part precedes the matrix clause, since these correspond to another class of English cleft structures, of the type What I want is music, often referred to as basic pseudo-clefts in the literature. In any case, such . Published corpus studies have not supplied converging results for the relative frequency of English it-clefts and pseudo-clefts, both of the basic What I want is music and of the reversed Music is what I want pseudo-cleft type. In writing, it-clefts are reported to occur more

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pseudo-cleft counterparts of English it-clefts only occurred in a very small number of cases in the German and Romance versions. Finally, in five instances neither the search interface nor manual file searches yielded a correct translational alignment. The absolute and relative frequencies of it-cleft counterparts in the five languages under study are given in Table 1. Table 1.  Translational equivalents of 459 English it-clefts in EUROPARL

No (correct) equivalent found It-cleft equivalents Non-it-cleft equivalents Ratio of it-clefts among correct equivalents

German

French

Italian

Spanish

Portuguese

0 39 420 8.5 %

0 273 186 59.5 %

2 180 277 39.4 %

1 172 286 37.6 %

2 261 196 57.1 %

The principal findings that emerge from the numbers in Table 1 are clear: First, French and Portuguese seem to favor clefting to a significantly higher extent than the other three languages. Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, the odd one out is German, where the proportion of clefting is strikingly inferior to all Romance versions of the parliamentary proceedings. In fact, cases such as (7) or (9), where all language versions under study resort to clefting, are clearly exceptional.10 Still, German cleft structures cannot simply be dismissed as artifacts brought into the language by translators, since in several cases, they occur in speeches which were delivered in German, cf. (9). (9) EP 02–06–12, Speaker 189, German original E Because it is they who create the most jobs. Ger Denn sie sind es, die in der Mehrzahl die Arbeitsplätze schaffen. for they be-prs.3pl it who in the majority the jobs create-prs.3pl often than either subtype of pseudo-clefts (Prince 1978: 886), whereas the inverse seems to hold true in spoken language, especially so in spontaneous dialogue (Collins 1991: 179; Hedberg & ­Fadden 2007: 51). Upon closer scrutiny, however, we may surmise that the use of it-clefts is favored by the formal, scripted character of discourse rather than by the medium of writing itself. Within scripted discourse, it is in argumentative genres where it-clefts clearly prevail. This, in turn, makes EUROPARL a particularly promising place to collect it-clefts in the first place. 10. To be sure, these quantitative data can only provide evidence for differential clefting propensities within German and Romance, whereas they do not permit to draw conclusions about the relative frequencies of cleft structures in English and any of the other languages under study. To this end, one would have to perform additional corpus searches, and check whether clefts in German or in one of the Romance languages correspond to non-clefted versions in English. Some tentative queries for translational equivalents of French c’est-clefts in French suffice to demonstrate that this situation obtains in a considerable number of cases.



Clefting and discourse organization

Fr It Sp Pt

[…] car ce sont elles qui créent la plupart des emplois. for it be-prs.3pl they-fem who create-prs.3pl the most.part of-the jobs […] in quanto sono questi ultimi che nella maggior parte dei casi creano posti di lavoro. in sofar-as be-prs.3pl these last.ones that in.the major part of.the cases create-prs.3pl posts of work Pues son éstas las que crean el mayor número de puestos de trabajo. since be-prs.3pl these-fem that create-prs.3pl the major number of posts of work […] que são elas que criam a maior parte dos postos de trabalho. because be-prs.3pl they-fem that create-prs.3pl the major part of.the posts of work

More commonly, however, some or all of the Romance languages employ clefting, while German does not, as in (8) above or in (10): (10) EP 99–11–16, Speaker 205, Swedish original E It is on this matter that I should like to see the Commission take action. Ger Gerade in dieser Frage wünsche ich mir Taten von seiten der Kommission. just in this question wish-prs.1sg I me-dat actions from side of.the commission Fr C’est là-dessus que je voudrais voir la Commission agir. it be-prs.3sg there-above that I want-cond.1sg see-inf the commission take.action It È su questo piano che desidero che la Commissione intervenga. be-prs.3sg on this plane that wish-prs.1sg that the commission inter- vene-sbjv.3sg Sp Es en relación con esto donde yo quisiera ver que la Comisión hace algo. be-prs.3sg in relation with this where I wish-pst-sbjv.1sg see-inf that the commission do-prs.3sg something Pt É sobre isto que eu quero ver a Comissão tomar uma iniciativa. be-prs.3sg on this that I want-prs.1sg see-inf the commission take a initiative The aim of the following section is to investigate if, and possibly how, the observed gradation in frequency of clefting is amenable to a principled explanatory account. In 3.1, we will discuss whether theories that treat it-cleft structures as monofunctional focus constructions stand up to the results of the present study. Subsection 3.2 will briefly explore a semantic alternative, before we move on in 3.3 to descriptive accounts of clefts that do not assume a one-to-one-relationship between syntactic form and information packaging function. More specifically, we will propose to relate the cross-linguistic differences in our data to the pragmatic typologies of clefts that have been suggested.

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3.

Comparing the uses of clefts

3.1

Focusing as an invariant cleft function?

As mentioned at the beginning, the capacity of it-cleft structures to unambiguously mark focus on the clefted constituent has already been noted by nineteenth-century grammarians, and continues to figure prominently in the linguistic literature to the present day. In fact, a significant number of authors, both of generative and of functionalist persuasions, take this information packaging capacity of it-clefts to be their only raison d’être. Within cartographic syntax, for instance, it has been proposed that all clefted constituents are moved into a designated focus projection in the left periphery (É. Kiss 1998, 1999) and that, ultimately, cleft configurations can even be captured in a monoclausal analysis within a sufficiently fine-structured complementizer phrase (É. Kiss 1998; Meinunger 1998). In non-derivational frameworks, relationships of pragmatic role assignment have been postulated, whereby the cleft copula, possibly in conjunction with the cleft pronoun, achieves focus on the clefted constituent (Lambrecht 2001: 470). Certainly, these monofunctional theories of clefting carry important typological implications. Given that in the world’s languages, clefting is but one of several means to focus individual constituents, any general theory of cleft usage must seek to situate clefting within a gamut of competing focus marking strategies. Leaving aside for the moment focus particles, which often carry additive or restrictive components of meaning, these alternatives can roughly be classified into three types. In the first type, prosody, in particular sentence accent and phrasing, functions as the sole exponent of constituent focus in situ. In the second type, by contrast, focus structure also manifests itself in syntactic ordering, in that the focused constituent is positioned ex situ, i.e. in a non-canonical place of occurrence. Finally, a third possibility, in particular for signaling argument focus, is to encode the focused argument in a non-minimal way. Examples of such non-minimal coding include overt subject pronouns in null subject languages, especially when placed post-verbally, cf. Sp Pago yo ‘I pay’. In languages that offer a choice between full and clitic object pro-forms, the use of full object pronouns, possibly in concomitance with clitic-doubling instead of clitic-only expression, constitutes another case of non-minmal coding of focused arguments. Notice that unlike clefting, which splits up simple clauses into a biclausal format, the alternative marking options do not introduce additional clausal nodes. In terms of grammatical economy principles, clefting therefore appears to be the most costly marking type, which should be avoided whenever the grammar of the language licenses a clause-internal focusing variant. Indeed, clefts have been characterized as “compensatory devices” more than once (Doherty 2001: 457; Di Tullio 2006: 487). Although it is limited to the division of labor between clause-internal rearrangement options and clefting, the following remark by Jespersen appears to anticipate such a view:



Clefting and discourse organization

In some, though not in all cases, this construction [the cleft construction, AD] may be considered one of the means by which the disadvantages of having a comparatively rigid grammatical word-order (SVO) can be obviated. This explains why it is that similar constructions are not found, or are not used extensively, in languages in which the word order is considerably less rigid than in English, French, or the Scandinavian languages, thus German, Spanish and Slavic.   (Jespersen 1937: 85)

Following Jespersen’s lead, and adding accent-only focus marking to the picture, Lambrecht (2001: 488) postulates a similar typological trade-off between discoursegoverned prosodic and syntactic flexibility, on the one hand, and the frequency of clefting, on the other hand. Within Romance, non-canonical orderings of major constituents are more readily available in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese than in French, where deviations from the basic declarative subject−verb−object order have become severely constrained over time. Moreover, Modern French is well-known for its relatively inflexible sentence accentuation, a property that has been considered primordial for the diachronic rise of clefting in French (Wehr 2005; see Dufter 2008 for discussion). In fact, as we have seen in the previous section, French is significantly ahead of Italian and Spanish in terms of clefting frequency. However, several objections can be raised against this trade-off view of clefting: First, it is surprising that Portuguese attains an almost equally high score of cleft equivalents as French, even though its sentence prosody and constituent order are considerably more flexible than those of French. Second, the extent of the difference between Romance and German cleft usage, as attested by the percentages of Table 1, might appear somewhat unexpected – especially if one keeps in mind the quote from Jespersen, where German and Spanish are grouped together. A third objection to the compensation theory of clefting is that diachronically, clefting is reported to have been on the rise not only in French, but also in Italian (Roggia 2006a,b), Spanish (Helfrich 2003) and Portuguese (Longhin 1999), even though none of the latter three Romance languages has undergone restrictions of prosodic and syntactic flexibility comparable to French. But the most serious problem for the trade-off view becomes clear as soon as we go through the corpus data: In an impressive number of cases, the Romance text versions resort to clefting even though monoclausal focus markings would equally be available. Such clefting ‘beyond necessity’ is illustrated in (11), from a speech delivered in Spanish. The occurrence of clefts in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, the three null subject languages in our small sample, appears unnecessary, since subject focus could arguably have been marked by an overt pronoun alone. (11) EP 03–01–14, Speaker 43, Spanish original E On the basis of Mr Markov’s proposals, and with his cooperation, the report has developed, leading to greater flexibility for the driver, because it is the driver who is aware of levels of tiredness at any given moment.

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Ger […] denn er selbst weiß, wie müde er zum jeweiligen Zeitpunkt ist. for he himself know-prs.3sg how tired he to-the respective moment be-prs.3sg Fr […] parce que c’est lui qui sait le niveau de fatigue qu’il a atteint à chaque moment. because it be-prs.3sg he-strong-pron who know-prs.3sg the level of tiredness that he have-prs.3sg reach.pst-ptcp at each moment It […] dopotutto è questi a sapere quanto si sente stanco in ciascun momento. after-all be-prs.3sg these to know.inf how-much 3refl feel-prs.3sg tired in each moment Sp […] porque es él quien sabe qué nivel de cansancio tiene en cada momento. because be-prs.3sg he who know-prs.3sg which level of tiredness have-prs.3sg in each moment Pt […] porque é ele que conhece o seu nível de cansaço em cada momento. because be-prs.3sg he who know-prs.3sg the his level of tiredness in each moment Additional examples are not hard to come by. Moreover, some corpus searches for clefted subject pronouns in Romance suffice to demonstrate that this pattern cannot be dismissed as induced by translation, since clefted subject pronouns are found with surprising frequency in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese speeches. By contrast, English translators decleft in a number of cases, as in (12): (12) EP 97–12–17, Speaker 229, Portuguese original E I take the risk, I pay for the things. Ger Ich trage das Risiko, ich komme für die Kosten auf. I carry-prs.1sg the risk I come-prs.1sg for the costs up Fr Tout le risque est pour moi, c’est moi qui paie. all the risk be-prs.3sg for me it be-prs.3sg I-strong-pron who  pay-prs.1sg It Lo faccio a mio rischio, sono io a pagare. it-dir-obj do-prs.1sg at my risk be-prs.1sg I to pay.inf Sp El riesgo es mío, soy yo quien pago las cosas. the risk be-prs.3sg mine be-prs.1sg I who pay-prs.1sg the things Pt O risco é meu, sou eu que pago as coisas. the risk be-prs.3sg mine be-prs.1sg I who pay-prs.1sg the things When we examine both pronominal and lexical subjects in focus, our data leave no doubt that clefting occurs in all Romance languages, even in cases where focus is already indicated otherwise, e.g. by means of emphatic particles such as It stessa ‘herself ’ or Sp propia ‘the very’:



Clefting and discourse organization

(13) EP 03–06–04, Speaker 27, French original E Of course, the work of the Convention […] is vast, but it was the Convention that wanted it that way. Ger […] aber der Konvent hat es selbst so gewollt. but the convention have-prs.3sg it-acc itself so want-pst-ptcp Fr […] mais c’est elle qui l’a voulu ainsi. but it be-prs.3sg she who it-dir-obj have-prs.3sg want-pst-ptcp so It […] ma è la stessa Convenzione ad averlo voluto. but be-prs.3sg the same convention to have.inf.it-dir-obj  want.pst-ptcp Sp […] pero ha sido la propia Convención la que lo ha querido así. but have-prs.3sg be.pst-ptcp the very convention the that it-dir-obj  have-prs.3sg want.pst-ptcp so Pt […] mas foi ela que assim o quis. but be-perf.3sg she that so it-dir-obj want-perf.3sg At least for clefted subjects, therefore, it seems safe to assume that a significant portion of cleft occurrences cannot be interpreted as a compensatory strategy employed for want of better alternatives. Our findings therefore shed considerable doubt on the compensatory device theory of clefting. In the next subsection, we will briefly explore an alternative view which does not pinpoint the unifying aspect of clefts in information packaging, but rather in semantics.

3.2

Exhaustivity as an invariant aspect of cleft meaning?

In line with much earlier generative work, notably Szabolcsi (1981) and É. Kiss (1998), Gussenhoven (2007: 96) has recently revived the view that the purportedly focus marking function of clefts is at most epiphenomenal, whereas all occurrences of clefting can be brought down to a simple common denominator in terms of quantificational semantics: By virtue of clefting, an exhaustive interpretation is enforced on the clefted constituent. Under this view, a sentence such as Jespersen’s It is the wife that decides in (1a) must be considered semantically equivalent to Only the wife decides, a prediction which, intuitively at least, stands to reason. A second prediction seems no less plausible: Since certain expressions, notably those with universal quantifiers, do not allow restrictive modification (cf. *only nobody, *only everybody), it naturally falls out that they do not sit comfortably in a clefted position either. Actually, sentences such as It is nobody/everybody that I want to see will probably be judged as odd by many speakers. Although this semantic alternative to monofunctional theories of cleft information packaging may seem promising at first sight, it is unfortunately not without its problems either. To begin with, if exhaustivity were indeed part of the semantic content expressed by the particular cleft format, one might wonder why restrictive particles

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such as only occur as modifiers of clefted constituents in the first place – recall that, in general, expressions with restrictive semantics cannot be combined felicituously (cf. ?only exclusively the wife). By contrast, clefts such as in (14) are fine, and do not convey any impression of redundancy in neither English nor French nor Portuguese, the languages that resort to the cleft format in this case: (14) EP 99–03–10, Speaker 26, English original E It is only on that basis that a balanced approach can be found. Ger Nur auf dieser Grundlage ist ein ausgewogener Ansatz möglich. only on this basis be-prs.3sg a balanced approach possible Fr C’est uniquement sur cette base qu’une approche équilibrée peut être envisagée. it be-prs.3sg uniquely on this basis that a approach balanced can-prs.3sg be-inf envisage.pst-ptcp It Solo su tale base è possibile definire un approccio equilibrato. only on such-a basis be-prs.3sg possible define.inf a approach bal- anced Sp Solamente sobre esa base podremos encontrar un enfoque equilibrado. only on this basis can-fut.1pl find.inf a approach balanced Pt Só nessa base é que se poderá encontrar uma abordagem equilibrada. only on-this basis be-prs.3sg that 3refl can-fut.3sg find.inf a approach balanced Sentences such as (15) constitute a second kind of data that is hardly compatible with an exhaustive semantics view of clefting (cf. also Hedberg 1990: 152–155, 2006: 391). In (15), an additive focus particle occurs with scope over the clefted constituent. Again, if exhaustivity was really an integral meaning component of the cleft construction, the clefted element in (15) would have to be able to be paraphrased as ?only also out of respect for your electorate, which seems to be of doubtful acceptability at best. We have provided the larger context in which (15) occurs in order to illustrate that the example does not seem to instantiate the special type “It is only X that P. It is also only X that Q”, where additive and exhaustive marking do not enter in contradiction. Notice that not only English, but also all Romance versions that resort to clefting – French, Italian, and Spanish – employ an additive particle in (15). (15) EP 97–09–17, Speaker 146, French original E [I see that we could spend another hour playing cat and mouse on this sub ject. But I am not going to take the place of the nationally elected Members of Parliament who, I am confident, will be able to interpret the texts as they have been agreed. They will also be able, as will both you and your colleague here present, to read the text and thus convince their electorate.] Moreover, it is also out of respect for your electorate that, as President-in-Office of the Council, I do not wish to set myself up as judge.



Clefting and discourse organization

Ger Im übrigen möchte ich mich auch aus Respekt vor Ihren Wählern als amtie render Ratspräsident nicht zum Richter erheben. moreover want-prs.1sg I me-acc also out-of respect for your voters as in-office Council.President not to-the judge raise.inf Fr D’ailleurs, c’est également par respect pour vos électeurs qu’en tant que pré sident en exercice du Conseil, je ne désire pas m’ériger en juge. moreover it be-prs.3sg also out-of respect for your voters that as pres- ident in office of-the council I neg1 want-prs.1sg neg2 me-dir-obj raise.inf in judge It D’altro canto, è anche per rispetto ai vostri elettori che, in quanto presidente del Consiglio, non desidero ergermi a giudice. of other corner be-prs.3sg also out-of respect at-the your voters that as president of-the council not want-prs.1sg raise.inf.me-dir-obj to judge Sp Además, por respeto a sus electores y como Presidente en ejercicio del Consejo, no deseo atribuirme el papel de juez. moreover out-of respect to your voters and as president in office of-the council not want-prs.1sg ascribe.inf.me-dir-obj the role of judge Pt Para além disso, é igualmente por respeito pelos vossos eleitores que, na qualidade de presidente em exercício do Conselho, não desejo erigir-me em juiz. for beyond say.pst-ptcp be-prs.3sg equally out-of respect for-the your voters that in-the quality of president in office of-the council not want-prs.1sg raise.inf me-dir-obj in judge A third objection to exhaustive cleft semantics comes from sentences of the kind exemplified by (16) and (17): (16) EP 02–03–13, Speaker 22, Danish original E In this case, it is everyone who is being discriminated against. Ger In dieser Hinsicht werden alle Bürger diskriminiert. in this respect become-prs.3pl all citizens discriminate.pst-ptcp Fr À ce propos, ce sont tous les citoyens qui font l’objet d’une discrimination. at this respect it be-prs.3pl all the citizens who make-prs.3pl the object of a discrimination It Così vengono discriminati tutti i cittadini. so come-prs.3pl discriminate.pst-ptcp all the citizens Sp En este punto son todos los ciudadanos los discriminados. in this point be-prs.3pl all the citizens the discriminated Pt Neste ponto, todos os cidadãos são alvo de discriminação. in.this point all the citizens be-prs.3pl target of discrimination

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(17) EP 03–09–01, Speaker 66, French original E It is whole swathes of the economy that are wiped out. Ger Ganze Wirtschaftsbereiche wurden vernichtet. whole economy.fields become-pst.3pl destroy.pst-ptcp Fr Ce sont des pans entiers de l’économie qui sont anéantis. it be-prs.3pl art.indef.pl sides whole of the economy who be-prs.3pl annihilate.pst-ptcp It Interi settori dell’economia vengono così distrutti. whole sectors of-the economy come-prs.3pl so destroyed.pst-ptcp Sp Sectores enteros de la economía quedan reducidos a la nada. sectors entire of the economy remain-prs.3pl reduce.pst-ptcp at the nothing Pt São parcelas inteiras da economia que ficaram reduzidas a cinza. be-prs.3pl sectors entire of-the economy that get-pst.3pl reduce.pst- ptcp to ash In (16) and (17), the constituents which occur in the clefted position defy restrictive modification (?only everyone, ?only whole swathes of the economy). Nevertheless, English, French and Portuguese have clefts in both examples. Finally, and more generally, if sentence pairs such as It is the wife that decides and Only the wife decides were indeed fully synonymous, the question arises for proponents of economy principles why speakers sometimes choose the more complex clefted variant in the first place. Needless to say, counterparts to English only are available for restrictive modification of constituents in German and Romance as well, so that exhaustivity marking alone will not suffice to account for cleft use there either, let alone for the quantitative differences observed. In summary, the occurrence of universally quantified clefted constituents, and of restrictive and additive focus particles as modifiers of other clefted constituents, count against exhaustivity as an invariable semantic aspect of cleft clauses. To our mind, the data strongly suggest that it should rather be analyzed as a preferred interpretation, that is, as a generalized conversational implicature in the sense detailed by Levinson (2000) (cf. also Horn 1981). It is to be expected then that such exhaustivity implicatures can be reinforced, as happens to be the case in only-clefts, cf. (14), but also canceled, a property which licenses also-clefts such as (15). That said, we do not wish to deny that, in many cases, implicating exhaustivity may indeed be a motivating factor for the recourse to this particular syntactic format. Crucially in the context of the present discussion, however, exhaustivity is of little help in explaining the differential occurrence of clefts. In the next subsection, we will return to the issue of focus–background structure in clefts and look out for cross-linguistic differences in their information packaging capacities.



3.3

Clefting and discourse organization

Information-structural types of cleft clauses and their distribution

In contradistinction to the monofunctional view of clefting expounded so far, Prince (1978) distinguishes between two principal pragmatic types of it-cleft sentences. In the first type, referred to as stressed-focus cleft by Prince, the main prosodic prominence falls onto the clefted constituent, signaling that the focus domain is equal to this expression, or its denotation, or possibly a subpart of one of them. Inversely, all linguistic material contained in the subordinate clause – or, in semantic terms, in the open proposition encoded by that material – is backgrounded. According to Prince, stressed-focus clefts in English coexist with a second pragmatic type, which she designates by the term informative-presupposition it-cleft. In this class, the embedded clause encodes information which the speaker assumes to be new to the addressee, and wishes to add to the interlocutors’ common ground. Following standard assumptions about focus as indicating the presence of relevant alternatives (Krifka 2006), informative-presupposition clefts can be, and have been, characterized as structures where some part or all of the embedded clause is in focus. In any event, the occurrence of informative-presupposition clefts seems to militate against a unitary information-structural analysis of it-cleft sentences in English. Indeed, many studies of clefting inspired by Prince (1978) have even argued for more fine-grained distinctions. While the proposals put forth in the literature differ in terminology, and in details of information-structural architecture, most of them distinguish, in some way or other, between (i) a type that corresponds to Prince’s stressed-focus clefts, and two subclasses of informative-presupposition clefts: (ii) a type where focus – or addressee-new information – is restricted to the embedded clause,11 and (iii) a type that may be characterized as all-focus or all-new, where the whole cleft clause is the domain of a single sentence-focus.12 Following Collins (1991), we may refer to these three classes as Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3, respectively. 11. It is a matter of debate whether the entire clefted constituent can be analyzed as background in Type 2 it-clefts, or whether the cleft format necessarily achieves focus somewhere in this position. Notice, however, that clefted expressions in Type 2 clefts tend to be short and anaphoric, and arguably do not contrast with relevant alternatives in the discursive contexts in which they occur. See Hedberg (1990: Chapter 6) for discussion of the topic characteristics of such clefted constituents. 12. For English clefts cf. Declerck (1984, 1988), Geluykens (1988), Hedberg (1990), Collins (1991), and Delin (1992). Recent surveys and refinements can be found in Collins (2006),­ ­Gómez González (2007) and Hedberg & Fadden (2007). For Romance languages, the nonuniform nature of clefting with respect to information packaging has similarly been acknowledged in the majority of recent studies. These include for French Schöpp (2002, 2003), Clech-Darbon, ­Rebuschi & Rialland (1999), Doetjes, Rebuschi & Rialland (2004) and Scappini (2006), for Italian D’Achille, Proietti & Viviani (2005), Schöpp (2005) and Roggia (2006a,b), for Spanish ­Morales (2005), and for Portuguese Reichmann (2005). Most work on Romance builds upon the classifications developed for English by Prince (1978) and her successors.

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In ­Huber (2002: 174–184, 2006), additional subdivisions are proposed. Most importantly in the present context, Huber identifies a class of multiple-focus cleft clauses, where one focus domain is coextensional with, or a proper subpart of, the clefted constituent, just as in ordinary Type 1 clefts, while at the same time the embedded part displays an additional focus-background articulation. From this point onwards, we will refer to Type 1 clefts with an all-background embedded clause as Type 1a, and to multiple-focus clefts as Type 1b. Table 2 summarizes the resulting classification: Table 2.  Information-structural types of clefts Type 1a Type 1b Type 2 Type 3

Clefted constituent

Embedded clause

… XFocus … … XFocus1 … […]Background All focus

[…]Background … XFocus2… … XFocus …

Such distinctions notwithstanding, the stressed-focus type has figured so prominently in the linguistic literature that much work subsequent to Prince (1978) continues to regard its focus-background partition as a defining property of it-clefts in general. While proponents of a syntactic notion of focus structure tend to assume such a oneto-one correspondence between syntax and information structure without discussion, Lambrecht (2001: 483–485) explicitly takes issue with Prince’s claims. His main objection against postulating a separate subclass of informative-presupposition clefts is that these do not appear to present grammatical differences when compared with stressed-focus clefts.13 According to Lambrecht, the distinction between these two types is inherently context-dependent, and gradual rather than categorical. To account for the class of ‘special’ informative presupposition uses of clefts, he resorts to the pragmatic notion of presuppositional accommodation (Lewis 1979). Accommodation has traditionally been conceived of as a kind of repair strategy, whereby the addressee adds the presupposed proposition to the set of all propositions which he or she assumes to be part of the interlocutors’ common ground (Beaver & Zeevat 2007). Notice that nowhere in this characterization is reference being made to language-specific aspects of structure. Therefore, the null hypothesis must be that accommodation is a universally available adaptive mechanism to enhance communicative efficiency. This leads us to expect, then, that informative-presupposition clefts, be they of Type 2 or Type 3, should likewise be universally attested, and that all languages should have equal propensity to employ clefts with this particular pragmatic profile. However, the findings from our corpus study fly in the face of this prediction. Indeed, our data set provides evidence for salient differences within Romance, and between Romance and German, in what typically appears as the translational coun13. Cf. however Dikken (2008) for a discussion of some peculiar syntactic traits of informativepresupposition it-clefts.



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terpart of English it-clefts. These differences become obvious when we categorize the English cleft tokens roughly into the types given in Table 2, after having examined each sentence within its larger context of occurrence.14 The upshot of such an analysis is that in EUROPARL, the majority of English it-clefts are of Type 2 (cf. also Delin 1992: 293), an observation that may come as a surprise, given grammarians’ penchants for Type 1a stressed-focus clefts. To be sure, Type 1 clefts, both of the single focus 1a and of the multiple focus 1b subtype, do occur in all languages under study. In fact, almost all of the German cleft structures in our corpus are of Type 1. Similarly to multiple wh-questions, multiple focus clefts clearly constitute a minor subtype in terms of token frequencies. That said, they show up with some regularity in cases where two contrasts need to be marked in parallel, as in (18). (18) EP 03–09–02, Speaker 287, Greek original E […] that it is not the individual’s disability that needs to be corrected, it is the restraining environment that must adapt […] Ger […] dass es nicht die Behinderung des Individuums ist, die korrigiert werden muss, sondern das restriktive Umfeld, welches […] angepasst wer den muss. that it not the disability of-the individual be-prs.3sg that correct.pst- ptcp become.inf must-prs.3sg but the restraining environment that […] adapt.pst-ptcp become.inf must-prs.3sg Fr […] que ce n’est pas au handicap d’un individu qu’il faut remédier, mais que c’est l’environnement restrictif qui [doit] être adapté […] 14. Admittedly, there are some cleft occurrences which seem to defy unambiguous classification. This is particularly true of sentences with clefted subjects which establish a referent already introduced as the topic of the cleft (cf. (11) and (13) above). Gómez González (2007) refers to such cases as continuous-topic clefts, and describes their information-structural profile simply as old–new. Collins (1991: 163–166), who also takes into account givenness status in addition to focus–background structure, classifies these occurrences as Type 2. However, we think that these analyses suffer from their failure to distinguish between two kinds of givenness, called referential and relational givenness by Gundel (1988). Put simply, a referring expression is referentially given if and only if the discourse referent that it denotes has been previously introduced into the discourse representation. Relational givenness, by contrast, must be evaluated relative to the sentence wherein an expression occurs. In at least one explication of relational givenness, it can be equated with background status. In light of this, we think that even though the clefted constituent in cases such as (11) or (13) certainly is discourse-given, it can best be analyzed as a contrastive topic, which arguably exhibits topic and focus properties simultaneously. On the other hand, not all of the information conveyed by the embedded clause in these cases is backgrounded. This, in turn, would suggest that clauses with clefted discourse-given subjects are best analyzed as instantiating Type 1b. Fortunately for our classificatory enterprise, however, the number of such in-between information packagings is greatly outweighed by clear cases of Type 1, Type 2 or Type 3 cleft clauses.

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It Sp Pt

that it neg1 be-prs.3sg neg2 to-the disability of a individual that expl must-prs.3sg correct.inf but that it be-prs.3sg the environment restrain- ing that must-prs.3sg be.inf adapt.pst-ptcp […] che non è la disabilità a dover essere corretta, ma piuttosto l’ambiente costrittivo che deve adeguarsi […] that not be-prs.3sg the disability to must.inf be.inf correct.pst-ptcp but rather the environment restraining that must-prs.3sg adapt.inf.3refl […] que no es la discapacidad del individuo lo que debe corregirse, sino el entorno restrictivo el que debe adaptarse […] that not be-prs.3sg the disability of-the individual that must-prs.3sg correct.inf.3refl but the environment restraining the that must-prs.3sg adapt.3refl […] que não é a deficiência do indivíduo que tem de ser corrigida, é antes o ambiente restritivo que tem de se adaptar […] that not be-prs.3sg the disability of-the individual that must-prs.3sg to be.inf correct.pst-ptcp be-prs.3sg rather the environment restraining that must-prs.3sg to 3refl adapt.inf

In many instances, Type 2 cleft clauses single out adverbials. Semantically, these adverbial clefts come in two principal guises: In the first subclass, illustrated by (19), the clefted background element provides a spatiotemporal setting for the proposition expressed by the cleft, in this case repeating, and thereby reinstating, a previously established frame topic: (19) EP 06–01–19, Speaker 10, Dutch original E It is also in Iraqi Kurdistan that the European Union is being presented with an outstanding opportunity to make a substantial contribution to the urgent task of reconstructing Mesopotamia. Ger Auch im irakischen Kurdistan bietet sich der Europäischen Union heute hervorragende Gelegenheit, einen wesentlichen Beitrag zu der so dringli chen Aufgabe des Wiederaufbaus Mesopotamiens zu leisten. also in-the Iraqi Kurdistan offer-prs.3sg 3refl the-dat European Union today outstanding opportunity a substantial contribution to the so urgent task of-the reconstruction Mesopotamia.gen to achieve.inf Fr C’est également dans le Kurdistan irakien que se présente pour l’Union européenne l’occasion exceptionnelle d’apporter une contribution substan tielle à la tâche urgente de reconstruire la Mésopotamie. it be-prs.3sg also in the Kurdistan Iraqi that 3refl present-prs.3sg for the Union European the opportunity exceptional to bring.inf a contribu- tion substantial to the task urgent of reconstruct.inf the Mesopotamia



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It Sp Pt

È sempre nel Kurdistan iracheno che all’Unione europea viene offerta l’incredibile opportunità di dare un contributo sostanziale nell’urgente compito di ricostruzione della Mesopotamia. be-prs.3sg always in-the Kurdistan Iraqi that to-the Union European come-prs.3sg offer.pst-ptcp the incredible opportunity of give.inf a contribution substantial in-the urgent task of reconstruction of-the Mesopotamia En el Kurdistán iraquí se le ofrece a la Unión Europea una oportunidad excelente para realizar una contribución notable a la urgente tarea de reconstruir Mesopotamia. in the Kurdistan Iraqi 3refl 3cl-dat offer-prs.3sg to the Union European a opportunity excellent for realize.inf a contribution notable to the urgent task of reconstruct.inf Mesopotamia É também no Curdistão iraquiano que está a ser dada à União Europeia uma excelente oportunidade para contribuir de modo substancial para a tarefa da reconstrução da Mesopotâmia. be-prs.3sg also in-the Kurdistan Iraqi that be-prs.3sg to be.inf give. pst-ptcp to-the Union European a excellent opportunity for contribute. inf of way substantial for the task of reconstruction of Mesopotamia

In the second subclass, which is substantial in terms of token frequencies, the clefted adverbial expresses manner or cause, and often contains demonstratives or other anaphoric devices, cf. (20). Such instances of clefting typically enhance the argumentative cohesion of the text, and have aptly been characterized as “cohesive clefts” (Fr c’est … qui/que ‘cohésif ’, Krötsch & Sabban 1990: 93) “conjunctive periphrases” (Sp perífrasis conjuntivas, Moreno Cabrera 1999: 4281–4283) or “cleft connectors“ (Ger Spaltkonnektoren, Gil 2002: 216, Wienen 2006). Crucially in our context, such cohesive clefts are more popular in English, French and Portuguese than in either Italian or Spanish, whilst they appear to be avoided almost categorically in German. (20) EP 03–06–03, Speaker 252, English original E It is for this reason that, with the help of the European Parliament, the Commission has decided to make 2004 the European Year of Education through Sport. Ger Aus diesem Grunde hat die Kommission mit Unterstützung des Parlaments beschlossen, 2004 zum Europäischen Jahr der Erziehung durch Sport zu erklären. for this reason have-prs.3sg the commission with help of-the Parliament. gen decide.pst-ptcp 2004 to-the European year of-the education through sport to declare.inf

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Fr It Sp Pt

C’est pour cette raison que la Commission a décidé de faire de 2004, avec le soutien du Parlement européen, l’Année européenne de l’éducation par le sport. it be-prs.3sg for that reason that the commission have-prs.3sg decide.pst-ptcp to make.inf of 2004 with the support of-the Parliament European the year European of the education by the sport Per questo motivo, con l’aiuto del Parlamento europeo, la Commissione ha deciso di proclamare il 2004 Anno europeo dell’educazione attraverso lo sport. by this motive with the help of-the Parliament European the commission have-prs.3sg decide.pst-ptcp to proclaim.inf the 2004 year European of-the education through the sport Por este motivo, con la ayuda del Parlamento Europeo, la Comisión ha decidido que el año 2004 sea el Año Europeo de la Educación a través del Deporte. by this motive with the help of-the Parliament European the commis- sion have-prs.3sg decide.pst-ptcp that the year 2004 be-sbjv.3sg the year European of the education at through of-the sport Foi por essa razão que, com a ajuda do Parlamento Europeu, a Comissão decidiu declarar 2004 o Ano Europeu da Educação pelo Desporto. be-perf.3sg by this reason that with the help of-the Parliament European the commission decide-perf.3sg declare.inf 2004 the year European of-the education through-the sport

In French, some of the most general adverbial clefts, notably c’est ainsi que ‘that’s how’, literally ‘it is so that’ or c’est pour cela/ça que ‘that’s why’, literally ‘it is for that that’ are arguably on the verge of lexicalization (cf. Herslund 2005; Blanche-Benveniste 2006; cf. Wienen 2006 for an in-depth empirical study). Given that the informativeness of the cleft matrix clause is minimal, such sentences seem to be by and large constrained to Type 2 cohesive uses in the contemporary language. In a significant number of cases, these cohesive clefts signal that the speaker is moving on to another discursive segment (Berretta 1994), or serve to summarize or resume the argumentation developed so far in the parliamentary speech. Arguably, these cleft clause occurrences function as a kind of paragraph mark in discourse rather than as sentence-level focus marking devices. The resumptive function of clefts is illustrated in (21), one out of a large number of similar examples in the corpus, where the cleft sentence occurs in the concluding statement of parliamentary discourses. Notice that once more, it is English, French and Portuguese that choose to cleft in (21), whilst German, Italian and Spanish resort to different means of fronting the anaphoric expression: (21) EP 06–09–07, Speaker 137, German original E It is with this in mind that my group endorses this resolution.



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Ger In diesem Sinne unterstützt meine Fraktion die vorliegende Entschließung. in this sense support-prs.3sg my group the present resolution Fr C’est avec cette idée en tête que mon groupe a soutenu cette résolution. it be-prs.3sg with this idea in head that my group have-prs.3sg endorse. pst-ptcp this resolution It In tale spirito il mio gruppo sostiene la risoluzione in esame. in such-a spirit the my group support-prs.3sg the resolution in examina- tion Sp Teniendo esto en cuenta mi Grupo apoya esta resolución. have-gerund this in account my group support-prs.3sg this resolution Pt É nesta perspectiva que o meu grupo subscreve a presente resolução. be-prs.3sg in-this perspective that the my group sign-prs.3sg the present resolution Discourse-pragmatic functions are also arguably at work in Type 3 or all-new clefts. As might be expected, these typically occur at the beginning of a speech, often with clefted adverbials that set an emotional tune for the ensuing expository or argumentative discourse.15 A representative example of this cleft species is given in (22): (22) EP 02–09–05, Speaker 130, Swedish original E Mr President, Commissioner, it is with great sorrow that we follow the events in Nigeria. Ger […] Voller Sorge verfolgen wir die Ereignisse in Nigeria. full-gen sorrow-gen follow-prs.1pl we the events in Nigeria Fr […] c’est avec beaucoup de tristesse que l’on suit les événements qui se déroulent au Nigéria. it be-prs.3sg with much of sadness that one follow-prs.3sg the events which 3refl take-place.3pl in-the Nigeria It […] con grande apprensione stiamo seguendo i fatti in Nigeria. with great apprehension stand-prs.1pl follow-gerund the facts in Nigeria Sp […] hemos seguido los acontecimientos en Nigeria con gran preocupación. have-prs.1pl follow.pst-ptcp the events in Nigeria with great preoccupa- tion Pt […] é com grande pesar que acompanhamos os acontecimentos na Nigéria. be-prs.3sg with great affliction that follow-prs.1pl the events in-the Nigeria 15. Especially in informal spoken varieties of French, still other Type 3 cleft clause usages are found, in particular so-called presentational clefts (Lambrecht 2004), whereas clefted counterparts in English appear pragmatically odd in such cases (Katz 2000: 258).

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In (22), one might want to interpret the clefting of with great sorrow as a rhetorical strategy, which is chosen in order to enhance the emphatic force of the adverbial. However, in other cases, such as (23), such an elative motivation seems less convincing: (23) EP 02–10–09, Speaker 136, French original E Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, it is with mixed feelings of regret and satisfaction that I begin this evening’s debate on the creation of a European Union Solidarity Fund. Ger […] Ich nehme heute Abend mit gemischten Gefühlen an dieser Debatte über die Errichtung eines Solidaritätsfonds der Europäischen Union teil. I take-prs.1sg today evening with mixed feelings at this debate over the creation of-a solidarity.fund of-the European Union part Fr […] c’est ce soir avec un sentiment partagé entre regret et satisfaction que j’aborde ce débat sur la constitution d’un fonds de solidarité de l’Union européenne. it be-prs.3sg this evening with a feeling share.pst-ptcp between regret and satisfaction that I approach-prs.1sg this debate on the creation of a fund of solidarity of the Union European It […] intervengo nella discussione di questa sera sulla creazione di un Fondo di solidarietà dell’Unione europea con un misto di rammarico e soddisfazi one. intervene-prs.1sg in-the discussion of this evening on-the creation of a fund of solidarity of-the Union European with a mixture of regret and satisfaction Sp […] inicio mi intervención en el debate de esta tarde sobre la creación de un Fondo de Solidaridad de la Unión Europea con sentimientos encontra dos de pesar y de satisfacción. start-prs.1sg my intervention in the debate of this evening on the cre- ation of a fund of solidarity of the Union European with sentiments meet. pst-ptcp of grief and of satisfaction Pt […] é com um sentimento misto de satisfação e pesar que abordo o debate desta noite sobre a criação de um Fundo de Solidariedade da União Europeia. be-prs.3sg with a sentiment mixed of satisfaction and grief that approach-prs.1sg the debate of-this night on the creation of a fund of solidarity of-the Union European Our data strongly suggest that Type 3 clefts are by and large restricted to English, French and Portuguese, whilst in German, Italian and Spanish, they are mostly rendered by non-clefted translations (though see Berretta 2002: 22; Gil 2004: 380 for examples of Type 3 clefting from Italian). Similarly to Type 2 adverbial clefts, German translators tend to, but need not, topicalize expressions that express a speaker’s sub-



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jective stance. Likewise, Italian and Spanish translations preferably put such elements sentence-peripherally. Probably, the choice between left and right is partly determined by syntactic weight, since heavier adverbials seem to sit more comfortably in final position. In any case, to expect a unique syntactic counterpart would mean to grossly underestimate the indeterminacies of translation observed. While the translational strategies chosen are thus somewhat varied, the constraint on employing Type 3 cleft clauses in Italian, Spanish and German proves surprisingly stable. As this subsection has shown, the differences in cleft frequency appear to be conditioned, to a large extent at least, by differences in the accessibility of the information-structural types considered. All three types are solidly attested in ­English, French and Portuguese. By contrast, Italian and Spanish tend to avoid Type 3 clefts and exhibit a significantly lower inclination towards employing cleft clauses of Type 2. German turns out to be even more restrictive, in that cleft occurrences are by and large confined to Type 1a and 1b. Clearly, these observations militate against treating Type 2 and Type 3 clefts as generally available exploitations of a monofunctional focus marking device, and provide evidence for language-particular constraints on information packaging in cleft structures. In the next subsection, we will move on to consider possible explanations for these cross-linguistic differences.

4.

Grammar, discourse management, and conventionalization

Even though the overall frequency of cleft clauses varies greatly, the English, German and the Romance cleft grammars license essentially the same range of syntactic categories for the clefted constituent. Noun phrases, determiner phrases and prepositional or adverb phrases are generally permitted, and amply attested, whereas adjective and verb phrases are marginal. Similarly, the range of grammatical relations that may hold between a clefted constituent and the embedded clause is by and large identical in the languages under study. Clefted subjects, direct, indirect and oblique objects as well as adverbials are all legitimate, and make up the great majority of occurrences, while clefted copula complements and predicates are rare to non-existent. In other respects, however, cross-linguistic differences in the grammar of clefting do exist, notably in the range of person-number and tense-aspect-mood categories licensed for the matrix copula and in the choices for relative items in oblique subordination (cf. Smits 1989; Sedano 1996 for cross-linguistic surveys). That said, none of these differences seems to affect the range of clefting possibilities. One would thus be hard pressed to argue that grammatical restrictions on cleft form can be held responsible for the singular reluctance of German to have recourse to this particular syntactic template. In line with Jespersen and Lambrecht, our starting assumption is that any explanatory account of the gradation in frequency observed will need to take into consideration the range of available non-cleft alternatives. However, we depart from the Jespersen-Lambrecht view precisely when it comes to establishing this range. Since in

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our opinion, focus domains which are coextensive with the clefted constituent constitute but one type of information packing, we cannot base our paradigmatic argumentation on focus marking constructions alone. As noticed in 3.2, Type 1 cleft tokens do not even represent the largest group in our EUROPARL data. Moreover, we have seen that even within this subgroup, there are reasons to call into doubt the force of economy-based constraints on clefting. By all odds, there must be more to clefting than signaling focus, and possibly exhaustivity. Following work by Delin and Oberlander (cf. in particular Delin 1992, 1995; Delin & Oberlander 1995, 2005), we propose to locate these additional motivations for use in elementary aspects of the cleft clause format, most importantly, in biclausal syntax and in the presupposed status of the embedded clause (cf. also Dufter 2006 for French). By virtue of splitting up a single clause into two and singling out one major constituent, clefting is an excellent device to bring this constituent unambiguously under the scope of operators such as negation, hedges or the like. While a systematic exploration of in situ constituent scope marking cannot be offered within the limits of this paper, the overall observation is that German seems more permissive in this respect than either English or Romance. Consider (24), where German is unique in encoding subject constituent negation into a single clause: (24) EP 04–05–04, Speaker 154, English original E It is not Europe that has been enlarged, but the European Union. Ger Nicht Europa wurde erweitert, sondern die Europäische Union. not Europe become-pst.3sg enlarge.pst-ptcp but the European Union Fr Ce n’est pas l’Europe qui s’est élargie, mais bien l’Union européenne. it neg1 be-prs.3sg neg2 the Europe which 3refl be-prs.3sg enlarge. pst-ptcp but indeed the Union European It Non è l’Europa che è stata allargata, ma l’Unione europea. not be-prs.3sg the Europe that be-prs.3sg stand.pst-ptcp enlarge.pst- ptcp but the Union European Sp Lo que se ha ampliado no es Europa, sino la Unión Europea. the that 3refl have-prs.3sg enlarge.pst-ptcp not be-prs.3sg Europe but the Union European Pt Não é a Europa, mas sim a União Europeia, que foi alargada. not be-prs.3sg the Europe but yes the Union European that be-perf.3sg enlarge.pst-ptcp Within Romance, our data suggest that Italian and Spanish are in general more tolerant of operators such as negation with narrow scope over single constituents than French and Portuguese, as witnessed by (25). In this example, English, French, and Portuguese resort to the cleft format, whereas the other three languages do not:



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(25) EP 00–03–16, Speaker 179, Dutch original E It is not by chance that the powerful Serbian police apparatus operates mainly at local level. Ger Nicht ohne Grund operiert der mächtige serbische Polizeiapparat jetzt insbesondere auf lokaler Ebene. not without reason operate-prs.3sg the powerful Serbian police-appara- tus now particularly on local level Fr Ce n’est pas sans raison que le puissant appareil policier serbe opère essen tiellement au niveau local. it neg1 be-prs.3sg neg2 without reason that the powerful apparatus police Serbian operate-prs.3sg essentially at-the level local It Non senza motivo, il potente apparato di polizia serbo interviene in parti colare sul piano locale. not without motive the powerful apparatus of police Serbian intervene- prs.3sg in particular on-the level local Sp No sin motivo opera el poderoso aparato político de Serbia especialmente en el nivel local. not without motive operate-prs.3sg the powerful apparatus political of Serbia especially in the level local Pt Não é por acaso que o poderoso aparelho policial sérvio actua agora espe cialmente a nível local. not be-prs.3sg by chance that the powerful apparatus police Serbian operate-prs.3sg now especially at level local More generally, the biclausal presentation of propositional content in clefts can also be an elegant way of bringing non-subject constituents into a position near to the beginning of the sentence. Such rearrangements seem to be particularly attractive if the clefted expression relates, anaphorically or in a more indirect way, back to the preceding discourse. As is well-known, German stands out from the rest of the languages considered in this paper in that it has maintained a basic verb-second declarative order up to the present day. In a large number of occurrences, and notably in cases where English and Romance have Type 2 non-subject clefts, the German version indeed achieves fronting of discourse links by topicalization. Stylistically, topicalization appears an entirely natural strategy in German, whereas the clefted counterparts would sound prolix or stilted in many cases. Unlike Modern English, German also has ample structural scrambling options for aligning focused constituents with the default sentence accent position (Abraham 2007). In French, by contrast, the prescriptive ban on dislocation structures and on preverbal lexical objects, as well as the limited acceptability of heavier adverbials in sentence-initial position, all contribute to the preference for Type 2 cohesive clefts in examples of this sort. Written varieties of Italian and Spanish are somewhat more liberal than French with regard to which kind of non-subject constituent can occur clause-initially, and expectedly show a propensity for Type 2 clefts which

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is intermediate between German, on the one hand, and French and Portuguese, on the other. For Portuguese, however, it is unclear to us whether the high incidence of Type 2 clefts is amenable to similar explanatory reasoning on grammar-internal grounds. Up to this point, our line of argumentation converges with Jespersen’s and ­Lambrecht’s, even though its point of departure is different. However, there is a second invariant property of clefting whose consequences remain, to the best of our knowledge, insufficiently explored in the existing literature. The invariant semantic aspect we are referring to is the presuppositional nature of the information contained in the embedded clause. As with other types of relative and complement clauses, this presupposition arises by virtue of syntax alone. While semantic and pragmatic explications of how presuppositions function in discourse are various, and many areas of theoretical controversy persist, Delin (1992, 1995) makes a strong point for separating ­presupposition from focus–background structure. According to this author, presuppositions need not be part of mutual knowledge, or of some mutually assumed set of common assumptions, or possibly of propositions that are at least taken to be uncontroversial among interlocutors. Instead, Delin argues in favor of a kind of update semantics, where presuppositions generated by syntactic form “indicate a speaker’s requirements for what should be included within the hearer’s discourse model” (Delin 1995: 97). Crucially for a fuller understanding of cleft usage, this entails that the information contained in the embedded clause is marked as not negotiable, or as content for which the speaker declines communicative responsibility. In particular, the point of placing information in the embedded subpart is, as Delin (1995) aptly puts it, to remind rather than to inform. An observable effect of presuppositional status is that hedges, or other epistemic qualifications, appear to be infelicitous in clefts (Kamio 1991), cf. the somewhat odd character of sentences such as ?It is the wife that, I think, decides. If hedging occurs in the matrix clause, its scope cannot extend to the whole of the cleft presupposition (Rowlett 2007: 185). Returning to German, this language displays yet another feature that permits speakers and translators to exclude information from the scope of illocutionary or epistemic operators, and to mark presupposition status without clefting. This is the presence of so-called Abtönungspartikeln, modal particles that can give various epistemic flavors to a sentence, or to a clausal subpart of it. In particular, particles such as ja or eben provide an effective means of marking the proposition conveyed in the clause as a piece of information which the speaker expects to be shared among interlocutors, or which at least should not be under discussion in the current discourse. In other words, these German modal particles must be considered a morphemic resource for fulfilling many of the tasks in the organization of argumentative discourse that motivate the use of cleft clauses in other languages.16 Consider (26), where the embedded part serves to remind, rather than to inform, 16. In stating this, we do not wish to imply that morphemic means to mark information as familiar, or exempt from discussion, are non-existent in English and Romance. In our data, there are cases where a German modal particle corresponds to expressions such as Fr après tout ‘after all’ or Pt como é sabido ‘as is known’. Statistically, however, such overt lexical markings seem to



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the audience about a parliamentary decision already taken at the time of utterance. The German speaker most naturally achieves this effect by adding ja, while English, French and Portuguese use a cleft clause. (26) EP 98–07–15, Speaker 266, German original E It was for this reason that the European Parliament, in the form of the Tsatsos/Méndez de Vigo report, incorporated very clear and very, very restrictive conditions […] Ger Deshalb hat das Europäische Parlament anhand des Berichts Tsatsos/ Méndez de Vigo ja ganz klare und sehr, sehr einschränkende Bedingungen […] eingebaut […] therefore have-prs.3sg the European Parliament on-the-basis-of the-gen report.gen Tsatsos/Méndez de Vigo mod-part entirely clear and very very restrictive conditions incorporate-pst-ptcp Fr C’est pour cela que le Parlement européen a introduit, au moyen du rapport Tsatsos/Méndez de Vigo, des conditions très claires et très restrictives […] it be-prs.3sg for that that the Parliament European have-prs.3sg intro- duce.pst-ptcp by means of-the report Tsatsos/Méndez de Vigo art- indef-pl conditions very clear and very restrictive It Perciò, sulla base della relazione Tsatsos/Méndez de Vigo, il Parlamento europeo ha introdotto chiare condizioni restrittive […] therefore on-the basis of-the report Tsatsos/Méndez de Vigo the  Parliament European have-prs.3sg introduce.pst-ptcp clear conditions restrictive Sp Por ello, el Parlamento Europeo, con motivo del informe Tsatsos/Méndez de Vigo estableció condiciones muy claras y sumamente restrictivas […] for that the Parliament European with motive of-the report Tsatsos/ Méndez de Vigo establish-perf.3sg conditions very clear and extremely restrictive Pt Foi também por isso, que o Parlamento Europeu, com o relatório Tsatsos/ Méndez de Vigo, impôs condições muito claras e muito restritivas […] be-perf.3sg also for that that the Parliament European with the report Tsatsos/Méndez de Vigo impose-perf.3sg conditions very clear and very restrictive In other cases, such as (21) above, it is precisely the crucial piece of information, in this case the decision to vote in favor of a resolution under discussion, which is presented in the embedded part of a cleft clause. In our opinion, cases such as these provide strong evidence for Delin’s view that the cleft format may serve to mark ­information be a minor option in both English and Romance. On strategies of modalization in Romance, see Waltereit (2006).

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as non-negotiable. More specifically, the choice of the cleft structure in (21) signals that the decision has already been taken – notice that it is irrelevant for the felicitous uttering of the cleft whether this information is, in actual fact or presumedly, discourse-given or uncontroversial to the audience. Both topicalization and modalization therefore need to be invoked to explain the near-absence of type 2 clefts in German, whereas English and Romance languages regularly have clefted counterparts, albeit with different frequencies. Similar arguments could probably be developed for explaining other asymmetries in cleft use between individual Germanic and Romance languages. Nonetheless, we surmise that not all of the differences in clefting frequency will ultimately be reducible to an explanation within such a paradigmatic perspective, where different linguistic resources compete, or conspire, to achieve identical goals in packaging information and in organizing discourse. We have already mentioned the fact that despite sharing many grammatical properties with its Spanish and Italian sisters, Portuguese employs clefts much more readily than either of them. With respect to English, French and Portuguese, our data lend support to time-honored proposals of areal convergence in present-day Western Europe, of an Atlantic Sprachbund originating from, or at least reinforced by, a shared Celtic substrate (cf. Sornicola 1991 and Wehr 2005 for discussion). Notice in this respect that the incidence of cleft structures is reported to be particularly high in Celtic languages, and in varieties of English such as Irish English that have been in close contact to Celtic over many centuries (Filppula 2004: 95). But even within French, Italian and Spanish, our corpus data provide rich opportunities for repudiating the claim that all observable differences in cleft use can be explained with reference to other differences between the respective linguistic systems. Rather, speakers and translators may typically choose among a variety of alternative ways for expressing, with sufficient approximation at least, the same content, and for fitting utterances appropriately into the discursive context. This is where languageinternal variation and change, whether motivated internally or by contact, enter the picture. In the history of English, informative-presupposition clefts, both of Type 2 and Type 3, are unattested before the fourteenth century (Ball 1994a), and remain exceptional in French before the sixteenth century (Dufter 2008). Subsequently, however, French seems to have developed a predilection for clefting in its modern period, and not least so for clefts of Types 2 and 3. This, in turn, left its mark in other European languages at the time where the influence of French was pervasive among the social, artistic and intellectual elites. On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians and other self-appointed guardians of language purity did not fail to condemn such ‘Frenchy’ kinds of diction either. Judging from metalinguistic commentaries, it seems that a favorite target for linguistic criticism were cohesive Type 2 clefts. Fornaciari, who admits cleft clauses of Type 1 information packaging in Italian (cf. his example (3) cited in the introduction), harshly objects to the use of Type 2 clefts such as It è cosí ch’io voglio fare, lit.

‘it is so that I want do …’, ‘that’s how I want to do …’ (Fornaciari 1881: 383). Such cleft patterns, he maintains, have arisen from inadvertent calquing from French



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(cf. D’Achille, Proietti & Viviani 2005 for an overview of the history of normative criticism in Italian). Nonetheless, such purism did not succeed in preventing cleft structures, especially of Type 2, from becoming ever more popular in written Italian since the nineteenth century (Roggia 2006a,b; Serianni 2006: 569). In Spain, the cleft clause format, especially with clefted adverbials and invariant que as subordinator, came under similarly heavy attack by prescriptive grammarians (cf. Dufter submitted for an overview). In an important eighteenth-century treatise on translations from French into Spanish, Capmany (1776: 65–66) recommends declefting in cases such as Fr c’est ainsi que, lit. ‘it is so that’, ‘this is how’ or Fr c’est pour cela que ‘it is for that [reason] that’. Cadalso (1778), another important author of eighteenth-century Spain, burlesques the “estilo afrancesado” of his contemporaries in a fictitious letter. It is probably no accident that the text of this letter starts off with a Type 3 cleft of exactly the same sort as we have seen at the beginning of speeches in (22) and (23) above. Even in German, cleft clauses were more widespread from the pen of eighteenth-century writers according to Paul (1919: III 64), whose citations from the literature include clear examples both of cohesive Type 2 and of all-new Type 3 clefts at the beginning of a letter. As in Italy and Spain, such types of clefts have also come under heavy attack by stylistic manuals in Germany (Matthias 1930: §410). It remains open to conjecture whether such normative pressure continues to be reflected in speakers’ and translators’ preferences to this day.

5.

Conclusion

Based on a multilingual parallel corpus of European Parliament proceedings, this contribution has studied the translational counterparts of English it-clefts in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. As reported in Section 2, French and Portuguese are clearly ahead of the other three languages in terms of the overall frequency of clefting in these translations. Most conspicuous, however, is the wide gap separating German from all of Romance, since the proportion of clefted translational equivalents in German amounts to less than a sixth of the corresponding values for French and Portuguese, and to less than one fourth of those of Italian and Spanish. In seeking to provide an explanation for the observed gradations in frequency, we have explored several alternatives in turn. In Section 3.1, we discussed the widely held view that cleft clauses serve to mark focus on the clefted constituent, and occur more frequently in a given language in direct proportion to the more restricted alternative focus markings in this language. Several arguments were adduced to show that this view clearly stands in need of revision. In 3.2, a related view was presented which takes the exclusion of alternatives for the clefted constituent to be a defining semantic property of clefts. However, some of the corpus evidence sheds doubt on this claim. We argued that

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rather than being part of some conventionalized constructional meaning of clefts, the exhaustive interpretation satisfies standard diagnostics for generalized conversational implicatures in the sense of neo-Gricean pragmatics. Section 3.3 introduced a typology of information packaging in cleft structures, and illustrated how the gradation in cleft clause frequency finds a parallel in the differential availability of these information-structural types. Simplified, Type 1 clefts put a focus on the clefted constituent, while Type 2 clefts only have focus in the embedded clause, and Type 3 cleft clauses are all-focus. Whereas French and Portuguese accept either of the three types, Italian and Spanish appear to avoid Type 3, and cleft occurrences in German are restricted by and large to Type 1. In any event, the data demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the assumption of a one-to-one relationship between syntax and focus-background structure in cleft clauses can not be upheld without risking a considerable ad hoc extension of the notion of focus. Furthermore, these observations also militate against weaker versions of the one-to-one correspondence view which suggest that Type 2 and Type 3 clefts are nothing more than an occasional exploitation of clefting. While this modified viewpoint may seem attractive to proponents of a syntactic theory of focus structure, it is at a loss to account for the differential availability of information structural types across languages. Indeed, our data would seem to suggest an implicational hierarchy, whereby Type 3 clefts are comparatively more marked than Type 2 clefts, and these in turn more marked than Type 1 cleft clauses, as summarized in (27): (27) Markedness hierarchy of clefting types in the languages under study Type 3 >> Type 2 >> Type 1 What this amounts to is that all languages use clefting for fronting focused constituents, notably in cases where the context suggests strong contrastive overtones. However, only a subset of languages apply clefting as a strategy for bringing topical constituents, of both the aboutness and the scene-setting type, into a left-peripheral position, as happens in Type 2 clefts. Even more restricted is the applicability of clefting for all-new clefts, even though the biclausal format in this subclass could easily find a justification on functional grounds along the lines of Lambrecht’s (1987: 254) preference law “Do not introduce a new referent and talk about it in the same clause”. Clearly, Type 3 clefts help to avoid just this dispreferred configuration by introducing the new referent in the matrix clause and predicating about it in the subsequent embedded subpart. It may not be incidental that the information-structural hierarchy of fronting by means of clefting mirrors another hierarchy of pragmatically triggered fronting tendencies. As suggested by Payne (1995), there is an implicational scale for constituent preposing in languages with verb initial basic word order. Cross-linguistically, focused constituents, especially when they are contrastive, have a greater chance of being fronted in verb initial languages than either frame topics or new aboutness topics, while constituents that bear neither focus nor topic features are least likely to be the target of



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leftward displacement into initial position. We leave the issue of implicational hierarchies shared between clefting and clause-internal fronting for future research. In Section 4, it was shown that there is no simple answer to the question of whether the observed information-structural gradation can itself be correlated to crosslanguage differences in other parts of the linguistic system. The aversion of German against Type 2 adverbial clefts, which make up for a large portion of cleft tokens in English, French and Portuguese, is arguably related to its greater tolerance for operator marking on single constituents, and, perhaps most importantly, to the verb-second property. It is this fundamental property of basic declarative constituent order which permits German to achieve clause-internal fronting of almost any major constituent. A third peculiar feature of German is its predilection for modal particles, which serve to signal certain assumptions about the discourse status of a proposition. In particular, some of these particles exempt a proposition from the scope of assertion, marking it as non-negotiable or as a piece of information for which the speaker refuses communicative responsibility. Such morphemic strategies of modalization appear to be considerably more limited, and less popular, in English and Romance. As an alternative, argumentative texts in these languages make heavier use of cleft clause formats, since these permit to introduce a proposition as presupposed and achieve many of the same effects associated with German modal particles. For other discourse types such as narration, a number of further points could probably be made in favor of language-specific determinants influencing clefting frequency. Nevertheless, Section 4 has ended by suggesting that at least some of the language-specific preferences for clefting, or for the avoidance of clefts, cannot be motivated on language-internal grounds alone. In conclusion, it may be appropriate to emphasize that clefting is but one of several means for fulfilling a variety of functions, which include sentence-related aims such as focus and operator scope marking, but also discursive goals such as enhancing cohesion, marking transitions, or differentiating between propositional content that is under discussion and information that is not. Any comprehensive account of cleft clause use will need to acknowledge the conventional nature of many discourse pragmatic subtypes of clefts, and will therefore have to take into consideration possible fossilizations of highly frequent subtypes of clefts as well as the role of language contact and prescriptive intervention.

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Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

Universidade Estadual de Campinas / Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

This study proposes an analysis of cleft sentences in Portuguese, from a crosslinguistic perspective. As normally assumed, wh-clefts and inverse wh-clefts will be proposed to be derivationally related, but inverse that-clefts will be claimed to have an independent derivation from canonic that-clefts, a view contrary to predominant analyses. Canonic that-clefts will be proposed to have a complementizer “que” with a +F-feature, while the inverse clefts are claimed to have a homophonous complementizer without such a feature. The proposal will find a strong diachronic support, as inverse that-clefts appear before the canonic that-clefts. We will claim that canonic clefts are incompatible with a verb second type of grammar, and that their emergence is a consequence of the loss of  V-movement to C. Brazilian Portuguese is claimed to undergo further changes due to the process of grammaticalization of its copula, which gives rise to the ‘reduced cleft’ construction.

1.

Introduction

The aims of this study are (i) to propose an analysis of cleft constructions found in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP and BP), from a cross-linguistic perspective, and (ii) to show its relevance in the account of their evolution since Old Portuguese. Considering that cleft sentences are focalization constructions, we will assume that (i) the parameter that determines their cross-linguistic and diachronic variations has to do with the functional heads that check focus features, which, in turn, determine the position where the focused elements appear in the sentence; (ii) that syntactic

. We thank Jairo Nunes, Ian Roberts, Uli Reich, Marcello Marcelino, and the audience at a conference given at USP for valuable comments on earlier drafts of the paper. . The first author had the research grants CNPq 303274/2005-0 and FAPESP 2006/00965-2, and the second author the grant CNPq 151554/2006-4 and 310302/2006-4.

124 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

changes in cleft structures are triggered by the change in the features of their lower complementizer and in the features of the copula.

2.

Informational structure and clefting

In a prosodically unmarked sentence, the new information, or the informational focus, is identified as the constituent that carries its nuclear stress, or any phrase that contains this element (Cinque 1993, Zubizarreta 1998). The nuclear stress is determined by the Nuclear Stress Rule formulated as follows: “Given two sister nodes Ci and Cj, the one lower in the asymmetric c-command ordering is more prominent.” (Zubizarreta 1998: 43)

The focus in a sentence is usually identified using a contextual wh-question. In the answer to this wh-question the element that replaces it is the focus. We exemplify this using English and Brazilian Portuguese. (1)

Contextual question a. What did the thief take? (2) b. What did the thief do? c. What happened?

Answer a. The thief took [F my laptop]. b. The thief [F took my laptop]. c. [F The thief took my laptop].

(3) a. O que o ladrão levou? (4) a. O ladrão levou [F o meu laptop]. b. O que o ladrão fez? b. O ladrão [F levou o meu laptop]. c. O que aconteceu? c. [F O ladrão levou o meu laptop]. The focus is also defined as the non-presuppositional part of the sentence. A wh-question and its answer share the same presupposition (Chomsky 1971, Zubizarreta 1998). Thus, for (2a) and (4a), the presupposition is in (5): (5) There is an x, and the thief took x. However, for the same contextual question (1a), repeated here as (6), there are two more possible answers: the wh-cleft and the that-cleft. In both cases the nuclear stress falls also on the focal element.

. The types of cleft sentences in English were based on Higgins (1973) and Prince (1978); the types of Portuguese clefts were based on Casteleiros (1979), Wheeler (1982), Modesto (2001) and Kato et al. (1996).



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 125

Contextual question Answer (6) What did the thief take? (7) a. The thief took [F my laptop]. (unmarked sentence) b. What the thief took was [F my laptop].  (wh-cleft) c. It was [F my laptop] (that the thief took). (that-cleft) (8) O que o ladrão levou? (9) a. b. c.

O ladrão levou [F o meu laptop]. (unmarked sentence) O que o ladrão levou foi [F o meu laptop]. (wh-cleft) Foi [F o meu laptop] (que o ladrão levou). (that-cleft)

The cleft constructions have an additional, meta-grammatical function: that of emphatic or contrastive focus, which can also be fulfilled by a simple sentence, with an in situ heavy stress. The contrastive stress is freely assigned and is not governed by the Nuclear Stress Rule, as it can fall on a function word or part of a word (Chomsky 1971). The contrastive focus is here represented with block letters. Contextual sentence Contrastive reply (10) The thief took my IPod. (11) a. No, the thief took MY IPod. (simple sentence) b. No, what the thief took was MY IPod. (wh-cleft) c. No, it was MY IPod that the thief took. (that-cleft) (12) O ladrão levou o meu IPod. (13) a. Não, o ladrão levou o MEU IPod. (simple sentence) b. Não, o que o ladrão levou foi o MEU IPod. (wh-cleft) c. Não, foi o MEU IPod que o ladrão levou. (that-cleft) Finally, a that-cleft structure identified by Casteleiro (1979) is the presentative cleft (15b), in which what is clefted is the whole clause, corresponding to the answer (4c) above, to the contextual question (3c), here repeated as (14).

126 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

Contextual question Answer (14) O que aconteceu? (15) a. [F O ladrão levou o meu laptop]. (= (4c)) b. BP and EP É que [F o ladrão levou o meu laptop]. (presentative cleft)

3.

Focus structures and cross-linguistic variation

3.1

Subject focus in simple sentences

So far, Portuguese (both European and Brazilian) behaves just like English in all the contexts listed above. The difference that can be pointed out is the presence/absence of a lexical expletive in that-cleft constructions. Like other Null Subject (NS) languages, we assume that there is a null expletive pro in both varieties of Portuguese. Instead of the well-known term it-cleft (cf. Lambrecht 2001), the term that-cleft that we have adopted is neuter regarding the type of expletive. (16) a. It was MY IPod that the thief took. b. pro foi o MEU IPod que o ladrão levou. Brazilian Portuguese is also similar to English when the informational focus is the subject in a non-cleft sentence. While in the case of non-subjects, it was always the rightmost element that received the nuclear stress, here the primary stress is on the subject, the leftmost element. According to Zubizarreta (1998: 20), this is due to the way English, French and German, and we can add Brazilian Portuguese, assign the nuclear stress. In these languages, defocalized and functional categories are “metrically invisible” in the application of the Nuclear Stress Rule, while in other Romance languages, like Spanish and Italian, and we can add European Portuguese, all phonologically specified elements are “metrically visible”. (17)

Contextual question BP (18) a. Who took my laptop? b. Quem levou o meu laptop?

Reply BP a. [F THE THIEF] took your laptop. b. [F O LADRÃO] levou o seu laptop.

. Except with presentative sentences. In English we would have the verb happen instead of the copula (It happens that my feet hurt). But we will consider that at the beginning of the derivation, English is like Brazilian Portuguese ([be [MY FEET+F hurt]]). . Brazilian Portuguese has been shown to be changing from a null subject to a non-null subject language, with the tendency to fill referential subjects, but to preserve the null expletive (cf. Duarte 1995).



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 127

(19) a. EP (20) a. EP Quem levou o meu laptop? Levou-o/o seu laptop [F O LADRÃO]. took-it / the your laptop the thief b. Spanish b. Spanish Quién robó mi laptop? Lo robó [F EL LADRÓN]. / Robó su laptop [F EL LADRÓN]. who stole my laptop it stole the thief / stole your laptop the thief If the stress is applied in situ in European Portuguese and Spanish, the interpretation is that of a contrastive focus. This is also true in Brazilian Portuguese and English. (21)

3.2

EP and BP O LADRÃO levou o seu laptop, e não o seu vizinho. the thief took the your laptop and not the your neighbor ‘The THIEF took your laptop, and not your neighbor.’

The distribution of that-clefts across languages

The same contextual sentence that triggers a contrastive reply can be followed by what we call an inverse wh-cleft reply in both English and the two varieties of Portuguese. However, though English does not license it, in both varieties of Portuguese we can also have an inverse-that-cleft sentence, where the copula fails to agree with the tense of the lexical verb (cf. (25b)): Contextual sentence Contrastive reply (22) The thief took my laptop. (23) No, MY IPOD was what the thief took. (inverse wh-cleft) (24) O ladrão levou o meu IPod. (25) a. EP and BP Não, o MEU IPod foi o que o ladrão levou. (inverse wh-cleft) b. EP and BP Não, o MEU IPod é que o ladrão levou. (inverse that-cleft) The wh-clefts – both the canonic ((11b) and (13b)) and the inverse type ((23) and (25)) – seem to be fairly well distributed cross-linguistically. But as noted by ­ Lambrecht (2001) that-clefts, or what he calls it-clefts, divide languages into types: (i) those that have it as an alternative for other focusing strategies (English and Italian), and here

. The alternative strategy for English is focus in situ, and for Italian VS order.

128 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

we add Portuguese; (ii) those that do not license it (German); (iii) those whose only construction to codify contrastive focus is the that-cleft construction (French). Stress in-situ is here represented in bold characters. Contextual question Reply (26) Is your knee hurting? (27) a. No, my FOOT hurts. / No, it’s my FOOT that hurts. (SV / that-cleft) b. German Nein, mein FUSS tut weh. (SV) c. Italian No, mi fa male il PIEDE. / No, è il PIEDE che mi fa male. (VXS / that-cleft) d. French Non, c’est mon PIED qui me fait mal. (that-cleft) (apud Lambrecht 2001: 486) With his comparison, Lambrecht (2001) shows that the only language in (27) that does not license the that-cleft construction is German, a verb second language. Likewise, Sornicola (1988) stresses that English is the only Germanic language that can have that-clefts because it has lost verb second properties. According to this view, both Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese align with non-verb second languages. Comparing Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese, it can be seen that the former behaves like English, while the latter is like Italian. (28) a. BP Não, meu PÉ dói. / Não, é meu PÉ que dói. (SV / that-cleft)

. The structure below corresponding to (27b) in German is a wh-cleft, with der, a relative pronoun. What German lacks is a similar construction with dass. (i) German Nein, es ist mein FUSS, der wehtut (und nicht mein Knie) no it is my foot which hurts   and not my knee . Ribeiro (1995a, 1995b) claims that Old Portuguese was technically a verb second language, with the V moving to C. However, unlike Modern German, Old Portuguese was also a null subject language, licensing verb first, and also allowed a low rate (4%) of Topic Phrases adjoined to CP. Moreover, Ribeiro & Kato (forthc.) refer to Kiparsky (1995), who shows that Old High German, Old English and Old Icelandic, considered verb second languages, also licensed what they call V>2 structures.



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 129

b. EP Não, dói-me o PÉ. / Não, é o PÉ que me dói. (VXS / that-cleft) The following section will show variation between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese regarding agreement phenomena.

3.3

Agreement facts and ‘reduced clefts’ in Brazilian Portuguese

Lopes Rossi (1996) pointed out an important distinction between wh-clefts and thatclefts in European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, regarding person/number agreement facts. Thus, with wh-clefts agreement with the copula is independent of the agreement within the free relative, in which agreement of the lexical verb holds with the relative pronoun, which is third person singular. In canonic that-clefts, on the other hand, both the copula and the lexical verb in the embedded clause agree with the focalized element, contrary to English where the copula agrees with the expletive. This indicates that no relative pronoun is involved in that-clefts, as is assumed in many previous analysis of that-clefts (Chomsky 1977). (29) a. b.

Quem mais trabalha nesta empresa sou eu. who most works in.this company am I ‘The one who works most in this company is me.’ EU sou quem mais trabalha na empresa. I am who most works in.the company ‘I am the one who works most in the company.’

(30) a. b.

O que mais pesa na mala são os livros. (wh-cleft) what most weighs in.the luggage are the books ‘What weighs most in the luggage are the books.’ OS LIVROS são o que mais pesa na mala. (inverse wh-cleft) the books are what most weighs in.the luggage ‘The books are what weigh most in the luggage.’

(31) a. b.

Sou EU que sou vadia. am I that am lazy ‘It is me that is lazy.’ São AS CRIANÇAS que fazem barulho. are the children that make noise ‘It is the children that are noisy.’

(wh-cleft)

(inverse wh-cleft)

(that-cleft)

(that-cleft)

But the most puzzling fact is that inverse that-clefts lack person/number agreement and tense concord between the copula and the lexical verb of the that-clause, a clear indication that here too no relative pronoun is involved. This is true in both Brazilian

130 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

Portuguese and European Portuguese. English lacks the inverse type of that-clefts, and uses the inverse wh-cleft instead: (32) a. b.

EU é que sou vadia. / *EU sou que sou vadia. I is that am lazy ‘I am the one who is lazy.’ NÓS é que fazemos o trabalho. / we is that do-1pl the work *NÓS somos que fazemos o trabalho. we are that do-1pl the work ‘We are who do the work.’

(inverse that-cleft)

(33) a. b.

EU é que comi o bolo. / EU fui que comi o bolo. (inverse that-cleft) I is that ate-1sg the cake / I was that ate-1sg the cake ‘I was the one who ate the cake.’ NÓS é que comemos o bolo. / we is that ate-1pl the cake NÓS fomos que comemos o bolo. we were that ate-1pl the cake (inverse that-cleft) ‘We were the ones who ate the cake.’

(inverse that-cleft)

One important aspect that distinguishes European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese is that the popular variety in the latter is relaxing both the tense concord and the person/number agreement in canonic that-clefts, in a clear process of grammaticalization of the copula: (34) BP a. b.

É EU que sou vadia. is I that am lazy ‘It is me that is lazy.’ É AS CRIANÇAS que fazem barulho. is the children that do.prs-3pl noise ‘It is the children that make the noise.’

(35) BP a. b.

É EU que comi o bolo. is I that eat-pst.1sg the cake ‘It was me that ate the cake.’ É AS CRIANÇAS que comeram o bolo. is the children that eat-pst.3pl the cake ‘It is the children that ate the cake.’

A further grammaticalization process erases the invariable copula, which leads to what we call the reduced cleft (cf. Kato et al. 1996).



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(36) BP a. (É) EU que sou vadia. b. (É) AS CRIANÇAS que comeram o bolo.

3.4 Wh-questions in Portuguese as cleft sentences Wh-questions are a special type of focalization sentence, with the wh-element as the focus of the sentence. Here, too, we find contrasts between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. In non-cleft questions, European Portuguese has VS order, while Brazilian Portuguese has SV order: (37) a. b.

EP Que bebes tu? (whVS) what drink you BP O que você bebe? (whSV) what you drink ‘What do you drink?’

Both European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese have an inverse that-cleft in wh-questions with SV order: (38) a. b.

EP Que é que (tu) bebes? BP O que é que você bebe? ‘What is (it) that you drink?’

Brazilian Portuguese has also a cleft question without the copula: (39)

BP O que que você bebe? what that you drink ‘What is (it) that you drink?’

The vernacular forms are (38a) for European Portuguese and (39) for Brazilian Portuguese. The forms in (37) are preferred in written language. The canonic that-type is also possible in Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions, being easily found in child language.

. We thank Adriana Lessa for these data.

132 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

(40) a. b. c.

é quem que tá tocano o violão? is who that is playing the guitar ‘Who is playing guitar?’ é que que tá gravano? is what that is recording ‘What is being recorded?’ foi quem que foi na loja? was who that went to.the store ‘Who went to the store?’

(Luana, 02; 03. 22)

(Luana, 02; 03. 22)

(Luana, 02; 04. 03)

The following section will contain our proposal for the derivations of focalization in simple sentences and through cleft sentences, which will give the basis for our understanding of the language variation discussed above, and a strong hypothesis to be developed in Section 5 for the evolution of clefts in Portuguese.

4.

Analysis

4.1

Subject focus in simple sentences

Concerning the subject as the focus of the clause, as in (27c) and (28b) above, we will assume Belletti’s (2004) analysis for postposed subjects, according to which the low part of the clause contains a VP periphery, and the focalized postposed subject is moved to this low Focus Phrase (FocP or FP). This means that, in the spirit of her analysis, we assume that postposed subjects in such cases are moved subjects, and not subjects in their in-situ origin (see other cases below in 4.2). (41) Italian Contextual question: Chi ha parlato? ‘Who has spoken?’ (42) Italian Ha parlato Gianni. ‘Gianni has spoken.’ (43) [CP [TP pro ha parlato [TopP [FocP Giannii [TopP [vP ti [VP]]]]]]] (apud Belletti 2004) However, in contrast to Belletti, who assumes that Spec of TP has a null referential subject pro, we assume, with Viotti (2007), that C in null subject languages can choose to have an optional EPP-feature in T. If C chooses a presentative sentence, T has no EPP-feature, and Spec of TP is not projected.10 Moreover, just like the Topic or the Focus position in the left periphery of the sentence, we assume with Kato (1999) that the internal periphery also assigns default cases for the DPs that land there. 10. If the EPP-feature is chosen, the sentence requires subject raising or expletive insertion.



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 133

(44) [CP …C…[TP ha-EPP parlato [TopP [FP Giannii (NOM default) [TopP [vP ti [VP]]]]]]] We also assume that what establishes the relation of person and number agreement between the verb and the postverbal subject is the operation AGREE (Chomsky 2001). Under this frame only the DP Gianni has interpretable φ-features, and enters the numeration fully specified as third person singular. The T has person and number features unvalued, but probing the sentence downwards, it can have them valued through the operation AGREE from the target Gianni, for morphological reasons. Full interpretation requires that they are deleted before LF. (45) [CP …[ TP ha3SG..parlato [TopP [FP [Gianni3SG] (NOM default) [TopP [vP ti [VP]]]]]]] AGREE We will see later that Brazilian Portuguese lost postposed subjects with transitive and inergative verbs, but not with unaccusatives and the copula, and, like French, resorts to cleft constructions to focalize the subject: (46) a. b.

French C’est Jean (qui a parlé). BP Foi o João (que falou). ‘It was Jean/João who spoke.’

4.2 Postposed subjects with fronted focalization in European Portuguese Not all postposed subjects are interpreted as the sentence focus. XVS order in (47) in European Portuguese results from Focus movement of the object to the higher FP position, at the periphery of the root clause (cf. Rizzi 1997), with the subject remaining in VP (Kato & Raposo 1996), and the operation AGREE establishing the agreement relation between the verb and the subject. The focus can also be a wh-element: (47) EP a. b.

MUITAS MULHERES amou o Pedro. many women loved the Pedro ‘Many women Pedro loved.’ A QUEM amaram as crianças? to who loved the children ‘Who did the children love?’

(48) a. [FP [MUITAS MULHERES]i [F’ [TP amouV [vP o Pedro [VP tV ti]]]]] b. [FP QUEMi [F’ [TP amouV [vP o Pedro [VP tV ti]]]]]

134 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

Kato and Raposo assume that FP is always projected in European Portuguese, and that when nothing moves to its specifier, the verb does, and the sentence is of the presentative, or thetic type, namely the whole sentence is focalized. Clitics are assumed to be always adjoined to T, and when the verb moves to F, the result is enclisis. If the verb stays in T, the clitic is left-adjoined to it, exhibiting proclisis. (49) a. b.

Amou-as o Pedro. loved-them the Pedro ‘Pedro loved them.’ MUITAS MULHERES o amaram. many women him loved ‘Many women loved him.’

(50) a. [FP AmouV+T [TP asj- [t]V+T [vP o Pedro [VP tV tj ]]]] b. [FP MUITAS MULHERESi [TP oj-amaramV [vP ti [VP tV tj ]]]] In Kato and Raposo’s analysis, Brazilian Portuguese has also Focus raising to FP, but while European Portuguese has “subject postposition”, with the lexical subject in situ (cf. (47a)), Brazilian Portuguese raises it to Spec of TP (cf. (51a)). This contrast is due to the pronominal character of European Portuguese agreement, which can satisfy the EPP-features morphologically, with the agreement morpheme checking case and φ-features in T (see Kato 1999). (51) a. [FP MUITAS MULHERESi [F’ [TP [o Pedro]i amouV [vP ti [VP tV ti ]]]]] b. [FP QUEMi [F’ [TP [o Pedro]i amouV [vP ti [VP tV ti ]]]]]

4.3 The derivation of wh-clefts (pseudo-clefts)11 Pseudo-clefts12 are proposed to derive just like an equative type of predication. Following Moro (1991), an equative sentence starts with a Small Clause (SC). The small clause merges with the copula, which moves to T to check its T-features. T has non- interpretable/unvalued φ-features, but, through the operation AGREE (Chomsky 2001), it has them valued for morphological reasons, after which they are deleted. If T has EPP-features, the subject of the small clause raises to Spec of T (52a).

11. For alternative analyses, see Modesto (2001), Mioto & Negrão (2007) and Costa & Duarte (2003). 12. Our analysis covers only the specificational type of pseudo-clefts. For a thorough discussion of the distinction between specificational and predicational readings of pseudo-clefts, see Dikken (2006).



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 135

(52) a. O culpado sou eu. b. Sou EU o culpado. c. EU sou o culpado. (53) a. b. c. d. e.

[SC o culpado [eu+1SG]] SC [VP serCOP [SC o culpado [eu+1SG ]]] Merge of the copula [TP serCOP +PRS ?p?number [VP tCOP [SC o culpado [eu+1SG]]]] V-to-T [TP sou+PRS+1SG [VP tCOP [SC o culpado [eu+1SG ]]]] AGREE [TP o culpadoi sou+PRS [VP tCOP [SC [ ti] [eu+1SG]]]] EPP (= (52a) O culpado sou eu.)

If the predicate eu has a +F feature, the derivation differs, with the subject of the small clause remaining in situ, and the predicate eu+F moving to the lower FP (54) (cf. Belletti 2005) or to the higher FP (55) (cf. Rizzi 1997): (54) a. b. c. d.

SC [SC o culpado [EU1SG+F]] Merge of the copula [VP serCOP [SC o culpado [EU+1SG+F]]] Focus-movement to the periphery of VP [FP EU+1SG+F [VP serCOP [SC o culpado [tEU]]]] V-to-T and AGREE [TP sou+PRS+1SG [FP EU+1SG [VP tCOP [SC o culpado [tEU ]]]]] (=(52b) Sou EU o culpado)

(55) a. b. c. d.

SC [SC o culpado [EU1SG+F]] Merge of the copula [VP serCOP [SCo culpado [EU+1SG+F]]] V-to-T and AGREE [TP sou+PRS1SG [VP tCOP [SC o culpado [EU+1SG+F]]]] V-to-F and Focus-movement to Spec of FP [FP EU+1SG [F’ sou [TP tCOP [VP tCOP [SC o culpado [tEU]]]]]] (=(52c) EU sou o culpado)

We assume that, though in both European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese the lexical verb stays in T, the copula has retained the property to go to F. The derivation of pseudo-clefts, or wh-clefts, proceeds as in equative sentences (cf. similar analyses in Kato et al. 1996; Modesto 2001; Belletti 2005, among others): (56) a. Quem a Maria conheceu foram esses meninos. (wh-cleft)

136 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

b. Foram ESSES MENINOS quem a Maria conheceu. (canonic wh-cleft)13 c. ESSES MENINOS foram quem a Maria conheceu. (inverse wh-cleft) (57) a. b. c. d. e.

SC [SC [quem a Maria conheceu] [esses meninos+3PL]] Merge of the copula [VP serCOP [SC [quem a Maria conheceu] [esses meninos+3PL]]] V-to-T [TP serCOP + T+PST?p?number [vP tCOP [SC [quem a Maria conheceu]  [esses meninos+3PL]]]] AGREE [TP foram+PST+3PL [VP tCOP [SC [quem a Maria conheceu]  [esses meninos+3PL]]]] EPP [TP [quem a Maria conheceu]i foramc [vP tCOP [SC ti  [esses meninos+3PL]]]] (= (56a))

(58) a. b. c. d. e.

SC [SC [quem a Maria conheceu] [ESSES MENINOS+3PL]DP] Merge of the copula [VP serCOP [SC [quem a Maria conheceu] [ESSES MENINOS+3PL]DP]] Focus movement to the periphery of VP [FP [ESSES MENINOS+3PL]j [VP serCOP [SC [quem a Maria conheceu]  [ tDP ]i]]] V-to-T and AGREE [TP serc +PST 1SG [FP [ESSES MENINOS]j [VP tc [SC [quem a Maria  conheceu] [tj]]]]] [TP foram+PST+3PL [FP [ESSES MENINOS]j [VP tc [SC [quem a Maria  conheceu] [tj]]]]] (= (56b); T has no EPP-feature here)

(59) a. b.

SC [SC [quem a Maria conheceu] [ESSES MENINOS+3PL]DP] Merge of the copula [VP serCOP [SC [quem a Maria conheceu] [ESSES MENINOS+3PL]DP]]

c. V-to-T and AGREE

13. Modesto (2001) calls this pattern the extraposed pseudocleft, but we call it the “canonic wh-cleft” to make it parallel to the canonic that-cleft. What he calls the “canonic wh-cleft” is what we call “wh-cleft” without any qualification.



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 137

d. e.

[TP foram+PST+3PL [VP tCOP [SC [quem a Maria conheceu]  [ESSES MENINOS+3PL]]]] EPP [TP [quem a Maria conheceu]i foramCOP [VP tCOP [SC ti  [ESSES MENINOS+3PL]DP ]]] V-to-F [FP [ESSES MENINOS+3PL]DP [F’ foramCOP [TP [quem a Maria conheceu]i tCOP [VP tCOP [SC ti [tDP]]]]]] (= (56c) and Focus movement to Spec of FP)

4.4 Presentative clefts and the derivation of inverse that-clefts In this section we will claim that the inverse that-cleft in (60b) is related to the presentative cleft in (60a). (60) a. É que o meu pé dói. (presentative cleft) b. O MEU PÉ é que dói. (inverse that-ceft) We argue that presentative clefts and inverse clefts have a complementizer que, of the type that we have in verbs like say, think, etc., which do not allow the wh-element to appear in its specifier, because it is not endowed with an F-feature. With unmarked sentences, we saw that the whole sentence can be the focus if the contextual question has no presuppositional part: Contextual question Answer (61) O que aconteceu? (62) [F O meu pé dói.] ‘What happened?’ the my foot hurts ‘My foot hurts.’ In Portuguese (both in Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese) a presentative cleft is also an appropriate answer to a contextual question like (61):14 (63) É que [F o meu pé dói]. is that the my foot hurts ‘It happens that my foot hurts.’ If a plain complementizer que is merged to an unmarked sentence, we derive a subordinate clause with no requirement of movement. If a copula is merged at this stage,

14. (60) can also be a short version of a causative clause: (i) – Por que você está chorando? (ii) – É (por)que o ladrão levou o meu laptop. – ‘Why are you crying?’ – ‘It is because the thief took my laptop.’

138 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

we obtain the presentative clause. The derivation converges because there is no Focus feature to be checked and there is no Focus movement. (64) a. b. c. d.

[TP O meu pé dói.] [CP que [TP o meu pé dói]] Merge of que [VP é [CP que [TP o meu pé dói]]] Merge of the invariable copula é [TP é [VP tCOP [CP que [TP o meu pé dói]]]] V-to-T (= (60a))

In order to derive the inverse that-cleft a constituent has to be contrastively focalized. Here such a constituent has to be marked with a +F feature, and is represented in block letters: (65) [O MEU PÉ]+F é que dói.

(Inverse that-cleft)

The derivation starts as in (66): (66) a. b. c. d. e.

[TP [ o meu pé]+F dói.] Merge of que [CP que [TP [o meu pé]+F dói.]] Merge of the invariable copula é [VP é [CP que [TP [O MEU PÉ]+F dói.]]] V-to-T and no EPP in T [TP éCOP [VP tCOP [CP que [TP [O MEU PÉ]+F dói.]]]] V-to-F and Focus to its Spec [FP [O MEU PÉ+F]i [F’ éCOP [TP tCOP [VP tCOP [CP que [TP ti dói.]]]]]]

The same derivation is assumed for cleft wh-questions: (67) O QUE é que dói? (68) a. b. c. d. e.

[TP [o que]+wh dói] Merge of que [CP que [TP [o que]+wh dói]] Merge of the invariable copula é [VP é [CP que [TP [O QUE]+wh dói]]] V-to-T and no EPP in T [TP éCOP [VP tCOP [CP que [TP [O QUE]+wh dói.]]]] V-to-C and wh-movement to its Spec [CP [O QUE+wh]i é+C [TP tCOP [VP tCOP [CP que [TP ti dói.]]]]]

Two pieces of evidence can be provided in favor of our analysis. First, the copula in the presentative sentence does not comply to tense agreement (consecutio temporum), being a kind of grammaticalized form. Observe that the same holds for inverse that-clefts. However, this is not the case in canonic that-clefts (69).



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 139

(69) a. É que meu pé dói. b. É que meu pé doeu. (70) a. O MEU PÉ é que dói. b. O MEU PÉ é que doeu. (71) a. É O MEU PÉ que dói. b. Foi O MEU PÉ que doeu. Second, languages like English do not have presentative clefts, and our theory predicts that they do not have inverse that-clefts either, and the prediction holds. (72) a. *It is that Maria left. b. *MARIA is that left. French has sentences like C’est que Jean est malade ‘It’s that Jean is ill’, but it has only the causative meaning, for which we can assume a different source (C’est (parce) que Jean est malade ‘It’s because Jean is ill’) (cf. Note 14).

4.5

The derivation of the canonic cleft sentence

We propose that in canonic that-clefts the complementizer que is endowed with +F features, like the complementizer of verbs that select interrogative sentences. In Brazilian Portuguese, the contrast with the que of verbs of saying is very revealing. With verbs of saying we have long wh-movement, while with verbs of asking the movement is to the local complementizer: (73) a. b.

Quemi a Maria disse que o Pedro ama ti? who the Maria said that the Pedro loves ‘Who did Maria say that Pedro loves?’ A Maria perguntou quemi (que ) o Pedro ama ti? the Maria asked who that the Pedro loves ‘Maria asked who Pedro loves?’

We claim that the focalized element in canonic clefts does not move to the specifier of the root FP, like in inverse clefts, because it can check the +F feature in the specifier of a lower complementizer position. (74) São [OS MEUS PÉS que] doem. We start with the TP already derived, which is merged with a complementizer with a +F feature. The Focus moves to its specifier. The copula is then merged to this FP, and the derivation proceeds as in other cases.

140 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

(75) a. b. c. d. e. f.

[TP OS MEUS PÉS+3PL doem] Merge of the complementizer que+F [FP que+F [TP OS MEUS PÉS+3PL doem]] Focus movement to Spec of FP [FP OS MEUS PÉS+3PL [que+F [TP ti doem]]] Merge of the copula [VP ser [FP OS MEUS PÉS+3PL [que+F [TP ti doem]]]] V-to-T [TP [serCOP + T+pres?p?number][VP tCOP [FP [OS MEUS PÉS+3PL][que+F [TPti doem]]]]] AGREE [TP [são +3PL]COP [VP tCOP [FP [OS MEUS PÉS+3PL][que+F [TP ti doem]]]]]

In both European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, the DP OS MEUS PÉS can no longer move to the left periphery of the root clause because its features have already been checked by que+F of the lower FP. This means that the canonic that-cleft cannot be the source for the inverse type of that-cleft.

4.6 Clefts without operators (semi-pseudo-clefts)15 One type of cleft we have not mentioned so far is the cleft type that exhibits neither a wh-word nor a that-complementizer. The following are some examples: (76) a. b. c. d.

Telefonou foi a Maria. telephoned was the Maria ‘The one who telephoned was Maria.’ Comprou um carro novo foi o Pedro. bought a car new was the Pedro ‘The one who bought a new car was Pedro.’ O João leu o livro novo foi no jardim. the John read the book new was in the garden ‘Where John read the new book was in the garden.’ Acontece é [que as épocas estão evoluindo]. happens is that the times are evolving ‘What happens is that times are changing.’

(77) a. (Quem) telefonou foi a Maria. b. (Quem) comprou um carro novo foi o Pedro.

15. See analyses of such constructions as reduced pseudo-clefts in Casteleiros (1979), Wheeler (1982), Kato et al. (1996) and different types of analyses in Bosque (1999) and Costa & Duarte (2003).



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 141

c. (Onde) o João leu o livro novo foi no jardim. d. (O que) acontece é que as épocas estão evoluindo. Here we propose a different analysis from those that derive this kind of cleft from pseudo-clefts (cf. Casteleiro 1979, Wheeler 1982, Kato et al. 1996). We start with a simple sentence merged with the copula; an FP is projected at the periphery of the VP and the DP+F is moved to its specifier; the copula raises to T and AGREE applies to establish verbal agreement; last, we have Remnant movement of the lower TP to the TopP position. (78) a. b. c. d. e. f.

Sentence with an element marked +F [TP [A MARIA+3SG]+F telefonou] Merge of the copula [VP serCOP [TP [A MARIA+3SG]+F telefonou]] Projection of FP and movement of the element marked +F to FP [FP A MARIAi+3SG [VP serCOP [TP ti telefonou]]] V-to-T [TP serCOP + T+PST?p?number [FP [A MARIA+3SG]i [VP tCOP [TP ti  telefonou]]]] AGREE [TP foi+PST3SG [FP [A MARIA+3SG]i [VP tCOP [TP ti telefonou]]]] Remnant movement of TP [TopP [TP ti telefonou]] [TP foi+PST3SG [FP A MARIA+3SG]i [VP tCOP  [TP tT ]]]

4.7 The derivation of the reduced that-cleft in Brazilian Portuguese In (79) we have what Kato et al. (1996) have called the reduced that-clefts, where the copula is absent. (79) BP a. b.

OS MEUS PÉS que doem. the my feet that hurt-3pl ‘My FEET hurt.’ ONDE que você vai? where that you go ‘Where are you going?’

Two possibilities of reduction can be considered: (i) (79) derives from the erasure of the copula in (80a), the inverse that-cleft, or (ii) it derives from the erasure of the copula in the canonic that-cleft (80b): (80) a. OS MEUS PÉS (é) que doem. the my feet is that hurt-3pl

142 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

b. (São) OS MEUS PÉS que doem. (are) the my feet that hurt-3pl Kato & Raposo (1996) proposed (80a) as the source of the reduced cleft on account of the invariability of the copula. However, European Portuguese has also an invariable copula in inverse that-clauses, but it does not license the reduced type. We also call attention to the fact that copula erasure is licensed in sentence initial position, but not in the middle (see Kato 2007). (81) a. b.

O seu cabelo *(é) lindo. the your hair   is beautiful ‘Your hair is beautiful.’ (é) lindo o seu cabelo. is beautiful the your hair ‘It is beautiful, your hair is.’

(82) a. OS MEUS PÉS *(é) que doem. b. (São) OS MEUS PÉS que doem. We claim, therefore, that the reduced cleft is derived following the same derivation as the canonic that-cleft, followed by copula-erasure at PF. Brazilian Portuguese, in its popular varieties, allows relaxation in agreement even in canonic that-clefts as in (83a). Lack of tense concord is also heard, as in (83b) (cf. examples (34) and (35)). (83) BP, *EP a. É OS MEUS PÉS que doem. is the my feet that hurt-3pl ‘It is my feet that hurt.’ b. É OS MENINOS que saíram. is the boys that left-3pl ‘It is the boys that left.’ We attribute both, the possibility of lack of person/number agreement and Tense concord in the copula, as progressive steps of grammaticalization, which is at the root of the grammaticalization that gave origin to the zero copula. Summarizing, we proposed that the inverse that-cleft, in both European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, derives from a presentative cleft, an impersonal construction with an invariable copula having an ordinary that-clause as its complement. As for the canonic that-cleft, we proposed a different story: it involves a homophonous que+F, with a Focus-feature, which allows the focalized element to land at its specifier. Thus, what accounts for this difference is a matter of the nature of selection by the copula. Brazilian Portuguese is undergoing a process of grammaticalization due to the weakening of its agreement system, which affects the grammar in other domains, and as a result manifests forms nonexistent in European Portuguese.



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 143

The following section will present the diachronic findings regarding the several types of cleft sentences.

5.

The diachronic cleft patterns in the history of Portuguese

Confirming previous studies (Ribeiro 1995a, 1995b, Torres Morais 1995), Old and Classic Portuguese is found to exhibit verb second patterns in both declarative and wh-questions: (84) a. [Com tanta paceença] sofria ela esta enfermidade.   with so.much patience suffered she this illness ‘She suffered this illness with such patience.’ (DSG, 14th c.) b. [Com estas e outras taaes rrazoões] arrefeçeo el-rrei de sua sanha.   with this and other reasons weakened the king in his rage ‘Because of this and other reasons, the king softened in his rage.’ (CDP, 15th c.) (85) a. – Como veestes vós a aqueste ermo?    how came you to this place ‘How did you get to this deserted place?’ (FLOS, 14th c.) b. – Como posso eu seer monge?    how can I be monk ‘How can I be a monk?’ (FLOS, 14th c.) c. – Quantas libras destes vós a aquel homem que veo a mim?    how.many pounds gave you to that man who came to me ‘How many pounds did you give to the man who came to me?’ (FLOS, 14th c.) d. – En que soon eu culpado?    in what am I guilty ‘What am I guilty of?’ (DSG, 14th c.) The main diachronic findings regarding cleft sentences in Old Portuguese are the following (Kato & Ribeiro 2007, Ribeiro & Kato forthc.): I.  Inverse wh-clefts, or pseudo-clefts, are the only cleft type found in the oldest verb second period.16 The copula is the verb in second position and the focused predicate 16. Ordinary relative clauses headed by a demonstrative pronoun could be found as early as the fourteenth century, but with the verb preceded by a negation breaking the verb first pattern: (i) Nõ he AMIGO aquelle que em todallas cousas nõ ama… not is friend that who in all-the things not loves ‘It is not a friend someone who does not love in all the things…’ (CGE, 14th c.)

144 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

constituent is the initial constituent, almost always a deictic term. (86a) and (87b) are typical examples of this period, with the predicate of the small clause in initial position: (86) a. b.

AQUESTO he o que todos devemos a fazer. that is what everyone should to do ‘That is what everyone should do.’ (DSG, 14th c.) ELE he o que tempera a sanha. he is what seasons the rage ‘He is who seasons the rage.’ (DSG, 14th c.)

II.  The cleft wh-questions in this period are also of the inverse pseudo-cleft type, but the only wh-pronouns that appear in this type of question are o que, quem and qual, and this seems to have been the case throughout the Classic period, as Lopes Rossi (1996) claims that cleft questions are restricted to wh-arguments. (87) QUE he o que dizes, irmãã? what is what say (you) sister ‘What is it that you say, sister?’ (DSG, 14th c.) III.  Wh-clefts with a free relative as subject, an ordinary TP sentence, appear as early as the sixteenth century. (88) a. b.

Porém, o que mais importa é que com esta mudança se dilatará mais nossa santa fé. however what more counts is that with this change one will spread more our saintly faith ‘However, what counts more is that our saintly faith will spread more with this change.’ (Faria, 16th c.) O que sabemos é que estava violentado e como em prisão. what (we) know is that (he) was raped and as in prison ‘What we know is that he was raped and as if in prison.’ (FLS, 16th c.)

IV.  Declarative inverse that-clefts start to be licensed in the fifteenth century (cf. (89a), (89b)), before the canonic type. The interrogative that-clefts start to appear in the seventeenth century, thus much earlier than what was claimed in previous studies, and while Portuguese was still a verb second language. Moreover, contrary to Lopes Rossi’s claim, the inverse that-cleft questions were not restricted to arguments (cf. (90a) and (90b)).

(ii) E nõ és TU aquel que tanto confiavas de ti…? and not are you that who so-much trusted of you ‘And aren’t you the one that so much trusted you...? (FLOS, 14th c.)



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 145

(89) a. b.

A DEMANDA DO SANTO GRAAL é que, em tam mostrará a  the quest of.the Holy Grail is that so will.show to  estes homees […] these men ‘THE QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL will then show these men […]’ (DSGraal, 15th c.) E ISSO é que se chama postura, ou posição reta. and this is that refl calls posture or position straight ‘And this is what one calls posture, or straight position.’ (Argote, 17th c.)

(90) a. b.

com que substantivo é que concordam? with which noun is that agree-3pl ‘Which noun is it that it agrees with?’ (Argote, 17th c.) E quando é que são Relativos? and when is that are Relatives ‘And when is it that they are Relatives? (Argote, 17th c.)

The derivation of the inverse that-clefts found in older phases proceeds exactly like in modern examples of inverse that-cleft, originating in presentative-like clefts. (91) E [CP/FP [ISSO]i [F’ é [TP tCOP [CP ti que-F [TP ti se chama postura …]]]]] (92) E [CP/FP QUANDOi [F’ é [TP tCOP [CP ti que-F [[TP pro são relativos] ti]]]]] V.  Though both pseudo-clefts and that-clefts of the inverse type are found in wh-questions before the nineteenth century, the non-cleft whVS pattern was the preferred norm until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it started to decrease (cf. Lopes Rossi 1996). European Portuguese, on the other hand, still retains the whVS pattern in written language (cf. Kato & Mioto 2005). (93) a. b. c. d. e.

Que dizeis vós, Humildade? what say-2pl you Humildade ‘What do you say, Humildade?’ (Gil Vicente, 16th c.) Que chama vossa mercê el-rei? what call you the-king ‘What do you call the king?’ (Couto, 17th c.) Aonde irá Semicúpio com a velha? to where go-fut.3sg Semicúpio with the old-lady ‘Where will Semicúpio go with the old lady?’ (Judeu, 18th c.) Onde estou eu? ‘Where am I?’ (Azevedo, 19th c.) DE QUE ri Diamantino? of what laughs Diamantino ‘What does Diamantino laugh at?’ (O Público, 20th c.)

146 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

VI.  In the eighteenth century we finally have the appearance of canonic wh-clefts ((94a) and (94b)) and canonic that-cleft sentences ((94c) and (94d)), which require the low FP position for the landing of the focalized element: (94) a. b. c. d.

foi VOSSA EMINÊNCIA quem me conduziu à presença de  was Your Eminence who me took to.the presence of  Sua Alteza Real Your Highness Royal ‘It was Your Eminence who took me to the presence of Your Royal Highness.’ (Alorna, 18th c.) foi VOSSA EMINÊNCIA quem julgou que eu era digna de  was You Eminence who considered that I was worth of  expor […] expose ‘It was Your eminence who considered that I was worth exposing…’ (Alorna, 18th c.) É O REI LEGÍTIMO que devemos opor ao usurpador. is the king legitimate that (we) should oppose to.the usurper ‘It is the legitimate king that we have to oppose to the usurper.’ (Alorna, 18th c.) É NAS MÃOS DE VOSSA EMINÊNCIA que êles depositam hoje  is in.the hands of Your eminence that they deposit today  a sorte da Igreja e da França the destiny of.the Church and of France ‘It is in Your Eminence’s hands that they deposit the destiny of the Church and of France.’ (Alorna, 18th c.)

While in previous periods the copula could only select a complementizer que-F, which yielded only inverse types of cleft, in the eighteenth century it also selects a que+F, which allows checking of Focus features in the lower FP. (95) [TP É [FP [O REI LEGÍTIMO]i [F’ que+F [devemos opor ti ao usurpador]]]] (= (94c)) VII.  In the twentieth century Brazilian Portuguese optionally starts to drop the copula in spoken cleft questions, and what we have been calling the reduced cleft comes up (wh que) (Duarte 1993 and Lopes Rossi 1996), with the same change affecting declaratives (Kato & Raposo 1996). This innovation is not found in European Portuguese. As we saw above, the possibility of erasing the copula seems to start when it no longer exhibited the person and number agreement and Tense concord properties, as was seen in (83), repeated here as (96):



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 147

(96) BP, *EP a. É OS MEUS PÉS que doem. is the my feet that hurt-3pl ‘It is my feet that hurt.’ b. É OS MENINOS que saíram. is the boys that left-3pl ‘It is the boys that left.’ The invariability of the copula in the inverse clefts, on the other hand, has to do with tense invariability of the copula in presentative sentences, from which they originate in both varieties, and in the classic period. (97) BP and EP a. É / *Foi que a Maria saiu. b. A Maria é / *foi que saiu. ‘It is/was Maria that left.’ This comparison lead us to propose that the reduced cleft derives, not from the inverse type, where both Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese exhibit an invariable copula, but from the canonic that-cleft type, in which only Brazilian Portuguese shows lack of Tense-agreement properties. (98) a. b.

BP and EP Quem é que chegou? BP (É) quem que chegou? ‘Who is it that arrived?

(99) a. b. c.

BP and EP A MARIA é que chegou. BP (É) a MARIA que chegou. EP Foi a MARIA que chegou. ‘It was Maria that arrived.’

VIII.  Non-cleft questions were mainly of the whVS order before the nineteenth century. The whSV order, without é que, starts to appear in the nineteenth century (see examples (100a) and (100b)) only in Brazilian Portuguese, becoming competitive with the é que cleft sentences and the reduced clefts in twentieth-century Brazilian Portuguese. ­Duarte (1992) correlates the innovative SV order in wh-questions to the appearance of whclefts, where the order is preferentially SV. But wh-questions are an inverse type of thatcleft, which we found to appear much sooner, in the fifteenth century. Moreover, Lopes Rossi (1996) argues that European Portuguese licenses é que cleft questions, but does

148 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

not license SV order in questions, which shows that the two forms are not parametrically related, i.e. reflexes of the same parameter value. (100) BP a. b.

E para que você quer ser ministro, seu Chico? and for what you want to be minister Mr Chico ‘And what do you want to be minister for, Mr Chico?’ (França Jr, 19th c.; taken from Duarte 1992) E o que você quer? and what you want ‘And what do you want?’ (Novaes, 20th c.; taken from Lopes Rossi 1996)

The authors, however, do not seem to have considered the fact that the two types of wh-questions that are licensed only in Brazilian Portuguese are the reduced cleft and the non-cleft whSV pattern. (101) BP, *EP a. QUEM que a Maria viu? who that the Maria saw b. QUEM a Maria viu? who the Maria saw ‘Who did Maria see?’ Hornstein, Nunes and Grohmann (2005) propose three types of complementizers, one lexical que with a [+wh] feature and two null complementizers, one with a [+wh] feature, and another one without the [+wh] feature to account for the case of wh-in situ. (102) a. [CP Quem+wh [que+wh [você viu twh ]]] who  that  you saw b. [CP Quem+wh [Ø+wh [você viu twh ]]] c. [CP [Ø-wh [ você viu quem]]] The problem with this analysis is the fact that the choices are based on two phonologically identical null forms, with opposite values, a potential problem for language acquisition. Our proposal is that there is no Ø+wh complementizer, but what we have is the possibility of erasing the que+wh complementizer at PF, a stylistic rule. The fact that, in colloquial language, it is the reduced cleft that is the unmarked and most frequent pattern, and that in written language the reduced cleft is rarely used seems to support our “stylistic” analysis. The “stylistic” analysis thus competes with the proposal presented by Kato & Raposo (1996), according to which the whSV patterns result from the loss of inversion in null subject languages.



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 149

Summarizing, from Old and Classic Portuguese to contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, we have the following changes in declarative clauses: (103) a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h.

Old P, Classic P, EP Morreu O rei (e não a rainha). died the king (and not the queen) Old P, Classic P, EP, BP O rei foi quem morreu. the king is what/who died Classic P, EP, BP Quem morreu foi O REI. who died was the king Classic P, EP, BP O rei é que morreu. the king is that died 18th c. EP and BP Foi o rei que morreu. 19th c. BP É o rei que morreu. 20th c. BP O rei que morreu. 20th c. BP O REI (que) morreu.

(non-cleft)

(inverse pseudo-cleft)

(pseudo-cleft)

(inverse that-cleft)

(canonic that-cleft) (canonic that-cleft) (reduced that-cleft) (focus in situ)

In our view, (103h) is the spell-out of (103g) with the complementizer erased. The evolution of wh-questions can be seen below: (104) a. b. c. d. e.

Old P, Classic P, EP QUE queria a Maria? what wanted the Maria Old P, Classic P QUE é o que a Maria queria? Classic P, EP, BP (O) QUE é que a Maria queria? BP O QUE que a Maria queria?  BP O QUE (que) a Maria queria?

(non-cleft whVS)

(inverse pseudo-cleft) (inverse that-cleft) (reduced that-cleft) (reduced cleft)

(104e) is the spell-out of (104d), with the complementizer erased. The comparison shows that European Portuguese still shares many aspects of Old and Classic Portuguese, while Brazilian Portuguese exhibits unique features in cleft structures.

150 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

6.

The convergence of a syntactic change and a stylistic rule

In addition to being a verb second language, Old Portuguese was also a prototypical null subject language, and as such licensed verb first structures in declarative sentences, with a null subject or a postposed one. (105) a. b.

Quero que mh’o digas e desejo mui de coraçon a saber want-1sg that me-it tell-2sg and wish-1sg much of heart to know ‘I want you to tell me and I wish, with my heart, to know...’ (DSG, 14th c.) Casou el- rrei com Dona Branca. married the-king with Dona Branca ‘The king married Dona Branca.’ (CDP, 15th c.)

Brazilian Portuguese starts losing the verb second properties in the eighteenth century (Torres Morais 1993) and the null subject properties in the nineteenth century (Duarte 1993, Berlinck 1995). Cleft sentences were seen to be a major pattern to codify contrastive focus, but as we saw in (27), except for French, it can also obtain in non-cleft sentences. In null subject languages, like Italian, sentence stress is assigned to the element that is moved to the low FP position in the sentence (cf. (106)), namely the VP periphery (Belletti 2004).17 European Portuguese, which has preserved the null subject properties, has the same construction as Italian: (106) a. b.

Italian Mi fa male [FP un PIEDE [vP.......]] EP Dói-me [FP um PÉ [vP........]]

In contrast, a contrastive focus reading in non null subject languages obtains in situ, just with an extra stress, as in example (107a) of English, and example (107b) of Brazilian Portuguese, another property that supports the analysis of change in the null subject parameter in this variety. (107) a. My FÓOT hurts. b. BP Meu PÉ dói. Recall, however, that in the previous section we gave a different account for this apparent ‘in situ’ form. We attributed a FP position for the contrastive focus.­

17. For Cinque (1993) and Zubizarreta (1998), it is the deepmost element in the sentence that gets primary stress. If the subject is to get the contrastive reading, it has to appear in postverbal position.



Cleft sentences from Old Portuguese to Modern Portuguese 151

Subjects can appear unstressed in declarative sentences, in a SV order, when it is not the contrastive constituent. We assume that in such cases the subject is in the specifier of TP. (108) BP Meu pé está doendo. my foot is hurting We can now try to account for the whSV order that is licensed in Brazilian Portuguese, but absent in European Portuguese. We could also attribute it to the loss of VS order, due to the change in the null subject parameter. What we observe, however, is that English, a non null subject language, maintains T-to-C, with auxiliaries, and disallows the whSV order, while French, which licenses the reduced cleft construction, also allows the whSV order. (109) a. Where are you going? b. *Where you are going? (110) French a. Où que tu vas ce matin? where that you go this morning ‘Where are you going this morning?’ b. Où tu vas ce matin? where you go this morning ‘Where are you going this morning?’ Our suggestion, therefore, is that the loss of VS order in Focus constructions is not due to the change in the null subject parameter, but results from a stylistic rule.

7.

Conclusions

We proposed the following differences between the derivation of wh-clefts and thatclefts: in wh-clefts, the copula selects a small clause, with a free relative as subject, while in that-clefts it selects a CP, with que as complementizer. The difference between the canonic types and the inverse types is in the landing site of the focalized element: in the inverse type the focus moves to the root FP, while in the canonic types it moves to the lower FP. Regarding that-clefts, we also proposed that the inverse type and the canonic type have distinct derivations: the inverse type originates from the same basis as the presentative cleft, whose complementizer has no +F feature, while the canonic cleft has a complementizer with a +F-feature. The analysis is supported by the diachronic evolution of clefts. Brazilian Portuguese underwent three major changes since Old Portuguese:

152 Mary A. Kato and Ilza Ribeiro

a. The first change was the weakening of Tense features in root C, with the consequent restriction of verb second orders, allowing only V-to-C/F movement of the copula; in Old Portuguese the copula could only select a C with a –F feature, deriving the presentative cleft. If the embedded clause contained a constituent with +F features, it underwent a cyclic movement to the root CP, deriving the inverse type of clefts. In other words, in Old Portuguese contrastive Focus features were checked only at the edge of the root CP. b. The second major change was the possibility of the copula to select a complementizer with +F features, which, in turn, licensed the checking of a constituent with F-features at the edge of the lower CP, deriving the that-cleft type of sentences. c. The third change, which did not affect Modern European Portuguese, is the appearance of clefts without the copula (the reduced cleft), as a result of the grammaticalization of the copula.

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Cinque, G. 1993. A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic Inquiry 24(2): 239–297. Costa, J. & Duarte, I. 2003. Cleft strategies in Portuguese: a unified approach. Paper presented at the III Colóquio do Projeto Português Europeu/Português Brasileiro, Lisboa. Dikken, M. den. 2006. Specificational copular sentences and pseudoclefts. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (eds), vol. 4, 292–409. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. DSG = Mattos e Silva, R. V. 1971. A mais antiga versão portuguesa dos “Quatro livros dos diálogos de São Gregório”. PhD dissertation, University of São Paulo. DSGraal = Piel, J.-M. 1988. A Demanda do Santo Graal (concluída por Irene Freire Nunes). Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda. Duarte, M. E. 1992. A perda da ordem V(erbo) S(ujeito) em interrogativas-Qu no português do Brasil. DELTA 8(n. especial): 37–52. Duarte, M. E. 1993. Do pronome nulo ao pronome pleno: A trajetória do sujeito no português do Brasil. In Roberts & Kato (eds), 107–128. Duarte, M. E. 1995. A perda do princípio ‘Evite pronome’ no português brasileiro. PhD dissertation, UNICAMP. Faria = Faria, M. S. de. (Date unknown). Discursos Vários Políticos. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda <www.ime.usp.br/~tycho/corpus>. (1583–1655) FLOS = Machado Filho, A. V. L. 2003. Um Flos Sanctorum do Século XIV. Edições, Glossário e Estudo Lingüístico. PhD dissertation, UFBA. FLS = Melo, G. C. de & Castro, A. P. (eds). 1984. A Vida de D. Frei Bertolameu dos Mártires (escrita por Frei Luís de Sousa – 1556–1632). Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda. França Jr. = França Júnior, J. J. de. 1980. Teatro de França Júnior. Tomo II, Rio de Janeiro: Serviço Nacional de Teatro, Fundação de Arte. Higgins, F. R. 1973. The pseudo-cleft construction in English. PhD dissertation, MIT. (Reproduced 1976 by the Indiana University Linguistics Club). Hornstein, N., Nunes, J. & Grohmann, K. 2005. Understanding Minimalism [Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics]. Cambridge: CUP. Kato, M. A. 1999. Strong and weak pronominals in the null subject parameter. Probus 11(1): 1–37. Kato, M. A. 2007. Free and dependent small clauses in Brazilian Portuguese. DELTA. Número Especial. Kato, M. A., Braga, M. L., Lopes Rossi, M. A., sikansi, N. & Correa, V. 1996. Construções-Q na gramática do português brasileiro falado: perguntas, clivadas e relativas. In Gramática do Português Falado, Vol. VI: Desenvolvimentos, I. G. V. Koch (ed.), 303–370. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP. Kato, M. A. & Mioto, C. 2005. A multi-evidence study of European and Brazilian wh-questions. In Linguistic Evidence. Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives [Studies in Generative Grammar 85], S. Kepser & M. Reis (eds), 307–328. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kato, M. A. & Raposo, E. 1996. European and Brazilian word order: questions, focus and topic constructions. In Aspects of Romance Linguistics, C. Parodi, A. C. Quicoli, M. Saltarelli & M. L. Zubizarreta (eds), 267–277. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Kato, M. A. & Ribeiro, I. 2007. A evolução das estruturas clivadas no português. In Para a História do Português Brasileiro, Vol. 6: A experiência dos grupos de estudo, T. Lobo, I. Ribeiro, Z. Carneiro & N. Almeida (eds), vol. 1: 165–182. Salvador: EDUFBA.

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Kiparsky, P. 1995. Indo-european origins of Germanic syntax. In Battye & Roberts (eds), 140–169. Lambrecht, K. 2001. A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics 39(3): 463–516. Lopes Rossi, M. A. 1996. A sintaxe diacrônica das interrogativas-Q do português. PhD dissertation, UNICAMP. Mioto, C. & Negrão, E. V. 2007. As sentenças clivadas não contém uma relativa. In Descrição, História a Aquisição do Português Brasileiro, A. Castilho, M. A. Torres-Morais, R. E. V. Lopes & S. M. L. Cyrino (eds), 159–184. Campinas: Ed. Pontes/FAPESP. Modesto, M. 2001. As Construções Clivadas no Português do Brasil. São Paulo: Humanitas. Moro, A. 1991. The raising of predicates: copula, expletives and existence. In More Papers on Wh-movement [MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 15], L. L. S. Cheng & H. Demirdache (eds), 183–218. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Novaes = Novaes, C. E. 1975. A mulher integral. Ms. Prince, E. F. 1978. A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language 54(4): 883–906. Ribeiro, I. 1995a. O efeito V2 no português arcaico. PhD dissertation, UNICAMP. Ribeiro, I. 1995b. Evidence for a verb-second phase in Old Portuguese. In Battye & Roberts (eds), 110–139. Ribeiro, I. & Kato, M. A. Forthcoming. Focalização de predicados no português arcaico e moderno. In Para a História do Português Brasileiro, vol. 7, V. Aguilela (ed.). Rizzi, L. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar: Handbook of Generative Syntax, L. M. Haegeman (ed.), 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Roberts, I. & Kato, M. A. (eds). 1993. Português Brasileiro. Uma viagem diacrônica. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp. Sornicola, R. 1988. It-clefts and wh-clefts: two awkward sentence types. Journal of Linguistics 24(2): 343–379. Torres Morais, M. A. 1993. Aspectos diacrônicos do movimento do verbo, estrutura da frase e caso nominativo no português do Brasil. In Roberts & Kato (eds), 263–306. Torres Morais, M. A. 1995. Do português clássico ao português moderno: Um estudo da cliticização e do movimento do verbo. PhD dissertation, UNICAMP. Viotti, E. 2007. Ordem VS no português brasileiro: questionando a existência de expletivos nulos. In Descrição, História e Aquisição do Português Brasileiro, A. de Castilho, M. A. Torres Morais, R. E. V. Lopes & S. M. L. Cyrino (eds), 131–158. Campinas: Pontes/ FAPESP. Wheeler, D. 1982. Portuguese pseudo-clefts: evidence for free relatives. In Papers from the Eighteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, K. Tuite, R. Schneider & R. Chametsky (eds), 507–520. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Zubizarreta, M. L. 1998. Prosody, Focus, and Word Order [Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 33]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

Fronting and verum focus in Spanish* Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal Universidad de Alcalá / UNED

There are a number of constructions in Spanish with fronting of a (non interrogative) constituent that do not correspond with clitic dislocation nor with contrastive focus. In such structures a variety of grammatical expressions may be fronted, from indefinite NPs (Algo debe saber) to demonstratives (Eso me dijo). Their interpretation is “emphatic”.   We claim that fronting triggers association of focus with sentence polarity, i.e., ‘verum focus’. In these constructions, which we label Verum Focus Fronting (VFF), there is no informational partition in the explicit content of the sentence: ‘verum focus’ is taken as narrow focus on polarity and the rest is taken as background. Both their emphatic value and their constrained distribution in discourse follow from this particular focus structure.

1.

Introduction

For Romance languages, it is usual to assume that constructions in which non-interrogative constituents are fronted fall into two different types: they are instances either

* The investigation presented in this paper is included in the research project “Semántica procedimental y contenido explícito” (SPYCE), funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación and FEDER (HUM2006-06630). A first version was presented at the XXX. Romanistentag Wien, Sektion 19: Focus und Hintergrund in romanischen Sprachen (University of Vienna, september 2007), and a slightly revised one was presented at the workshop Predicate Focus, Verum Focus, Verb Focus: Similarities and Differences (University of Potsdam, november 2008). We are very grateful to the audiences for stimulating discussion, and also to Ángel Gallego, Maria Lluïsa Hernanz and Josep Quer for some data and useful ideas. We are particularly indebted to an anonymous reviewer for her/his detailed comments and her/his challenging and encouraging discussion of various points of our proposal. Doing justice to all her/his suggestions and pursuing all the issues s/he raised would require at least an additional full-length paper. Our gratitude goes also to Aoife Ahern for checking the English and for her help with the idiomatic translations of the examples. The ideas finally adopted are our exclusive responsibility.

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of clitic left-dislocation or of contrastive focalisation. The two structures are illustrated in the examples (1) and (2):1 (1)

Spanish El libro, ya lo he terminado. the book already cl have.prs.1sg finished ‘The book, I have already finished (it).’

(2)

Spanish el libro he terminado (no los artículos). the book have.prs.1sg finished not the papers ‘I have finished the book (not the papers).’

In clitic dislocation constructions, the constituent that occurs at the leftmost periphery (el libro ‘the book’) is interpreted as a topic, and is co-referential with the resumptive clitic lo. The dislocated constituent is typically deaccented; a comma is usually written to mark off the dislocated constituent from the rest of the sentence, but this is merely a graphic convention and does not necessarily indicate that there should be any kind of pause (though the pause is always possible). Clitic dislocation has well known syntactic properties, such as iterativity and ability to occur both in root and in embedded sentences (see Cinque 1990; Zubizarreta 1998, 1999; Frascarelli 2000; Vallduví 2002; Anagnostopoulou 2006 for details).2 Contrastive focalisation, on the other hand, is characterised by emphatic stress (indicated by small capitals) on the fronted constituent, which is interpreted as a highlighted element taken from a contextually given set and excluding other alternative members of the set. Focalisation differs from clitic dislocation in a number of syntactic properties: there are no resumptive clitics, there is only one contrastive focus slot, and the construction shows all the typical features of operator-variable configurations, such as sensitivity to island contexts and weak cross-over effects (see Zubizarreta 1998, 1999; Szendrői 2006). However, there are constructions that do not fit in well with any of these two categories. Some relevant examples are gathered under (3)–(5):3 (3) a. Nada tengo que añadir a lo que ya dije en su día. nothing have.prs.1sg to add to it that already say.pst.1sg in its day ‘I have nothing to add to what I said at the time.’ 1. From now on, fronted constituents will be highlighted in boldface. 2. In the literature, it is usual to distinguish a further class of topic construction, namely ‘hanging topic’ (see Cinque 1983). Since the difference between ‘ordinary’ dislocated topics and hanging topics is not relevant for our current purposes, we will use the term ‘clitic dislocation’ in a very general sense, intending to cover both kinds of topics. 3. The idiomatic English translations usually do not render the special, ‘emphatic’ flavour of the corresponding Spanish examples.

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b. c.

Algo debe saber. something must.prs.3sg know ‘S/he must know something.’ Poco te puedo decir. little you.obl can.prs.1sg say ‘Little can I say to you.’

(4) a. Lo mismo digo (yo). the same say.prs.1sg (I) ‘I say the same.’ b. Eso creía ella. this believe.pst.3sg she ‘That’s what she thought.’ (5) Dije que terminaría el libro, y el libro he say.pst.1sg that finish.cond.1sg the book and the book have.prs.1sg  terminado. finished ‘I said that I would finish the book, and finish the book I did.’ These constructions seem to have “mixed” properties: on the one hand, they resemble clitic dislocations in that the fronted constituent does not bear any emphatic stress; but, at the same time, like in contrastive focalisation, the construction does not include any resumptive clitic. The structures in (3)–(5) can be found not only in Spanish, but also in other Romance languages:4 (6) Italian a. Qualcosa avrà fatto, nelle vacanze. something have.fut.3sg made in-the holidays ‘S/he must have done something during the holidays.’ b. ...e questo disse anche il Sottosegretario. ... and this say.pst.3sg also the Subsecretary ‘... and so said also the Subsecretary.’ (Cinque 1990) 4. It is unclear whether French shows this kind of fronting. Some of the examples mentioned in Abeillé, Godard & Sabio (2008) could fit in the general pattern we are describing. These are examples from spoken French like (i) Dix-sept ans il a. ten-seven years he have.prs.3sg ‘Seventeen years he has.’ (ii) Deux cigarettes j’ai fumé. two cigarettes I-have.prs.1sg smoked ‘Two cigarettes I have smoked.’

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(7) Catalan a. Algú hi trobarás, a la casa. someone there find.fut.2sg at the house ‘(For sure), you will find someone at the house.’ b. Pocs col·legues hi ha convidat, a la festa. few colleagues there have.prs.3sg invited to the party ‘S/he invited few colleagues to the party.’ (Quer 2002) (8)

Portuguese Muitos libros lhe ofreceu o Pedro! many books him.obl offer.pst.3sg the Pedro ‘Pedro offered him many books!’ (Ambar 1999: 42)

Therefore, the examples in (3)–(8) suggest that there is a third kind of fronting, with a number of specific properties that have to be accounted for in an adequate way. Surprisingly, in the previous literature no general analysis is provided, and only some partial and fragmentary accounts can be found. For Spanish, Zubizarreta (1998) merely mentions examples like the ones in (3) as cases of ‘emphasis’, with no further explanation. Cinque (1990) deals with the Italian data in (6a) as cases of ‘bare quantifiers as operators’, and offers a different analysis for the examples in (6b), which are considered as instances of ‘resumptive preposing’. Quer (2002) and Vallduví (1993) treat Catalan examples such as those in (7) as instances of ‘quantifier fronting’, and Gallego (2007) refers to them as ‘mild focalization’. Ambar (1999) and Barbosa (2001) emphasise the ‘evaluative’ nature of examples like (8). We believe that a more detailed characterisation is needed to account for all the grammatical and discourse properties of this third class of fronted constituents and the constructions in which they occur. In this paper, we will try to answer the main questions that arise, namely, how these structures can be characterised from a syntactic point of view, and how they are interpreted. More precisely, our aim is to provide a unified account for the whole range of examples in (3)–(8): we will argue that, despite their obvious differences, they can all be explained under a single analysis based on the information-structure status of the entire construction. Moreover, we will show that the analysis can be further extended to cover a wider domain of constructions. The organisation of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, we will examine the grammatical properties of fronting, and review the previous literature. Section 3 presents the core assumptions of our proposal, which is built on the information structure status of the constructions under examination. In Section 4, we will consider the consequences of this proposal for interpretation and contextual adequacy. An extension of the analysis to other well known constructions is included in Section 5. Finally, our main findings will be summarised in Section 6.

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2.

A new class of fronting

2.1

Grammatical properties

The grammatical properties of the constructions in (3)–(5) indicate that these are not clitic dislocation structures. To begin with, resumptive clitics are systematically ruled out, as shown by the ungrammaticality of the sequences in (9):5 (9) a. Nada (*lo) tengo que añadir a lo que ya nothing (*cl) have.prs.1sg to add to it that already  dije en su día. say.pst.1sg in its day b. Algo (*lo) debe saber. something (*cl) must.prs.3sg know c. Poco te (*lo) puedo decir. little you.obl (*cl) can.prs.1sg say d. Lo mismo (*lo) digo. the same (*cl) say.prs.1sg In other cases, the occurrence of the clitic does not result in bare ungrammaticality, but changes the structure and the interpretation of the whole construction into that of clitic dislocation: (10) a. Eso lo creía ella. this cl believe.pst.3sg she ‘This, she believed (it).’

5. The conditions governing clitic doubling can vary from dialect to dialect (cf. Suñer 1989). We are considering present day Peninsular Spanish only. We exclude fronted datives, for which – as noted by the reviewer – clitic resumption is compulsory for independent reasons and common to all Spanish dialects. Another point raised by the reviewer, and certainly worth a more accurate discussion, is the fact that clitic doubling is possible when fronting the universal quantifier todo ‘all’. The following examples were mentioned by her/him: (i) Todito te (lo) perdono, menos eso. all.dim you.obj (cl) forgive.prs.1sg, but that ‘All I can forgive but that.’ (ii) Todo *(lo) tienes que hacer a tu gusto. all *(cl) have.prs.2sg to do at your pleasure ‘You have to do everything as you like it.’

The case of todo does not invalidate our generalisation concerning the absence of resumption in this kind of fronting: the presence of the clitic in (i) and (ii) is due to the particular conditions of clitic doubling with todo (see Suñer 1988), and not to the basic features of the construction.

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b. ... y el libro lo he terminado. and the book cl have.prs.1sg finished ‘... and the book, I finished (it).’ In addition, in the examples in (3)–(5) there is an adjacency requirement between the fronted constituent and the verb – a condition that does not hold for clitic dislocation structures, but is in force in interrogatives and focus movement; consider the contrast between (11)–(12), which shows that the subject cannot appear in a preverbal position, on the one hand, and the clitic dislocations in (13), where such requirement is not in force, on the other: Nada tengo yo que añadir a lo que ya dije en  nothing have.prs.1sg I to add to it that already say.pst.1sg in su día. its day ‘I have nothing to add to what I said in due time.’ Algo debe saber ella. something must.prs.3sg know she ‘S/he must know something.’ Poco te puedo yo decir. little you.obl can.prs.1sg I say ‘Little can I say to you.’ Lo mismo digo yo. the same say.prs.1sg I ‘So say I.’ e. Eso creía ella. this believe.pst.3sg she ‘That’s what she thought.’

(11) a. b. c. d.

(12) a. *Nada yo tengo que añadir a lo que ya dije nothing I have.prs.1sg to add to it that already say.pst.1sg en su día. in its day b. *Algo ella debe saber. something she must.prs.3sg know c. *Poco yo te puedo decir. little I you.obl can.prs.1sg say d. *Lo mismo yo digo. the same I say.prs.1sg (13) a. Esto, yo lo tengo que añadir. this I cl have.prs.1sg to add ‘This, I have to add (it).’

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b. Estas cosas, ella las debe saber. these things she cl must.prs.3sg know ‘These things she must know them.’ The intonation of the sentences in (3)–(5) is not the same as that of clitic dislocation constructions either: there is no deaccentuation of the fronted constituent, nor is it possible to have a pause between it and the rest of the structure. Finally, indefinite quantifiers, such as nada ‘nothing’, algo ‘something’ and poco ‘little’, can hardly be interpreted as topics (i.e., as the part of the proposition that is being talked about), and are indeed incompatible with clitic dislocation; the usual paraphrases with ‘As for...,’ or ‘Speaking of...’ are excluded: (14) *En cuanto a nada, (lo) tengo que añadir. as for nothing (cl) have-1sg to add Taken together, all these facts show that the structures in (3)–(5) are not cases of clitic dislocation. There are, on the other hand, reasonable grounds for thinking that these structures are not cases of contrastive focalisation either (Quer 2002: 257–258). It is true that they share a significant number of features with them, such as the lack of resumptive clitics, subject-verb inversion, as illustrated in (11)–(12), and other defining properties such as sensitivity to islands, as shown in (15): (15) a. *Algo tengo [la sospecha de que debe saber]. something have.prs.1sg the suspicion of that must.prs.3sg know b. *Poco hay [gente que te pueda decir...]. little there.is people who you.obl can.sbjv.3sg say However, two crucial differences still remain. The first one has to do with intonation: the sentences in (3)–(5) always lack emphatic stress on the fronted constituent. The second one concerns the interpretation: while focalisation is the way to express contrastive focus, the fronted element in (3)–(5) does not indicate that the fronted element should be singled out from a discourse set of competing alternatives, and in fact cannot co-occur with an explicit mention of the discarded alternative: (16) a. b. c.

Nada tengo que añadir, (*no algo). nothing have.prs.1sg to add not something ‘Nothing more can be added (*not something).’ Algo debe saber, (*no nada). something must.prs.3sg know not nothing ‘(There) must be something she knows (*not nothing).’ Poco te puedo decir, (*no bastante). little you.obl can.prs.1sg say not a-lot ‘There is little I can tell you (*not lots).’

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d. e.

Lo mismo digo, (*no otra cosa). the same say.prs.1sg not another thing ‘I say the same (*not something else).’ Dije que terminaría el libro, say.pst.1sg that finish.cond.1sg the book ‘I said I’d finish the book, y el libro he terminado, (*no el artículo). and the book have.prs.1sg finished, not the paper and finish the book I did (*not the paper).’

Therefore, from a syntactic point of view, the form of the examples in (3)–(5) is basically that of focalisation; there are substantial differences, however, regarding the intonation pattern, their interpretation and their discourse functions, which are clearly diverse, so it has to be concluded that these must be cases of a different construction. The previous considerations exclude the possibility of analysing and interpreting the constructions in (3)–(5) as instances of clitic dislocation or focalisation. One could argue that there is still an additional possibility that we have not taken into account: that of regarding the fronted element as an informative (non-contrastive) focus. There are in fact some Romance varieties that resort to fronting as a means of marking new information. This is the case of Sicilian, Sardinian and Triestino, among Italian dialects:6 (17) Sicilian – Chi scrivisti airi?   what write.pst.2sg yesterday – N‘articulu scrissi.   a paper write.pst.1sg ‘– What did you write yesterday? – A paper (I wrote).’ (18)

Sardinian Custu libru appo lessu. this book have.prs.1sg read ‘I have read this book.’ (Jones 1988: 185)

In (17) and (18) the fronted elements represent the ‘narrow focus’, i.e., the new information that answers a previous question. However, it is quite clear that this is not the case in Spanish either: the examples in (3)–(5) could not be used to answer a question, and no element in the sentence can be assigned a ‘narrow focus’ reading. In Spanish, as in Italian, Catalan and French, it is impossible to place the informative focus of a sentence in the left periphery, as shown by the oddness of the Spanish dialogues in (19): 6. See Cruschina (2006) for Sicilian, and Jones (1993) and Mensching & Remberger (in press) for Sardinian. A similar pattern is found in Czech, according to Lenertová & Junghanns (2007).



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(19) a. – ¿Qué me puedes decir? what me.obl can.prs.2sg say – #{Nada / eso} te puedo decir. {nothing / this} you.obl can.prs.1sg say ‘– What can you tell me? – #{Nothing / this} I can tell you.’ b. – ¿Qué has terminado? what have.prs.2sg finished – #El libro he terminado. the book have.prs.1sg finished ‘– What have you finished? – #The book I have finished.’ The constructions we are examining definitely cannot be used in this way, i.e., as introducing new information as an answer to a wh-question.7 The interpretation as an informative focus is thus excluded for Spanish. We have, then, examined the main grammatical properties of the constructions in (3)–(5). Nothing has been said till now about a crucial issue: What kind of constituents can be fronted? The examples that appear in the scarce literature on the topic are always argumental nominal expressions (cf. the examples in (3)–(8)). Direct object NPs are indeed the fronted constituents in the core examples of the construction under

7. The reviewer claims that Spanish can apparently express informative focus by leftward movement too, in the light of examples like the following dialogue: – ¿Y qué te han traído a ti? And what you.obj have.prs.3pl brought to you.obl? ‘And what did they bring to you?’ – Unas zapatillas me han traído. Slippers I.obj have.prs.3pl brought ‘A pair of slippers they brought me.’ The intonational contour would be the typical one in contrastive focus; the fronted phrase does not express any contrast, but carries the new information requested by the previous question. In our view, this is still a case of contrastive focalisation and represents a marked way to convey the additional idea that the new piece of information is surprising or unexpected, i.e., the example constitutes a case of contrastive focus used for the expression of informative focus. Such a strategy seems to be much more natural in Italian (cf. Brunetti this volume), in examples like the following one: – Che cosa hanno dato al vincitore? What thing have.prs.3pl given to.the winner? ‘What did they give to the winner?’ – Una medaglia gli hanno dato. A medal he.obl have.prs.3pl given ‘They gave him A MEDAL.’

164 Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal

e­ xamination. However, it is not difficult to find cases of fronting with different syntactic categories and grammatical relations, as shown in the examples in (20)–(22): (20) Adjective Phrases a. – Así que eres de Sevilla... so that be.prs.2sg from Seville... – Sevillano soy, sí señor. from.Seville be.prs.1sg yes sir ‘– So you are from Seville… – Sevillian I am, yes sir.’ b. Muy harto debe estar para contestar de esa forma. very fed.up must.prs.3sg be to answer of that way ‘Very fed up indeed he must be to answer you like that.’ (21) Adverbials a. Pronto te has cansado, ¿eh? soon you.obl have.prs.2sg got.tired ‘(So) soon you have tired yourself out, haven’t you?’ b. Ahí lo tienes. there it.obj have.prs.2sg ‘There you have it.’ (22) Prepositional Phrases a. Con la Iglesia hemos topado.8 with the Church have.prs.1pl bumped ‘The Church we have come across.’ b. De poco te servirá quejarte ahora. of little you.obl serve.fut.3sg complain now ‘Little good will it do you to complain now.’ The grammatical properties of the constructions illustrated in these examples are not different from those described for the examples in (3)–(5). Any adequate account of this new kind of fronting must cover the whole range of data.9 8. As the reviewer points out, this example “is attributed to Cervantes, although what the genial author actually wrote is just Con la iglesia hemos dado, Sancho (Quijote, II, 9, p. 696 in Rico’s 1998 edition), with no capital in iglesia, since a real, material church is meant in the passage”. In the course of time both the main verb (from dar (con) ‘to find’ to topar ‘to hit against something’) and the nature of the church (from a building to a spiritual organization) have changed. The expression is nowadays used to convey that something meets a formidable obstacle. 9. As can be observed in the examples, fronting can affect both arguments and adjuncts. Most of our data contain fronted arguments, mainly because the interpretive effects of fronting somehow dissolve with adjuncts, in particular with locative and temporal adjuncts. Such an asymmetry is probably related to the attraction of informational focus by adjuncts. This is what

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The basic syntactic properties of the constructions in (3)–(5) and the equivalent examples in other Romance languages that we have examined so far can thus be provisionally summarised as follows: – They are operator-variable structures (no resumptive clitics, sensitivity to islands, weak-crossover effects). – They display subject-verb inversion (with the corresponding requirement of adjacency of the fronted constituent and the verb). – They cannot be considered as cases of focus movement (neither contrastive focalisation, nor informational focus fronting). – They involve different syntactic categories.

2.2 Some previous accounts Some of these syntactic properties had already been discussed in Benincà (1988) and Cinque (1990) for Italian constructions like (23): (23) a. b.

Qualcosa farò (non preoccuparti). something do.fut.1sg not worry ‘Something I will do (don’t worry).’ Qualcuno troverò di sicuro, per questo compito. someone find.fut.1sg of sure for this task ‘Someone I will find surely for this task.’

Cinque (1990: 74) states that bare quantifiers like qualcosa ‘something’ and qualcuno ‘someone’ in left-dislocated positions qualify as proper operators that are able to bind an empty category as a variable in argument position – the object position in (23). As a consequence, such operators do not require that a clitic be inserted to identify the empty category: this would account for the absence of a resumptive clitic. In contrast, according to Cinque, quantified NPs fail to qualify as operators when they appear in left-dislocated positions, and thus require resumptive clitics, as shown in (24): (24)

Italian Qualche sbaglio, ogni tanto, *(lo) fa anche Gianni. some mistake every such *(it) make.prs.3.sg also Gianni ‘Some mistake now and then, even Gianni makes it.’

Therefore, in Cinque’s analysis bare quantifiers can be base-generated in a left-dislocated position (i.e., they can occupy such position without having been moved there),

happens in polar interrogatives; for example, an interrogative like Did she kill him with a gun? tends to be interpreted as Is it with a gun that she killed him? How adjunct fronting differs from argument fronting is an issue that we will not pursue here.

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but due to their operator nature, they display certain wh-movement properties, such as the absence of resumption. Though the basic insights in Cinque’s (1990) analysis are right, we think that there still remain several problems. First of all, Cinque is not clear about which bare quantifiers behave like operators in ‘fronting without resumption’ constructions. Quer (2002) points out that strong quantifiers like all or both are incompatible with this kind of fronting, and in fact most of our examples involve weak quantifiers: probably, not all quantifiers behave as operators.10 Second, Cinque is not explicit either with respect to the interpretation of the fronted constituents: Are they ­topics, or foci? He does not really address this issue, but he seems to maintain that bare quantifiers occupy the same position as left-dislocated topics – a claim we do not support, as shown in the previous section. In addition, there are some data that seem to challenge his predictions: as rightly pointed out by Quer (2002), quantified NPs (which according to Cinque are not operators) can however appear in a fronted position without requiring a resumptive clitic, at least in Spanish and Catalan: (25) a. b.

Spanish Bastante trabajo tengo ya. enough work have.prs.1sg already ‘Enough work I have already.’ Catalan Pocs col·legues hi ha convidat. few colleagues there have.prs.3sg invited ‘He invited few colleagues.’

This suggests that the crucial factor is not the contrast between bare quantifiers and quantified, complex NPs. A different explanation should be offered for the acceptability of bare and complex quantified expressions when fronted. We will not deal with this issue here, but the key notions probably are the compatibility of quantified NPs with a topic interpretation, and the possibility of assigning them a non-specific / non-referential interpretation – the only one that indefinite quantifiers can receive in fronting constructions (see Leonetti 2009 for further details). In any case, our claim is that ‘fronting without resumption’ is always an instance of (a particular kind of) A-bar movement; the nature of the landing site corresponding to this kind of movement is outside the limits of this paper.

10. The constraint invoked by Quer (2002) makes ‘fronting without resumption’ a Definiteness Effect context. We believe that there is no real restriction against definiteness or strong quantifiers: they are simply less acceptable in this type of fronting, unless certain conditions are met (for instance, the availability of an immediate antecedent for the definite expression; cf. Sections 2.3. and 4.3). It seems that it is the connection between (non)specificity and focus structure, instead of definiteness, what is at stake in these cases. We will not pursue this issue further here.

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Benincà (1988: 141–145) and Cinque (1990: 86–94) offered not only accurate descriptions of quantifier fronting in Italian, but very interesting remarks on another construction, which they dubbed Resumptive Preposing (Anteposizione anaforica in Benincà 1988). Their examples are reproduced in (26): (26) Italian a. La stessa proposta fece poi il partito di maggioranza. the same proposal make.pst.3sg then the party of majority ‘Then the majority party made THE SAME PROPOSAL.’ b. ...e questo disse anche il Sottosegretario. and this say.pst.3sg also the Subsecretary ‘... and so said also the Subsecretary.’ c. Allo stesso modo si comportò suo figlio. to.the same way cl behave.pst.3sg his son ‘In the same way, his son behaved.’ Two properties of Resumptive Preposing are clearly salient: on the one hand, we have again fronting without resumption, but involving mostly definite NPs instead of quantified NPs; on the other hand, the examples in (26) obey very strict conditions of use: as Cinque (1990: 87) notices, “the fronted phrase must either directly resume an identical phrase in the immediately preceding discourse or be inferentially linked to such a phrase”. The presence of demonstratives or ­lexical items such as stesso ‘same’ in the examples is clearly related to the anaphoric nature of Resumptive Preposing. In systematic contrast to clitic left-dislocation, Resumptive Preposing shows every diagnostic of wh-movement: the fronted constituent has to be adjacent to the verb, which triggers subject-verb inversion, and it is incompatible with any other instance of wh-movement such as, for instance, Focus movement: (27)

Italian *ai nostri colleghi le stesse cose ha detto il to.the our colleagues the same things have.prs.3sg said the presidente. president

Although Benincà (1988: 142) points out that the examples in (26) are essentially of the same type as those of quantifier fronting, Cinque (1990) prefers to classify them as separate cases: according to him, Resumptive Preposing is actually a case of A-bar movement, while quantifier preposing seems to be a special case of left dislocation with operator-variable properties. We believe that, from a syntactic point of view, there is no justification in keeping the two constructions separate and that all cases of non-contrastive fronting without resumption are essentially the same – here we depart from Quer (2002) and Cinque (1990). If this is true, there should be an independent way of accounting for the strict pragmatic conditions that hold for Resumptive Preposing. In fact, we will try to show

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in Section 4 that such an account is feasible and can be built on the basis of the interaction between the syntax of this kind of fronting and the nature of the fronted phrase. We will argue that it is not necessary to distinguish Quantificational Fronting from Resumptive Preposing, because they are simply instances of a more general phenomenon: this move will have the obvious advantage of capturing their common features and avoiding the multiplication of different specific constructions.

2.3

Contextual restrictions and ‘emphatic’ interpretation

It is likely that fronting of definites and fronting of indefinites have not been considered as instances of the same construction due to the particularly salient restrictions mentioned in the previous section and that have to do with the need for some sort of anaphoric dependence. This is a restriction that does not affect the structures with fronted indefinites, which fit into a greater range of contexts. We want to argue that the syntactic and semantic properties of the construction are always the same and that the contextual restrictions that govern their acceptability in discourse can be ­explained as a result of the interaction between the semantics of the construction and the specific properties of definites and indefinites. The idea that indefinites are not subject to the same contextual restrictions that are in force for definites does not mean, of course, that constructions with fronted indefinites are free from any contextual constraint. It is important to bear in mind that fronting is always optional, in the sense that the absence of fronting does not result in ungrammaticality; nevertheless, it has remarkable interpretive effects, as already shown with respect to the inadequacy of the answers in (19). Now, a comparison between the examples with fronting, on the one hand, and the corresponding examples without fronting, on the other, is in order to shed some light on the nature of such semantic effects. Consider the minimal pairs in (28): (28) a. b. c.

{Alguna cosa/algún ruido} debiste oír. / {something/ some noise} must.pst.2sg hear Debiste oír {alguna cosa/algún ruido}. must.pst.2sg hear {something/some noise} ‘You must have heard {something/some noise}.’ Bastante trabajo tengo ya. / enough work have.prs.1sg already Tengo ya bastante trabajo. have.prs.1sg already enough work ‘I have already enough work.’ Nada tengo que añadir. / No tengo nada que añadir. nothing have.prs.1sg to add not have.prs.1sg nothing to add ‘Nothing more have I to add. / I have nothing more to add.’

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d. e. f.

De poco te servirá. / Te servirá de poco. of little you.obl serve.fut.3sg you.obl serve.fut.3sg of little ‘Little use will this be to you / It will be of little use to you.’ Pues a eso me refiero. / Pues me refiero a eso. so to this cl refer.prs.1sg so cl refer.prs.1sg to this ‘Well that is what I’m talking about. / Well I’m talking about that.’ Por algo será. / Será por algo. for something be.fut.3sg be.fut.3sg for something ‘There must be some reason for it. / There must be some reason for it.’

The difference produced by fronting is quite subtle, does not affect truth conditions, and is certainly difficult to grasp on intuitive grounds. Nevertheless, speakers agree in considering the version with fronting in some sense ‘stronger’, ‘more marked’ and ‘emphatic’, with respect to the alternative version with canonical order. ‘Affective’ and ‘evaluative’ are terms that usually emerge in the literature for the characterisation of fronting too (cf. Ambar 1999). It is well known that these are loose notions, not easy to define. However, they have been useful in grammatical description, and it is worth to look for an adequate way to cast them in more precise terms. A first source of evidence for a linguistic treatment of ‘emphasis’ comes from the fact that the version with fronting shows in fact a more constrained distribution in discourse. Take, for example, the minimal pair in (28a). If inserted in a dialogue like (29), both sentences (with and without fronting) are equally acceptable: (29) A: B:

– Yo no oí nada. – Pues tú estabas allí. {Alguna cosa debiste oír. / Debiste oír alguna cosa.} ‘– I didn’t hear anything. – Well you were there. {You must have heard SOMETHING / You must have heard something.}’

On the contrary, if inserted in a different context, like the one in (30), only the sentence with the canonical word order sounds natural: (30) A: B:

– No sé por qué, pero hoy me he despertado a las cinco de la mañana… ‘– I don’t know why but I woke up at five o’clock this morning…’ – {Debiste oír algún ruido. / #Algún ruido debiste oír.} ‘– You must have heard some noise. / #You must have heard SOME noise.’

In the context introduced by A’s utterance, the fronting construction is no longer felicitous, so this difference has to be related to the way in which fronting drives the interpretation and the connection to the previous discourse. Let’s look at a different minimal pair. Imagine that speaker B has just launched a business.

170 Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal

(31) A: B:

– ¿Qué tal te va el nuevo negocio? – Bien. {Tengo ya bastante trabajo. / #Bastante trabajo tengo ya.} ‘– How’s your new business going? – Fine. I have quite a lot of work now. / #I already have enough work (I have enough work as it is).’

Here, in B’s reply the sentence with the canonical word order reinforces the idea that business is going well and having a lot of work is presented as a positive outcome. The version with fronting, on the other hand, is clearly odd in this context, because it diverts the interpretation towards the negative consequences of having a lot of work, so it sounds rather like a complaint, which would not fit in with the previous positive response Bien. The version with fronting instead would be adequate in a totally different situation, for instance, one in which B has been offered additional work and wishes to communicate that s/he has already too much work to do and s/he cannot take on any more. The same remarks about the ‘emphatic’ flavour of these constructions extend to the interpretation of sentences with fronted definites, for example, in the contrast between the two versions of (28e). Notwithstanding, when the fronted constituent is a definite NP, the use of the construction is subject to additional constraints. In order to analyse them, two main classes of definite expressions have to be distinguished: on the one hand, non-lexical, anaphoric, pronominal definites (the cases of Resumptive Preposing with demonstratives and expressions like lo mismo ‘the same’); on the other hand, lexical definites, i.e., definite descriptions and proper names (such as the example in (5)). As for non-lexical definites, it has been claimed (see Cinque’s quote above) that they require an explicit linguistic antecedent. The requirement of an antecedent is, however, a general property of pronominals, which is totally independent from fronting; so, this fact is not to be taken as a significant feature of fronting constructions. Therefore, we have to establish in a more detailed way what the contextual restrictions are that operate on structures with fronted definites. Let’s begin by considering the examples in (4), repeated here as (32) for convenience, in which ‘neuter’ forms like lo mismo ‘the_same.neu’ and eso ‘this.neu’ occur: (32) a. Lo mismo digo (yo). the same say.prs.1sg (I) ‘I say the same.’ b. Eso creía ella. this believe.pst.3sg she ‘That’s what she thought.’ In (32) the speaker uses the anaphoric NP to retrieve an antecedent, which can be any previously mentioned proposition. Apart from this requirement, which is an obvious consequence of the pronominal nature of the NPs, there are no further specific con-

Fronting and verum focus in Spanish 171



textual restrictions due to fronting. So, for example, (32a) can be uttered as a reply to a previous turn in which the interlocutor has put forward his opinion on a given topic. Things seem to be more complex when non-neuter anaphoric pronominals are involved, such as ese ‘this.masc one’ and esa ‘this.fem one’, which can pick antecedents referring to human entities. Consider the example in (33): (33) (Sí, sí,) a esa vimos. yes yes to this.fem see.pst.1pl ‘Yes, yes, that’s the one we saw.’ To be adequate in discourse, the example in (33) has to find not only an accessible feminine antecedent for the pronominal esa, but also a sort of “antecedent” for the whole proposition in which the fronted constituent appears; put in other words, the whole proposition has to be evoked in the previous discourse, as in the following dialogue: (34) A: B: A:

– Pues el otro día vimos a esa actriz que hacía de hermana de la protagonista en la película… – Pero ¿cuál? ¿esa a la que entrevistaban ayer? – Sí, sí, a esa vimos. ‘– The other day we saw that actress who was the main character’s sister in the film… – But which one? The one they interviewed yesterday? – Yes, yes, that’s the one we saw.’

In the case of fronted lexical definites, there is also a strong requirement that the propositional content has been made accessible in the immediate context. Thus, a sentence like (35), uttered out of the blue, with no connection to any previous relevant information, is quite difficult to contextualise: (35) ?El libro he terminado.   the book have.prs.1sg finished The example in (35) is not adequate as introducing new information either, as shown in (36): (36) A: – ¿Qué hiciste ayer?   what do.pst.2sg yesterday ‘What did you do yesterday?’ B: – #El libro terminé.   the book finish.pst.1sg ‘I finished the book.’ But once an adequate context is supplied, like the one in (5) – repeated as (37) –, in which the propositional content is previously introduced, it sounds perfectly natural:

172 Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal

(37)

Dije que terminaría el libro, say.pst.1sg that finish.cond.1sg the book y el libro he terminado. and the book have.prs.1sg finished ‘I said that I would finish the book, and finish the book I did.’

Consider now the following set of examples: (38) a. Tenía que leerse el Quijote, y el Quijote se leyó. have.pst.3sg to read.cl the Quijote and the Quijote cl read.pst.3sg ‘S/he had to read the Quijote and read the Quijote s/he did.’ b. #Tenía que leerse el Quijote, y el Quijote   have.pst.3sg to read.cl the Quijote and the Quijote tradujo. translate.pst.3sg #‘S/he had to read the Quijote and translate the Quijote s/he did.’ c. #Tenía que leerse una novela de Cervantes,   have.pst.3sg to read.cl a novel of Cervantes y el Quijote se leyó. and the Quijote cl read.pst.3sg #‘S/he had to read a novel by Cervantes and read the Quijote s/he did.’ d. #Tenía que leerse la novela más famosa de Cervantes,   have.pst.3sg to read.cl the novel most famous of Cervantes y el Quijote se leyó. and the Quijote cl read.pst.3sg #‘S/he had to read Cervantes’ most famous novel, and read the Quijote s/he did.’ e. #Tenía que leerse el Quijote, y La regenta se leyó.   have.pst.3sg to read.cl the Quijote, and La regenta cl read.pst.3sg #‘S/he had to read the Quijote and read La Regenta s/he did.’ f. Tenía que leerse el Quijote, y se leyó La regenta. have.pst.3sg to read.cl the Quijote and cl read.pst.3sg La regenta ‘S/he had to read the Quijote and s/he read La regenta.’ Only (38a), where the construction with fronting literally reproduces the words in the first sentence, is an acceptable sequence. Examples (38b–d) show that no deviation from this condition is allowed if the structure is to fit in adequately; neither the entailment relation holding between una novela de Cervantes and el Quijote, nor even the coreferentiality between la novela más famosa de Cervantes and el Quijote, are enough to license the second sentence. The contrast between (38e–f) indicates that the condi-

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tion on the previous mention affects only structures with fronting, but not the same sentence with canonical order.11 The examples discussed in this section show that the use of the version with fronting is pragmatically more constrained because it is ‘stronger’, in the relevant sense, being loaded with a specific argumentative orientation, a property that is informally included in the notion of ‘emphasis’. What has to be explained now is, first, why a modification in word order gives rise to these interpretive effects; and second, why fronted definites and indefinites obey partially different contextual restrictions. A detailed answer will be provided in the following sections.

3.

Fronting and information structure

The first problem we have to address is, therefore, that of properly defining the kind of fronting operation instantiated in (3)–(5) and its interpretive properties, namely what has been called ‘emphatic’ interpretation. Our proposal will build on the idea that the relevant answer lies in the informational status of the construction. Clitic dislocation and focalisation, though very different from each other in many respects, share a crucial property: they both establish an informational partition in constituent structure. Clitic dislocation detaches the topic from the comment, and places it in a peripheral position; focalisation, on the other hand, separates the contrastive focus from its background. Therefore, they are both operations that not only single out a constituent from its syntactic environment (as heavy stress on in-situ focus does), but specifically do it in a linear way, by placing it in a detached position.

11. The reviewer notices that when using demonstratives and anaphoric expressions the conditions on use are not always as strict as we assume. In fact, in a sequence like (i) fronting does not require a previous mention of the proposition in the context (an antecedent is obviously required by the demonstrative esta ‘this’): (i)

No previeron el descenso demográfico, ni hubo una planificación rigurosa. Y en esta situación estamos ahora. ‘They didn’t foresee the demographic decline, and there was not a rigorous plan- ning either. And in this situation we are now.’

Moreover, the example does not seem to fit in the discourse functions of fronting that we discuss in Section 4. Two alternative solutions for examples of this kind are (a) analysing them as a different type of fronting construction, not exactly the same one we are dealing with here, as suggested by the reviewer; and (b) maintaining a unified analysis, while deriving the peculiar properties of (i) from some intervening additional factor, possibly related to the grammatical function of the fronted phrase: notice that it is not a direct object that is being fronted in (i), but a locative predicate; recall our caveat with respect to arguments and adjuncts in Footnote 9. The issue is certainly relevant for a fine classification of fronting strategies and we leave it open for future research.

174 Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal

The proposal we want to put forward with respect to the examples in (3)–(5) is based on two related assumptions: a. this construction represents a case where fronting, together with other grammatical mechanisms, forces an interpretation of the sentence with no informational partition among its constituents; b. the resulting informational structure is a case of ‘polarity focus’ or ‘verum focus’. These two assumptions will be discussed with more detail in the next two sections.

3.1

Fronting as a means of avoiding informational partition

As for the first assumption, we already showed that the fronted element cannot be interpreted as a topic: this is due to the lack of resumptive clitics and to the intonational contour (which is different from that of a clitic dislocation). On the other hand, the fronted element cannot be interpreted as a contrastive or an informational narrow focus either, for the reasons already mentioned: the syntax of information structure in Spanish does not allow placing an informational focus on the left side of a sentence, and the absence of heavy stress blocks the possibility of having a contrastive reading. In addition, subject-verb inversion also has a central role as a way of avoiding the interpretation of the subject as a topic (even if it is pronominal or null), given that in Spanish (as in other Romance languages) postverbal or internal subjects are never topics. Thus, fronting and subject-verb inversion both converge to force an interpretation in which no constituent is singled out, so every possible informational partition is excluded: the syntax does not seem to allow any kind of split between topic and comment, nor between focus and background.12 This is the first key factor for an adequate understanding of the interpretive properties of the construction we are considering. This proposal can be related to Erteschik-Shir’s (2007) idea of ‘altruistic movement’. She argues that in some languages fronting an element which does not function

12. The absence of an informational partition is not incompatible with the possibility of adding an external topic (left or right dislocated), as illustrated in (i) and (ii): (i) [A ella], poco le puede haber contado. to her little she.obl can.prs.3sg have told ‘To her there is little that he can have said.’ (ii) De poco servirá, [que te sigas quejando]. of little serve.fut.3sg that you.obl keep_on.sbjv.2sg complaining ‘Little good will it do for you to keep complaining.’ This is completely independent of the fronting mechanism, and does not contradict the claim that there is no topic/comment (or focus/background) distinction inside the construction with fronting.

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as a topic can be a way to impose a ‘thetic’ or ‘all-focus’ interpretation.13 This sort of phenomenon can be found in German and Danish in examples like the ones in (39) and (40), in which adverbs are fronted: (39)

German Leider hat keiner dem alten Mann geholfen. unfortunately have.prs.3sg nobody the old man helped ‘Unfortunately, nobody has helped the old man.’

(40)

Danish Desværre kom Hans ikke til selskabet. unfortunately come.pst.3sg Hans not to party ‘Unfortunately Hans didn’t come to the party.’

Erteschik-Shir (2007: 124) points out that this kind of movement is ‘altruistic’, in the sense that the fronting of the adverb is not triggered to satisfy a particular semantic or informational requirement of the moved element itself, but to induce a particular interpretation of the whole construction by forcing a ‘broad focus’ reading. Thus fronting of non-topical and non-focal constituents can have a bearing on the information structure of the sentence: “Fronting such elements may render a thetic focus structure with a stage topic” (Erteschik-Shir 2007: 124). Though Romance examples of fronting are different from Erteschik-Shir’s in the sense that fronted elements also include arguments, adjuncts and predicates, her idea can be extended and adapted to capture some Romance data. In fact, Sardinian seems to instantiate some version of this ‘altruistic fronting’. According to Jones (1993: 356), a sentence with a fronted predicate, in addition to the interpretation in which the preposed constituent is interpreted as narrow focus, is also compatible with a ‘broad focus’ interpretation, with “emphasis on the truth value of the sentence as a whole.”14 However, Erteschik-Shir’s and Jones’ data are only partially comparable to the Spanish ones, because thetic or ‘all-new’ readings are actually excluded in our examples of fronting. The Sardinian example in (41), again from Jones (1993), is perfectly acceptable as a thetic utterance: (41)

Sardinian Manicáu appo. eaten have.prs.1sg ‘I have eaten.’

13. The occurrence of a constituent in a non-canonical position and the de-topicalisation of subjects by means of word order are indeed a hallmark of sentential focus constructions across languages (Lambrecht 2000). See also Lambrecht (1994), Krifka (2007), Féry (2007) for the notion of ‘thetic’ or ‘all-new’ utterances. 14. Mensching & Remberger (to appear) explain this effect in syntactic terms, as the result of the need to move the finite verb to Focº whenever SpecFocP is filled.

176 Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal

In Spanish, on the contrary, sentences with fronting cannot be used as answers to questions introducing all-new contexts, as shown by the oddness of the dialogue in (36),15 repeated here as (42) for convenience: (42) A: – ¿Qué hiciste ayer?   what do.pst.2sg yesterday ‘What did you do yesterday?’ B: – #El libro terminé.   the book finish.pst.1sg #‘The book I finished.’ One could argue that El libro terminé is always unacceptable except in particular contexts like the one in (5). This is due to the fact that fronting of definite NPs severely constrains the contextual compatibility of the construction, by requiring some sort of linguistic antecedent, as already mentioned for Resumptive Preposing (cf. also Section 4.2). Thetic constructions, on the other hand, are not subject to this sort of contextual requirements. In fact, if El libro terminé had a thetic interpretation, one would expect that it should be acceptable in (42), which is not the case. This raises a further question: why do Spanish fronting constructions lack a thetic reading? Thetic readings in Romance are usually obtained by means of subject inversion (as in Llegó el tren, lit. ‘Arrived the train.’), but they are not excluded with a SV(O) word order (as in María recogió sus juguetes ‘María picked up her toys.’). The crucial point is that fronting of a constituent is never needed to get a thetic interpretation. Fronting is always a costly operation if what is to be obtained is merely a thetic reading that could be perfectly expressed by a simpler, more economical syntactic structure. As mentioned above, this is also consistent with some general pragmatic principles, according to which marked interpretations tend to be reserved for formally marked expressions (cf. the ‘markedness principle’ of Levinson (2000), or the ‘principle of paradigmatic contrast’ of Lambrecht (2000), or the idea of ‘interface economy’ suggested by ­Reinhart (2006)): optional operations in the grammar are marked, in the sense that they increase processing effort; as a consequence, they are performed only if they derive an interpretation that would not otherwise be available. To sum up, economy principles prevent fronting constructions from getting unmarked thetic readings. In addition, considering Spanish fronting constructions as thetic structures does not provide an appropriate explanation of their emphatic nature, which is their most salient property on the interpretive side, since thetic utterances are not usually emphatic. Thus, the notion of ‘thetic’ or ‘all-focus’ is not the most appropriate tool for dealing with the linguistic properties of our construction. This is where our second assumption comes into play.

15. As the reviewer points out, this was possible in earlier stages. A diachronic analysis is, however, far beyond the scope of this paper.

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3.2

Fronting as the trigger of ‘verum focus’

Our second assumption is that the informational structure of the constructions with fronting is not that of a thetic construction, but a case of ‘verum focus’, i.e., of focus on the truth value of the sentence (also called ‘polarity focus’) (see Höhle 1992; Krifka 2007; Féry 2007). The obvious connection between ‘thetic’ and ‘verum focus’ is the intuitive idea that focus covers the whole sentence. Nevertheless, the two notions should not be confused. Some brief remarks on the semantics of focus and on the notion of ‘verum focus’ are in order here. Höhle (1992) noticed that in German a pitch accent on the finite verb is used to emphasise the truth of the whole proposition expressed, rather than the content of a particular constituent: (43) a. b.

Hört sie dir zu oder nicht? listen.prs.3sg she you.obj to or not ‘Does she listen to you or not?’ Sie HÖRT mir zu. she listen.prs.3sg me.obl to ‘She DOES listen to me.’

As shown by the translation, the equivalent of ‘verum focus’ in English is obtained by means of prominence marking on the auxiliary. The natural paraphrase for (43b) is (44): (44) It is true that she listens to me. In order to integrate the notion of ‘verum focus’ into our analysis, the standard view of focus in the framework of ‘alternative semantics’ (see Rooth 1992; and also Krifka 2007) has to be borne in mind. Focus is accounted for by adding an extra semantic value [[α]]f to the ordinary semantic interpretation of the sentence [[α]]o. This focus semantic value represents a set of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation: Informally, the focus semantic value for a phrase of category S is the set of propositions obtainable from the ordinary semantic value by making a substitution in the position corresponding to the focused phrase. (Rooth 1992: 76)

Now, if what is in focus is a whole sentence p, whose ordinary semantic meaning is a proposition [[p]]o, the focus semantic value, [[p]]f, is the set of propositions which potentially contrast with it. In the present case, this means considering the set of relevant alternatives to the proposition expressed, which must themselves be of a propositional nature and must include all the constituents (and not only part of them). The obvious alternative to the proposition expressed is the proposition with the inverse polarity: for a proposition p, the relevant alternative is its negation, ~p; the default alternative focus set of p, [[p]]f, is therefore {p, ~p}. The focus on the whole sentence points to the contrast between the two members of the set, i.e., the two mutually

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­exclusive propositions. Now, considering that the propositional content is identical in both propositions except for the polarity sign, it is no surprise that what is in focus is the sentence polarity itself. Some authors consider ‘verum focus’ as “a further special case of narrow focus, namely on the affirmative part of a declarative sentence” (Féry 2007: 167), and suggest representing it as an independent operator (Höhle 1992; Romero & Han 2002; Romero 2006). This could seem contrary to our initial claim that fronting prevents the sentence from receiving an informational partition. We think that both ideas are compatible and can be maintained at the same time: what fronting of a non-topic and non-focus constituent does, together with subject-verb inversion, is to prevent the overt constituents of the sentence from being split into two informationally different regions. When focus affects the polarity, the rest of the sentential constituents forms a single informational region (in this case, the background), so that there seems to be no ‘topic–comment’ or ‘focus–background’ distinction affecting the overt components of the sentence, though there actually is a ‘focus–background’ partition ­represented by narrow focus on polarity. If this idea of ‘verum focus’ as a class of narrow focus is adopted, the immediate prediction is that the propositional content would have to be considered as background; i.e., it has to be known or given to some extent. This is, in fact, what Höhle (1992: 113) suggests: for him, ‘verum focus’ indicates that the information is not new for the speaker, who emphasises the truth of a contextually known proposition. This prediction, which is a crucial piece in our account, is in fact borne out, as we will see later (cf. Section 4.3). Furthermore, we want to argue that ‘verum focus’ is not merely a possible reading for Spanish fronting constructions, but the only available possibility whenever fronting of non-topics/non-focus and subject-verb inversion occurs. Whereas canonical word order can be ambiguous between the interpretation of narrow focus on a constituent and that of sentential focus, fronting gives rise to a construction that has unequivocally a ‘verum focus’ reading, and that is different from all the rest of competing focus constructions. To sum up, the steps leading to the ‘verum focus’ interpretation are the following. Once an informational partition is excluded, the most immediate solution would be extending the focus to the whole sentence to get a thetic reading. However, as we already pointed out, that kind of reading is excluded too for economy reasons, given that (a) a thetic reading is easily obtained “for free” in unmarked SV or VS sentences; (b) fronting always produces marked structures, which call for marked readings, according to well-known economy principles in interpretation; and (c) as a consequence, thetic readings are not optimal interpretations for fronting constructions. In such a situation, the only remaining way to assign a plausible interpretation is ‘verum focus’, an interpretation that is consistent with both the non-informational partition requirement and the marked status of the fronting structure. As a result, what can initially be conceived of as an inferential path inexorably leading to a last resort interpretation has probably turned into a conventional grammatical meaning associated with a marked construction.

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In what follows we will call ‘verum focus fronting’ (hereinafter, VFF) the fronting construction we have been analysing so far. The notion of ‘verum focus’ is crucial for an understanding of fronting constructions and their ‘emphatic’ interpretation, as will be shown in the next section.

4.

Interpreting Verum Focus Fronting

4.1

Emphasis and Verum Focus Fronting

According to our proposal, the whole range of interpretive properties of the VFF constructions, in particular their ‘emphatic’ nature, can receive a straightforward explanation based on the notion of ‘verum focus’. More specifically, we would like to suggest that ‘verum focus’ is indeed the most appropriate tool for capturing the intuitive idea of ‘emphasis’ in a theoretical way. As mentioned before, when the polarity of a proposition is in focus, it is highlighted in contrast with its alternative. This is why informal paraphrases of ‘verum focus’ sentences typically involve the explicit indication that the content is true or sure (cf. example (36); see Höhle 1992; Romero & Han 2002; Romero 2006). In fact, in Spanish the most natural paraphrase of a VFF structure consists in a construction in which the propositional content is embedded under the affirmative particle sí ‘yes’ or under the adjectives seguro ‘sure’ or cierto ‘true’, as shown in (45): (45) a. b. c. d.

Algo has visto. → {Sí / seguro} que has visto something have.prs.2sg seen → {yes / sure} that have.prs.2sg seen algo. something ‘You have seen something. →Yes / surely you have seen something.’ A alguien encontrarás. → {Sí / Seguro} que encontrarás a alguien. to someone find.fut.2sg → {yes / sure} that find.fut.2sg to someone ‘You will find someone.’ → ‘It’s sure that you will find someone.’ Lo mismo creo yo. → Es cierto que yo the same believe.prs.1sg I → be.prs.3sg true that I creo lo mismo. believe.prs.1sg the same ‘That’s what I think, too.’ → ‘It’s true that I think so too.’ Miedo me da pensarlo. → fear I.obl give.prs.3sg think_it {Sí / es cierto} que me da miedo pensarlo. {yes / be.prs.3sg true} that I.obl give.prs.3sg fear think_it ‘Afraid as I am to think so.’ → ‘Yes / It’s true I’m afraid to think about it.’

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e. f.

Sevillano soy. → Sí que soy sevillano. from.Seville be.prs.1sg → yes that be.prs.1sg from.Seville ‘Sevillian I am.’ → ‘Yes I am Sevillian.’ Muy harto debe de estar. → Sí que debe de estar very fed.up must.prs.3sg be → yes that must.prs.3sg be (muy) harto very fed.up ‘Very fed up he must be.’ → ‘Yes he [certainly] must be (very) fed up.’

These paraphrases make explicit the partition between the propositional content and the polarity: only the polarity is in focus and the proposition stays in the background. We claim that what is perceived as ‘emphasis’ is the result of focus on sentence polarity. On the one hand, focus overtly marks the assertion of a propositional content, and, at the same time, it rejects any alternative proposition; as a consequence, the propositional content is asserted in a very strong way. On the other hand, the fact that the proposition is treated as background information (i.e., as already present, in some sense, in the common ground) and the fact that this background information is both introduced again and asserted contributes to reinforcing the strength of the assertion (cf. Section 4.3). Thus, ‘emphasis’ is the effect of reasserting background information and removing from the context any competing assumption. An interesting consequence of this approach to the emphatic nature of VFF constructions is that ‘verum focus’ and ‘emphasis’ cannot be treated merely as implicatures of the utterance. They are in fact triggered by the syntax and cannot be cancelled, as shown by the oddness of sequences such as (46): (46) #Alguien encontrarás, pero no es seguro.   someone find.fut.2sg, but not be.prs.3sg sure #‘(It is true that) you WILL find someone, but it is not sure.’ VFF in the first sentence is semantically incompatible with the content of the second sentence, and no pragmatic mechanism is able to rescue such a contradiction. Additional evidence for the emphatic nature of Spanish VFF can be found in word order patterns in traditional proverbs and idioms. VFF is a characterising feature in most of them, which reinforces their typical flavour of “old-fashioned” sententious assertions conveying indisputable and irrefutable truths: (47) a. b.

A la fuerza ahorcan. to the force hang.prs.3pl ‘Hanging is done by force. (= No surprise that one is reluctant to do unpleasant things.)’ De casta le viene al galgo from cast it.obl come.prs.3sg to.the greyhound (tener el rabo largo). have the tail long

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c. d. e. f. g. h.

‘From its cast it comes to the greyhound to have a long tail.  (= You cannot modify someone’s nature.)’ No por mucho madrugar, amanece más temprano. not for much get.up.early dawn.prs.3sg more early ‘It is not so that getting up early brings forth the dawn.’ Quien mucho abarca, poco aprieta. who much embrace.prs.3sg little grasp.prs.3sg ‘He who embraces much grasps little.’ Menos da una piedra. less give.prs.3sg a stone ‘Less would a stone give. (= Better than nothing.)’ Doctores tiene la Iglesia. doctors have.prs.3sg the Church ‘The Church has its doctors. (= Leave the explanation of difficult matters to the real experts.)’ Poderoso caballero es Don Dinero. (Quevedo) powerful knight is Sir Money ‘Sir Money is a powerful knight. (= Money can get everything.)’ Más se perdió en Cuba… more cl lose.pst.3sg in Cuba ‘More was lost in Cuba. (= You have to relativise things.)’

Now, our next claim is that all the interpretive properties of VFF constructions can be derived, without further stipulation, from the interaction between the semantics of ‘verum focus’, on the one hand, and the specific semantic features of each kind of fronted elements (namely, definites vs indefinites), on the other.

4.2 Exhaustive and contrastive readings In an alternative semantics approach, focus is conceived of as having two main functions, ‘exhaustive’ and ‘contrastive’. These are not inherent features of focus constituents or of focus constructions; the labels rather refer to the way in which focus interacts with the previous discourse and modifies the common ground. Focus is ‘exhaustive’ when it indicates that the focused constituent α is, among the set of possible alternatives, the only one that gives rise to a true proposition. Focus is ‘contrastive’ when used to contrast a constituent α with a constituent β (typically, a previously mentioned expression), which belongs to the alternative focus set of α, i.e. β є [[α]]f. In the cases under examination, the exhaustive reading arises when the context provides a contrast set; and the contrastive reading is obtained when a contextually accessible proposition q belonging to the focus set of [[p]]f is refuted; given that the focus set of [[p]]f is limited to the set {p, ~p}, it has to be assumed that q = ~p, and therefore it is the polarity that is contrasted.

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Exhaustive readings represent the first kind of interpretation available for focus constructions. Since the focus is on the polarity, and given that for the same propositional content there are only two possibilities (affirmative and negative), the alternative focus set contains two members only. The ‘background’ nature of the propositional content requires, in this case, that the whole array of possibilities be contextually accessible, so the VFF construction can be used to choose the true one. There are a number of environments particularly well suited to obtain this result. An obvious context that satisfies this requirement is a yes/no interrogative (also called a ‘polar interrogative’, precisely because the unknown variable concerns the polarity), a structure in which the propositional content is mentioned: (48) A: – ¿Encontrarás a alguien? B: – A alguien encontraré, (estoy seguro). to someone find.fut.1sg (be.prs.1sg sure) The question in the first turn introduces a possibility, that the interlocutor can find someone (to help her), without asserting any of the available alternatives. The VFF construction in B’s reply is used to choose the affirmative possibility and to emphasise that this is the only proposition the speaker considers to be true – the negative alternative being discarded at the same time. Notice that in (48) a reply without VFF (i.e. with canonical order, as Encontraré a alguien ‘I will find someone’), though perfectly grammatical, is not the optimal linguistic strategy, since it does not contribute any additional information to the more economical solution sí ‘yes’, unless it receives a marked intonation (one corresponding to ‘I will find someone’). The VFF, on the contrary, directly provides the extra content – emphasis, i.e., affirmation of a proposition plus rejection of other competing propositions –, which justifies using it as an alternative to a simple affirmative answer. The same explanation works with VFF constructions with fronted lexical definites: (49) A: – ¿Conociste por fin al presidente? B: – Al presidente he conocido. to.the president have.prs.1sg known Both in (48) and (49), the propositional content in the question is reproduced in the answer. The interrogative encodes a split between the unknown polarity (yes/no) and the propositional content, which is exactly the same split that can be found in the VFF construction: the information structure of the answer matches that of the question. A further discourse environment that can trigger the exhaustive reading of a VFF construction is one in which the propositional content is presented as a possibility, an intention, a duty or a belief. This is what can be found in the example in (5), repeated here as (50): (50) Dije que terminaría el libro, y el libro he say.pst.1sg that finish.cond.1sg the book and the book have.prs.1sg

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terminado. finished ‘I said that I would finish the book, and finish the book I did.’ In Section 2.3, we informally discussed the requirement that VFF with definites is acceptable only if the propositional content has been previously mentioned. Now, we can offer a more principled explanation in terms of the requirements of ‘verum focus’. Recall that ‘verum focus’ is a kind of narrow focus on the sentence polarity, and the propositional content is presented as background information. In this case, the whole propositional content, including the definite NP, must be contextually given and salient: a previous explicit mention is needed. The first sentence of the example provides exactly the kind of context that VFF needs: it introduces the speaker’s intention to finish the book, so that the second sentence – the VFF structure – can be used to confirm the truth of the positive alternative. This also explains the acceptability of (38a), Había que leerse el Quijote, y el Quijote se leyó  ‘He had to read the Quijote, and read the Quijote he did’, and the overall pattern illustrated in the rest of the examples discussed in (38): the VFF construction is accepted only when its whole propositional content is background information, i.e., has been mentioned in the previous discourse. The exhaustive reading seems to be the only possible interpretation for VFF with definites. This does not entail that VFF with indefinites cannot receive an exhaustive interpretation as well. In fact, the examples in (51) contain indefinites and receive an exhaustive interpretation:16 (51) a. b.

Dije que traería a muchos amigos, say.pst.1sg that bring.cond.1sg to many friends y a muchos amigos he traído. and to many friends have.prs.1sg brought ‘I said that I would bring many friends, and bring many friends I did.’ La echadora de cartas pronosticó que ganaría bastante the card-reader predict.pst.3sg that win.cond.1sg a.lot.of dinero, y bastante dinero he ganado. money and a.lot.of money have.prs.1sg won ‘The card reader predicted I would win quite a lot of money, and quite a lot of money I have won (and win quite a lot of money I did).’

16. The reviewer notes that, in addition to definites and indefinites, whole sentences can also be fronted: Os dije que iríamos a comer a la playa, y a comer a la playa you.obl tell.pst.1sg that go.cond.1pl to eat to the beach and to eat to the beach vamos. go.prs.1pl ‘I told you that we would go to the beach for lunch, and go to the beach for lunch we will do.’

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Other examples of contexts that illustrate the same discourse articulation between a previous mention of a propositional content and VFF are the following: (52) A: – Parece que escapas del diablo. seem.prs.3sg that escape.prs.2sg from.the devil B: – Y del diablo escapo. and from.the devil escape.prs.1sg ‘– You seem to be escaping from the devil. – And from the devil I’m escaping.’ (53) a. b.

Me amenazaron con que me quitarían el I.obl threaten.pst.3sg with that I.obl take-away.cond.3pl the trabajo, y el trabajo me han quitado. job and the job I.obl have.prs.3pl taken-away ‘They threatened to take away my job, and take away my job they did (and my job they have taken away).’ La echadora de cartas pronosticó que aprobaría el examen, the card-reader predict.pst.3sg that pass.cond.1sg the exam y el examen he aprobado. and the exam have.prs.1sg passed ‘The card reader predicted I would pass the exam and pass the exam I did.’

Polar interrogatives and propositional objects depending on verbs of possibility, intention, belief, etc. are, therefore, two discourse environments that give rise to exhaustive interpretations. What do they have in common? By now it should be evident that the relevant generalisation is the following: they all introduce in the discourse a propositional content that is mentioned, but not asserted, i.e., the propositional content is merely presented as a possibility, not as a piece of the accepted common ground. The absence of assertion is the result either of presenting a proposition as the content of a yes/no interrogative, or of embedding it under a predicate that does not entail the truth of its complement clause. The discourse function of the VFF construction is that of selecting and emphatically asserting the positive option.17 If this is right, an immediate prediction is that the propositional content embedded under factive predicates, which is presented as true, will not be a suitable candidate for being reproduced in a VFF construction, and in fact this is the case, as shown by the incongruity of (54): 17. According to the reviewer, examples with indefinites “are most suitable in a counter-to-expectation communicative context where VFF stresses (by emphatically affirming) the nonspecificity of the referent in prior speech (or the common background). It has therefore something of a metalinguistic or quotational use.” We agree that this is indeed the effect one obtains in these constructions – an interpretive effect that is perfectly compatible, we think, with our claim that the function of VFF is that of selecting and emphatically affirming the positive option.



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(54) #Lamenté que perdieras tu empleo,   regret.pst.1sg that lose.pst.subj.2sg your job y tu empleo has perdido. and your job have.prs.2sg lost ‘I was sorry you lost your job and lose your job you did (and your job you have lost).’ A further prediction has to do with the acceptability of VFF constructions as responses to interrogatives. Fronting is acceptable in answers to polar interrogatives (provided that the VFF construction “copies” the form of the question), but not to wh- interrogatives: first, because the fronted phrase in the VFF structure cannot be the informational focus corresponding to the wh-phrase; second, because other ­questionanswer pairings with wh-interrogatives do not allow an adequate connection between the VFF and the context. Consider the contrast between the acceptability of (49) and the oddness of the following examples: (55) a. – ¿Qué ha pasado? – #Al presidente he conocido.   what have.prs.3sg happened  to.the president have.prs.1sg met ‘– What happened? – #The president I have met.’ b. – ¿A quién has conocido? – #Al presidente he conocido.   to whom have.prs.2sg met   to.the president have.prs.1sg met ‘– Whom have you met? – #The president I have met.’ c. – ¿Qué pasó con el presidente?   what happen.pst.3sg with the president – #Al presidente he conocido.   to.the president have.prs.1sg met ‘– What happened with the president? – #The president I have met.’ The question in (55a) calls for an ‘all-new’ answer, in which no part of the expressed propositional content can be treated as background information. According to our proposal, VFF structures are characterised specifically by presenting the content as given, so they are odd in this context. In the questions in (55b–c), the content is split into focus (‘whom’ and ‘what happened’) and background (‘You have met someone’ and ‘Some event took place having to do with the president’); in both cases, the answer is expected to offer new information on the interrogative variable, a possibility that is excluded again for VFF constructions. Only in (49) the information structure of the question and that of the answer perfectly match. The existence of this kind of identity restriction in question-answer pairs does not mean, of course, that a VFF structure can never work as an adequate reply. Take the example in (19), repeated here as (56a), and compare it with (56b): (56) a. – ¿Qué me puedes decir? – #Nada te puedo decir.   what I.obl can.prs.2sg say   nothing you.obl can.prs.1sg say ‘– What can you tell me? – #I can tell you nothing.’

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b. – ¿Qué sabes? – Nada te puedo decir.   what know.prs.2sg nothing you.obl can.prs.1sg say ‘– What do you know? – There’s nothing I can tell you.’ In (56a) answering with a VFF structure is odd because the question requires an answer in which nada ‘nothing’ can be understood as bearing narrow focus on the newly presented information – a possibility that is not available for VFF constructions in Spanish. The situation is radically different in (56b), where the VFF is not an answer that satisfies the unknown variable of a question, but a reply: it does not provide new information about the variable what, but rejects the underlying prerequisite of the act of questioning itself, namely, that the hearer can give the answer. In this sense, the reply in (56b) patterns with other possible replies such as I don’t want to talk about it, You know it better than I do, No comments, and the like. The previous discussion on exhaustive readings can be summarised as follows. Some discourse environments introduce a propositional content without asserting it, i.e., they overtly present the alternative focus set as open for consideration: this defines two basic environments, namely yes/no interrogatives and non-factual clauses. In such contexts, VFF constructions are used to choose the affirmative proposition as the only one that is true, and to discard the competing negative proposition. So-called ‘exhaustive readings’ correspond to this interpretive pattern. The second main kind of interpretation available for focus constructions is represented by ‘contrastive’ readings, in which a member of the focus set is highlighted in order to reject, replace or correct a previously presented element of the same set of alternatives. Recall the example in (29), repeated here as (57) for convenience: (57) A: B:

– Yo no oí nada. – Pues tú estabas allí. {Debiste oír alguna cosa. /Alguna cosa debiste oír.} ‘– I didn’t hear anything. – Well you were there. You must have heard something. / You must have heard something.’

In the first turn, the speaker conveys the assumption that s/he could not see or hear anything when a certain event took place. In the reply of this dialogue, both versions of the second sentence are adequate. The sentence without fronting (Debiste oír alguna cosa) seems to convey a ‘neutral’ observation, where ‘neutral’ means ‘compatible with any discourse environment’ and ‘devoid of any particular argumentative orientation’, so it will fit in well with any kind of context. The sentence with fronting (Alguna cosa debiste oír), on the contrary, is particularly well suited to refute the other speaker’s conveyed assumption, since it goes in the opposite argumentative direction with respect to the partner’s utterance, in which the opposite idea (‘I haven’t heard anything’) is salient: the idea that speaker A has not heard anything is explicitly communicated in his utterance and is therefore contrasted with B’s assertion Alguna cosa debiste oír, which emphatically rejects it, by asserting that it is true or it is sure that he must have heard something.



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Example (57) might suggest that the contrastive interpretation should only arise when the competing proposition has been made explicit in the immediate discourse. This is obviously not the case. Consider the dialogue in (58): (58) A: – Tengo mucho trabajo y estoy sola… have.prs.1sg much work and be.prs.1sg alone B: – No te preocupes, a alguien encontrarás que pueda ayudarte. not cl worry.subj.2sg to someone find.fut.2sg that can help.you ‘– I’ve got a lot of work and I’m all alone… Don’t worry, you’ll find someone that can help you.’ In this dialogue, A complains about her current situation; B’s comment contains a VFF (a alguien encontrarás que pueda ayudarte) emphasising the idea that she will find someone to help her. Although A’s utterance does not explicitly convey the assumption that she will not find anyone to help her, B’s reply is perfectly adequate in this situation. How does our proposal account for this kind of examples? What is needed for a contrastive interpretation to arise, we claim, is not that the alternative proposition should be explicitly expressed, but rather that it be accessible and compatible with the context. In the present case, the relevant proposition can be derived from the immediate discourse, so what the VFF construction does is to reject an implicit contextual assumption obtained from the previous utterance by default reasoning, and to cut off the possible argumentative line based on it, as shown in the schema in (59): (59) I am alone → I won’t have anyone who can help me. VF-You will find someone to help you. In this process, an extra inferential step in the derivation of the interpretation is needed – that of taking into consideration one of the possible contextual implications of the first utterance. Now, one could think that our proposal yields the right predictions in those cases in which the VFF sentence contradicts a previous assumption, be it explicitly expressed or not, but cannot account for the examples in which no such contradiction appears. In fact, there are a number of cases in which the VFF construction seems to be used precisely to confirm a previous statement by adding a proposition that goes in the same argumentative direction. This is typically the case in the examples involving fronted definites and anaphoric pronouns (Cinque’s examples of Resumptive Preposing). So, in a dialogue like the one in (60), the second turn seems to run in the same argumentative direction as the first one: (60) A: – Pepe dijo que era demasiado tarde.   Pepe say.pst.3sg that be.pst.3sg too late ‘Pepe said it was too late.’ B: – {Lo mismo / eso} dijo Juan.   the same this say.pst.3sg Juan ‘Juan said the same thing.’

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The explanation goes as follows. According to our analysis, if p is Juan dijo {lo mismo / eso}, the contrastive interpretation should amount to eliminating ~p, i.e., Juan no dijo {lo mismo / eso}. Now, although ~p has not been directly uttered in the previous discourse, it nevertheless can be derived as an entailment arising from the exhaustive reading of the previous utterance. Recall that assigning an exhaustive interpretation to an utterance is a common interpretive strategy, which consists in strengthening the explicitly communicated content as a means to obtain an optimally relevant interpretation. So, from A’s statement (‘Pepe said it was too late’), it could be possible to infer an exhaustive reading (‘only Pepe said that it was too late’), according to which this proposition is the only one that is true regarding the state of affairs. The corresponding focus set of this enriched interpretation would contain the whole range of contrasting propositions with respect to the possible entities falling under the scope of only. The first obvious entailment of the exhaustive interpretation is ‘No one else said the same’, which in turn entails ‘Juan did not say the same’, which happens to be ~p. In this way, the discourse connection between the two utterances in (60) is inferentially retrieved on the assumption that A’s statement can be assigned an exhaustive interpretation, which is precisely what B intends to reject. The inferential process corresponding to the dialogue in (60) involves additional steps, and can be summarised in the schema in (61): (61) Pepe said it was too late. → Only Pepe said that. → No one else said the same. Juan didn’t say the same. VF: Juan said the same. Therefore, in (60) the VFF has a contrastive value, since it emphatically asserts a proposition and rejects its negation, which in turn is one of the possible entailments of an exhaustive reading of the utterance in the previous utterance. The additional effect that is obtained is that of preventing the proposition expressed by the previous speaker from receiving an exhaustive reading, i.e., being understood as the only one yielding a true proposition.18 18. The reviewer contests our explanation and suggests that “other syntactic or discourse-governed phenomena, such as scope broadening or connectivity through encapsulation and textual anaphora (…) foster frontings that may result in emphasis…” In the particular case of fronting of expressions with anaphoric features, s/he argues that what we have is focus on the constituent, which can be expressed by the insertion of focal adverbials such as exactamente ‘exactly’ and precisamente ‘precisely’. No doubt, this suggestion is worth considering. What we were trying to do in our explanation is to dissociate the contribution of the anaphoric constituent from that of the whole construction. More specifically, we were envisaging the anaphoric expressions as imposing a further interpretive restriction in the search-space for the alternatives, given that the entity they refer to must be identical in both cases. This gives rise to the interpretive effect that the anaphoric expression falls out of the polarity scope, and that it is the anaphor that is highlighted or emphasized.



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What these last examples show is that the VFF construction exhibits the properties of grammatical (or procedural) meaning: it imposes a particular path of interpretation, one in which not only the propositional content is overtly asserted, but crucially the alternative content is overtly rejected. In other words, it induces an interpretation in which a certain state of affairs and its entailments and implications are excluded or blocked. If the alternative is present or salient as a result of having been mentioned in the previous discourse or entailed by some (set of) previous propositions, the interpretation just proceeds by discarding it; if the alternative is not present in either way, the structure of the construction itself compels the hearer to accommodate it (that is, to derive it and consider it), before discarding it. In this way, the implications that could arise if such a move was not taken are “deactivated”. There is no need to have a previously established context that includes the relevant proposition: if it is not already present, the VFF structure will force its derivation. This does not mean that it will be possible to accommodate just any VFF construction. As mentioned before, they have restricted conditions of discourse adequacy. Recall now the example in (30), repeated here as (62): (62) A: – No sé por qué, pero hoy me he despertado a las cinco de la mañana... ‘– I don’t know why but I woke up at five o’clock this morning…’ B: – {Debiste oír algún ruido. / #Algún ruido debiste oír.}   must.pst.2sg hear some noise   some noise must.pst.2sg hear ‘You must have heard some noise. / #You must have heard some noise.’ In the initial utterance, no hypothesis about the reason why the speaker woke up is put forward, and the second speaker merely suggests a possible explanation, without opposing any implicit assumption derivable from the first utterance. In such a situation, only the sentence with the canonical word order is acceptable; the version with fronting sounds clearly inadequate. Why is accommodation not able to “rescue” the acceptability of VFF in this context? An answer can be suggested along the following lines: there is no inferential path connecting the opposite proposition (‘You should not have heard any noise’) to the previous utterance, nor to its implications and entailments. No relevant interpretation is reached by forcing the accommodation of such a proposition into the context. To sum up, a number of VFF constructions fit into their contexts as a means to express a refutation or a correction of a previously accessible proposition with the opposite polarity. Their role is to ensure that such a negative proposition is definitively removed from the common ground and replaced by its corresponding affirmative one. All the examples of contrastive reading examined so far involve VFF constructions with fronted indefinites and pronominal definites. The reason is that lexical definites are totally excluded when the discourse function of VFF is to reject a previously stated assumption, as shown by the following contrast:

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(63) A: – No encontraré a nadie que me ayude…   not find.fut.1sg to no.one that me help.subj.3sg B: – A alguien encontrarás… to someone find.fut.2sg ‘You will find someone…’ (64) A: – Hoy es jueves, así que no encontraré al director… ‘Today is Tuesday, so I won’t find the director…’ B: – #Al director encontrarás.   to.the manager find.fut.2sg #‘The director you will find.’ The construction with the fronted indefinite in (63) can be used to reject the negative proposition in the previous turn (i.e., it has a contrastive interpretation). The possibility to refute a negative statement is not available, however, for the VFF construction with a fronted lexical definite. This is the main difference that can be found between fronted indefinites and fronted lexical definites: the latter cannot be used if the speaker intends to correct or reject a previous assertion. Definites clearly obey stronger conditions than indefinites: in addition to being incompatible with corrections and rejections, they require a previous explicit mention of the proposition expressed. Indefinites are compatible with both exhaustive and contrastive readings, and do not need a previous mention of the proposition when used in environments that force a contrastive reading. A challenging question is why there should be such differences between definites and indefinites in VFF constructions. In the next section we will try to offer some tentative ideas that could account for this difference.

4.3 Fitting into the context Dealing with these contextual restrictions, in particular with the reason why VFF with lexical definites obeys stronger constraints than VFF with indefinites, implies taking into careful consideration one of the major implications of ‘verum focus’, namely, the requirement that the propositional content be in the background: a feature shared by all the examples we have examined is in fact that the propositional content should be present in the common ground. VFF constructions reproduce an accessible propositional content and affirm it emphatically. Since ‘verum focus’ means emphasis on the polarity value of a background assumption, the expectation is that the contextual restrictions holding for VFF should be related to (1) what counts as background information and (2) what the rationale is behind emphasising background assumptions in certain contexts. As happens with all focus constructions, the set of alternative possibilities is a crucial aspect of the semantics of VFF. A way of accounting for the relation between VFF constructions and their context is examining how the context contributes to the



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identification of this particular set. According to our hypothesis, this can be done in two different ways: – by overtly presenting the alternative set {p, ~p} under the form of a non-asserted propositional content; – by overtly presenting a proposition that belongs to the alternative focus set of p, i.e., by introducing either p or ~p. In addition to these two ways of introducing the alternative set there is also a third possibility: that the context does not directly provide any direct clue for the identification of the alternative set. Let’s consider these different situations in detail. The first one is by overtly presenting the alternative set under the form of a non-asserted propositional content, i.e., when it is questioned or embedded under a modal element or an indicator of propositional attitude. In this situation, the requirement that the propositional content has to be given is satisfied by evoking a propositional content, without affirming it. This is in fact the kind of context that gives rise to exhaustive interpretations of VFF constructions (cf. Section 4.2), both with lexical definites and indefinites (see examples (48)–(53)). When the proposition is evoked, the context introduces the alternative set, that is, the possibility that the content could be finally affirmed by the speaker or not, and the discourse function of VFF is precisely that of affirming it. Emphatic affirmation is felicitous and informative because it communicates the speaker’s commitment about the truth of the proposition in a context where the propositional content counts as given but unasserted information. Why does this process require an almost literal reproduction of the propositional content, regardless of whether the fronted element is a definite or an indefinite? As mentioned, the role of the VFF construction is simply to pick out one of the two possibilities (the positive one). The reason why not even synonyms or coreferential expressions are allowed (cf. the examples in (38)) is that any change in the form of a constituent would divert the interpretive process towards a contrast between the previous content and the content of the VFF construction, leaving the polarity contrast in the background. This will prevent the identification of the two contrasting propositions involved and will trigger additional inferences to explain why an extra contrast has been made salient. In this context, interpreting VFF requires the selection of a value for some given propositional content, and any intruding factor will give rise to unacceptability. The condition on literal reproduction, thus, can be explained in purely pragmatic terms. The second way in which the context contributes to the identification of the alternative set is that in which a proposition that belongs to the alternative focus set of p is asserted, i.e., by introducing either p or ~p. This situation gives rise to two different scenarios. If p is asserted, considerations of relevance require that the repetition should add some extra content; otherwise, it would seem redundant. Among the reasons for repeating content without resulting in a redundancy, we can find confirming a previous statement (typically one that has been previously uttered by a different speaker) and providing some further content to a previous statement. Now,

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a remarkable discourse property of VFF constructions is their incapacity to reinforce a proposition that has already been asserted. The unacceptability of (65) and (66) shows that the restriction holds for emphatic affirmation both with definites and indefinites: (65) A: – Veo que tienes demasiado trabajo. ‘I see you’ve got too much work.’ B: – #Demasiado trabajo tengo.   too.much work have.prs.1sg ‘#Too much work I have.’ (66) Mi hijo aprobó el examen. #Y el examen aprobó. my son pass.pst.3sg the exam   and the exam pass.pst.3sg ‘My son passed the exam. #And the exam he passed.’ It seems that only a particularly strong grammatical device is able to affirm an already asserted proposition again and override the risk of producing a redundant affirmation. In these cases a specific syntactic formula must be used to mark the explicit reinforcement, as in (67)–(68):19 (67) A: – Veo que tienes bastante trabajo. ‘I see you’ve got much work.’ B: – Sí que tengo bastante trabajo. yes that have.prs.1sg much work ‘Yes, I have got much work.’ (68)

Mi hijo aprobó el examen. Y vaya si aprobó el examen: My son pass.pst.3sg the exam. And part pass.pst.3sg the exam sacó un sobresaliente. get.pst.3sg an A! ‘My son passed the exam. And did he ever pass the exam: he got an A!’

It should not be surprising, however, that in (67) the second speaker resorts to constructions that overtly indicate a split between polarity and propositional content. Such a manifest formal split makes them stronger than VFF constructions, which explains why they appear in environments that require a marked reinforcement device. The conclusion is that a previous affirmation of a proposition does not make a suitable context for VFF. If what has been previously introduced is the opposite proposition ~p, VFF is used to affirm its positive counterpart p, thus correcting, rejecting or refuting the negative proposition. As pointed out in the previous section, this kind of context gives rise to contrastive interpretations and to the aforementioned asymmetry between in19. See Hernanz (2006) for a detailed analysis of Spanish constructions with sí ‘yes’ and sí que ‘yes that’.



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definites and lexical definites (see Section 4.2): definites are subject to stronger conditions of use in VFF constructions since they cannot appear when the speaker rejects a given propositional content. Why are VFF constructions with definites unable to connect with an overt negative proposition? The key factor is probably the fact that in negative sentences definites tend to be interpreted as referential expressions, falling outside of the scope of negation: for instance, in No se leyó el Quijote (‘S/he didn’t read the Quijote’), the negation does not affect the object NP. Once a definite NP has been introduced in an asserted proposition, it tends to be processed as old information, when it has to reappear in the subsequent discourse. This informative status favours a ‘topic–comment’ articulation of the proposition, thus blocking the possibility of matching with the ‘verum focus’ structure of VFF. Thus, what gives rise to the exclusion of definite NPs is an incompatibility in informative status between such NPs and the VFF construction. No similar effect is obtained when the proposition in the background is simply evoked: in this case, the referent of the definite NP is merely mentioned, but not established as a potential topic. If this approach is right, it can also explain why indefinite NPs are not subject to the same restrictions: they can hardly be interpreted as topics and old information, so they do not favour informational partitions and do not collide with the conditions imposed by VFF constructions. Finally, there is still the possibility that the context does not provide any overt indication about the alternative set of the proposition expressed in the VFF construction. How is the requirement that such propositional content has to be treated as given or background information satisfied in this situation? Our proposal is the following: when the context offers no overt alternatives for consideration, the whole “responsibility” of identifying the set entirely falls on the VFF construction, which overtly asserts the affirmative proposition and evokes (and rejects) the corresponding negative one. It is the VFF construction that triggers the search for a contextual assumption that is contrary to the proposition expressed, in order to remove such an assumption from the common ground. If the negative proposition has not been expressed in the discourse, it will have to be inferentially retrieved, the only limitation being that of establishing a consistent match with the context. Thus, there is no need to have a previous mention, since the construction itself will induce the accommodation of the proposition into the context. This is what we get when the negative proposition can be recovered as an implicature of the previous discourse (cf. examples (60)–(61)). Only when it is not possible to establish this match, the construction sounds odd (cf. example (62)). When this process is completed, VFF receives an adequate interpretation. We take this to be the basic, default situation. In contexts where no alternative set has been overtly presented, VFF constructions containing fronted definites are never acceptable. We think that this is due to the properties of definites and the discourse requirements they impose, more specifically, to the topicality of definite NPs and the way it collides with the ban on informational partitions imposed by VFF.

194 Manuel Leonetti and Victoria Escandell-Vidal

4.4 Indefinites and scalar effects As shown above, sentences with fronted indefinites receive an emphatic interpretation that can be explained as an effect of ‘verum focus’. As a further specification to this general semantic content, the constructions involving indefinites give rise to some additional interpretive effects that derive from the fact that indefinites typically have scalar properties. As it is well known, indefinites can be ordered on a scale, as for instance: muchísimo > mucho > bastante > poco > poquísimo ‘very much > much > enough > some > little’. Let’s take again some of the basic cases of VFF, with indefinites like mucho, poco and bastante, to illustrate this point: (69) a. b. c.

Mucho dinero debe tener. much money must.prs.3sg have ‘S/he must have lots of money.’ Poco más te puedo decir. little more you.obl can.prs.1sg say ‘There’s little more I can tell you.’ Bastante trabajo tengo ya. enough work have.prs.1sg already ‘I’ve got enough work already.’

According to the general mechanism for the interpretation of VFF, uttering (69) not only amounts to emphatically asserting the propositional content and rejecting the corresponding negation, but in addition it rejects also all the propositions obtained by substituting the indefinite quantifiers with other quantifiers representing lower (or higher) values on a scale. Thus, uttering (69a) excludes ‘(S)he has some money’, ‘(S)he has little money’ and ‘(S)he has no money’; uttering (69b) excludes ‘I can tell you much more’; and uttering (69c) excludes ‘I have little work’. This is due to the usual attraction of focus by indefinites.20 Polar interrogatives – which crucially involve sentence polarity – containing indefinite quantifiers represent a nice example of this kind of attraction of focus. As shown in (70) and (71), the most natural answer for them takes the indefinite as the focus bearer: (70) A: – ¿Conocías allí a alguien?   know.pst.2sg there to someone ‘Did you know anyone there?’ B: – A Juan.   to Juan ‘Juan.’

20. This is the reason why one has to resort to prosodic emphasis on the indefinite in most of the English translations in order to capture the adequate interpretation of the Spanish examples.

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(71) A: – ¿Vino mucha gente?   come.pst.3sg much people ‘Did many people come?’ B: – Cuarenta y cinco personas.   forty and five persons ‘Forty-five people.’ Given this, it is no surprise that scalar focus appears in (69): the alternatives are ordered, and the focus denotation is the lowest or highest element on the scale. Focus thus marks a cutting point on the scale that determines which values produce true propositions. A series of ordered alternatives are thereby rejected. As a result, VFF constructions with indefinites typically receive scalar interpretations that can be rendered by expressions like ‘at least’, ‘even’ or ‘at most’: (72) a. S/he must have at least a lot of money. b. I can tell you {at most very little / almost nothing more}. c. I have {at least enough work / a lot of work}. Scalar readings with indefinites are therefore simple effects of the interaction between ‘verum focus’ and the semantic properties of the fronted elements.

5.

Some extensions

5.1

Negative Preposing

Our treatment of VFF constructions with indefinites can be extended to gain a better understanding of an old grammatical issue, Negative Preposing. For ­Spanish, the relevant examples are in (73), taken from Bosque (1980: §2.2): (73) a. b. c.

De nada carece. of nothing lack.prs.3sg ‘There is nothing s/he lacks. (= S/he has it all.)’ De ninguno de esos problemas trató la reunión. of none of those problems deal.pst.3sg the meeting ‘Not one of those problems was the meeting about. (= None of those problems were addressed in the meeting.)’ A nadie le dijo nada. to no.one s/he.obl say.pst.3sg nothing ‘To no-one did s/he say a word.’

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The essential features of Negative Preposing in English are equivalent to those of the Spanish examples: a constituent containing a negative quantifier (or a downward entailing expression) is preposed, and as a consequence subject inversion takes place: (74) a. With no job would Mary be happy. b. On no account should you go there. Haegeman (2000) claims that the preposed constituent is in focus, and cannot be taken as a topic. Our proposal, as should already be obvious from the preceding discussion, takes Negative Preposing as a particular instance of VFF. On the formal side, this accounts for the operator-variable properties of the syntax of Negative Preposing, as well as for subject inversion; on the interpretive side, it provides a plausible account both of the semantic contribution of Negative Preposing, and of the resulting contrast between sentences with preposing and sentences with negative constituents in situ, as exemplified in (75): (75) a. On no account should you go there. b. You should not go there on any account. The basic difference lies in the stylistically marked, emphatic status of the first ones, vs. the unmarked, neutral status of the in situ versions, as expected if Negative Preposing is an instance of VFF. Finally, the fronted phrase is obviously not a topic, but it cannot be given a (contrastive/informational) focus reading either, so ‘verum focus’ seems to be an adequate way to account for the cluster of properties associated to Negative Preposing. It is worth discussing the contrast in (76), taken from Jackendoff (1972: 364), and slightly adapted for Spanish in (77), in the light of our hypothesis on VFF: (76) a. With no clothes, Mary could be attractive. b. With no clothes could Mary be attractive. (77) a. b.

Con with Con with

muy very muy very

poca ropa, María podría resultar atractiva. few clothes María can.cond.3sg look attractive poca ropa podría María resultar atractiva. few clothes can.cond.3sg María look attractive

While in the (a) examples the scope of the negative element is reduced to the preposed constituent (which is a dislocated topic), in the (b) examples negation takes scope over the whole sentence (‘Mary could not be attractive with any clothes’), and the preposed constituent cannot be a topic. Haegeman (2000) points out that in English only the (b) version – the one with Negative Preposing – admits tags with neither and licenses negative polarity items, which suggests that negation is in fact working in two different ways in (a) and (b). Instead of assuming that fronting moves a constituent towards a Focus Phrase in (76b), as argued in Haegeman (2000), we claim that fronting places the negative constituent in an unspecified preverbal position in order to trigger ‘verum focus’. The interpretation of (76b) follows the same pattern we already

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described for VFF in Spanish: the opposite proposition (‘Mary could be attractive with certain clothes’) is rejected, as well as any other alternative proposition obtained by substituting the negative phrase with a quantifier. This strong assertion of the explicitly communicated proposition gives the sentence its typical emphatic and stylistically marked flavour. Both (76b) and its Spanish version in (77b) fit in the previous discourse, in their basic, default use, giving rise to a contrastive interpretation: they indicate that an accessible contextual assumption is to be refuted. If our perspective on Negative Preposing is right, a number of apparently unrelated constructions will reveal as particular cases of a single general pattern.

5.2

VFF and VP Preposing

It is not difficult to perceive a strong similarity between Spanish VFF, particularly in examples like (5), (51)–(53), and English VP Preposing (hereinafter, VPP). We believe that VPP is simply a particular instance of VFF in English. This should be enough to get a straightforward account of the discourse functions of VPP. Ward (1990: 742–744) claims that VPP performs two functions: first, “it may serve to affirm a speaker’s belief in a salient proposition explicitly evoked in the discourse”, and second, “it may serve to suspend a speaker’s belief in an explicitly evoked and salient proposition”. As the second discourse function is clearly dependent on the presence of the connective if introducing the preposing (cf. I know why Ellen said that, if say it she did), we will concentrate on the first function, illustrated by the following examples from Ward (1990): (78) a. It was necessary to pass, if I was to stay at Oxford, and pass I did. b. We went to Canada to learn, and learn we did. c. I don’t clean quite so fanatically as you, but clean I do. Ward (1990: 743) makes a distinction among three different types of proposition affirmation: ‘Independent proposition affirmation’ affirms a proposition that is neither semantically entailed by nor presupposed in the prior discourse; ‘Concessive affirmation’ affirms a proposition that stands in rhetorical opposition to another proposition conceded in the prior discourse; and ‘Scalar Affirmation’ affirms a proposition whose predicate is construable as a scale upon which the subject represents a high value. The parallelism between the discourse functions of VFF and those of VPP (as Ward presents them) is not perfect, as most cases of ‘Scalar Affirmation’ could not be translated into a Spanish VFF construction.21 However, leaving aside the case of ‘Scalar Affirmation’, the discourse functions of VFF and VPP are essentially the same, as can 21. What Ward (1990) labels ‘scalar affirmation’ corresponds to a ‘verum focus’, emphatic construction, which is different from VFF, and stronger, as shown in the examples:

(i) Smith errs – and err he does! – by assuming that… (Ward 1990: 744)



(ii) Smith se equivoca – ¡y vaya si se equivoca! – al suponer que…

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be inferred from all the previous discussion. Proposition affirmation in VPP is the equivalent of exhaustive interpretations in VFF: it involves propositions that are first explicitly evoked in the discourse and then non-redundantly (and emphatically, we would add) affirmed by the speaker (see also Horn 1991). Ward does not provide any principled explanation for the fact that VPP has precisely this kind of interpretive effects. An extension of our account of Spanish VFF is all we need to obtain such an explanation. Suppose that a sentence like …learn we did is in fact an instance of VFF (we will not discuss the nature of the syntactic node hosting the fronted VP): first, the VP cannot be interpreted as a topic nor as a contrastive focus, and there is no informational partition, so that focus falls on sentence polarity; second, according to the usual pattern of VFF, the proposition we learnt is strongly affirmed as a result of the rejection of the opposite proposition we did not learn, an effect of ‘verum focus’. The constraint on explicit evocation of the proposition in the preceding discourse is the same one we observed in Spanish VFF with definite NPs, and can be derived from ‘verum focus’ too.

5.3

Topics for future research

A number of puzzling issues concerning VFF have yet to be investigated. We will not be able to deal with them here, but they deserve a brief mention. a. VFF seems to be incompatible with negation,22 as illustrated in (79), and with imperatives (and directive speech acts), as illustrated in (80). (79) a. b. c. d.

Algo (*no) something (*not) Bastante trabajo enough work Poco más (*no) little more (*not) Lo mismo (*no) the same (*not)

debe saber. must.prs.3sg know (*no) tengo. (*not) have.prs.1sg te puedo decir. you.obl can.prs.1sg say digo yo. say.prs.1sg I

22. There are apparently some counterexamples to this generalisation. They include quantifiers as mucho ‘much’ and demasiado ‘too much/too many’, as in (i) and (ii): (i) Mucho dinero no ha ganado. much money not have.prs.3sg won ‘S/he hasn’t won much money.’ (ii) Demasiado no contribuyes, con esa actitud. too.much not contribute.prs.2sg with that attitude ‘Your attitude is not helping us at all.’ Maybe such constructions are not to be analysed as real VFF cases.



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e. Con la iglesia (*no) hemos topado. with the Church (*not) have.prs.1pl bumped (80) a. *Algo dime. (Cf.ok Algo dijo.)   something tell.impr.2sg.me something tell.pst.3sg b. *Nada más añade. (imp) (Cf. ok Nada más añado.)   nothing more add.impr.2sg nothing more add.prs.1sg c. *Eso dime. (Cf. ok Eso dice.)   this tell.impr.2sg.me this tell.prs.1sg d. *A buenas horas llegad. (Cf. ok A buenas horas llegáis.)   to good hours come.impr.2pl to good hours come.prs.2pl The fact that this behaviour is found as well in other ‘evaluative’ and exclamative constructions (see Hernanz 2006) suggests that a more general semantic incompatibility is operating here. The constraints operate, for instance, on Locative Inversion in English (cf. Here comes the sun vs *Here does not come the sun, Come here! vs *Here come!), which shares some properties with VFF: it is optional, marked, and the preposed locative is not a topic constituent. b. The analysis of VFF constructions opens a way to a better understanding of the grammar of irony in Spanish (Beinhauer 1958; Bosque 1980; Hernanz 2001). A significant number of constructions that can only have an ironical interpretation seem to be further cases of VFF. (81) a. ¡A buenas horas llegas! to good hours come.prs.2sg ‘A fine time for you to arrive! b. ¡Bonita faena me has hecho! nice chore me.obl have.prs.2sg done ‘A nice chore you’ve done for me!’ c. ¡Sí, hombre, el coche te voy a prestar! yes man the car you.obj go.prs.1sg to lend ‘Sure, man, my car I’m going to lend you!’ The striking fact is that it is obviously syntax that forces the ironical reading of (81), and the syntax in these examples shows all the defining properties of VFF: optional fronting of a constituent, subject-verb inversion, lack of resumptive clitics, unavailability of a narrow focus reading. Moreover, these sentences all have an emphatic/exclamative value. Adding them to our list of VFF constructions has some obvious advantages, the most interesting one being the possibility of deriving irony from ‘verum focus’, if we

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­assume that VFF affects sentence polarity and irony is the expression of a certain attitude towards the truth (or the felicity) of an utterance.23 c. Another group of Spanish fronting constructions that also display the typical features of VFF have been recently analysed by Hernanz (2001, 2006): they include cases of fronting of adjectival, prepositional and adverbial expressions, among them adverbs like bien ‘well’ and sí ‘yes’, sometimes optionally followed by the complementiser que ‘that’. (82) a. b.

Honrado que es uno… honest that be.prs.3sg one ‘Honest (as) one is…’ Salado que es el niño. lovely that be.prs.3sg the boy ‘Lovely, that child is.’

(83) a. ¡A la playa que nos fuimos! to the beach that cl go.pst.1pl ‘To the beach we went!’ b. Allá que se quedó… there that cl stay.pst.3sg ‘There s/he stayed…’ (84) a. ¡Pues bien te apresuraste a contárselo! so well cl hurry.pst.2sg to tell.him/her.it ‘Well you were certainly in a hurry to tell him/her!’ b. Bien que le gustó el jamón ibérico… well that him/her.obl please.pst.3sg the ham Iberian ‘S/He certainly liked the Iberian ham…’ (85) Sí (que) hemos estado en Egipto.24 yes (that) have.prs.1pl been in Egypt ‘Yes we have been to Egypt.’ These sentence patterns are all emphatic, and parallel interrogative, exclamative and Negative Preposing constructions in several ways. Most of Hernanz’s accurate observations reproduce the same features we noted in VFF. As for bien fronting, for instance, 23. The reviewer points out that these are not instances of ‘verum focus’, but rather of ‘scalar focus’. As in the cases of indefinite quantifiers, our idea is to derive the scalar effect from the interaction of ‘verum focus’ on the one hand, and the properties of indefinites, on the other. We agree that the grammar of irony and the properties of fronted nouns are topics that deserve a more articulated discussion. 24. Notice that this construction is just the basic paraphrase for VFF that we mentioned in previous sections.

Fronting and verum focus in Spanish 201



she claims that “bien is used to indicate that the event denoted in the sentence really took place” (Hernanz 2006: 108) and that it reinforces the positive value of the sentence by canceling “an implicit negative expectation” (2006: 110), which equals the usual effects of VFF; moreover, she notices that this kind of fronting is incompatible both with negation (cf. *Bien no viene a verme cuando lo necesita ‘But (s)he does not visit me when (s)he needs me’) and with directive speech acts (cf. *¡Bien harás lo que te diga! ‘You will do what I will tell you!’). Finally, Hernanz (2006) argues that bien is associated to functional nodes like Polarity Phrase and Focus Phrase in the left sentential periphery. We would like to suggest that a comprehensive account of bien fronting should be based on our analysis of VFF constructions. The same would work for the rest of sentence patterns in (82)–(85).

6.

Conclusions

In the preceding sections we have presented an analysis of a scarcely studied kind of fronting constructions in Spanish. Such constructions have revealed as a productive testing ground for the study of the interaction between grammar and pragmatics. We think that our main findings are the following. We have argued for the existence of a third class of fronting constructions that must be distinguished from both Clitic Dislocation and Contrastive Focalisation. This new class shows a syntactic pattern almost equivalent to Focalisation, but with different phonological and semantic properties. From a syntactic point of view, this kind of fronting is an instance of A-bar movement. We leave for future research the precise nature of its target position, as well as the crosslinguistic variation of the phenomenon. This third class of fronting constructions is characterised by the absence of any informational partition between the overt constituents of the sentence. The fronted element cannot be interpreted as a topic nor as a contrastive focus or an informational focus. A thetic (all-new) reading of the sentence is also discarded, probably for economy reasons, given that it could be obtained in a simpler way, without fronting. Only one particular type of information structure is compatible with all the mentioned grammatical features: ‘verum focus’, with focus limited to polarity and the rest of the propositional content taken as background. We labelled the construction ­‘Verum Focus Fronting’ (VFF). Analysing fronting as a grammatical mechanism for the expression of ‘verum focus’ has some important consequences: it allows us to derive all the interpretive properties of the construction from its information structure, and so to provide a principled explanation for its emphatic value and its constrained distribution in discourse. In particular, the requirement that all the propositional content be part of the background severely restricts the number of contexts where the VFF construction can be used felicitously. In fact, these can be reduced to two kinds of environments. The first one is a context that overtly presents the alternatives of the polarity focus set

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{p, ~p} without asserting any of its members, as happens in polar interrogatives and non-factual contexts; the VFF construction is then used to assert the positive alternative and reject the negative one. The second environment is one where the negative proposition ~p is salient in the immediate context, either as a directly asserted proposition or as a manifest implicature; the VFF structure is used to reject it and to affirm its positive counterpart. Thus, the VFF construction gives rise to both exhaustive and contrastive readings as a result of its interaction with available contextual assumptions. The fact that definite NPs show a more constrained distribution in discourse than indefinites can be explained in terms of their referential status: once introduced as part of an assertion, a definite NP becomes a potential topic and favours an informational partition, which is incompatible with the requirements imposed by VFF that the propositional content be treated as background information. Only the contexts that make it possible to take the whole propositional content as given are suitable environments for VFF constructions. The properties of ‘verum focus’ offer also a sound explanation for the intuitive idea that VFF constructions are “emphatic”: what is perceived as emphasis is the result of reintroducing a propositional content (treated as) already present in the discourse in order to assert the affirmative proposition while at the same time rejecting its negative counterpart. We hope that our proposal can make a contribution both to grammatical description and to a better understanding of the principles that govern the interaction of grammar and context. In fact, the heterogeneous group of fronting constructions that grammarians have described reduces to a well motivated triad that covers a variety of language-specific constructions: 1. Preposing of Topics (Clitic Dislocation) 2. Preposing of Contrastive Foci (Focus Movement) 3. Preposing of unmarked constituents in order to force ‘verum focus’ (VFF, ‘Negative Preposing’, ‘VP Preposing’…) Much work remains to be done on several related issues, such as the syntactic patterns of VFF across languages, the relations with other mechanisms that mark ‘verum focus’, and the place of VFF within a general picture of crosslinguistic variation in information structure.

References Abeillé, A., Godard, D. & Sabio, F. 2008. Two types of NP preposing in French. Paper presented at the 18th International Congress of Linguists, July 21–26, Seoul, Korea. Ambar, M. 1999. Aspects of the syntax of focus in Portuguese. In The Grammar of Focus [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 24], G. Rebuschi & L. Tuller (eds), 23–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.



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Anagnostopoulou, E. 2006. Clitic doubling. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (eds), vol. 1, 519–581. Oxford: Blackwell. Barbosa, P. 2001. On inversion in wh-questions in Romance. In Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar [Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax], A. Hulk & J.-Y. Pollock (eds), 20–59. Oxford: OUP. Beinhauer, W. 1958. El español coloquial. Madrid: Gredos. Benincà, P. 1988. L’ordine degli elementi della frase e le costruzioni marcate. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, L. Renzi (ed.), vol. 1, 129–194. Bologna: Il Mulino. Bosque, I. 1980. Sobre la negación. Madrid: Cátedra. Brunetti, L. This volume. Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish. Cinque, G. 1983. ‘Topic’ constructions in some European languages and ‘connectedness’. In Connectedness in Sentence, Discourse, and Text, K. Ehlich & H. van Riemsdijk (eds), 7–41. Tilburg: Katholieke Hogeschool. Reprinted 1997 in Materials on Left Dislocation [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 14], E. Anagnostopoulou, H. van Riemsdijk & F. Zwarts (eds), 93–118. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cinque, G. 1990. Types of A’-Dependencies [Linguistic Inquiry Monographs]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Cruschina, S. 2006. Informational focus in Sicilian and the left periphery. In Phases of Interpretation [Studies in Generative Grammar 91], M. Frascarelli (ed.), 363–385. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Erteschik-Shir, N. 2007. Information Structure. The Syntax-Discourse Interface [Oxford Surveys in Syntax & Morphology]. Oxford: OUP. Féry, C. 2007. Information structural notions and the fallacy of invariant correlates. In The Notions of Information Structure, C. Féry, G. Fanselow & M. Krifka (eds), 161–184. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam. Frascarelli, M. 2000. The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Focus and Topic Constructions in Italian. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Gallego, A. 2007. Phase Theory and Parametric Variation. PhD dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Haegeman, L. M. 2000. Negative Preposing, Negative Inversion, and the split CP. In Negation and Polarity, L. Horn & Y. Kato (eds), 21–61. Oxford: OUP. Hernanz, M.-Ll. 2001. ‘¡En bonito lío me he metido!’: notas sobre la afectividad en español. Moenia 7: 93–109. Hernanz, M.-Ll. 2006. Emphatic polarity and C in Spanish. In Studies in Spanish Syntax, L. Brugè (ed.), 105–150. Venezia: Università Ca’ Foscari. Höhle, T. 1992. Über Verum-Fokus im Deutschen. In Informationsstruktur und Grammatik. J. Jacobs (ed.), 112–141. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Horn, L. R. 1991. Given as new: when redundant affirmation isn’t. Journal of Pragmatics 15(4): 305–328. Jackendoff, R. S. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Jones, M. A. 1988. Sardinian. In The Romance Languages, M. Harris & N. Vincent (eds), 314–350. London: Croom Helm. Jones, M. A. 1993. Sardinian Syntax. London: Routledge. Krifka, M. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In The Notions of Information Structure, C. Féry, G. Fanselow & M. Krifka (eds), 13–55. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.

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Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics]. Cambridge: CUP. Lambrecht, K. 2000: When subjects behave like objects: An analysis of the merging of S and O in sentence focus constructions across languages. Studies in Language 24(3): 611–682. Lenertová, D. & Junghanns, U. 2007. Wide focus interpretation with fronted focus exponents in Czech. In On Information Structure, Meaning and Form: Generalizations across Languages [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 100], K. Schwabe & S. Winkler (eds), 347–363. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Leonetti, M. 2009. Remarks on focus structure and non-specificity. In Proceedings of the IV NEREUS International Workshop ‘Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages’, M. T. Espinal, M. Leonetti & L. McNally (eds). Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft Universität Konstanz. Levinson, S. C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Mensching, G. & Remberger, E.-M. (forthcoming). The left periphery in Sardinian. In Syntactic Variation. The Dialects of Italy, R. D’Alessandro, A. Ledgeway & I. Roberts (eds). Cambridge: CUP. Quer, J. 2002. Edging quantifiers. On QP-fronting in Western Romance. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2000 [Current Issues in Linguistics 232], C. Beyssade, R. Bok-Bennema, F. Drijkoningen & P. Monachesi (eds), 253–270. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Reinhart, T. 2006. Interface Strategies. Optimal and Costly Computations. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Rooth, M. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1): 75–116. Romero, M. 2006. Biased yes/no questions: the role of VERUM. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 30: 9–24. Romero, M. & Han, C. 2002. Verum focus in negative yes/no questions and Ladd’s p/¬p ambiguity. In Proceedings of SALT XII, B. Jackson (ed.), 204–224. Ithaca NY: CLC Publications. Suñer, M. 1988. Quantifiers and direct object doubling. In Advances in Romance Linguistics, D. Birdsong & J. Montreuil (eds), 411–425. Dordrecht: Foris. Suñer, M. 1989. Dialectal variation and clitic-doubled direct objects. In Studies in Romance Linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistics 60], C. Kirschner & J. A. DeCesaris (eds), 377–395. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Szendrői, K. 2006: Focus movement (with special reference to Hungarian). In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (eds), vol. 2, 272–337. Oxford: Blackwell. Vallduví, E. 1993. A preverbal landing site for quantificational operators. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 2: 319–343. Vallduví, E. 2002. L’oraciò com a unitat informativa. In Gramàtica del català contemporani, J. Solà, M. R. Lloret, J. Mascaró & M. Pérez-Saldanya (eds), vol. 2, 1221–1279. Barcelona: Empúries. Ward, G. 1990. The discourse functions of VP preposing. Language 66(4): 742–763. Zubizarreta, M. L. 1998. Prosody, Focus, and Word Order [Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 33]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Zubizarreta, M. L. 1999. Las funciones informativas: Tema y foco. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, I. Bosque & V. Demonte (eds), vol. 3, 4215–4244. Madrid: Espasa.

Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition Estelle Leray

Bergische Universität Wuppertal

This study analyzes the use of the additive focus particles German auch and French aussi in the utterances of three children who are simultaneously acquiring German and French; furthermore, the aim is to compare this data with the respective linguistic habits of monolingual German and French children and adults. Our analysis indicates an influence of the German language system on the bilingual children’s linguistic productions in French. In French, the bilingual children mainly use the particle in immediate post-verbal position [Pierre boit aussi un café ‘Pierre also has coffee’; lit. ‘Pierre drinks also a coffee’], whereas the monolingual speakers tend to place the particle in the final position of the sentence [Pierre boit un café aussi]. This position, according to our analysis, is the only one in which the German particle auch [Peter trinkt auch einen Kaffee] appears. In the latter part of this article we will seek to explain this direction of influence. The hypothesis brought up by Müller et al. (2002), claiming that the direction of influence is determined by differences in the structural complexity of both language systems, is not supported by this study, i.e., our analysis has not revealed salient differences of this kind.

1.

Introduction

This article examines the distribution of the additive focus particles German auch and French aussi in the production data of three French-German children who have been raised bilingually. In addition, these data will be compared to the production data of a monolingual German child, a monolingual French child ­between the ages of . My heartfelt thanks go to Natascha Müller, Franziska Witzmann, Nicole Hauser-Grüdl and Lastenia Arencibia Guerra for driving discussions, for the many suggestions and for the ­encouragement. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the valuable comments. Finally, I would like to thank Peter Herbeck, Johnette Perreida and Kristina Ehrlich for their editing assistance.

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2;6 and 4;6, and two adults. According to our study, the process of acquiring the use of the French focus particle in the case of the bilingual children differs from that of the monolingual child. Some of the possible positions of aussi in the bilingual children’s speech production appear more frequently in the bilingual than in the monolingual children’s productions. Most notably, the immediate postverbal position for aussi [Pierre boit aussi un café lit. ‘Pierre drinks also a coffee’] was chosen in 65% of all the bilingual data, whereas the monolingual child used aussi in the immediate post-verbal position only in 9% of all cases. Moreover, the bilingual children associated aussi in this position with subjects as well as objects and with constituents with other functions. This association corresponds to the range of focalization functions of the German particle. The monolingual child, however, associated aussi in post-verbal position only with objects. In the German system, only two positions are possible for the focus particle auch in such cases, i.e., either before the first constituent [Auch Peter trinkt einen Kaffee] or after the verb [Peter trinkt auch einen Kaffee]. According to our analysis of spontaneous speech data, the post-verbal position is the only position used in spoken language. The fact that the bilingual children predominantly used the particle in the post-verbal position in their French utterances shows that in this area the grammar of German has an influence over French. This influence is predicted based on the criterion taken from Müller & Hulk (2000, 2001), according to which cross-linguistic influence can arise when the phenomenon occurs at a point where two grammatical modules interface (cf. Section 2.3.1). According to Müller et al. (2002), the direction of influence is likewise predictable: whenever a difference of complexity exists between two languages, the less complex of the two languages influences the other. The objective of the present study is to examine this criterion and to answer the question as to whether the German system is in fact less complex than the French system in this respect. The remainder of this article is structured as follows: In Section 2, a number of basic facts about the syntax and semantics of the focus particles auch and aussi will be provided. In addition, this section will also provide some findings about cross-linguistic influences in bilingual language acquisition and discuss the role of complexity for determining the direction of cross-linguistic influence. Our own empirical study and its results will be presented in Section 3. Section 4 will be devoted to the discussion of the question whether the ascertained language influence of German over French can be explained via the higher degree of complexity of the French language system. The results will be collated in Section 5.

2.

Theoretical background

This section provides some theoretical background for the study of the focus particles auch and aussi, introducing some fundamental semantic and syntactic properties of the two particles (2.1) and presenting recent findings about cross-linguistic influences



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in bilingual language acquisition (2.2). This information will provide the background for the presentation of our own empirical study and the discussion of its results in Sections 3 and 4.

2.1

Semantics and positions of auch and aussi

2.1.1 Semantic contribution of auch and aussi The semantic contribution of the particles auch and aussi is illustrated in the following examples: (1) Pierre aussi boit un café. Pierre also drinks a coffee ‘Also Pierre drinks a coffee.’ (2) Auch Peter trinkt einen Kaffee. also Peter drinks a coffee ‘Also Peter drinks a coffee.’ In sentences (1) and (2), the entity which the particles auch and aussi affect is added to the number of entities which share the same quality. Therefore, this particle is also called additive. In (3) and (4), the constituent affected by the particle is marked via square brackets. (3) [Pierre] aussi boit un café. (4) Auch [Peter] trinkt einen Kaffee. The ‘addition’, expressed through the use of auch/aussi, implies that the class of discourse referents to which Pierre or Peter are being added already ‘exists’. The application of the focus particles thus presupposes that somebody (other than Pierre or Peter) drinks a coffee. In the literature on this subject most authors support the view that the added element presents the focus of the sentence, hence the name ‘focus particle’ ­(Altmann 1976; Jacobs 1983; König 1991; Büring & Hartmann 2001; Sudhoff 2008). This . Particles such as auch or aussi can also be considered as being ‘inclusive’. . This theory was discussed greatly since the particle auch can also carry the pitch accent: (i) Peter trinkt AUCH einen Kaffee. Peter drinks also a coffee ‘Also Peter drinks a coffee.’ Dimroth (2004) and Krifka (1999) suggested that Peter represents a contrastive topic in this instance. More recent formulations such as from Sudhoff (2008) demonstrate that the theory ‘added element = focus of the sentence’ is absolutely compatible with an accentuated auch (cf. Section 2.2.1).

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­presumption, among others, falls back on the observation that the particle’s element of reference carries the pitch accent and that this accent in languages such as English and German acts as the focus marker. What are we to understand by ‘focus’? The respective literature offers diverse interpretations of this phenomenon, characterized either pragmatically (a, b) or semantically (c, d): a. Focus expresses ‘new information’ (Halliday 1966; Selkirk 1984); b. focus expresses information that is not c-construable, i.e. the phrase in question has no semantic antecedent and has not been brought to the listener’s attention (Rochemont 1986); c. focus opens up a ‘set of alternatives’ within the sentence (Jacobs 1983; Rooth 1985, 1992); d. focus introduces a presupposition of existence (Geurts & van der Sandt 2004). König offers the following remarks on the discussion of competing concepts of focus in the theoretical literature: It has become also increasingly clear in the course of these discussions, however, that it is pointless to look for a uniform interpretation of focus and that different interpretations are appropriate for the different types of focus distinguished in the literature: presentational focus, contrastive focus, exhaustive focus, etc. […] Moreover, the exact interpretation of focus also seems to be dependent on the presence of focus-sensitive operators, such as focus particles and perhaps also illocutionary operators […] (König 1991: 32)

According to König, in the case of an association of focus with a focus particle, the best interpretation for the focal phenomenon is the one offered by Jacobs (1983) and Rooth (1985), who both put forward the notion that focus indicates alternatives: “[…] it is fairly clear how a focus is to be interpreted whenever it is associated with a focus particle: the focus of a particle relates the value of the focused expression to a set of alternatives.” (König 1991: 32). In this study we would like to follow König’s definition of ‘focus’ as a semantic phenomenon in reference to additive focus particles.

. The accent is certainly a prerequisite of the focus marker; however, it is not the determining factor. In the following examples, Berlin is always the accentuated constituent. Note that the accentuation is possible with different focalizations: (i) weil Karl morgen [nach BerLIN]F fahren wird because Karl tomorrow to Berlin drive-inf will ‘because Karl is driving tomorrow to Berlin’ (ii) weil Karl morgen [nach BerLIN fahren]F wird (iii) weil Karl [morgen nach BerLIN fahren]F wird (iv) weil [Karl morgen nach BerLIN fahren]F wird



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A salient property of focus particles is their mobility within a sentence (cf. Jacobs 1983), i.e., their ability to occupy various positions in a sentence. The different positional choices available for focus particles correlate with different possibilities of focalization. In the next subsection we will present the possible positions for the German and French particles.

2.1.2 Positions of auch and aussi In German, the particle auch can occupy two positions in a sentence: (i) sentenceinitially (5), and (ii) in the middle field, as in (6): (5) a. b.

Auch [Peter] trinkt einen Kaffee. also Peter drinks a coffee ‘Also Peter drinks a coffee.’ Auch [einen Kaffee] trinkt Peter. also a coffee drinks Peter ‘Peter drinks also a coffee.’

(6) a. b. c. d.

[Peter] trinkt auch einen Kaffee. Peter drinks also a coffee ‘Also Peter drinks a coffee.’ [Einen Kaffee] trinkt Peter auch. a coffee drinks Peter also ‘Peter drinks also a coffee.’ Peter trinkt auch [einen Kaffee]. Peter drinks also a coffee ‘Peter drinks also a coffee.’ Einen Kaffee trinkt auch [Peter]. a coffee drinks also Peter ‘Also Peter drinks a coffee.’

When the particle appears in the middle field, either the first constituent ((6a) and (6b)) or the constituent following the particle ((6c) and (6d)) can be focalized. As can be seen in (5), when the particle appears sentence-initially only the first constituent can be focalized. In French, the additive focus particle can appear in five different positions: (i)  Between the subject and the finite verb (7): (7) [Pierre] aussi boit un café. Peter also drinks a coffee ‘Also Peter drinks a coffee.’ In this case, only the subject can be focalized.

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(ii)  After the finite verb: (8) a. b.

Pierre boit aussi [un café]. Pierre drinks also a coffee ‘Pierre drinks also a coffee.’ [Pierre] boit aussi un café. Pierre drinks also a coffee ‘Also Pierre drinks a coffee.’

Both subject and object can be focalized. (iii)  At the end of the sentence: (9) a. b.

[Pierre] boit un café aussi. Pierre drinks a coffee also ‘Also Pierre drinks a coffee.’ Pierre boit [un café] aussi. Pierre drinks a coffee also ‘Pierre drinks also a coffee.’

Again, both subject and object can be focalized. (iv)  After left-dislocated constituents (10) and (v) after right-dislocated constituents (11): (10) [Pierre] aussi, il boit un café. Pierre also he drinks a coffee ‘Also Pierre drinks a coffee.’ (11) Il boit un café, [Pierre] aussi. he drinks a coffee Pierre also ‘Also Pierre drinks a coffee.’ In both (10) and (11), only the dislocated constituent can be focalized. The positions available for auch and aussi in a sentence of the type “XP Vfin YP” (German Peter trinkt einen Kaffee, French Pierre boit un café ‘Peter/Pierre has a coffee’) can be represented as in (12) and (13), respectively: (12) (auch) XP Vfin (auch) YP (13) WP (aussi), XP (aussi) Vfin (aussi) YP (aussi), ZP (aussi) When we combine the two systems, the following arrangement appears: (14) WP (aussi), (auch) XP (aussi) Vfin (aussi/auch) YP (aussi), ZP (aussi) The two systems only correspond in the case of the immediate post-verbal position. For the sake of simplicity, we will number the different positions from left to right.



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However, in the case of the combination of aussi and a dislocated constituent (right or left), the positions will be numbered separately as they do not directly belong to the sentence (P = position): (15) WP (P01), (P1) XP (P2) Vfin (P3) YP (P4), ZP (P02) Following this scheme, the German and the French systems can be represented in the following manner: (16) auch: (P1) XP Vfin (P3) YP aussi: WP (P01), XP (P2) Vfin (P3) YP (P4), ZP (P02) As we can see in (16), the only position shared by both systems is P3. In the next subsection we will discuss proposals for syntactic structures for auch and aussi.

2.2 The syntax of auch and aussi Since Altmann’s (1976) work Die Gradpartikeln im Deutschen [The scalar particles of German], many investigations of the German particles have been carried out (cf. Jacobs 1983; Bayer 1996; Reis & Rosengren 1997; Büring & Hartmann 2001; ­Nederstigt 2003; Reis 2005). At the same time, however, there exist only few works on French particles (cf. Nølke 1993). The analyses of German particles are mostly couched within the generative framework and can be subdivided into two groups: (a) those which assume that the particles can be adjoined to any syntactic phrase (adjunction-to-XP) (cf. Bayer 1996; Reis & Rosengren 1997), and (b) those according to which particles can only connect to verb phrases (adverbial analyses) (cf. Jacobs 1983; Büring & Hartmann 2001). However, both approaches turn out to be problematic when we consider cases of non-adjacency and apparent surface violations of verb second position, as will be shown below. In a new approach to German particles, Sudhoff (2008) tries to solve these problems by uniting the two approaches: auch in the middle field is connected to VP and in the prefield (P1) to DP. In the following subsections, the various approaches for the analysis of German focus particles will be presented. Because of the

. P2 and P4 are ungrammatical in German: (i) *Peter auch trinkt einen Kaffee. Peter also drinks a coffee (ii) *Peter hat einen Kaffee getrunken auch. Peter has a coffee drink-perf also P1 is not acceptable in French: (iii) *Aussi Pierre boit un café. also Pierre drinks a coffee

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absence of published literature on French focus particles, we will stick to the analyses of German particles and propose a possible syntactic analysis of the French data.

2.2.1 The syntax of auch Apart from Reis & Rosengren’s (1997) approach, which is only concerned with the additive focus particle auch, all cited works investigate the nature of all kinds of focus particles, including, besides additive particles, also restrictive (e.g. nur ‘only’) and scalar (e.g. sogar ‘even’) ones. By contrast, our presentation will be limited to the handling of additive particles in the various approaches. All of the theories examined assume that (a) focus particles represent a maximal projection such as ‘AUCHP’ or ‘NURP’ and that (b) these can only be adjoined to other maximal projections XP. The example in (17), taken from Büring & Hartmann (2001: 241), demonstrates the second point: (17) *[CP Peter [nur [C’ KÜSSTEF Maria]]]. Peter only kissed Maria In German, adjunction of focus particles to C’ is not permitted. 2.2.1.1   Reis & Rosengren (1997).  Reis & Rosengren assume that focus particles (PRT) can be adjoined to any maximal projection XP. This assumption is based on examples in which [PRT DP], [PRT PP], [PRT VP], [PRT AP] and [PRT CP] can be topicalized (cf. Reis & Rosengren 1997: 256): (18) [Auch einen AUFsatz]i hat Peter ti geschrieben. also an essay has Peter write-perf ‘[An ESSAY], Peter wrote as well.’

DP

(19) [Auch an einem AUFsatz]i hat Peter ti gearbeitet. also at an essay has Peter write-perf ‘[On an ESSAY], Peter has worked as well.’

PP

(20) [Auch fleißig geLEsen]i hat Peter ti. also diligently read-perf has Peter ‘[Diligently READ], Peter has as well.’

VP

(21) [Auch sehr LIEB]i war er plötzlich ti. also very dear was he suddenly ‘[Very DEAR], he was suddenly as well.’

AP

(22)

[Auch dass PEter einen Aufsatz schreibt,]i wussten alle ti. also that Peter an essay writes knew everybody ‘That Peter writes an essay, everybody knew as well.’ (all examples taken from Reis & Rosengren 1997)

CP



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In their discussion on these constructions Reis & Rosengren (1997) state: “Since topicalization has applied in all of these cases, we may assume that auch plus the XPs in question also form a constituent in their base position within the VP.” (p. 256) According to Reis & Rosengren’s hypothesis, the sentence in (22) has the following derivation: (23) [CP Peteri trinktj [VP [DP auch [DP einen Kaffee]F] ti tj]]. Peter drinks also a coffee ‘Peter also drinks a coffee.’ Thus, the association of the particle and the focused constituent is determined syntactically, i.e., through adjacency. However, the adjacency requirement is not always obeyed, as can be seen in (24) and (25): (24) [Einen Kaffee]F trinkt Peter auch. a coffee drinks Peter also ‘A COFFEE Peter drinks as well.’ (25) weil man auch nach Hamburg [FLIEgen]F kann. because one also to Hamburg fly-inf can ‘because you can go to Hamburg by plane as well.’ In these examples, the particle is separated from the focused constituent by one or more elements (verb and subject in (24), and a prepositional phrase in (25)). Thus, (24) and (25) cannot be explained by Reis & Rosengren’s approach. A further problem for the adjunction-to-XP analysis is presented by Büring & Hartmann (2001) who recur to the findings in Jacobs’ (1983) work: If FPs [focus particles, E.L.] could adjoin to DP, we would expect ‘FP DP’ s­ equences within NPs and PPs. Since NP and PP are left-headed in German, such sequences should be easy to detect, because the FP should follow the N/P and precede the DP. (Büring & Hartmann 2001: 233)

The impossibility of such focus particles inside complex noun phrases and prepositional phrases is illustrated by (26) and (27): (26) *[PP P PRT DP] a. *mit nur Hans with only Hans b. *gegen sogar den Präsidenten against even the president (27) *[NP N PRT DP] a. *der Bruder nur des Grafen the brother only of-the earl

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b. *die Proklamation sogar der Unabhängigkeit the proclamation even of-the independence 2.2.1.2   Büring & Hartmann (2001).  According to the hypothesis of Büring & ­Hartmann (2001), focus particles only adjoin to verbal phrases (CP, IP, VP). According to this hypothesis, the example (23) must be analyzed in the following way: (28) [CP Peteri trinktj [VP auch [VP [DP einen Kaffee]F ti tj]]]. Peter drinks also a coffee ‘Peter also drinks a coffee.’ The focus particle is adjoined to the verb phrase which contains the focused element: in (28) einen Kaffee is base-generated as the direct object of the verb in the verb phrase. The verb phrase, in turn, constitutes the next higher verbal XP. In Büring & Hartmann’s approach, the association between particle and focus constituent is a semantic and not a syntactic phenomenon. Following Rooth’s (1985, 1992) theory of Alternative Semantics, Büring & Hartmann assume that the label Focus (+F) is assigned at Logical Form, i.e., after the syntactic computation. The sentences in (24) and (25), repeated below for convenience as (29) and (30), can be accounted for by their approach: The F-marked constituent is associated with the particle. (29) [Einen Kaffeei]F trinkt Peter AUCH ti. (30) weil man [VP auch [VP nach Hamburg [FLIEgen]F kann]]. However, a crucial disadvantage of their approach is that it violates the verb-second rule: (31) [CP Auch [CP PETER küsste Maria]]. also Peter kissed Maria ‘Also Peter kissed Maria.’ According to this analysis, the finite verb occurs in third and not in second position. 2.2.1.3   Sudhoff (2008).  Sudhoff proposes a syntactic analysis of focus particles. In his approach he tries to unite the adjunction-to-XP and adverbial analyses. He assumes the existence of two basic adjunct positions for focus particles: in the middle field the particle is adjoined to VP (adverbial analysis), while in the pre-field the particle is adjoined to DP (adjunction-to-XP). . The ungrammaticality also holds true for additive particles: (i) *mit auch Hans with also Hans (ii) *das Haus auch des Nachbarn the house also of-the neighbour



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Sudhoff ’s analysis is based on the theory of information structure as proposed by Steube (2000) and Steube et al. (2004). According to this approach, “German has a syntactically determined focus domain in the mid-field with the sentence adverbials as its left boundary, and […] background constituents preferably leave this focus domain via movement to the left, i.e. scrambling and topicalization” (Sudhoff 2008). Sudhoff shows to which extent, in German, the order of constituents is dependent on the information structure of a sentence: (32) (Was noch?) ‘What else?’ Es hati [VP auch [VP gestern ein Mann einen HUND geschlagen ti]]F. it has also yesterday a man a dog beat-perf ‘A man also beat a DOG yesterday.’ In (32) the whole VP is focalized. Only the auxiliary hat has to be moved out of the focus domain because of syntactic reasons. In sentence (33), on the other hand, not only the auxiliary but also the adverb gestern has to be moved out of the focus domain, because this adverb constitutes background information. (33)

(Was ist gestern noch passiert?) ‘What else happened yesterday?’ Gesternj hati [VP auch [VP tj ein Mann einen HUND geschlagen ti]]F. yesterday has also a man a dog beat-perf ‘Yesterday a man also beat a DOG.’

However, (i) there are sentences in German in which focused constituents must be extracted out of the focus domain for syntactic reasons, while (ii) there are also constructions in which non-focus constituents remain in the focus domain. These cases are also taken into account by Steube et al. (2004). In the case of (i) the trace of the moved phrase is marked [+F], while in (ii) the non-focused constituent bears the feature [–F]: (34) (Wo ist Maja noch gewesen?) ‘Where else has Maja been?’ [In Berlin]i warj Maja sogar [VP tk ti,[+F] tj]F. in Berlin was Maja even ‘Even in Berlin Maja has been.’ (35) (Gestern hat Maja Markus geküsst.) ‘Yesterday Maja kissed Marcus.’ . Sudhoff refers here to Sternefeld’s (2006) and Haider’s (1997) approaches, which do not assume an additional projection between VP and CP. . The adverb gestern ‘yesterday’ is part of the background because it is part of the preceding question.

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Gesterni hatj Majak auch [VP ti tk Felix geküsst[–F] tj]F. yesterday has Maja also Felix kiss-perf ‘Yesterday Maja also kissed Felix.’ The adjacency problem that occurs due to the syntactic association between the particle and the focus constituent is resolved here, in contrast to Büring & Hartmann’s analysis, by recurring to the information structure of the sentence. The sentences (36) and (37) are derived in the following way: (36) (Warum hast du Tickets nach Hamburg gebucht?) ‘Why did you book tickets to Hamburg?’ [CP Weil mani [VP auch [VP ti nach Hamburg[–F] FLIEgen kann[–F]]F]]. because one also to Hamburg fly-INF can ‘Because you can also go to Hamburg BY PLANE.’ (37) [CP Einen Kaffeej trinkti Peterk [VP auch tk,[–F] tj,[+F] ti,[–F]]F]. a coffee drinks Peter also ‘(lit.) A coffee drinks Peter as well.’ In sentence (37) einen Kaffee functions as a contrastive topic (cf. Krifka 1999) and thus it is topicalized to the left. In the following we aim to propose a modification of the underlying structure proposed by Sudhoff. Sudhoff follows Haider (1997) and Sternefeld (2006) in assuming that there is no additional functional projection between VP and CP in a German sentence. However, for the sentence structure of German it can be assumed that a light verb phrase (vP) is projected above the VP. This analysis goes back to Larson’s (1988) double object construction and rests on the semantic idea that a three-place predicate such as in Hans legt eine Zeitung auf den Tisch ‘Hans puts a newspaper on the table’ is internally complex. Thus, the expression can be semantically divided into the paraphrase Hans macht, dass eine Zeitung auf dem Tisch liegt ‘Hans causes the newspaper to lie on the table’. Syntactically, this means that the VP has to be split into two phrases: a VP (containing the main verb) and a vP (the light verb phrase). The direct object and the indirect object function as the ‘inner subject’ and the complement of V. Thus, the direct object is generated in the specifier of V. The subject of the sentence is generated in the specifier position of the vP: (38) [CP [vP Hans [VP [SpecV eine Zeitung] [PP auf dem Tisch] [V liegt]]]] Hans a newspaper on the table lies The function of vP is mainly to provide a position for the agentive subject (Hans). Agentivity is a trait which can not only be detected with three-place predicates, but also with two-place and one-place predicates. Thus, it is plausible to project the . For the following argumentation, we adopt the theory of vP as presented in Gabriel & Müller (2008).



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 217

vP–VP analysis onto all types of verbs.10 Hence, we assume that the analysis of a German sentence must include a VP, a vP, as well as a CP. Applied to Sudhoff ’s analysis, this means that the focus domain consists of the vP plus VP and that focus particles are adjoined to the vP instead of VP. Let us now have a look at how the derivation of a construction which includes a focus particle in the prefield would look like within such a framework. Sudhoff proposes that the particle can adjoin to a non-verbal phrase: (39) [CP[DP Auch [DP PEterk]] trinkti [VP tk einen Kaffeej ti]]F. also Peter drinks a coffee ‘Also Peter drinks a coffee.’ Here, the particle and the focus constituent are contained in the same phrase, so that the verb-second rule is not violated. According to Sudhoff, the appearance of focus particles in the prefield is governed by several restrictions. The domain of the FP [focus particle, E.L.], which immediately follows (or precedes) the particle in the prefield, obligatorily receives a contrastive interpretation. In this respect, FPs in the prefield have much in common with contrastive negation, which can also be analyzed as an adjunct to the prefield constituent […] I take this contrastive interpretation to be the precondition for the adjunction of FPs to non-verbal projections, and hence for the occurrence of FPs in the prefield together with their domains. (Sudhoff 2008)

This interpretation becomes especially clear in the case of restrictive particles (cf. Sudhoff ’s example (36)): (40)

Nur [FElix] hat gestern gesungen, und nicht Maja / und sonst only Felix has yesterday sing-perf and not Maja / and else NIEmand. nobody ‘Only FELIX sang yesterday and not Maja / and nobody else.’

The discussion of the problems faced by the various analyses of German focus particles have led us to adopt Sudhoff ’s analysis, with the modification that the VP is split into two projections (vP and VP). Thus, we follow Sudhoff in assuming that German auch has two positions to which it can adjoin. In the case of P1, auch adjoins to DP. However, in the case of P3, we assume that the particle is adjoined to vP and not to VP.

10. Only in unaccusative and passive constructions, vP is not projected because of lack of agentivity.

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2.2.2 The syntax of aussi As far as we know there are no studies dealing with the syntactic structure of French expressions containing aussi in the generative framework. Taking into account the preceding discussion of the syntax of German focus particles, our intention is to provide some ideas on a possible syntactic structure for aussi. As we have seen in Section 2.1.2, aussi can appear in five different positions in a French sentence. After the dislocated constituent (P01, P02, cf. (41) and (42) below), after the first constituent (P2, cf. (43)), immediately after the finite verb (P3, cf. (44) and (45)), and sentence-finally (P4, cf. (46) and (47)): (41) [Pierre] aussi, il boit un café. (42) Il boit un café, [Pierre] aussi. (43) [Pierre] aussi boit un café. (44) Pierre boit aussi [un café]. (45) [Pierre] boit aussi un café. (46) [Pierre] boit un café aussi. (47) Pierre boit [un café] aussi. As in the case of German focus particles, we assume that aussi represents a maximal projection that can be adjoined to another maximal projection. The non-adjacency of aussi and the DP in the examples (45) and (46) shows that the assignment of the focus feature [F] cannot be realized syntactically (as assumed by Reis & Rosengren) but must be semantically assigned (as assumed by Büring & Hartmann), or, as Sudhoff proposes, must be assigned on the level of information structure. The precise nature of this process is not to be dealt with at this point. We assume that the focus particle aussi can only be adjoined to two positions: DP in the case of the positions P01, P02, and P2 and vP in the case of P3 and P4. 2.2.2.1   Adjunction to DP.  The dislocations in (41) and (42) show that the particle in combination with the DP can form a constituent.11 The dislocation is to be compared with the topicalization in Reis & Rosengren (1997) (cf. Section 2.2.1). For (41) and (42), we propose the syntactic structures given in (48) and (49): (48) [DP [Pierrei] aussi], ili boit un café.

11. Büring & Hartmann’s objection that focus particles and DPs cannot form constituents is difficult to prove in French because the particle always appears to the right of the focused DP: (i) Ger *mit auch [Hans] (ii) Ger *das Haus auch [des Nachbarn] Fr avec [Jean] aussi Fr   la maison [du voisin] aussi



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 219

(49) Ili boit un café, [DP [Pierrei] aussi].12 Analogous to dislocations, aussi in position P2 is to be analyzed as an adjunction to DP. This position can only be occupied by the subject of the sentence: (50) [TP [DP [DP Pierre]F aussi] boit un café]. In contrast to German auch, French aussi appears to the right of the DP. (This, however, is not always the case, as can be seen in example (44)). Since Kayne’s (1994) influential work, it is often assumed that adjunction can only apply to the left of a constituent. Therefore, we assume that the particle is in fact adjoined to the left ([DP aussi [DP Pierre]]) and that DP internal movement to the right ([DP [Pierre]i aussi ti]) applies at a later stage of the derivation.13 Such a phenomenon is not unusual in French as can be seen in the case of postnominal adjectives (cf. Laenzlinger 2005). 2.2.2.2 Adjunction to vP.  In order to describe the possible structures for aussi in P3, we must have a look at the basic structure of a French sentence. Here we will follow Mensching’s (2003) minimalist analysis (cf. also Gabriel & Müller 2008): (51) [TP Pierrei boitj [vP ti tj [VP tj [DP un café]]]]. Pierre drinks a coffee ‘Pierre drinks a coffee.’ After the application of Merge of V + object, v + V, and subject + v, the finite verb and the subject must move to T and SpecT respectively, in order to check interpretable features. Non-interpretable features are those which are neither semantically nor phonetically interpretable and would lead to a ‘crashing’ at the interfaces if not checked until Spell-Out. The subject has a ‘strong’ non-interpretable Case feature ([nominative]) and the verb a ‘strong’ V-feature, which both have to be checked to avoid ‘crashing’. Starting out from this structure, the adjunction of the focus particle to vP in the case of P3 is possible: (52) [TP [Pierrei] boitj [vP [vP aussi] ti tj [VP tj [DP un café]]]F]. (53) [TP [Pierrei]F boitj [vP [vP aussi] ti tj [VP tj [DP un café]]]]. As can be seen, the subject and the finite verb move into the TP above the focus particle. According to our analysis, P4 could be realized by moving the direct object into a position between v and T:

12. We will not discuss the position of the dislocates in detail as it is irrelevant for the present purposes. For more information cf. López (2009). 13. A condition on this movement is that the DP must have a complex internal structure (a kind of ‘split-DP’).

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(54) [TP [Pierrei] boitj ??[DP un café]F [vP [vP aussi] ti tj [VP tj]]]. (55) [TP [Pierrei]F boitj ??[DP un café] [vP [vP aussi] ti tj [VP tj ]]]. The question arises as to which position could be a legitimate landing site for the direct object. In French, AgrOP can be projected between vP and TP. This projection is optional and appears, for example, in cases of participle agreement. This hypothesis will be further scrutinized in Section 4. According to our analysis, the additive focus particle can be adjoined to DP and vP in French. This corresponds to the binary system of adjunction found in the area of German focus particles. German system: P1 P3 French system: P01, P02, P2 P3, P4 Adjunction to DP Adjunction to vP In the following subsection, the discussion will move beyond the syntax and semantics of focus particles to issues in bilingual language acquisition.

2.3

Cross-linguistic influence

This section will discuss what is to be understood by the term ‘cross-linguistic influence’ and which implications it may have for the bilingual child in the case of language separation. The influence criteria set forth by Müller & Hulk (2000) will be taken into consideration. Based on these criteria, it should be possible to predict which grammatical domains are susceptible to influence. We will also take a closer look at the complexity criterion which, according to Müller et al., explains why language A influences language B and not inversely, i.e., why a certain direction of influence occurs.

2.3.1 Cross-linguistic influence and separation of the languages14 ‘Cross-linguistic influence’ denotes “[…] the systematic influence of the grammar of one language on the grammar of the other language during acquisition, causing differences in a bilingual’s patterns and rates of development in comparison with a monolingual’s” (Paradis & Genesee 1996: 3). Thus, a condition for ‘cross-linguistic influence’ is an existing separation of the two language systems in the linguistic makeup of the child. This falls in line with an approach to bilingualism which considers crosslinguistic influence and language separation as not excluding one another. This perspective on bilingual language acquisition was introduced at the end of the 1990s by Hulk and Müller (Müller 1998; Hulk & Müller 2000; Müller & Hulk 2000/2001), in order to unite two approaches which had previously been considered incompatible.

14. For a similar argumentation cf. Müller et al. (2006).



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 221

The two distinct perspectives on bilingual language acquisition will be presented by considering the works by Volterra & Taeschner (1978), on the one hand, and Meisel (1989), on the other. The first mentioned authors claim that the two language systems are fused in the initial stages of the child’s grammar development. Only later on will two language-specific lexica and two language-specific syntactic systems evolve. Volterra & Taeschner support their hypothesis with empirical data of two Italian-German bilingual children. Evidence in favor of a fusion of the two language systems (above all the two lexica) can be found in cases of mixed expressions such as haus rotto (German ‘house’ and Italian ‘broken’).15 According to Volterra and Taeschner, such expressions are produced by the bilingual child because he or she possesses only few word equivalents, i.e., the child uses only one lexicon which comprises elements of both language systems. However, Volterra & Taeschner’s (1978) argument of missing word equivalents is weakened by Cantone (2006), who shows in her study of German-Italian children that mixed expressions also occur in cases in which word equivalents exist. Meisel (1989), on the other hand, observes an early separation of language systems, which, in turn, is evidence against cross-linguistic influence. Meisel investigates the speech data of two German-French children with respect to grammatical phenomena in the area of word order. The examined children detect the language-specific regularities very early. Thus, they place the verb after the first constituent. Furthermore, Meisel observes that the ordering of the object and non-finite verb is target-like in the two corresponding languages: the order object–verb (e.g. den Kuchen gegessen ‘the cake eaten’, den Kuchen essen, lit. ‘the cake eat’) is realized in the German utterances of the bilingual children, while it is the verb–object order that occurs in the French utterances (e.g. manger le gâteau ‘eat the cake’). While Meisel as well as Volterra & Taeschner assume that cross-linguistic influence and language separation are mutually exclusive, Hulk & Müller argue that the two phenomena can occur simultaneously. This hypothesis presupposes that linguistic influence does not affect the whole grammatical system but only certain areas of grammar. According to Hulk and Müller, it is only specific properties of grammatical phenomena that account for cross-linguistic influence and not grammar-external phenomena such as ‘language dominance’.16 The two authors postulate the following criteria to predict areas susceptible to cross-linguistic influence: (i)  Cross-linguistic influence occurs at the interface between two modules of grammar and more particularly at the interface between pragmatics and syntax in the so-called C-domain, since this is an area which has been claimed to create problems in L1 acquisition. 15. For a detailed discussion of this work cf. Müller et al. (2006). 16. The notion ‘language dominance’ refers to those cases in which one of the two language systems which the bilingual acquires is stronger or more easily acquired. ‘Language dominance’ could be ruled out as a reason for cross-linguistic influence in various works (Cantone et al. 2008).

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(ii)  Syntactic cross-linguistic influence occurs only if language A has a syntactic construction which may seem to allow more than one syntactic analysis, at the same time, language B contains evidence for one of these two possible analyses. In other words, there has to be a certain overlap of the two systems at the surface level. (Müller & Hulk 2000: 228)

In order to predict the existence of cross-linguistic influence in a specific grammatical area, it is sufficient for one criterion to be fulfilled. Let us have a closer look at the two criteria and how they apply to the area of focus particles. First, we would like to briefly explain what exactly is meant by the first criterion with an intersection. The interface between two grammatical modules is defined by Pillunat, Schmitz & Müller (2000), using an example of subject omission in Italian. In a language such as Italian, the subject is ‘omitted’ or covertly realized as long as it is not emphasized contrastively, cf. It Ø mangia ‘he/she eats’.17 The occurrences of null subjects are not subject to any restrictions, but determined by the inherent understanding of the subject reference by the listener who receives the utterance. In a context in which the subject reference is inherently understood, the use of a pronoun leads to unacceptable sentences. (56)

Italian Luigi è stanco. Allora #lui / Ø va a letto. Luigi is tired so   he / Ø goes to bed ‘Luigi is tired. He is going to bed.’

Pillunat, Schmitz & Müller (2006: 8) conclude: Das Zusammenspiel zwischen Syntax und Pragmatik kann [...] wie folgt formuliert werden: Für die Null-Subjekt-Sprache Italienisch [...] eröffnet die Syntax zusätzlich zu der phonetischen Realisierung des Subjekts (als Pronomen) die Möglichkeit, dieses auszulassen. Die Wahl zwischen den beiden Möglichkeiten (Realisierung / Auslassung) wird durch die Pragmatik bestimmt. [The interface between syntax and pragmatics can […] be formulated as follows: For Italian as a null subject language the Italian syntax presents, besides the possibility of the phonetic realization of the subject (as a pronoun), the possibility of its omission as well. The choice between these two options (realization / omission) is regulated by pragmatics.]

What about additive focus particles? On which interface does the additive focus particle operate and in which manner do these two grammatical modules influence one another? As mentioned in 2.1.1, the use of an additive focus particle entails a presupposition attributed to semantics. Furthermore, we have seen in 2.1.2 that focus particles can appear in different sentence positions. We conclude from that informa17. The empty pronominal element is labeled as pro.



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 223

tion that additive focus particles operate on the syntax–semantics interface. As will become clear in Section 3.3, in French, an influence of semantics over syntax can be observed. A strong trend can be recognized from our data: aussi in P3 is not used for subject focalization. Only P4 (or P01) are used for that purpose. According to this information, the syntax–semantic interface develops as follows: syntax provides several possible positions for the additive particle. Semantics influences the choice of one of these syntactic positions depending on the focalized constituent: i.e., the position of aussi is determined by whether a subject, an object or another constituent is focalized. The second criterion indicates that one of the languages must provide several syntactic analyses for one specific grammatical phenomenon and that at least one of these analytic possibilities should exist in the other language for the same phenomenon. However, in the case of the particles auch and aussi, we find that the syntactic analyses do not differ. In the German system and the French system alike, the particle is adjoined to either a vP or a DP. Therefore, in this domain, it is not a case of ‘subsetsuperset relationship’ as would be required by the second criterion. Thus, the first criterion of Müller & Hulk’s analysis turns out to be applicable to the acquisition of focus particles by French-German bilingual children: Cross-linguistic influence is expected in this domain of grammar.

2.3.2 Direction of influence None of the two criteria in Müller & Hulk (2000) predicts the directionality of the cross-linguistic influence. According to Müller et al. (2002), the directionality of influence can be explained taking into account the ‘computational complexity’ of a certain grammatical phenomenon in a certain language. Following this hypothesis, the less complex analysis of the two languages that a bilingual child acquires will be projected onto the other language system. Thus, children follow the principle of economy “Choose the least complex analysis” in language acquisition (cf. also Rizzi 1994; Roeper 1996; Wexler 1998 for discussions of principles of economy in language acquisition). However, the notion of complexity has to be defined further. Based on a proposal by Jakubowicz (2002), Müller et al. define complexity in the following way: (i)  The syntactic computation in a given language is less complex when a merged functional category must be present in every sentence. […] The syntactic computation is more complex if a merged functional category is present in some sentences. Such a functional category expresses semantic information and is added to the obligatory functional skeleton. […] In other words, the CCH [computational complexity hypothesis, E.L.] claims that functional categories can be divided into those that are syntactically necessary and those that are semantically motivated. […] (ii)  The syntactic computation in a given language is less complex when an argument is canonically merged with a predicate (that is, merged in the lexical domain). […] The syntactic computation is more complex when an argument is

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non-canonically merged with a functional category (that is merged in the functional domain). […] When an argument is non-canonically projected, its projection is delayed in the course of the computation, and the resulting structure is more complex. (Jakubowicz 2002: 171)

It is important to note that this list of criteria of complexity is not exhaustive. The authors themselves point out that the elaboration of further criteria is necessary in order to provide a satisfactory solution for the directionality of influence in bilingual language acquisition (cf. Müller et al. 2002: 194). However, the two criteria can provide an explanation for the influence of the Italian language system in the acquisition of German word order. Müller et al. discover in their study that German-Italian bilingual children do not have problems with the acquisition of finite verb placement in German main clauses (after the first constituent). In contrast, the position of the finite verb is not target-like over a long period of time in the monolingual acquisition of German. The first criterion in Jakubowicz (2002) can explain this paradox: It is assumed that SVO in German is the result of a merger of two functional categories, COMP and INFL. Thus, the finite verb in German main clauses is moved to that position that is occupied by the complementizer in subordinate clauses, i.e. COMP. Thus, the derivation of SVO in German requires not only purely syntactically motivated functional categories but also COMP, while ­Italian SVO is derived with purely syntactically motivated functional categories only. (Müller et al. 2002: 194)

Thus, it could be claimed that the Italian system is less complex in this respect. Müller et al. (2002) show that cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of a German-Italian bilingual grammar can be detected also in the choice between overt objects and object omission. However, in this case the Italian system is influenced by the German one. The bilingual children omit objects for a longer period than the monolingual Italian children. Here, object clitics play a crucial role. The directionality of influence can be predicted taking into account the second criterion of Jacubowicz (2002): In contrast to Romance languages, there are no genuine clitics in German. In this language, these are pronouns that are associated with the verb in the lexical domain (VP). In the case of Italian clitics, in contrast, it is assumed that they are inserted into the syntactic structure in the functional domain as they are underspecified for the nominal feature [N]. Thus, they cannot occupy a position in the lexical domain (cf. Müller et al. 2006: 139). It has been shown that grammatical complexity determines the directionality of influence in the areas of object clitics and of the position of the verb in main clauses. Following Hulk & Müller’s criteria, a prediction of cross-linguistic influence concerning this specific phenomenon should be possible because of the fact that the area of focus particles operates on an interface between two modules. According to Müller et al. (2002), the complexity of the grammatical phenomenon in the two respective languages plays a crucial role in determining the directionality of influence. The way



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 225

in which complexity can be defined was illustrated by means of word order and object omission. The presentation of the analysis of production data in the following section – from three bilingual children as well as monolingual children – will show that in the area of additive particles, the German system influences the French system. In Section 4, we will discuss whether that influence in the area of the focus particles auch and aussi is due to a difference in the degree of complexity of the two systems. First, however, our empirical study and its results will be presented in Section 3.

3.

The study

3.1

Data

The participants of this study were three bilingual children as well as two monolingual children and adults. The corpus consists of the subjects’ spontaneous speech production. The data of the monolingual children and adults were taken from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). Table 1 shows the data of the German monolingual children. The monolingual adults were the interlocutors of each monolingual child, respectively. Table 1.  Monolingual children’s ages Child

Language

Age

Number of recordings

Simone Philippe

German French

3;0,24–3;9,18 2;6,13–3;0,06

 8 16

No information was provided in the CHILDES database as to the length of each individual recording. It was only noted that the duration of each recording varied between one and six hours. The data of the three bilingual children (cf. Table 2) were taken from the corpus of the research project Die Architektur der frühkindlichen bilingualen Sprachfähigkeit: ­Italienisch/Deutsch und Französisch/Deutsch in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich [Architecture of the early bilingual speech capacity: A contrastive analysis of Italian/German and French/German in Italy, Germany, and France], which has been carried at the University of Wuppertal since 2004.18

18. The project was financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and conducted by Natascha Müller.

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Table 2.  Bilingual children’s ages Child

Language

Age

Number of recordings

Amélie

German French German French German French

2;11,14–3;5,13 idem 2;11,20–3;5,24 idem 2;6,21–2;10,18 4;0,19–4;6,18†

10

Alexander Céline

 9   7  7

†The divergence of Céline’s investigation period is due to the observation that she begins to speak French later than the other children.

The bilingual children were born in Germany and living in Hamburg when the data was recorded. In the case of Amélie and Alexander, the mother is French and the father German while Céline’s mother is German and her father is French. All parents were pursuing the principle ‘one person – one language’. Each recording was conducted by a German native speaker for the German part or by a French native speaker for the French part, each recording comprising thirty minutes.

3.2

Method

Two aspects are examined in this analysis: First, we need to consider the position in which auch/aussi occurs. In order to do so, the schematic representation (15) will be used. Second, we investigate the association of the distinct types of constituents with the distinct positions of particles. This case requires the ability to localize the focalized constituents. We have seen, however, that neither the accent (cf. fn. 3) nor the positions of the particles (cf. Section 2.1.2) are precise ­ indicators of the focus. That on which we can depend is the presupposition (cf. Section 2.1.1). A sentence such as [Pierre boit aussi un café] leaves open the choice between two possible presuppositions: either ‘Somebody (other than Pierre) drinks a coffee’ or ‘Pierre drinks something (other than coffee)’. We can thus establish which constituent is focused by determining which of the presuppositions is present in the preceding conversation. Thereafter, the focalized constituents are to be classified according to their function – ‘subject’, ‘object’ or ‘others’ – and put into three respective categories. The category ‘others’ comprises those functions which cannot be defined as either subject or object – mostly prepositional phrases or adverbial phrases. Table 3 sums up the number of occurrences of auch and aussi in finite sentences.19

19. Here, not all finite expressions with additive particles were considered but only those in which the focused constituent could be detected.



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 227

Table 3.  Number of occurrences Adult Monolingual Bilingual Total

3.3

auch

aussi

39 37 53 129

34 56 55 145

Results

3.3.1 Position The results for German presented in Figure 1 clearly show that position P3 is the only position used by both monolinguals (children plus adults) and bilingual children.20

Figure 1.  Positions of auch

These results indicate that auch typically appears in the middle field in spontaneous speech. The following three sentences are taken from the children corpus: (57) Die wollen auch mit den Schlitten fahren. they want also with the sledge go-inf ‘They also want to sledge.’

(Simone 3;3,25)

(58) Ich hab aber auch ein Kürbis. I have but also a pumpkin ‘But I also have a pumpkin.’

(Amélie 3;2,27)

20. P4 is only used by one child (Amélie). Here P4 only appears in copula constructions: (i) das blau auch (2;11,14) (ii) das is hier auch (3;1,30) (iii) die is aber kaputt auch (3;1,30)

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(59) Da is’ auch ein Loch. there is also a hole ‘There is also a hole.’

(Alexander 3;4,05)

The use of the French focus particles is more heterogeneous than the use of the German particles:

Figure 2.  Positions of aussi

The following examples illustrate the use of French particles by children in the positions P01 (60), P2 (61), P3 (62), P4 (63), and P02 (64): (60) Et lui aussi, il mange. (Alexander 3;2,02) and him also he eats ‘And he eats as well.’ (61) Les chaussons aussi sont mouillés.  (Philippe 2;8,22) the slippers also are wet ‘Also the slippers are wet.’ (62) Moi, j’ai aussi une trommel qui va avec.  Me I have also a drum which goes with ‘I also have a drum which goes well with it.’

(Amélie 3;5,13)

(63) Il y a une citrouille aussi.  (Amélie 3;5,13) expl there has a pumpkin also ‘There is also a pumpkin.’ (64) Je fais de la fumée, moi aussi.  I make of the smoke me also ‘I’m making smoke as well.’

(Philippe 2;10,17)

In Figure 2 the first noticeable aspect is the difference in the monolingual speakers’ use of aussi in positions P3 and P4. The monolingual speakers place aussi in P4 most



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 229

often (43% in the child data and 56% in the adult data). With the bilingual children, however, aussi appears most frequently in P3 (65%). The difference in the frequency of P3 between bilingual speakers and the monolingual child is considerable: The bilingual child uses this position seven times more often than the monolingual child (65% vs. 9%). The placement of aussi in P4 rarely occurs among the bilingual children: in only 7% of all cases. In regards to the other positions of aussi, it must be noted that the occurrence of P01 is comparable among the three groups (23% with the adults, 32% with the monolingual child and 27% with the bilingual children). P2 appears exclusively in the data of the monolingual child. Neither the adult nor the bilingual children make use of this position. P02 is used by the monolingual speakers, but absent in the production data of the bilingual children. In order to explain the difference between P3 and P4, we need to look more closely at the acquisition process of the different children (i.e., the first occurrence of P3 and P4 in the data): Table 4.  Acquisition age of the different positions of aussi Child

P01

P2

P3

P4

P02

Philippe Alexander Amélie Céline

2;6,13 3;2,02 3;1,02 4;1,17

2;7,25

2;11,07 3;1,22 3;1,02 4;0,19

2;6,13 3;2,02 3;5,13 4;5,13

2;6,27

Philippe, the monolingual child, uses P4 before P3. P4 is already used at the age of 2;6,13 while P3 occurs five months later (2;11,07). In the case of the bilingual children (Céline and Amélie) we can observe the opposite development: P3 is used first while P4 is used four and five months later, respectively. Only in the case of Alexander, P3 and P4 are used almost simultaneously. However, the occurrence of P4 can only be observed in one recording at the age of 3;2,02. In later recordings, the position P4 remains inactive and is only activated again at the age of 3;9,07. P01 is used regularly by monolingual as well as bilingual children from the beginning. To summarize, the process of acquisition of the distinct positions of particles by monolingual and bilingual children can be represented as in (65): (65) Monolingual process of acquisition: P4, P01 > P02 > P2 and P3 Bilingual process of acquisition: P3, P01 > P4 In the following subsection, we will investigate the association of the distinct types of constituents with the different positions of particles.

3.3.2 Functions In the three corpora, the particle auch in P3 can focalize subjects, (direct) objects, as well as ‘other’ constituents:

230 Estelle Leray

Figure 3.  Usage of auch in P3

Subject (66) [Die] mögen auch Lebkuchen. they like also gingerbread ‘[They] also like gingerbread.’ (67)

(Simone 3;7;07)

Object Ja wir ham auch [drei Kassetten mit – von Tarzan]. (Alexander 3;4,05) yes we have also three cassettes with of Tarzan ‘Yes, we also have [three cassettes of Tarzan].’

Others (68) [Da] kann sie auch rauflegen.  (Céline 2;7,19) there can she also put-inf ‘She can also put it [there].’ As can be seen in Figure 3, it is the subject that is focused by the particle with the highest frequency in all groups. The subject is focused with a frequency of 79% in the case of the adults, 92% in the case of the monolingual and 75% in the case of the bilingual children. The constituent with the function of object is the second most focused constituent (12%, 5%, and 18% respectively). Constituents with ‘other’ functions are the least frequently focused. Although there are quantitative differences between the three groups, we can detect a clear order of frequency in which the distinct constituents are focused: subject > object > ‘others’. Furthermore, the results indicate that subjects, objects and constituents with other functions can be focused by additive particles in the middle field. The examination of the distinct constituent functions in the French data will be restricted to the positions P3 and P4 as they show the highest degree of divergence. As can be seen in Figures 4 and 5, no uniform order of frequency can be observed in the French data.



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 231

Figure 4.  Usage of aussi in P3

Figure 5.  Usage of aussi in P4

Let us now consider the monolingual speakers’ results. In the case of the adults, P3 is used predominantly for object focusing. This tendency becomes especially clear in the monolingual child’s use (100% object focusing using P3). Occurrences of P3 constituent focusing with other functions other than subject or object cannot be found. Monolingual speakers use P4, however, to focus all types of constituents. The adults tend towards subject focusing, whereas the monolingual child rather associates aussi in P4 with objects. In Section 2.1.2, we described the options that grammar offers for the particle positions of aussi. Nevertheless, these results show that the practical application deviates from these grammatical options. Despite the option to focus a subject in P3, this tends to be avoided.21 21. P01 along with P4 is also used for marking focus on the subject (100% by the adult and 61% by the monolingual child).

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The results of the bilingual children inversely mirror those of the adults: In contrast to the monolingual speakers, P3 (and not P4) is the position with which the bilingual speakers focus subjects, objects, as well as other constituents with other functions. P4 is excluded from subject focusing, which is only possible in P3. The focusing options with P3 correspond to the focusing options of the German focus particle (see above).22 At this point, we can draw the following conclusions: Of the two possible positions for the German additive focus particle auch, only P3 (middle field) is used by all three groups of speakers (cf. Figure 1). Subjects and objects, as well as other constituents can be focused from this position (cf. Figure 3). The French data show that the use of additive focus particles by bilingual children diverges from the monolinguals: While the latter prefer to realize the particle in P4, the former tend to use P3 (cf. Figure 2). The possibilities of focalization in the latter position also differ from the monolingual production: While the monolinguals use P3 exclusively to focus objects, the bilinguals can focus subjects, objects, as well as constituents with other syntactic functions in this position (cf. Figure 4). Thus, the use of P3 by bilingual children is equivalent to the possibilities of focalization of the German particles. The fact that the bilingual children prefer to use aussi in P3 – the only possible position for auch in German – and that they furthermore project the possibilities of focalization of German auch on the French system, can be explained if we assume that there is cross-linguistic influence in the development of the bilingual grammar of additive particles: The German system influences the development of the French system. In the next section we want to concentrate on how this influence can be explained. Is it in fact due to a different complexity of the language systems, as Müller et al. have suggested?

4.

Discussion: Complexity in the domain of focus particles

Our data has shown that cross-linguistic influence does indeed occur. In the case examined, the German system influences the French: the only available syntactic position P3 for auch in German is overrepresented in the French speech data of the bilinguals in contrast to the monolingual children who make use of all positions avail22. An anonymous reviewer made an interesting comment as to the results of this study. The reviewer commented that the German particle auch and the French particle aussi differ fundamentally in their focalization capacities. Auch primarily serves to focus subjects, but rarely for focusing objects (54 to 6 in the case of the monolingual speakers). When considering the use of aussi, the proportions are better balanced between subjects and objects: 44 subjects and 33 objects focalized by the monolingual speakers. How can this difference be explained? It is conceivable that object focalization in German takes place using other additive particles (gleichfalls, ebenfalls, sogar, selbst), while this hypothesis would require further investigation to be confirmed.



Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 233

able for aussi in the target grammar. According to Müller et al. (2002), the complexity of the grammatical phenomenon in the two respective languages plays a crucial role in determining the directionality of influence. The way in which complexity can be defined was illustrated by means of word order and object omission (cf. Section 2.3.2). How can complexity be defined in the area of additive focus particles? A purely structural complexity, as Jakubowicz (2002) attempts to establish in her criteria of complexity, seems inapplicable to the domain of focus particles, considering – as we have demonstrated in Section 2.2 – that both systems behave identically. In French and in German alike, focus particles are adjoined to DP as well as vP. However, the result that bilingual children tend to realize the additive particle in P3 in French could be interpreted as an avoidance of P4 rather than a preference for P3. As we have seen, the realization of P4 requires movement into the higher functional projection AgrOP. Thus, we could assume that problems with the functional category AgrO lead the bilinguals to avoid P4. In this section we will consider two areas in which this functional projection is involved: (a) participle agreement and (b) the derivation of double object constructions. In the literature on agreement projections it is often assumed (cf. Kayne 1989; Sportiche 1998, among others) that agreement between the direct object and the participle is effected in a Spec-Head relation in AgrOP. For example, in a sentence like French Jean l’a peinte ‘Jean painted it’, in which the clitic l’ represents the feminine noun la table, the clitic and the participle move into SpecAgrO and AgrO0, respectively. In this configuration, agreement is established: (69) [TP [AgrOP pro...[AgrO Vpast participle]...[VP Spec[V tv][DP [tpro ]]]]] It is known from the study of language acquisition (cf. Pirvulescu & Belzil 2008) that children have problems with participle agreement over a long period of time. Thus, if AgrO in fact plays a role in establishing P4, the bilingual data can be explained without problems: bilingual children prefer to use P3 in their French production because the projection of AgrO is still unstable in child grammar and the use of P4 would involve movement to this functional category. However, if we adopt this analysis, we lose a means of explaining the monolingual data. Although monolinguals have problems with participle agreement and the projection of AgrOP, our data show that they use focus particles in P4 without difficulty; in fact, this position is even preferred. This contradiction leads us to two possible conclusions: (i) either AgrO is not the functional projection involved in P4, or (ii) the syntactic analysis of P4 involving AgrOP is correct, but the problems that children have with the acquisition of AgrO in the area of participle agreement are irrelevant to the realization of P4. As has already been mentioned, double object constructions constitute an additional area in which AgrOP plays an important role. Sabel (1996) proposes that direct and indirect objects check Case in a Spec–Head relation within two separate projections (AgrDOP and AgrIOP):

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(70) .....[AgrDOP [AgrIOP [vP [VP ]]]] In 3.3.1 we have seen that P4 does not only appear less frequently but also later in the acquisition process. P3 is the first position to be used while P4 appears several months later. Schmitz (2006) shows that verbs with double objects pose difficulties in language acquisition: Children omit one of the two objects for a long time. We assume that at least one of the two functional categories AgrDOP and AgrIOP is not activated by the children. Therefore, a movement of the object, necessary for the use of P4, is not possible. Thus, the hypothesis to be proven here is that bilingual children cannot use P4 until they have learned how to use double object constructions, i.e., until they have acquired both AgrO phrases. We assume that the use of predicates with three realized arguments comes prior to the use of P4 for additive particles (i.e. from 3;2,02 in the case of Alexander, 4;5,13 in the case of Amélie, and 4;5,13 in the case of Céline (cf. 3.3.1)). In Schmitz (2006), Alexander’s and Céline’s data (not Amélie’s, however) are examined in the context of double object constructions. Schmitz’s results show that double object constructions are used before P4. Céline uses three place predicates such as donner ‘to give’ or dire ‘to say’ with the realization of all arguments starting from the age of 3;3: (70) Elle donne le bébé le boire.  she gives the baby the drink

(3;3,12)

(71) Je dis pas ça à toi.  I say not this to you

(3;9,18)

As has been mentioned in Section 3.3.1, Alexander uses P4 already from the age of 3;2,02. However, in this case we are dealing with a single case which is not repeated until seven months later. Schmitz’s work demonstrates that Alexander uses double object constructions during this period: (72) Hey tu peux me la porter.  hey you can clit-dat clit-acc bring-inf

(3;3,0)

(73) Je vais t’ le montrer.  I go clit-dat clit-acc show-inf

(3;5,03)

(74) Je te le dis pas.  I clit-dat clit-acc say not

(3;6,07)

These results indicate that the realization of double object verbs is most likely not responsible for the difficulties in the production of P4. Syntactic complexity cannot account for the direction of cross-linguistic influence in the area of focus particles in bilingual French-German acquisition.



5.

Additive focus particles in bilingual language acquisition 235

Conclusion

In this article we have investigated the use of additive focus particles (German auch and French aussi) in the acquisition of German-French bilingual grammars. We have seen that the positions in which the particles are used differ in the bilingual and French monolingual production. The position P3 is preferred by the bilingual children in their French production. This position corresponds to the only possible position in German (cf. Section 3). This indicates that there is a case of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of additive particles, the German system influencing the French. In the investigation of bilingual language acquisition it is assumed that the difference in complexity of the acquired language systems determines the direction of influence (cf. Section 2.3.2). Thus, we investigated the syntactic complexity of the systems of focus particles in the two languages German and French. In our analysis, we were unable to establish any difference in complexity between these two language systems. According to our analysis, the two systems do not differ from each other in their possibilities of adjunction. In German as well as in French, the additive focus particle can adjoin to vP or to DP. We furthermore stated that the preference for P3 in the French production of the bilinguals could be due to the avoidance of P4. This is because the category (AgrO) – responsible for the realization of P4 – could be either unstable (in the case of participle agreement) or inactive (in the case of double object constructions). Our investigations could exclude both possibilities. In short, a higher complexity of the French system could not be established. Another problem pertaining to the question of the complexity of the two systems is the fact that the acquisition of P3 and P4 is the exact opposite for monolingual children: P4 is preferred over P3. In the investigation of bilingual language acquisition, it has been observed that the areas which are problematic for bilingual children are also problematic for monolinguals. In the area of focus particles, however, we cannot confirm this observation. This study has shown that in the area of additive focus particles, there is no difference in syntactic complexity between the two languages. This finding directly contradicts the criterion determining the direction of influence established by Müller et al. (2002). In our opinion, the apparent falsification of the criterion of direction leaves room for two possible interpretations. The first possible interpretation is that the bilingual data reflects absolutely no language influence. For an area in which the systems of both languages overlap at the surface level as well as in the syntactic analysis, we may consider the possibility of a ‘fusion’ of the two systems. What looks like a case of cross-linguistic influence in the area of focus particles could be seen as a case of real ‘language contact’. The other possible interpretation of this finding is that the data basis and/or the analysis of the additive focus particles are insufficient for a ‘conclusive’ evaluation of the direction criterion. Other studies (e.g. Pillunat, Schmitz & Müller 2006; Müller & Hulk 2000, 2001) support the validity of this postulation. For this article, the spontaneous speech production data was taken from a single child – not a

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truly ­representative data base. Therefore, an analysis of other French monolingual children is indispensable. However, in the case that the results of this analysis be confirmed by further analyses, we would have to come back to the question of complexity: Further proposals for the analysis of the positions P3 and P4 would then be necessary. In both positions, the subject as well as the object can be focalized. However, this case of ‘free order’ contradicts the assumption that grammar is an economical system (cf. Chomsky 1995). It remains unclear why the object should be moved if it can fulfill the same function in its base position.

References Altmann, H. 1976. Die Gradpartikeln im Deutschen. Untersuchung zu ihrer Syntax, Semantik und Pragmatik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Bayer, J. 1996. Directionality and Logical Form [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34]. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Büring, D. & Hartmann, K. 2001. The syntax and semantics of focus-sensitive particles in German. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19(2): 229–281. Cantone, K. 2006. Code-switching in Bilingual Children [Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 37]. Dordrecht: Springer. Cantone, K., Kupisch, T., Müller, N. & Schmitz, K. 2008. Rethinking language dominance in bilingual children. Linguistische Berichte 215: 307–344. Chomsky, N. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Dimroth, C. 2004. Fokuspartikeln und Informationsgliederung im Deutschen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Gabriel, C. & Müller, N. 2008. Grundlagen der generativen Syntax. Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Geurts, B. & van der Sandt, R. A. 2004. Interpreting focus. Theoretical Linguistics 30(1): 1–44. Haider, H. 1997. Projective economy. On the minimal functional structure of the German clause. In German: Syntactic Problems – Problematic Syntax. W. Abraham & E. van Gelderen (eds), 83–103. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Halliday, M. A. K. 1966. Intonation system in English. In Patterns of Language, A. McIntosh & M. A. K. Halliday (eds). London: Longman. Hulk, A. & Müller, N. 2000. Crosslinguistic influence at the interface between syntax and pragmatics. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3(3): 227–244. Jacobs, J. 1983. Fokus und Skalen. Zur Syntax und Semantik der Gradpartikeln im Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Jakubowicz, C. 2002. Functional categories in (ab)normal language acquisition. In The Process of Language Acquisition, I. Lasser (ed.), 165–202. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Kayne, R. 1989. Facets of Romance past participle agreement. In Dialect Variation and the Theory of Grammar, P. Benincà (ed.), 85–103. Dordrecht: Foris. Kayne, R. 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax [Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 25]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. König, E. 1991.The Meaning of Focus Particles: A Comparative Perspective. London: Routledge.



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Krifka, M. 1999. Additive particles under stress. In Proceedings of SALT 8, 111–128. Cornell: CLC Publications. Laenzlinger, C. 2005. French adjective ordering: Perspectives on DP-internal movement types. Lingua 115(5): 645–689. Larson, R. 1988. On the double object construction. Linguistic Inquiry 19(3): 335–391. López, L. 2009. A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure [Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics]. Oxford: OUP. MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Meisel, J. 1989. Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In Bilingualism Across the Lifespan. Aspects of Acquisition, Maturity, and Loss, K. Hyltenstam & L. K. Obler (eds), 13–40. Cambridge: CUP. Mensching, G. 2003. Minimalistische Syntax der romanischen Sprachen. In Syntaxtheorien. Modelle, Methoden, Motive. E. Stark & U. Wandruszka (eds), 171–191. Tübingen: Narr. Müller, N. 1998. Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1(3): 151–171. Müller, N., Cantone, K., Kupisch, T. & Schmitz, K. 2002. Zum Spracheneinfluss im bilingualen Erstspracherwerb: Italienisch–Deutsch. Linguistische Berichte 190: 157–206. Müller, N. & Hulk, A. 2000. Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual children: object omissions and Root Infinitives. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Child Language Development, C. Howell, S. A. Fish & T. Keith-Lucas (eds), 526–557. Somerville MA: Cascadilla. Müller, N. & Hulk, A. 2001. Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4(1): 1–21. Müller, N., Kupisch, T., Schmitz, K. & Cantone, K. 2006. Einführung in die Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung. Tübingen: Narr/Francke/Attempto. Nederstigt, U. 2003. Auch and noch in Child and Adult German [Studies on Language Acquisition]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Nølke, H. 1993. Le regard du locuteur: Pour une linguistique des traces énonciatives. Paris: Kimé. Paradis, J. & Genesee, F. 1996. Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18(1): 1–25. Pillunat, A., Schmitz, K. & Müller, N. 2006. Die Schnittstelle Syntax–Pragmatik: Subjektauslassungen bei bilingual deutsch-französisch aufwachsenden Kindern. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 143: 7–24. Pirvulescu, M. & Belzil, I. 2008. The acquisition of past participle agreement in Québec French L1. Language Acquisition 15(2): 75–88. Reis, M. 2005. On the syntax of so-called focus particles in German – a reply to Büring/ Hartmann 2001. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23(2): 459–483. Reis, M. & Rosengren, I. 1997. A modular approach to the grammar of additive particles: the case of German auch. Journal of Semantics 14(3): 237–309. Rizzi, L. 1994. Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: The case of root infinitives. Language Acquisition 3(4): 371–394. Rochemont, M. S. 1986. Focus in Generative Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Roeper, T. 1996. The role of merger theory and formal features in acquisition. In Generative Perspectives on Language Acquisition [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 14], H. Clahsen (ed.), 415–449. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Rooth, M. 1985. Association with focus. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Rooth, M. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1): 75–116. Sabel, J. 1996. Restrukturierung und Lokalität. Universelle Beschränkungen für Wortstellungsvarianten [Studia Grammatica 42]. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Schmitz, K. 2006. Zweisprachigkeit im Fokus. Der Erwerb der Verben mit zwei Objekten durch bilingual deutsch-französisch und deutsch-italienisch aufwachsende Kinder. Tübingen: Narr. Selkirk, E. O. 1984. Phonology and Syntax: The Relation between Sound and Structure. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Sportiche, D. 1998. Partitions and Atoms of Clause Structure. London: Routledge. Sternefeld, W. 2006. Syntax. Eine morphologisch motivierte generative Beschreibung des Deutschen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Steube, A. 2000. Ein kognitionswissenschaftlich basiertes Modell für Informationsstrukturie- rung (in Anwendung auf das Deutsche). In Von der Philologie zur Grammatiktheorie. Peter Suchsland zum 65. Geburtstag, J. Bayer & Ch. Römer (eds), 231–238. Tübingen: ­Niemeyer. Steube, A., Alter, K. & Späth, A. 2004. Information structure and modular grammar. In Information Structure. Theoretical and Empirical Aspects [Language, Context and Cognition 1], A. Steube (ed.), 15–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sudhoff, S. 2008. Focus particles in the German middlefield. In The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures: Event Structures and Information Structure [Language, Context and Cognition], A. Steube (ed.), 439–460. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Volterra, V. & Taeschner, T. 1978. The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language 5(2): 311–326. Wexler, K. 1998. Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua 106(1–4): 23–76.

Major constituent order, information packaging, and narrative structure in two Middle French texts Claude Muller

University Bordeaux-3 and CNRS: UMR CLLE-ERSS

Middle French (comprising the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) offers significant variations in word order, particularly for subject noun phrases. As an intermediate period between Old French and Modern French, Middle French may have had competing structural patterns, which would explain variations in word order. We put forward the hypothesis that the analysis of information packaging and narrative structuring can help to understand such variations. Our investigation underlines the major role of communicative parameters such as focalization, either for informative or for pragmatic reasons, but also as givenness vs. newness in word order choices. The distribution of subject noun phrases before or after the tensed verb – a major problem in the syntax of Middle French  – also appears to be linked to communicative parameters involving discourse ­organization in narrative texts. The pre-verbal position is preferably used for established thematic subjects within a narrative sequence, while a postverbal position is used for either known, not fully thematic subjects, or entirely new thematic subjects at the beginning of a narrative sequence.

Introduction This paper provides an investigation of Middle French word order based on the analysis of two contemporaneous narrative texts, both written at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The syntax of Middle French is to some extent at an intermediate position, between Old French verb second and Modern French subject–verb–object (SVO) declarative constituent order. Middle French syntax is of particular interest to historical linguists as it represents the last period with salient differences from present-day varieties, while Classical French, the period following Middle French, already exhibits roughly the same word order possibilities as Modern French. At the same

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time, Middle French has not been as thoroughly studied as Old French, a period for which syntactic descriptions such as Skårup (1975) are of great interest (see also Vance 1997, Buridant 2000). Indeed, Middle French has often been passed off as a period of transition between Old and Modern French, as such many irregularities have been put down to the resulting competition between syntactic structures inherited from Old French and innovations anticipating Modern French. Of course, it is possible to consider the variant constituent orderings of Middle French as being merely a random reflection of ongoing change in basic sentence structures. However, it is also conceivable that the observed variability is systematically linked to discourse parameters. In this paper, we shall suppose that informative and communicative parameters (including narrative choices), in addition to the traditional functional and structural factors, can at least partly explain some areas of variability which earlier descriptions simply dismissed as inconsistencies typical of such an interim phase of grammatical evolution. Thus, information structure and discourse organization could be the principal forces at work in the changing of word order patterns. In Section 1, we present our corpus of Middle French historical texts (1.1), a sketch of Old French syntax (1.2), followed by a discussion of the functional and structural parameters which are relevant for Middle French word order (1.3). In Section 2, we introduce the information functions used in our analysis (2.1), and we examine how word order variations can affect information structure in the case of subject inversion (2.2). In Section 3, we examine a selection of features displayed by the information structure and narrative organization in the chosen Middle French texts. Sections 4 and 5 link the subject ordering with information structure: Section 4 covers post-verbal subjects, Section 5, pre-verbal subjects. Furthermore, in this section we will also defend the hypothesis that narrative structuring rather than information structure at the sentence level may help to explain the choice of pre-verbal subjects in the context of competing grammars for our texts. Section 6 extends this analysis to the less frequent construction of pre-verbal object noun phrases, which have a defined semantic profile in independent clauses, confirming early observations concerning pre-verbal subjects. Finally, our conclusions are presented in Section 7.

. For a general evaluation, see Marchello-Nizia (1997: Chap. 24). . Discussing Old French, Wehr (2007) makes use of pragmatic and communicative notions by studying dislocated phrases. Vance (1997) also links structural positions and information (see, for example, her Section 3.5.4).



Major constituent order, information packaging, and narrative structure 241

1.

Corpus and structural parameters

1.1

The corpus analysed

Our examination is based on a grammatical analysis of two extracts of historical texts in prose, which date from the beginning of the fifteenth century and are considered to be representative of the written French of the period: one excerpt of Froissart’s Chroniques and one from the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (JBP). We categorize the individual constituents according to their grammatical function; thus, noun phrases are classified as subject, direct object, dative, non-dative indirect object and, in some cases, as attributive. Among the adverbial phrases, locative and temporal adverbials are singled out because they are of crucial importance for the information structure. Adjective phrases are not specified when adnominal, whereas predicative adjective phrases are included in the study. Subject personal pronouns are separately coded. Verbal components are classified as V (tensed verbs), Pp (past participles) and Inf ­(infinitives). By definition, every sentence includes a V component. The most frequent coordinating connectors or relators are separately coded, such as, e.g., et ‘and’, mais ‘but’, car ‘as, because’, or ‘now, in fact’ or item ‘ditto’. Complex conjunctions are represented by the single label Conj, whereas in complement clauses and in relative clauses, the subordinating item is not separately tagged. Our labelled corpus comprises more than two thousand clauses from the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (written between 1405 and 1418) and about five hundred from Froissart (a text which refers back to events that took place in the year 1389 but was probably written at the beginning of the fifteenth century). These data allow us to examine in detail a major element of variation in the structure of the clause, namely the position of the subject, both for nominal and for overt pronominal subject constituents.

1.2

Old French syntax

Old French (until 1300) is characterized by a systematic difference in major constituent order between independent and subordinate clauses. In independent clauses, the regular order is of the verb second type with an initial constituent X, which may be the subject of the clause or, just as well, a non-subject constituent, such as an object complement or adverbial. Overt subjects need to be positioned postverbally whenever the pre-verbal X position is filled by a non-subject constituent in declarative sentences. In such cases of syntactically triggered subject-verb inversion, the subject is

. Historical chronicles are probably less likely to employ rhetorical or literary devices. . Each finite clause has a tensed verb; participles and infinitives are analysed as complements of tensed verbs. Verbless clauses are excluded from analysis here, since the attribution of functional labels like subject can be pointless in these cases.

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normally placed immediately after the tensed verb. In information structural terms, the constituent X can be a topic which features in the clause (often but not always memorized by the speaker), a focus, with a contrastive meaning (it is X, not Y, that…), or an initial word without any informative content, such as an expletive subject il (see Vance 1997: 40 for an example from the thirteenth century). Subordinate clauses do not generally have the trigger position and often begin with the subject. Given the long period of Old French, it is also conceivable that these clauses followed different structural patterns. It is sometimes supposed that in the period preceding the written use of Old French subordinate clauses could have had subject–object–verb (SOV) structure, as is the case in the first extant French text, the Strasbourg Oaths (Serments de Strasbourg) (Skårup 1975: 502–503). Such a verb final structure is sometimes found in relative clauses, even in late Old French or Middle French. However, the majority of subordinate clauses attest an SVO-type structure, with a small number of exceptions following the constituent order of independent clauses, in which a non-subject constituent between the subordinator and the finite verb triggers subject-verb inversion. Some authors therefore suggest that Old French was an asymmetrical verb second language, in which the verb second rule only holds true in independent clauses (Vance 1997: 30), and perhaps in some restricted cases of complement clauses, when the complement clause is governed by verbs such as verba dicendi: complement clauses of predicates such as dire ‘say’ sometimes exhibit subject-verb inversion with pronominal subjects (Vance 1997: 143). The opposite point of view, according to which Old French is a symmetrical verb second language (Lemieux & Dupuis 1995), claims that a verb second rule operated in subordinate as well as in independent clauses and argues in favour of an identical position of the triggering first item inside the clause (in the generative descriptions, an IP position instead of the commonly accepted CP position). It should be noted that Vance (1997), while defending an asymmetrical description, also provides a different analysis for independent clauses of the SVX type in thirteenth-century Old French. According to Vance, the XVS type is amenable to a standard verb second analysis, with V in C0. However, when the first term is the subject, Vance assumes an IP structure with the verb in I0 and the subject in the specifier of IP, as is commonly postulated for Modern French.

1.3

Sentence structures in Middle French

1.3.1 Verb second sentences In contrast to Old French, Middle French lacks a clear-cut syntactic differentiation between independent and subordinate clauses. What remains from Old French is the possibility of verb second constructions with post-verbal subjects. In independent clauses, many sentences continue to have the subject constituent immediately in the . In complex inversion structures of Modern French, it is now often supposed that V does not raise to C (see for example Kayne 1994: 44).



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post-verbal position, even in cases where a past participle (1) or a direct object (2) follows: (1) Pourquoy sont ces huy fermez? [JBP §797] why are these doors locked-up ‘Why is this door locked up?’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 340) (2)

Item, le XXVe jour dudit moys de septembre, emmenerent item the 25th day of.the.aforesaid month of September, took les gens d’armes les prinsonniers […] [JBP §809] the people.of.weapons the prisoners ‘On the 25th of September the soldiers took […] those prisoners […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 345)

Furthermore, it is possible to find an object noun phrase before the tensed verb, as in (3): (3) […] et les gembes qu’on pendoit aux portes mangerent ilz and the legs which one hung at.the doors ate they en saillant […] [JBP §315] by jumping ‘They ate legs, too, that were hung up over gates, by jumping up at them […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 162) In embedded clauses, a focussed object following a conjunction or a wh-word may also precede the verb: (4) Quand ce virent les Angloys, ilz s’en allerent pillant […] [JBP §257] when this saw the English they went-away plundering ‘Seeing this, the English went their way, stealing […]’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 141)

1.3.2 The type XSV We have come across a substantial number of clauses in which the subject precedes the verb, either as the only pre-verbal constituent or after initial non-subject constituents, as in (5). In the latter case, this XSV structure competes with the XVS type. At any rate, no verb second constraint seems to be operative any more:

. Generally, X in the formula XSV is limited to triggers other than noun phrases, i.e., connectives and adverbials. Only very rarely is a non-subject noun phrase immediately followed by a subject. When this occurs, it is probably the case that the non-subject noun phrase is in extraposition.

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(5) Item, le jeudi ensuivant, ung autre nommé Colin de Brie, escuier, fut prins oudit lieu comme devant est dit, et prins au Palays, trayné comme Simonnet devant dit, et couppé sa teste es halles […] [JBP §67] item  the  Thursday  following  an  other  named  Colin  de  Brie  esquire was  caught  at.the.aforementioned  place  as  afore  is  said  and  put  in.the Palais  dragged  as  Simonnet  afore  said  and  cut  his  head  in.the  Halles ‘Next Thursday, another man, called Colin de Brie, esquire, captured at the same place as above, was taken from the Palais, dragged to the Halles like Simon, and there beheaded.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 73) If one accepts Vance’s analysis of the SVX type, which she describes as IP structures rather than CP structures (Vance 1997: 39), sentences such as (5) illustrate the generalization of older non-verb-second constructions already present in Old French, albeit in restricted contexts. In fifteenth-century Middle French, the order subject–verb, although statistically predominant in the totality of clauses examined, is found to be less frequent than the reverse ordering in independent clauses. In our corpus, Froissart’s Chroniques has post-verbal subjects in independent clauses 58% of the time, the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, 54%. In subordinate clauses, by contrast, the proportions of post-verbal subjects are 6% and 18%, respectively.

1.3.3 The pre-verbal sequence of connectors and adverbs In contrast to Old French, Middle French quite readily permits more than just one pre-verbal constituent. In particular, it even allows for sequences of connectors. The sequence of constituents preceding the finite verb is usually made up of two distinct categories, both able to trigger the post-verbal positioning of the subject. In the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, the propositional content is explicitly linked to the preceding context by coordinating conjunctions such as et ‘and’, mais ‘but’, or conjunctive adverbs like si or item. These connectors may be followed by adverbials, which typically act as frame-setters for the eventuality described by the verb phrase, cf. (6). In many cases, these frame-setting adverbials can be considered scenic topics. (6) Item, le Ve jour de may, fut le bastart de Vauru trainé parmy toute la ville de Meaulx, et puis la teste coppée, et son corps pendu à ung arbre. [JBP §343] item  the  5th  day  of  May  was  the  bastard  of  Vauru  dragged  through all  the  town  of  Meaux  and  then  the  head  cut  and  his  body  hung  to  a  tree ‘On the fifth day of May the Bastard of Vauru was dragged all over the town of Meaux and then beheaded. His body was hung on a tree.’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 172) While sentences in which an isolated conjunction (particularly et ‘and’) triggers subject-verb inversion are not completely absent from Old French, they are far more



Major constituent order, information packaging, and narrative structure 245

typical of the Middle French period, during which time this type of inversion “takes on new dimensions” (Marchello-Nizia 1997: 415). Example (7) from our corpus illustrates this structure: (7) Et furent tous leurs biens mis en la main du roy. [JBP §72] and were all their goods put in the hand of.the king ‘[…] and all their goods were confiscated by the Crown […]’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 78)

1.3.4 Pre-verbal object noun phrases and predicative adjective phrases In most cases where a sentence has an object noun phrase or a predicative adjective phrase in pre-verbal position, the subject is positioned postverbally. It rarely happens that the pre-verbal sequence hosts an argument XP other than the subject, while this is possible in the case of object noun phrases or predicative adjectives: (8) […] et très chier coustoit une ceste lettre […] [JBP §845] and very expensive cost-imperf a this letter ‘Very dear these letters were.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 356) Wherever this occurs, the resulting structures belong to one of three different syntactic patterns: (i) the verb second type, as in (9); (ii) the XSV type, as in (10), which has object–subject–verb ordering (a rare variant), or (iii) the modern type, with a topic left-dislocation structure and a resumptive clause-internal pronoun, as in (11): (9) […] car le Chastelet fut eschellé de toutes pars, et descouvert et prins par force, et tous ceulx de dedens mis à l’espée, et la plus grant partie fist on saillir sur les carreaulx, où grant compaignie estoit du peuple qui les occioient sans mercy de plus de cent plaies mortelles […] [JBP §220] for  the  Châtelet  was  escalated  of  all  sides  and  destroyed  and  taken by  force  and  all  those  of  inside  put  to  the  sword  and  the  more  great part  made  one  come.out  on  the  paving  where  great  company  was of.the  people  who  them  killed  without  mercy  of  more  of  hundred wounds  mortal ‘[…] the walls were scaled on all sides, the Châtelet opened up and taken, and everyone inside it slaughtered. They made most of them come out on to the paving, where the main body of the mob mercilessly killed each one of them with more than a hundred mortal blows.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 125)

. According to Herman, subject inversion after é (et) ‘and’ is the exception rather than the rule in Old French (Herman 1990: 274, speaking about the first extended text in prose of Old French, Les quatre livres des rois).

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(10) […] et tant hayoient ceulx qui gouvernoient ceulx qui n’estoient pas de leur bande, qu’ilz proposerent que par toutes les rues ilz les prendroient et tueroient sans mercy, et les femmes ilz noieroient […] [JBP §189] and  so.much  hated  those  who  ruled  those  who  neg-1  were  neg-2 of  their  gang  that  they  resolved  that  through  all  the  streets  they them  would.take  and  would.kill  without  mercy  and  the  women  they would.drown ‘[Such was Paris’s evil government.] Its rulers so detested all who were not on their side that they resolved to seize and kill them all without mercy in every street; the women they were going to drown.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 111) (11) Item, la plus grant partie des cappitaines qui estoient dans Paris, on les paioit des advoynes que on avoit amenées à Paris pour estre bien salvement, et avoient congié de prendre ce qu’ilz povoient autour de Paris, à II ou III lieues environ, et ilz ne s’en faignoient pas. [JBP §170] item  the  more  great  part  of.the   captains  who  were  in  Paris  one them  paid  indef-art-pl  oats  which  one  had  brought  to  Paris  for be  well  safely  and  had  permission  to  take  that  which  they  could around  of  Paris  at  two  or  three  leagues  about  and  they  neg-1  refl of.it  deprived   neg-2 ‘Most of the captains in Paris were paid out of the oats that had been brought into Paris for safety. Also they had permission to take anything they could get, up to two or three leagues around Paris, at which they were in no way backward.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 106)

1.3.5 An extended verb second type A noticeable change observable during Middle French is the increasing cohesiveness of the verbal group. In tensed clauses with compound verb forms, the past participle tends more and more to be placed immediately after the finite auxiliary. Thus, in many sentences with a non-subject first constituent, or with a sequence of pre-verbal nonsubject terms, the subject does not appear in third position, immediately postverbally, but in a position further to the right of the sentence. In this case, the subject follows a complex verbal group, made up of an auxiliary and a past participle or infinitive. Such sentences are often analysed as being different from verb second structures (Vance 1997: 272). For Vance (1997: 349), two competing structural analyses are available for the Middle French type XVS, viz. verb second or the modern Stylistic Inversion type. According to Vance, verb second sentences and sentences showing Stylistic Inversion differ radically in their syntactic structure. However, we have to bear in mind that Vance’s discussion is limited to sentences with non-compound verb forms. In our opinion, some sentences of Middle French lend support to another hypothesis, i.e. that a derived verb second type could also apply to compound verb forms, the verbal “zone” being able to receive these compound forms: one could say that the old verb



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second system is split up into two competing constructions, verb second on the one hand, and a construction whereby one part of the verbal group is located in second position on the other. Examples (12) to (14) illustrate the last option: (12) Item, the XIXe jour de may, jour Sainct Yves, fist mettre le roy le siege devant Creel par le connestable. [JBP §799] item  the  19th  day  of  May  day  saint  Yves  made  put  the  king  the siege  before  Creil  by  the  constable ‘On 19th May, St. Yves’s day, the King had the Constable lay siege to Creil.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 342) (13) Et furent faiz monseigneur de Berry et monseigneur de Bourbon cappitaines de la ville de Paris […] [JBP §1] and  were  made  lord  of  Berry  and  lord  of  Bourbon  captains  of  the town  of  Paris ‘[…] and my lords of Berry and of Bourbon were made Captains of the town of Paris.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 47) (14) […] et eust esté le roy ars qui ne l’eust mis hors par devers le meilleur.  [JBP §108] and  would.have  been  the  king  burnt  who  not  would.have  put  out through  into  the  better ‘[…] the King himself would have been burned if they had not got him out on the safest side.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 90) Sentences in which the subject follows a non-finite verb but precedes an object noun phrase (12), a copula complement (13), or another past participle (14) ­cannot be analysed as showing Stylistic Inversion. Instead, we suppose that the verbal position is occupied by both the auxiliary and one or more non-tensed verbs, independent of the meaning of the individual sentence.

1.3.6 Pre-verbal pronouns Pre-verbal subject pronouns are cliticized on the tensed verb, at least on the surface level; however, in Old French only post-verbal subject pronouns are definitely cliticized (see Skårup 1975). According to Vance (1997: 288), pre-verbal subject pronouns in embedded clauses are encliticized to the complementizer in Old French, but not in Middle French. Except for one single token of je ‘I’ in Froissart, subject personal pronouns in Middle French are no longer separated from the tensed verb by lexical material. The only items that may still intervene are clitics expressing negation and non-subject pronominal clitics. The category of clitic subject personal pronouns must include the impersonal on (< Latin homo ‘man.nom’), which exhibits the same properties as subject clitics derived from Latin pronominal forms. However, it is possible that the pre-verbal subject pronouns are attached to the verb only in terms of

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­phonology, being full arguments in the syntax (Vance 1997: 289). Here, Vance follows the argumentation of Kayne (1984) concerning subject pronouns in Modern French.

1.3.7 Subordinate clauses In subordinate clauses, the predominating structure is the type ConjSVX. Yet some variation is attested, since a non-subject complement can precede the finite verb. Relative clauses may show a somewhat different syntactic organization in that the subject relative qui offers a regular pre-verbal position for a complement (15). Furthermore, the tensed verb is sometimes placed at the end of the clause after a dependent past participle (16), which seems to maintain the archaic SOV pattern described by Skårup (1975: 502). (15) Si advint par le plaisir Deu que ung mauvais eir corrumpu chut sur le monde, qui plus de cent mil personnes à Paris mit en tel estat qu’ilz perdirent le boire et le manger, le repouser […] [JBP §93] and  happened  by  the  pleasure  of.God  that  a  bad  air  corrupt  fell  on the  world  which  more  of  hundred  thousand  persons  at  Paris  put  in such  state  that  they  lost  the  drink  and  the  food  the  sleep ‘And it pleased God that a foul corrupt air should fall upon the world, an air which reduced more than a hundred thousand people in Paris to such a state that they could neither eat, drink, nor sleep […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 85) (16) […] ils creront en luy et diront que c’est Messias qui promis leur estoit, et l’aoreront comme Dieu. [JBP §865] they  will.believe  in  him  and  will.say  that  it  is  Messiah  who  promised them  was  and  him  will.worship  as  God ‘[…] they will believe in him and will say that he is their promised Messiah and will worship him as God.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 362)

1.3.8 Summary The following formula summarizes the general ordering pattern found in Middle French independent declarative clauses: (connector) (scenic) (C) (S) V (S) (Pp) (S) (Complements) (S) (Additional comments) Constraint: At least one of the four pre-verbal positions must be occupied in declarative clauses. (C) is either an optional nominal complement (contrastively focussed) or an adverbial complement. The subject S is not obligatory and may occupy several positions; if S is a personal pronoun, only the positions adjacent to V are acceptable.



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Generative analyses of the last decades have suggested many approaches in order to explain the properties of Middle French. It is generally admitted that Middle French remains a verb second language (Vance 1997: 273), with reanalysis of some structures. Thus, the XVS type in independent clauses can sometimes be reinterpreted according to the pattern of Stylistic Inversion (Vance 1997: 338), in which the finite verb remains in I0 and does not raise to C0. Concerning XVS clauses, we suppose that there are four patterns in Middle French: (i) verb second when the finite verb immediately precedes the subject and when the subject is followed by a past participle or an object noun phrase; (ii) an extended verb second type when the subject follows the finite verb and a non-finite one (infinitive or past participle) but also precedes an object, a predicative adjective, or another past participle; and finally there are the two modern types (iii) Stylistic Inversion and (iv) ‘Heavy Inversion’ with a ‘heavy’ clause-final subject. When the post-verbal subject is a personal pronoun, we suppose that the structure can only be of the verb second type. Consider (17), a sentence which lends itself to an analysis as either verb second or Stylistic Inversion: (17) Ainsi s’en alla la belle Agnès, le dixiesme jour de may ensuyvant à son peché comme devant. [JBP §884] so  went.away  the  beautiful  Agnès  the  tenth  day  of  May  following  to her  sin  as  before ‘Thus Fair Agnes went away, back to her sin as before, on 10th May.’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 367) The structural conditions are met for verb second, but that sentence, with a verb of movement and an emphatic subject, could also be a case of Stylistic Inversion, exactly as in Modern French. In any event, the ordering of major constituents in sentences such as (17) cannot simply be dismissed as a freely available stylistic rearrangement option, but needs to be analysed as a direct reflection of a particular information packaging. Thus, according to Vance (1997: 59), a post-verbal subject in a verb second structure is thematic and known to the speaker, whereas it must be focussed in cases of Stylistic or ‘Heavy’ Inversion. The modern type SVX, already existent in Old French, was not confined to signalling subject focus according to Vance (1997: 40). Vance observes that an initial subject generally expresses known or presupposed information, but also that “such information is not linked to the discourse in any specific way”. However, she does not take into account the “presumed familiarity” of the reader with the semantic content of the subject. In the next section, we will clarify our principal communicative and information structural concepts, before applying these parameters to the analysis of Middle French in the remainder of this article.

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2.

Communicative parameters

2.1

Communicative and information structural concepts

In this section, we will take stock of the currently accepted information structural concepts that are relevant to the present study.

2.1.1 The distinction between entirely new and partially known information It can be useful to distinguish thetic sentences (‘all-new’ information) from categorical sentences (of which a part is known). This does not mean that there is no topic in a thetic sentence. Both the topic (locally supporting what is being said) and the discourse topic may introduce new information. The distinction between a completely new topic and a previously introduced one, even in a recurrent mode, is of crucial importance. For example, in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, there are recurrent references to the price of wood or meat, or the rate of coins; in such cases the structure of the sentence could have been influenced by the narrator’s feeling that the sentence conveys an additional remark on an old topic, rather than offering completely new information on a new topic (cf. Section 5 below). 2.1.2 Text units It is somewhat easier to distinguish the various narrative units within the story, each of them organized with reference to a discourse topic in a sub-story. Such sequences are referred to here as narrative sequences. Note that the position of one sentence, at the beginning or inside a narrative sequence, can also be of importance when trying to explain word order variation. 2.1.3 Background knowledge Besides textually given information, everything concerning both the civilization of the time and its customs must be regarded as given. 2.1.4 The topic In most clauses there is a sentence topic, which is the support of what is said in the comment. The topic can be either known (given) or new: it is essentially the term about which something is said. Krifka’s more precise definition – “The entity or set of entities under which the information expressed in the comment constituent should be stored in the Common Ground content” (Krifka 2007: 41) – is interesting in that it does not exclude a possible focalization on a topic or its newness. What is relevant is only the procedure of classification of information under mental headings. 2.1.5 The comment This represents what is said about the topic. When there is more than one term, it is quite probable that one part will be more salient, thus being a focus inside the com-



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ment. We must, however, identify a particular case, sometimes difficult to appreciate in Middle French, namely the possibility of side-structure information: additional comments, associations, embellishments (Levelt 1993: 136). Such side-structure must be distinguished from the comment. Usually, such appendices providing side-structure information directly follow the comment. The end of the comment is naturally focussed, this being due to the communicative dynamism: it is a property of an expression that reflects its relative degree of importance in comparison with other expressions in the sentence (Firbas 1992; cf. also the review by Chafe 1994). That functional notion partially depends on other semantic or pragmatic features of the expression (a given expression has less communicative dynamism than a new one), but the speaker has a certain degree of freedom in exploiting that property: there is a general tendency to put the major informative constituent at the end of the sentence. Thus, it may be difficult to see the difference between a final term in the comment and in background information. Of course, prosody may help to signal the intended information structure, but of course no prosodic cues are available in the Middle French prose texts under study.

2.1.6 The focus This must be a salient linguistic expression which is considered to be of importance. Following Krifka, we shall suppose the existence of several types of foci, either informative (often in final position) or pragmatic and prosodically marked, probably in front position. É. Kiss (1998) shows that in many languages one must distinguish between an identificational focus and a simple information focus. In the first case, the focus receives a logical rather than a discursive definition: it carries the features of exhaustive and contrastive identification on a previously established discursive set of entities. In medieval French, argument noun phrases in the first position of a sentence can function either as identificational foci or, when no exhaustive interpretation is intended, as contrastive topics. In Middle French, such a fronting of focus constituents is rare, and most focus expressions are informational foci and are positioned at the end of the sentence. But is a focus necessarily contrastive? The matter is discussed by Krifka. Basically, it seems to us that pragmatic foci are not always contrastive. We may note that contrastivity does not entail newness: the focus may be both known and contrastive, just as for discourse topics associated with a new event. The relevance of the contrast must be evaluated in the context: following Chafe (1976), we shall admit that this notion of contrast applies only when there is a limited number of paradigmatic choices available. Another point seems important to us. Chafe suggested, without explicitly committing himself to this idea, that there could be a gradation in focalization. In analysing information structure in our texts, it became clear to us that some constituents which appear to be focussed and could be considered as the most prominent ones within their clause if they had appeared in clause-final position, can be downgraded in terms of focus–background structure by another constituent following it. We must then assume a scale of focality (see 4.2 below).

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What, then, are the relations between information structural notions – such as topic, comment, or focus – and grammatical categories? As expected, noun ­phrases are the best candidates for function of topic or focus, and among them, subjects typically function as informative topics, while objects are canonical targets of default focus. Adverbials have special topical functions, and are also possible foci. Verbs, especially intransitive ones, may also be focussed. Final constituents in apposition or adverbials sometimes need to be analysed within their larger context of occurrence and with recourse to knowledge of the historical background in order to determine whether they are fully informative, and thus potentially focussed, or whether they belong to the side-structure information. A topic can bear focus features. We shall suppose that this is the case when the topic (in the informative and classificatory meaning given above) is at the same time the outcome of the communicative dynamism and, of course, when it is contrastive. This happens quite often in Middle French in sentences having a final subject. What can then be said about the remainder of the clause? We could suppose that the comment is emptied of its content or we must admit an overlap between topic and comment. Furthermore, the comment sometimes includes a secondary focus. I use the notion of “focussed topic” principally for final subjects, considering that the scenic adverb which most of the time opens the sentence in front position is only a framesetter, not a participant of the verbal action.

2.2 The influence of word order on communicative functions We shall consider, as an example, the semantic differences induced in Modern French by nominal subject inversion, i.e., Stylistic Inversion in generative analyses. In Modern French, the default focus is found in final position. Here the verb loses a part of its semantic content and the global meaning can be modified. Compare examples (18a-b): (18) a. ≠ b.

Dans ce bureau, quatre personnes travaillent / travaillent bien. in this office four persons work / work well ‘In this office, four people work / work well.’ Dans ce bureau travaillent quatre personnes / travaillent bien quatre in this office work four persons work well four personnes. persons ‘Four people are working (well) in this office.’ (Cornish 2001)

In (18a) the focus is on the final verb, as it is the default focus position. The natural interpretation is that the people mentioned are actually carrying out work, which is shown by the evaluative meaning of the adverb bien ‘well’. In (18b), the predicate has



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no such evaluative meaning component, and the sentence takes the ‘habitual’ meaning (there are four workplaces). (19) a. Dans l’armoire, les chaussures sont cirées. in the cupboard the shoes are polished ‘In the cupboard, the shoes are polished.’ ≠ b. ??Dans l’armoire sont cirées les chaussures. in the cupboard are polished the shoes ??‘The shoes are polished in the cupboard.’ The sentence in (19a) has an evaluative meaning (the shoes are well-polished in an orderly manner), because the final verb is focussed. The sentence in (19b) implies a rather odd interpretation: the polishing of the shoes seems to happen inside the cupboard. No evaluative meaning is present and the predicate denotes an action linked to a place, because no locative meaning is possible. Thus, subject inversion in Modern French is not only a way of achieving focalization of the subject, for it can also affect the semantic interpretation of the entire clause. If Stylistic Inversion exists in Middle French, as is assumed by Vance (1997: 167), it could yield, in contexts of locative inversion, focus on the subject and a stative interpretation of the verbal predicate. This seems to be the case in examples such as (20): (20) […] et là ou long de l’escharfault estoit ordonné le pas du roy Saladin et tous fais de personnages, les crestiens d’une part et les sarazins d’aultre part.  [Froissart 351] and  there  along  of  the  scaffold  was  arranged  the  battle  of.the  king Saladin  and  all  made  of  persons  the  Christians  of  one  side  and  the Saracens  of  other  side ‘[…] and there along the stand was arranged the fight of the king Saladin and all actions of characters, the Christians on one side and the Saracens on the other side.’ The verb has no evaluative meaning, and the final stress marks focus on the subject. In the same descriptive context, when the verb must be interpreted as an evaluative predicate and the subject is given, the preferred clause type is verb second: (21) Et jusques à l’eglise Nostre Dame estoient les rues parees. [Froissart 353] and until to the church Notre Dame were the streets decorated ‘And until the church Notre-Dame were the streets ornamented.’ In the next section, we shall examine elements in sentence-initial position and strategies of topic change in Middle French.

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3.

Discourse organisation in Middle French

3.1

Sentence-initial elements and discourse organisation

As has been observed above, time and place adverbs in first position are scenic topics which are not incompatible with argument noun phrases occurring before the tensed verb. Those elements, scenics as well as connectors, have two quite distinct functions: connectors are discourse links, whereas scenics introduce the frame of the following event. In some cases, the narrative is an immediate continuation of what precedes. In other cases, the connector introduces a new storyline or a new discursive sequence which often spans an entire paragraph. As we will see in Section 5, such a structuring into discursive sequences, which is of great importance in a diary like the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, can explain, at least in part, some of the variation observed in the positioning of the subject. Example (6), repeated below as (22), illustrates the relationship between the constituents of a sentence and their communicative functions: (22) Item, le Ve jour de may, fut [le bastart de Vauru]TOPIC [trainé parmy toute la ville de Meaulx]comment, et puis [la teste]TOPIC [coppée]FOCUS, et [son corps]TOPIC [pendu à ung arbre]comment. [JBP §343] item  the  5th  day  of  May  was  the  bastard  of  Vauru  dragged  through all  the  town  of  Meaux  and  then  the  head  cut  and  his  body  hung  to  a  tree ‘On the fifth day of May the Bastard of Vauru was dragged all over the town of Meaux and then beheaded. His body was hung on a tree.’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 172) Connector / Scenic / V of the comment / topic / (comment (focus)) Connector / sub-topic / focus Connector /sub-topic / (comment (focus)) This sentence occurs in a passage that reports the fate of the French loyalist war chiefs in the town of Meaux, which had been taken just before by the English army. The information structure remains identical in the three segments of the sentence, with topics occurring before their comment. The body-parts referred to, which function as sub-topics, are semantically related to the principal topic le bastart de Vauru. A significant feature, compared to Modern French, is the possibility in Middle French to isolate the tensed auxiliary fut from the comment, according to the logic of the verb second clause format. Thus, the end of the clause contains the topic and its comment side by side, with a final focus.

. The triggers of subject inversion are underlined.



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3.2

Discourse organisation and change of topic

Within a discourse sequence, sentences following the sequence-initial one are typically combined by means of coordinating conjunctions. In such units of discourse, the initial topic may make way for another one, which is normally closely linked to it, cf. (23): (23) Et furent sur le point de trois heures après nonne en la place de Sainte Caterine et ja estoient venues [les dames]TOPIC, [la roynne de France]TOPIC toute premiere, et fut amenee jusques à là en ung char couvert moult richement […] et [les aultres dames et ducesses]TOPIC [chacune]TOPIC en tres grant arroy et monterent et entrerent ens es escharfaulz qui ordonnez estoient pour elles. [Froissart 362] and  were  on  the  point  of  three  hours  after  nun  in  the  place  of  St. Catherine  and  already  were  come  the  ladies  the  queen  of  France  all first  and  was  driven  until  to  there  in  a  chariot  covered  very  richly  and  the  other  ladies  and  duchesses  each  in  very  great  state  and  went.up  and  entered  into  in.the  scaffolds  which  prepared  were  for them ‘At three o’clock, [the knights] were in the place de Sainte-Catherine and the ladies had already come, first of all the queen of France, and [the queen] was driven till there in a big chariot covered very richly […], and the other ladies and duchesses were each one in very rich array and went up and entered in the scaffolds which were organized for them.’ The topic function passes from the knights to the ladies. First, it centres on one of them, the queen, then it returns to the ladies, and is next distributed on “each of them”, before coming back to the general set, “the ladies”. The changes obey the proximity rule given above: the subject matter is the account of a tournament, and it belongs to the shared knowledge of the time that the principle actors of a tournament, the knights, fight before the very eyes and under the judgment of their ladies. As can be seen in that sentence, topics may be focussed, and a sub-topic is sometimes a specification of a more general one (here, the queen among the ladies), a partition (the other ladies), or a distributive presentation (each one). In the following example, there is also a change of topic, also associated with a focalization on the new one, but with a gradation: the new focussed topic constituent must be more salient than preceding focus constituents within the sentence: (24) Ce merquedy arriva à Paris [le conte de Saint Pol]TOPIC, qui revenoit tout droit d’Angleterre et s’estoit moult hastez pour estre à celle feste […] Sy fu [le conte de Saint Pol]TOPIC le tres bienvenu du roy et de tous les seigneurs, et estoit à celle feste et dalez la roynne de France [sa femme]TOPIC, qi fu moult joieuse de sa venue. [Froissart 363]

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this  Wednesday  arrived  in  Paris  the  count  of  St.  Pol  who  came.back all  direct  from  England  and  refl  was  much  hasted  for  be  at  that party  thus  was  the  count  of  St.  Pol  the  very  welcomed  of.the  king and  of  all  the  lords  and  was  at  that  fair  and  near  the  queen  of France  his  wife  who  was  very  happy  of  his  coming (lit.) ‘This Wednesday arrived in Paris the count de Saint Pol, who came back directly from England, and hurried much in order to be in that feast. The count of Saint Pol was very welcomed by the king and by all the lords, and was at that feast, and near the queen of France was his wife, who was very happy of his coming.’ The initial topic is the discourse referent designated by le conte de Saint Pol, which is also in focus. This discourse referent remains the topic of the relative clause, which is of limited informativity and can be considered an additional, secondary comment. In the second sentence, the topic expression is repeated in the typical position of a nonfocussed topic. In what follows, in spite of the coordination and the risk of a misinterpretation, the topic changes, or, more precisely, focalizes on a sub-topic, sa femme ‘his wife’, which must be prosodically more prominent than the double focus immediately before. The end of the sentence, a relative clause, is also an additional comment. As we can see, the change of topic is rather easy and the post-focus position of the last topic turns it into a sort of ‘super-focus’, which is the culmination point of the whole sentence in terms of its communicative dynamism. In the next part of this article, we will seek to assess the hypothesis that communicative parameters play a role in the choice of the subject position. To this end, we will examine post-verbal subjects in Section 4, first in auxiliary-participle constructions and then in single verb clauses, before moving on to pre-verbal subjects in Section 5.

4.

Post-verbal subject position, thematization and focalization

4.1

Clauses containing an auxiliary and a past participle

4.1.1 The verb–subject–past participle sentence type (VSPp): The subject is mostly an anaphoric, non-focussed topic The linear order verb–subject–past participle is no longer available in Modern French, while it is rather frequent in Middle French. We found 26 VSPp clauses in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris and 12 in Froissart (against 68 and 7 of the VPpS type, respectively). In almost all cases of VSPp, the subject is a topic for what follows, and is also a known discourse referent, either anaphoric or inferred from the context. This situation obtains in all 12 cases found in the Froissart text fragment under study, and in 25 out of 26 occurrences of VSPp in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris. Two illustrative examples are given in (25) and (26):



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(25) […] et estoit le dit escharfault couvert de draps […] [Froissart 352] and was the said scaffold covered with cloth ‘[… ] and the afore-mentioned scaffold was covered with cloth […]’ (26) Et le XVIIe jour dudit moys d’octobre, jeudy, fut le dessus-dit grant maistre d’ostel mis en une charrette, vestu de sa livrée […] et en cel estat mené es halles. [JBP §10] and  the  17th  day  of.the.said  month  of  October  Thursday  was  the above-said  grand  master  of  household  put  in  a  cart  dressed  of  his livery  and  in  this  state  led  to.the  halls ‘On Thursday 17th October this Grand Master of the Household was put into a cart, wearing his own colours […] like this taken to the Halles.’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 51) Some subjects belong to a special type: they are formed by, or include, the thematic indefinite pronoun tout ‘all, every’. These subjects seem to be focussed: (27) Ainsi estoit tout gouverné, comme vous avez ouy. [JBP §90] so was everything ruled as you have heard ‘This is how everything was run, as you have heard.’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 84) There are six sentences that display the pattern, including four with the pronoun tout ‘all’ and two with the determiner, for instance (7), repeated below as (28): (28) Et furent tous leurs biens mis en la main du roy. [JBP §72] and were all their goods put in the hand of.the king ‘[…] and all their goods were confiscated by the Crown.’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 78) The propositional content of (28) invites the interpretation of the subject being an exhaustive focus. In all other cases, except one, the subject noun phrase has a definite determiner. Only one sentence introduces an entirely new discourse referent in that position, which naturally is expressed by an indefinite noun phrase: (29) Et à l’entrée de la Villette Sainct Ladre, au bout de devers Paris, furent deux hommes tempestez, dont l’un fut tué tout mort […] [JBP §8] and  at  the  entrance  of  the  Villette  St.  Lazare  at.the  end  of  to  Paris were  two  men  struck  of.them  the  one  was  killed  all  dead ‘And at the Paris end of the Villette-St.-Lazare two men were struck; one of them was killed outright […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 51) Even so, the subject remains a topic for what follows. The explanation for that position could be a focalization constraint: the salient information is provided by the past participle; note that placing the subject after the participle would falsely lead to a

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focus on the subject (particularly on the number): the subject, although new, is not focussed in this example.

4.1.2 The VPp(x)S type: The final subject is a focussed topic providing new information The entire set of VPp(x)S sentences, with a post-verbal subject following the past participle and possibly some other constituents, comprises 95 cases in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris. 71 of the subjects in these clauses are foci, whereas only 24 qualify as topics. In Froissart there are only eight instances of VPp(x)S, six or seven of which appear to exhibit subject focus. In typical constructions (cf. (30)–(34) below), the subject is placed in the final position of the sentence in order to signal the non-canonical focus-background structure, viz. subject focus. Most of these sentence-final subjects are informative proper nouns, or indefinite noun phrases. In the majority of cases, these subjects occur in passive sentences: (30) Item, le lundi VIIe jour d’octobre ensuivant, fut prins ung nommé Jehan de Montagu grant maistre d’ostel du roy de France […] et fut mis en Petit Chastellet. [JBP §9] item  the  Monday  7th  day  of  October  following  was  taken  a  named Jean  of  Montaigu  grand  master  of  household  of.the  king  of  France and  was  put  in  Petit  Châtelet ‘On Monday 7th October 1409, a man called Jean de Montaigu, Grand Master of the King’s Household, was arrested and […] put into the Petit Châtelet.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 51) (31) […] mais par la grace de Dieu ledit Gaucourt et ses gens furent desconffys honteusement; et en furent tuez bien VIc, et bien cent noyez, et bien cinquante des plus gros prins. [JBP §27] but  by  the  grace  of  God  the.said  Gaucourt  and  his  people  were defeated  shamefully  and  of.them  were  killed  well  600  and  well hundred  drowned   and  well  fifty of.the more  big  taken ‘[…] but by God’s grace Gaucourt and his men were shamefully defeated. At least six hundred of them were killed and a hundred drowned and fifty of their most important men taken.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 61) The quantified expression bien VIc, which constitutes the theme or topic in terms of filing providing an address for storing the information provided in the clause, is focussed and occurs after the participle. However, we notice that in the subsequent clauses, which lack a finite verb, quantified expressions of a very similar type precede the participle. In these clauses, it seems that the two expressions – the noun and the participle – are both focussed. Probably, there is a gradation in focalization, with a heightened importance of the constituents that occur in the last position within their clauses. In (32) to (34),



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however, the relative importance of the post-verbal non-subject constituents is weak, and the position of such adverbial expressions appears to be more variable: (32) Item, le mardi XXVIIe jour de septembre, jour Sainct Cosme et Sainct Damien, fut despendu par nuyt du gibet de Paris Jehan de Montagu, jadis grant maistre d’ostel du roy […] [JBP §57] item  the  Tuesday 27th  day  of  September  day  St.  Cosmas  and St.  Damian  was  taken.down  at  night  of.the  gallows  of  Paris  Jean of  Montaigu  formerly  grand  master  of  household  of.the  king ‘On Tuesday, September 27th, St. Cosmas and St. Damian, the body of Jean de Montaigu, sometime Grand Master of the King’s Household […] was taken down at night from the gallows [of Paris].’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 69) (33) Et furent en celle année trouvés à Paris en aucuns lieux escorpions que on n’avoit point en ce temps acoustumé à veoir. [JBP §308] and  were  in  this  year  found  in  Paris  in  some  places  scorpions  which one  neg-1  was  neg-2  in  this  time  used  to see ‘Scorpions were found this year in some places in Paris, which in those days was very unusual.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 160) (34) Et furent celle journée à Paris morz à l’espée ou d’aultres armes, en my les rues, sans aucuns qui furent tuez es maisons, cinq cent vingt deux hommes. [JBP §193] and  were  that  day  in  Paris  killed  at  the  sword  or  of  other  arms  in mid  the  streets  without  some  who  were  killed  in.the  houses  five hundred  twenty  two  men ‘Five hundred and twenty-two men died by the sword or other weapons that day in Paris out in the streets, not counting the ones who were killed inside the houses.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 114) In (32)–(34), the subject comes after several other major constituents. Such subjects which occur late in their clause are strongly emphasized and tend to be structurally ‘heavier’ than subjects occurring in earlier subject positions (cf. Vance 1997: 170). In (33), the relative clause that follows the subject is a background comment. Now, how can we explain the fact that in some of these sentences there are postverbal subjects which are obviously not focussed, or at least not the most strongly focussed terms? If we admit that informativity tends to increase within sentences from left to right, as claimed by the theory of communicative dynamism, a non-final subject, even when focussed, remains an informationally subordinated expression with respect to what comes after it, and the clause-final position tends to be prosodically more prominent. Such sentences are of the type VPp(x)SY, with Y as the main focus. In some cases, the subjects following a past participle do not seem to be focussed, as in (35), which could be analysed as a case of what we called an extended verb second structure (see Section 1.2.5 above):

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(35) Là lui on coupa la teste, et après fut porté le corps au gibet de Paris, et pendu au plus hault […] [JBP §10] there  him-dat  one  cut  the  head  and  afterwards  was  taken  the  body to.the  gallows  of  Paris  and  hung  at.the  more  high ‘There they cut his head off and afterwards his body was taken to the Paris gallows and hung up as high as it would go […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 51) Yet, in other cases, the subject is obviously informative and is a focussed topic, which in turn may precede an information focus: (36) Item, les festes de Nouel ensuivant […] fut fait par le roy le comte d’Alençon duc d’Alençon […] [JBP §116] item  the  holidays  of  Christmas  following  was  made  by  the  king  the count  of  Alençon  duke  of  Alençon ‘Next Christmas […] the King created the Count of Alençon Duke of Alençon […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 92) (37) […] et furent aussi criez à prendre petiz moutons d’or pour XVI solz parisis […] [JBP §158] and  were  also  proclaimed  to  take  small  moutons  of  gold  for  16  sols parisis ‘Small gold moutons […] to be reckoned at 16s[ols] p[arisis].’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 103) However, not all clause-final major constituents are necessarily focussed. We must distinguish salient foci, the informationally most prominent parts of the comment, from backgrounded information. Consider (38): (38) Item, le vendredi ensuivant, furent commencées à murer les portes comme autresfoys. [JBP §147] item  the  Friday  following  were  begun  to  block.up  the  gates  as in.the.past ‘Next Friday they began blocking the gates up again.’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 101) Here, the underlined adverbial merely provides a supplementary comment, whereas the salient piece of information is the blocking up of the gates. A similar observation can be made for (39): (39) Item, la vigille Sainct Jehan furent remises les chesnes de fer au boutz des rues de Paris […] [JBP §209] item  the  eve  St.  John  were  put.back  the  chains  of  iron  at.the  ends of.the  streets  of  Paris



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‘On St. John’s eve the iron chains were put back across the ends of the streets of Paris.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 121) As a matter of fact, in those times there were chains in the streets of Paris to close the streets at night. For a fifteenth-century reader, this was common knowledge. Likewise, everybody knew at that time that such chains, which were taken away in war or riot periods, were placed at the ends of the streets. Thus, the last locative marker provides no new information for the coeval reader and must probably be understood as a backgrounded part of the comment rather than as an information focus. In some cases, as in (40) below, a sentence-initial global emphasis must be distinguished from information focus at the end. The sentence in (40) follows directly after the listing of the knights who were killed or captured in the defeat of Azincourt: (40) Oncques, puis que Dieu fut né, ne fut fait telle prinse en France par Sarazins ne par autres […] [JBP §130] never  since  that  God  was  born  neg  was  made  such  capture  in France  by Saracens  nor  by  others ‘Never since God was born did anyone, Saracens or any others, do such destruction in France.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 96) Here there is a sentence-initial focus on the adverbials and an information focus on the passive subject. The constituent par Sarazins ne par autres hardly brings in any new information at all, all the more so since the Saracens are the typical bad guys of the time. Rather, this additional constituent serves as a scalar expression of intensity and constitutes, in a way, an extension of the emphatic beginning of the sentence realized by the focussed scenic. That is, the final constituent achieves a reinforcement of the main information, viz. the extraordinarily large number of people killed or caught in a single battle. In spite of its emphatic character, the end of the sentence is therefore motivated by rhetorical structure rather than by information structure. Despite the fact that the subject comes after a non-tensed verb, some of these sentences could be seen as cases of an extended verb second construction (where V includes a past participle or an infinitive), especially when the subject is not focussed and when a final term brings the most prominent information, as in (35) above.

4.2 XV(O)S / XVSO: The main focus comes at the end of the comment In other constructions with a single verb and a post-verbal subject, the conclusions are identical: a final subject is the main focus. Conversely, in a VSO sentence, it is the object which is focussed. Consider (41), which is VOS:

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(41) Secondement et ou millieu tenoient et adextroient la littiere le duc de Berry et le duc de Bourgoingne. [Froissart 349] secondly  and  in.the  middle  held  and  escorted  the  litter  the  duke  of Berry  and  the  duke  of  Bourgogne ‘The duke of Berry and the duke of Bourgogne held and escorted the litter in the middle.’ The reader already knows that the new queen enters Paris in a litter, escorted by princes whose names convey more information than the object la litière. Consequently, these subjects are focussed and placed after the direct object. A similar situation obtains in (42): (42) Et vindrent ce chastel requerre et assaillir aultres gens […] [Froissart 357] and came this castle demand and assault other people ‘And other people came in order to demand and to assault this castle.’ Here, too, the final major constituent provides the principal information, viz., that there is another group of people intervening in the tournament. The subject occurs separated from its tensed verb by the infinitive complement, which in turn includes a direct object, resulting in the old object–verb order inherited from Latin and Old French. It should be noted that emphatically focussed subjects may occur at a considerable distance from the verb, cf. the identificational focus on the subject in (43): (43) Et ot le pris des joustes pour le mieulx joustant de tous et qui le plus avoit continué de ceulx de dehors, par l’assentement et jugement des dames et des hiraulx, le roy de France. [Froissart 363] and  had  the  prize  of.the  jousts  for  the  best  jousting  of  all  and  who the  most  had  pursued  of  those  of  outside  by  the  assent  and  judgment  of.the  ladies  and  of.the  heralds  the  king  of  France ‘And it is the king of France, for being the best jousting of all, and the man who had at most pursued the fight among those from outside, who received the price of the jousts, by the assent and the judgment of the ladies and the heralds.’ Conversely, subjects occurring before the object in verb-second sentences normally are non-focussed topics: (44) Et donnoit ceste fontainne par ses conduis claré et pieument tres bon et par grans rieux. [Froissart 350] and  gave  that  fountain  by  its  pipes  Clairé  and  Piement  very  good and  through  great  streams ‘And that fountain ran in great streams of Clairé and excellent Piement.’



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4.2.1 Double-focus constructions In support of the Chafian idea of focus as a gradual notion, we may cite sentences in which there is both an emphasized topic with contrastive focus and a second focus in the canonical sentence-final position: (45) Vous devez savoir que le mardy sur le point de .xij. heures vindrent les bourgois de Paris environ .xl. tout des plus notables, vestus tous d’un drap, tous paraulx, à l’ostel du roy à Saint Pol et apporterent ce present […] [Froissart 359] you  must  know  that  the  Tuesday  at  the  point  of  12  hours  came  the citizens  of  Paris  about  forty  all  of.the  more  notable  dressed  all  of  a cloth  all  alike  at  the  hotel  of.the  king  at  Saint  Pol  and  brought  this present (lit.) ‘You must know that on Tuesday at twelve o’clock came the burgesses of Paris, about forty of the most notable ones, clothed all of a cloth, each alike, to the hotel of the king at Saint Pol and brought this present.’ The subject of the first embedded clause in (45) is a ‘heavy’ noun phrase, with two parts, the second one providing both a quantitative specification and a qualitative evaluation. The clause introduced by que thus exhibits subject-verb inversion, which is found only rarely in subordinate clauses. However, the subject is not the unique focus, for the outcome of the sentence is the locative complement à l’ostel du roy à Saint Pol ‘at the hotel of the king at Saint Pol’ which is placed after the subject. This final focus is the result of the communicative dynamism and thus does not rule out the presence of a focus of another type earlier in the sentence. There are some cases of variation in constituent order that do not seem to correlate with differences in information structure. The double focalization on a post-verbal subject and on a direct object is not linked to any significant change of meaning. Thus, with the set phrase faire procession ‘walk in procession’, we find the following two possibilities: (46) Le sabmedi ensuivant firent ceulx du Chastellet, tous grans et petiz, procession. [JBP §48] the  Saturday  following  made  those  of.the  Châtelet  all  great  and  small procession ‘Next Saturday all the Châtelet people, great and small, went in procession.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 66) (47) […] c’est assavoir, le penultime jour de may oudit an, jour de lundi, firent procession ceulx du Palais de Paris […] [JBP §29] it  is  ascertained  the  penultimate  day  of  May  of.the.said  year  day  of Monday  made  procession  those  of.the  Palais  of  Paris ‘On Monday, the next to last day of May in the same year, the people of the Palais in Paris […] went in procession […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 62)

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It is also possible to find a pre-verbal subject with the same predicate, in spite of the scenic topic at the beginning: (48) Le mardy derrenier jour de may, oudit an, partie des paroisses de Paris firent procession […] [JBP §30] the  Tuesday  last  day  of  May  of.the.said  year  part  of.the  parishes  of Paris made  procession ‘On Tuesday, the last day of May in the same year, some of the town’s parishes made processions […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 62) These variations do not seem to lead to significant changes in meaning (cf., however, Section 6 below on partitives in pre-verbal position). Even a ‘heavy’ topic may be found between the verb and a final term, as in (49). This linear order is understandable only if this final term also bears focus in spite of being short: (49) Tretout le temps que le roy fut hors de Paris, firent ceulx de Paris et ceulx des villaiges d’entour procession, comme devant est dit, et alloient chascun jour par ordre en procession aux pellerinaiges de Nostre Dame entour Paris, comme au Blanc-Mesnil […] [JBP §51] all  the  time  that  the  king  was  outside  of  Paris  made  those  of  Paris and  those  of.the  villages  of  around  procession  as  afore  is  said  and went  each  day  through  order  in  procession  to.the  pilgrimages  of  Our Lady  around  Paris  as  at.the  Blanc-Mesnil ‘All the time that the King was away from Paris, the people of Paris and of the surrounding villages made processions, as I have described. Each day they went in procession to one of the places of pilgrimage of Our Lady round about Paris, as for instance to Blanc-Mesnil […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 66) A special type of double-focus sentence is obtained when the information structure links two paradigms, as, for instance, in (50) with a man and a place. We notice that the notion of topic as a label for storing new information may be attributed both to the place and to the man. Thus, the two contrastive foci are equally informative topics, and the ordering can be freely interchanged: (50) Et etoit garde de la porte de Sainct-Denis le sire de Gaule, et de celle de SainctMartin Louys Bourdon […] et le duc de Berry gardoit le Temple, Orleans Sainct-Martin des Champs, Arminac l’ostel d’Artois qui estoit le droit chief d’eulx, Alençon Behaigne […] [JBP §87] and  was  guard  of  the  gate  of  St.  Denis the  sire  of  Gaule  and  of  the. one  of  St  Martin  Louis  Bourdon  and  the  duke  of  Berry  guarded  the Temple  Orleans  St.  Martin  des  Champs  Armagnac  the  Hôtel  of  Artois who  was  the  real head  of  them  Alençon  Bohème



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‘Messire de Gaule was in charge of the Porte St. Denis and Louis Bourdon […] of the Porte St. Martin. The Duke of Berry was in command of the Temple, Orleans of St.-Martin-des-Champs, Armagnac, their real head, of the Hôtel d’Artois, and Alençon of the Hôtel de Bohème […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 83)

5.

Pre-verbal subjects: The role of the narrative sequences

5.1

Pre-verbal nominal subjects at the beginning of the fifteenth century

The diachronic evolution towards an almost invariable placement of the subject before the verb is one of the most intensely investigated research topics in historical French syntax. However, published studies on the topic are sometimes difficult to interpret and compare with one another as the statistics provided do not always measure the same categories. In Middle French, the share of post-verbal nominal subjects remains considerable in independent clauses (more than 50% in the labelled basis of our study, cf. the table below).10 Thus, there are 381 pre-verbal subjects among the 737 subject noun phrases (S) in both the independent and the subordinate clauses in our excerpt of the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris. In independent clauses, post-verbal subject noun phrases are in the clear majority, with 213 pre-verbal subjects versus 339 occurring after the tensed verb. By contrast, in subordinate clauses the great majority of nominal subjects are pre-verbal; we found 168 pre-verbal subjects against only 17 in post-verbal position. In the Froissart text investigated, there is a total of 208 subject noun phrases (S), 96 of them pre-verbal and 112 following the tensed verb. Again, it is revealing to distinguish between independent and subordinate clauses. In the former class, we have 53 pre-verbal and 108 post-verbal nominal subjects, whereas in subordinate clauses, the proportion is strikingly different: 43 pre-verbal nominal subjects as against only 4 post-verbal ones.

. Thus, Price (1961) gives the percentage of 54.2% of pre-verbal subjects in independent clauses for the extract of Froissart analysed; but he includes subject pronouns, which have quite a different proportion of pre-verbal subjects. Quite surprisingly, Herman in his study of Les quatre livres des rois (1990: 262) states that he did not take into account clauses with a compound tense and passive clauses. However the statistics in Vance (1997: 350) confirm the predominance of the inverted order with subject noun phrases. 10. According to Marchello-Nizia (1997: 415), the subject‑verb ordering in independent ­clauses is predominant in a proportion varying between 52% and 75%. I did not find the same percentages in the, admittedly limited, corpus that I have analysed. It is also quite probable that the percentage of SV grew over the years. Notice that Marchello-Nizia’s values are given for the whole period of Middle French.

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5.2

The pre-verbal nominal subject: A participant inside  a narrative sequence?

The general preference that appears to hold is that in the absence of a clause-initial non-subject item that triggers subject-verb inversion, such as a connector or a scenic topic, independent clauses preferably begin with the subject. In Froissart’s text, there are 18 occurrences among the 53 pre-verbal subject noun phrases in which the subject is the only pre-verbal constituent. In the remaining 35 cases, however, the clause is headed by an item which might have triggered inversion, but actually fails to do so. Given this, it seems natural to ask what motivates placing the subject preverbally in such clauses. A detailed examination of this class of clauses suggests two explanations. One explanation, to which we will return below, is simply that since pre-verbal placement is a means of focalizing constituents in general, pre-verbal subject noun phrases following clause-initial non-subject items are focussed as well. However, an explanation along these lines does not seem attractive for the majority of clauses with pre-verbal subjects, since these do not seem to bear a special focus interpretation or emphasis, judging by their individual contexts of occurrence. Rather, these pre-verbal subjects are all topics, but of a particular sort: The majority of them designate participants of what could be called a sub-story inside the general story. Crucially, then, these preverbal subject noun phrases do not introduce a new participant in a new storyline. Most of the time such subjects are names of known participants, and in some cases these nominal subjects simply denote referents which are known and familiar to the readership of the time. In (51), we find ourselves ‘inside’ such a narration. Here, within the story about the royal procession going to Notre-Dame, one sentence mentions the bishop of Paris. Even though this figure was not mentioned before, his existence can be inferred from the context: (51) Et au devant de l’eglise Nostre Dame de Paris, en la place, l’evesque de Paris estoit revestus des armes de Nostre Seigneur et tout le college aussy […] [Froissart 354] and  at.the  before  of  the  church  Notre  Dame  de  Paris  in  the  square the  bishop  of  Paris  was  dressed  in.the  arms  of  Our Lord  and  all  the college  too ‘And, before the church Notre Dame de Paris, on the square, the bishop of Paris was dressed in Our Lord’s arms, and the whole college too.’ It seems, therefore, that the choice between pre-verbal and post-verbal position for a subject noun phrase denoting a familiar referent may be influenced by narrative structure. Inside a narrative sequence, the subject denoting a familiar referent may be placed before the verb, even in clauses in which there are other pre-verbal elements, such as connectors or scenic topics. Similarly, when the referent of a nominal subject has been previously mentioned within the same sub-story, this nominal subject



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­occurs before the verb. Furthermore, it is easy to understand why many non-focussed pre-verbal subjects are the only pre-verbal elements within their clause: within a narrative sequence there is no need for frame-adverbials, nor do connectors seem useful in many cases: (52) Et quant les dames orent passé le Grant Pont de Paris […] il estoit ja tart. Car les chevaulx et ceulx qui les dames menoient n’alloient ne n’avoient allé depuis qu’ilz departirent de Saint Denis que le petit pas. Le Grant Pont de Paris estoit tout au long couvert et cellé de blancq et de vert cendal. [Froissart 353] and  when  the  ladies  had  passed  the  Grand  Pont  de  Paris  it  was already  late  for  the  horses  and  those  who  the  ladies  escorted  neither  went  nor  had  gone  since  that   they  left  of  Saint  Denis  but  the small  pace  the  Grand  Pont  de  Paris  was  all  at.the  long  covered  and sealed  of  white  and  of  green  silk ‘And when the ladies had crossed over the Grand Pont de Paris, it was already late. For the horses, and those which the ladies escorted, had advanced but at foot’s pace since they left from Saint Denis. The Grand Pont of Paris was all along covered and baldachined with white and green silk.’ Among the subjects designating familiar referents, we may include noun phrases with tous, tout ‘all’. Even if such noun phrases pick out new discourse referents, they totalize formerly introduced participants and come mostly at the end of a sub-story: (53) Tous ces chevalliers estoient armez et parez en leurs targes du ray du soleil. [Froissart 362] all  these  knights  were  armed  and  decorated  in  their  shields  of.the ray  of.the  sun ‘All these knights were armed and decorated on their shields with the sun’s ray.’ The same explanation holds true also with indefinites, when they represent a part of a known group or set. Thus, in (54) the reference set is ‘the ladies’ and is well known. The indefinite determiners realize a partition of that set: (54) Aucunes dames demourerent au palais et aucunes s’en retournerent à leurs hostelz en la ville […] [Froissart 358] some  ladies  stayed  in.the  palace  and  some  refl  of.it  returned  to their  hôtels  in  the  town ‘Some ladies stayed in the palace, and some others came back to their mansions in the town.’ In such cases, the subject is mostly pre-verbal, even if other elements occur in the pre-verbal part of the clause:

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(55) Pareillement aultres bourgois de Paris, tres richement parez […] vindrent devers la roynne de France […] [Froissart 360] in.the.same.way  other  citizens  of  Paris  very  richly  dressed  came  towards  the  queen  of  France ‘In the same way, other citizens of Paris, very richly dressed, came towards the queen of France.’ (56) Et pareillement toutes les aultres dames furent mises hors de leurs littieres […] [Froissart 354] and  in.the.same.way  all  the  other  ladies  were  put  out  of  their  litters ‘And in the same way, all the other ladies were got down from their litters.’ Only a handful of sentences with pre-verbal subjects do not contain contextual specifications. As already noted above, the only remaining tokens of pre-verbal nominal subjects in independent clauses appear to be focussed topics occurring inside a narrative sequence. We found three instances of this type in Froissart. In the first examples, the subject referent belongs to the sub-story of the feast given by the king to his guests in the Palais de la Cité: (57) Menestreux estoient là à grant foison, qui ouvroient de leurs mestiers de ce que chascun savoit faire [Froissart 356] ministrels  were  there  in great  abundance  who  worked  of  their  professions  of  this  that  each  knew  do ‘Minstrels were here in abundance, who carried out their professions in what each knew to do.’ The sentence-initial subject menestreux ‘ministrels’ is indefinite and introduces a new discourse referent. Notice that it would have been perfectly possible to begin the sentence with the place adverb là ‘there’ instead. In this position, a nominal expression such as menestreux, which establishes the aboutness topic for the subsequent portion of text, is probably focussed. Its placement is then best explained by the general observation that putting a constituent into sentence-initial position can be a means of marking focus on that constituent. The second example of a pre-verbal focussed subject occurs within the same sequence, when the author describes what he calls l’assise, viz. the layout of the guests around the tables: (58) […] et vous diray l’assise quelle elle fu. Pour la haulte table du roy l’evesque de Noion faisoit le chief et puis l’evesque de Lengres et puis de lez le roy l’archevesque de Rouen et puis le roy de France, qui […] Aprés le roy ung petit en sus seoit la roynne de France […] [Froissart 356] and  you  tell-fut.1sg  the  layout  what  it  was  for  the  high  table of.the  king  the  bishop  of  Noyon  made  the  head  and  then  the  bishop of  Langres  and  then  of  side  the  king  the  archbishop  of  Rouen  and



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then  the  king  of  France  who  after  the  king  a  little  in  up  sat  the queen  of  France (lit.) ‘And I shall tell you the layout what it was. For the high table of the king the bishop of Noyon was at the top, and then the bishop of Langres and then nearby the king the archbishop of Rouen and then the king of France, who […]. After the king, a little higher sat the queen of France.’ Here, the pre-verbal subject noun phrase l’evesque de Noion follows an adverbial phrase and contrasts with the last subject la roynne de France, which is in post-verbal position. The first subject, the first term in an enumeration, is arguably an identificational focus, which is not the case for the last subject. The third example of focussed pre-verbal nominal subjects is given in (59). Here Froissart depicts the events taking place at the Gate of Saint Denis: the royal cortege walks across a kind of shelter, decorated like a heaven full of angels which are represented by a children’s choir. When the queen walks through the building, a little play is presented, during which some children dressed as angels put a crown on her head: (59) Et ad ce que la roynne passa dedens sa littiere desoubz la porte le paradis s’ouvry et deux angles yssirent hors en eulx avalant et tenoient en leurs mains une tres riche couronne […] Et la mirent et assirent les deux angles moult doulcement sur le chief de la roynne […] [Froissart 351–352]. and  to  this  that  the  queen  passed  inside  the  litter  under  the  gate the  heaven  refl  opened  and  two  angels  went.out  out  in  them  descending  and  held  in  their  hands  a  very  rich  crown  and  it  regarded  and  placed  the  two  angels  very  gently  on  the  head  of  the  queen ‘As the queen passed under the gate, inside her litter, the heaven opened and two angels came out and descended and held in their hands a very rich crown […] And they looked at it and placed it very gently on the head of the queen.’ The pre-verbal position of the first subject le paradis ‘the heaven’ seems to be correctly accounted for by the preceding explanation, since the referent has already been described in the preceding text passage. However, the second pre-verbal subject, the indefinite subject deux angles ‘two angels’, could have been been expected to surface in post-verbal position: while the children’s choir dressed like angels has been depicted before, the two angels, as new protagonists, could be expected to receive focus. Now, the last sentence does not seem to be in accordance with what we said earlier: the subject is known, occurs inside a narrative sequence and yet it is post-verbal. But there is a feature which is of central importance here: the last subject is not a topic anymore, or at least not the principal topic, since the topic of that last sentence is the crown. Therefore, we must add the following constraint to the set of constraints already formulated: a pre-verbal subject that comes after triggering items must play a prominent topic role in the sentence.

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All in all, we may propose the following hypothesis: A pre-verbal subject noun phrase represents a known, thematic discourse referent appearing inside and not at the beginning of a narrative sequence, and functioning as a protagonist of a sub-story with major thematic value. In some cases, such subjects are focussed and contrastive, which is compatible with the preceding conditions.

5.3

An example of the XSV constructions in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris: The paragraphs with item

In order to investigate the preceding hypothesis we examined sentences in our second reference text which are mainly used for introducing a new narrative sequence: those beginning with item. There are 147 sentences of this type in our corpus, and out of these 147 we found only 16 pre-verbal nominal subjects, a low percentage of little more than 10%. In our statistics, the proportion of pre-verbal nominal subjects within the entire set of clauses is 381 out of 2080, i.e., 18%. ­Because nearly all narrative sequences begin with an independent clause, we also calculated the proportion of pre-verbal subjects within the set of all independent clauses: Here, the proportion is 213/1259 = 16.9%, which is still high. Thus, it seems that these sentences confirm the hypothesis proposed above. When we look at the 16 clauses in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris in which a nominal subject occurs preverbally, we notice that in several cases the sentence occurs inside a narrative or discursive chain, despite the item at the beginning. Example (5), repeated for convenience as (60) below, will serve to illustrate this point: (60) Item, le jeudi ensuivant, ung autre nommé Colin de Brie, escuier, fut prins oudit lieu comme devant est dit, et prins au Palays, trayné comme Simonnet devant dit, et couppé sa teste es halles […] [JBP §67] item  the  Thursday  following  an  other  named  Colin  de  Brie  esquire was  caught  at.the.aforementioned  place  as  afore  is  said  and  put  in.the Palais  dragged  as  Simonnet  afore  said  and  cut  his  head  in.the  Halles ‘Next Thursday another man, called Colin de Brie, esquire, captured at the same place as above, was taken from the Palais, dragged to the Halles like Simon, and there beheaded.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 73) The incident reported in (60) follows a similar episode which is brought back to mind, hence the indefinite un autre ‘another one’ is used. There are other similar cases. For instance, in the text passage immediately preceding the sentence in (61), the narrator has talked about the poor quality of wine, and he continues as follows: (61) Item, ceulx de l’ost en avoient grant charté […] [JBP §107] item those of the army of.it had great cost ‘They were very short of provisions in the army […]’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 89)



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Something quite similar happens in a paragraph dealing with rising prices, where the sentence in (62) appears immediately after an analogous remark: (62) Item, ung bien petit porc coustoit LX solz ou IIII frans […] [JBP §176] item a well small pig cost 60 sols or 4 francs ‘A very small pig cost 60s. to four francs.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 107) Thus, many cases which at first seemed to be counter-examples to our hypothesis show a cutting up of sub-sequences, where pre-verbal subjects appear inside the whole sequence. A striking case involving the linkage of two paragraphs is visible in (63). Notice that the second paragraph is in fact the direct continuation of the story in the first sentence: (63) Item, le moys d’aoust ensuivant, au commencement, aryva le roy d’Engleterre à toute sa puissance en Normendie, et print port emprès Harefleu, et assiegea Harefleu et les bonnes villes d’entour. Item, monsieur de Guienne, filz ainsné du roy, se party de Paris le premier jour de septembre, à ung dimanche au soir, à trompes, et n’avoit que jeunes gens avec lui, et party pour aller contre les Angloys […] [JBP §125–126] item  the  month  of  August  following  at.the  beginning  arrived  the  king of  England  at  all  his  force  in  Normandy  and  took  harbour  near  Harfleur  and  besieged  Harfleur  and  the  good  towns  of  around item  my.lord  de  Guienne  eldest  son  of.the  king  refl  left  of  Paris  the first  day  of  September  at  a  Sunday  at.the  evening  at  trumpets  and neg  had  but  young  people  with  him  and  left  for  go  against  the Englishmen ‘Early next August the King of England and all his forces arrived off the Norman coast. They landed at Harfleur and laid siege to Harfleur and the good towns near by. On a Sunday evening, September 1st, my lord of Guienne, the King’s eldest son, left Paris to the sound of trumpets to go and fight the English. He took only young men with him.’  (transl. Shirley 1968: 94) Thus, even in this case of a new event with new protagonists occurring in a new paragraph, the difference in the position of the subject could be that the new event is to be seen as a continuation of what precedes. All things considered, there is only one case among the sixteen pre-verbal nominal subject clauses for which we have no explanation: (64) Item, ce jeudi XIIIe jour de septembre, ung jeune homme osta la bande à l’ymage Sainct Huistace que on lui avoit baillée […] Et tantost fut prins, fust tort ou droit, lui fut le poing coppé sur le pont Alleiz devant Sainct Huistace, et fut banny à touzjours mais; et si ne fust oncques homme qui osast dire le contraire, tant estoit tout mal gouverné et de maulvaises gens. [JBP §110]

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item  this  Thursday  13th  day  of  September  a  young  man  took.off  the sash  at  the  statue  St.  Eustace  which  one  him-dat  had  put  and at.once  was  taken  was.it  wrong  or  right  him-dat  was  the  fist struck.off  on  the  bridge  Alais  in.front.of  St.  Eustace  and  was banished  at  always  ever  and  indeed  neg  was  ever  man  who  would. dare  would.dare  say  the  opposite  so.much  was  everything  evilly  governed  and  by  evil  people ‘On this Thursday, September 13th, a young man took off the sash which had been put on the statue of St. Eustace […] Rightly or wrongly he was at once arrested and his fist was struck off on the Pont-Alais in front of St. Eustace’s Church. Then he was banished for ever. Yet not one man dared oppose this, so evilly was everything governed, and by such evil men.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 90) The episode related in (64) is isolated, and the indefinite subject is a new participant. The tenuous link with what precedes it could be that this story is told in order to illustrate the nastiness of the governing clan, the Armagnacs, as can be seen in the final remarks of this example.

5.4

Generalization to narrative sequences

We have tried to confirm the hypothesis of the relevance of the concept of narrative sequence by examining all the paragraphs of the reference edition of the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris. There are 220 paragraphs in our labelled corpus, which divide the text in sequences of varying size. No independent narrative sequence begins inside a paragraph; on the other hand, some paragraphs continue a preceding one, as in (63) above. Out of the 220 paragraphs, 178 contain a subject, either a nominal or a pronominal one (if we put aside the beginnings which contain impersonal sentences, subject-less verbs, non-verbal expressions etc.). Within this set, there are 140 clauses with a post-verbal subject against 38 with a pre-verbal one. When we examine the context of the 38 clauses with pre-verbal subjects, we find that at least 17 are clearly linked to the preceding paragraph. A kind of discursive link is arguably also established in the three cases where the connector cependant ‘however’ appears; despite the fact that this connector introduces a new (sub-)story, it is used to make the new sentence contrast with the immediately preceding sequence. Therefore, only 18 out of 178 clauses with an overt subject remain in which a pre-verbal subject occurs at the beginning of a new narrative sequence. This rate (about 10%) is very low and must be compared with the average rate of pre-verbal subjects in independent clauses, which is 46%. Among the 18 pre-verbal subjects that occur in clauses at the beginning of a new narrative sequence, there are some focussed topics. This is in accordance with the observations made above. We supposed (cf. Section 1.2.8) that a position C for a focussed noun phrase remains available before the tensed verb even when other items



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are in the first position (in the pre-verbal sequence): this position could also be available for a subject noun phrase, whatever the structure may be in this case.11 In (65), for instance, we find a ‘heavy’ and informative subject at the beginning of a new discursive sequence, despite the presence of pre-verbal terms that could have triggered subject inversion: (65) Item, environ la fin de novembre, l’an mil IIIIC et XV, le duc de Guienne, ainsné filx du roy de France, moult plain de sa voulenté plus que de raison acoucha malade et trespassa le XVIIIe jour de decembre oudit an, jour mercredi des IIII Temps. [JBP §132] item  around  the  end  of  November  the  year  thousand  400  and  15  the duke  of  Guienne  eldest  son  of.the  king  of  France  much  full  of  his will  more  than  of  reason  laid.down  sick  and  died  the  18th  day  of December  of.the.said  year  day  Wednesday  of.the  four  times ‘Towards the end of November 1415 the Duke of Guienne, the King’s eldest son, rich in self-will, poor in wisdom, fell ill. He died on 18th December, the Wednesday in Ember week.’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 97) Such cases accord with previous observations: a pre-verbal focussed subject is always possible, even if it starts a new story, as is the case here.

5.5

Pronominal subjects in independent clauses

The hypothesis that there is a connection between the pre-verbal position of the subject and the discursive linking could explain the important statistical difference we found between ante-position and postposition of subject pronouns. When we compare the respective proportions of pre-verbal and post-verbal subjects in the two categories of nominal subjects (S) and subject pronouns (Sp) in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, we find that these proportions differ considerably. As already mentioned above, our corpus contains 381 pre-verbal and 356 post-verbal subject noun phrases (in both independent and subordinate clauses), i.e., 51.6% of the nominal subjects occur in pre-verbal position. By contrast, no less than 331 out of the 347 pronominal subjects occur preverbally, i.e. 95.3%. The reason for such a marked difference could be that most of the personal pronouns are third person anaphoric devices and thus

11. It could be a continuation of the topicalized position of the verb second type. Vance (1997: 341) imagines two different strategies for topicalization in Middle French, where topicalized elements either move into the specifier of CP (as in verb second languages) or into an adjoined position.

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are more readily found in discursive continuations rather than at the beginning of a narrative sequence.12 The situation for the impersonal subject item on is somewhat different. While its syntax is the same as that of the personal pronouns, pre-verbal position is not as highly favoured as with the other pronominal forms: there are 131 pre-verbal occurrences of on, compared to 37 post-verbal tokens. In independent clauses the ratio is similar to that of the subject noun phrases: 33 tokens are pre-verbal, and 36 post-verbal (cf. also the similar findings in Vance 1997: 189). This specific characteristic could be due to the primary meaning of on (it is not, strictly speaking, an anaphoric form). In the beginning of a narrative sequence, this item can thus be positioned after the verb, just like new subject noun phrases: (66) Item, la premiere sepmaine de septembre ensuivant, fist on deffense aux bouchiers que plus ne vendissent leur char sur le pont Nostre-Dame […]  [JBP §150] item  the  first  week  of  September  following  made  one  prohibition  to.the  butchers  that  more  neg  sell  their  meat  on  the  bridge  Notre Dame ‘In the first week of September the butchers were forbidden to carry on their business any longer on the Pont Notre Dame […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 101–102) However, on is never found in final position, which is a consequence of the cliticization process of that term, and it is never focussed either. The syntax of on is thus an additional argument for the thesis that subjects in pre-verbal position establish a discourse link with what precedes.

6.

Pre-verbal object noun phrases in independent clauses

An object noun phrase can precede the tensed verb, even if this is not very frequent, and this despite the potentially confusing order of the sentence (see 1.2.4 above).13 Such object noun phrases are always strongly focussed. As noted, they can occur in 12. The same difference was noted by Herman (1990: 280) for Old French. His explanation is in line with what I am saying here: according to Herman, the use of a personal pronoun made it possible to begin a sentence with a stressed term without thereby laying emphasis on this initial term (recall that the subject pronoun was not yet a clitic in Old French), a term which was related to discourse referents already given in the context or the situation. 13. Object–verb orderings continue to be attested throughout the sixteenth century. Combettes (2003: 175) cites sentences of this type, for example Ceste methode a bien sceu pratiquer le sage Socrates, lit. ‘That method could well practice the wise Socrates’ (Thévet, Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, 1558). The position of the complement is dependent on a preceding context.



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three different syntactic constructions in Middle French. However, most such OV constructions are subject-less, and it is difficult to determine where the subject would have been placed. The structural conditions of their occurrence are somewhat different from the verb second structures: they occur frequently in subordinate clauses, especially after the subject relative pronoun qui, and elsewhere when a subject pronoun is not realized. We found 20 occurrences of such OV structures in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, among which 13 are in subordinate clauses. In relative clauses, especially after the subject relative pronoun qui, there are no semantic conditions for the object noun phrase to be pre-verbal. But in the seven cases of object–verb ordering in independent clauses, the object noun phrase is always an indefinite noun phrase, with a partitive meaning in six of these sentences, often with the indefinite determiner autre, cf. (67) and (68) (see also the examples in 1.2.4): (67) […] que il commença à lermer fort des yeulx mais autre chose n’en osa faire pour paour d’esmouvoir le commun […] [JBP §215] that  he  began  to  weep  strongly  through.the  eyes  but  other  thing  neg of.it  dared  do  for  fear  of  arouse  the  common.people ‘[…] indeed he wept bitterly, but that was all he could do about it for fear of arousing the people […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 124) (68) […] si se conseilla la justice, et du blé veoir voldrent, et ne virent point ou blé nulle deffaulte […] [JBP §582] thus  refl  considered  the  court  and  of.the  corn  see  wanted  and neg-1 saw  neg-2  at.the  corn  no  default ‘The authorities considered the matter and decided to inspect the corn. They could see nothing wrong with it […]’ (transl. Shirley 1968: 267) The explanation for such a placement of the object noun phrase before the verb must combine two different conditions. First, the object noun phrase must be strongly focussed (contrary to the subject noun phrase). Secondly, it must be linked to what precedes it, and this fits well with the semantic category of partitive noun phrases, since they introduce a subset of a previous discourse topic. Here too, then, the pre-verbal position could be more attractive for an item inside a narrative sequence.

7.

Conclusions

As in Old French syntax, we need to distinguish between independent and subordinate clauses in the grammatical analysis of Middle French texts. In subordinate clauses, word order is not very different from that of Modern French, even if some OV constructions are found in Middle French that are impossible in the present-day language. In Middle French independent clauses, the majority of subject noun phrases is still placed after the verb. In XVS structures, we observed four structural types. There

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remains a verb second type, like in Old French, so long as it is borne in mind that the first position can be occupied by more than one single term. In such instances, the subject is a known topic. We suppose that Middle French has what we called an extended verb second structure, in which the subject is never the main focus of the clause and is followed by an argument noun phrase or a copula complement. Middle French also has the Stylistic Inversion type, mostly with a new, focussed subject. In the ‘Heavy Inversion’ type, the subject comes at the end of the clause, usually after adverbials, and is the major information focus in the sentence. Structural ambiguities are possible, and could explain reanalysis phenomena in such a period of competing grammars. Not surprisingly, one can say that there is a gradation in focalization towards the end of the sentence, so that the item most focussed is normally the last one, followed only by possible additional comments. Thus, focussed, new subject noun phrases are often positioned at the very end of the sentence. Conversely, known, anaphoric, nonfocussed post-verbal subjects appear, preferably, directly after the tensed verb. Regarding the choice between pre-verbal and post-verbal subjects, we tried to determine which semantic features of the subject and its linkage to other constituents could possibly govern its position. The explanation offered in this study is linked to the narrative structure of the texts examined rather than to information structure at the sentence level. We hypothesized that in the beginning of a new narrative sequence the nominal subject, whether new or known, is preferably placed after the verb. Inside a narrative sequence, the subject (either previously introduced or presupposed in the context) is more likely to be in pre-verbal position if it remains a major topic of what is described in the sentence. The strong tendency to put such subjects occurring inside a narrative sequence in a pre-verbal position fits well with the properties of subject pronouns. Subject pronouns are seldom placed in a post-verbal position excepting generic on (due to the non-anaphoric meaning of that term). As in Old French, it is possible in Middle French to put a ‘heavy’ focussed subject in the pre-verbal sequence, independent from the narrative structure. What remains in Middle French of non-subject noun phrases before the tensed verb seems to obey to a double constraint in independent clauses: such complement noun phrases are always strongly focussed, and they occupy the pre-verbal position for focussed constituents. They also belong to a peculiar class of noun phrases. Most of them are partitive noun phrases, referring to a wider set of entities and therefore show discourse linkage with previous information. The results of this study demonstrate persuasively that communicative parameters must include narrative structuring in order to explain, at least partially, the observed variations in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris and in Froissart’s Chroniques. However, future research must determine whether or to what extent the hypotheses and observations presented here can be generalized for other genres and texts of Middle French.



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Texts Anonymous. Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris. Ed. A. Tuetey 1881 & ed. C. Beaune 1990 [Coll. Lettres gothiques]. [Years 1405–1418 (§1–220) for the labelled corpus]. Froissart, J. 2004. Chroniques. Livre IV [Coll. Lettres gothiques], P. Ainsworth & A. Varvaro (eds). Paris: Librairie générale française. [§1: Enthroning of the new queen of France, pp. 348–365]. Shirley, J. (ed.). 1968. A Parisian Journal 1405–1449. Translated from the anonymous Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

References Buridant, C. 2000. Grammaire nouvelle de l’ancien français. Paris: Sedes. Chafe, W. L. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Subject and Topic, C. N. Li (ed.), 25–56. New York NY: Academic Press. Chafe, W. L. 1994. Review of Firbas 1992. Language 70(2): 350–353. Combettes, B. 2003. Variation dans la structure du syntagme verbal. In Évolution et variation en français préclassique. Études de syntaxe, B. Combettes (ed.), 171–210. Paris: Honoré Champion. Cornish, F. 2001. L’‘inversion locative’ en français, italien et anglais: propriétés syntaxiques, sémantiques et discursives. Cahiers de grammaire 26: 101–123. Firbas, J. 1992. Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication. Cambridge: CUP. Herman, J. 1990. Du latin aux langues romanes. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kayne, R. S. 1984. Connectedness and Binary Branching. Dordrecht: Foris. Kayne, R. S. 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. É. Kiss, K. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74(2): 245–273. Krifka, M. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In The Notions of Information Structure [Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 6], C. Féry, G. Fanselow & M. Krifka (eds), 13–55. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam. Lemieux, M. & Dupuis, F. 1995. The locus of verb movement in non-asymmetric verb second languages: the case of Middle French. In Clause Structure and Language Change [Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax], A. Battye & I. Roberts (eds), 80–109. Oxford: OUP. Levelt, W. J. M. 1993. Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Marchello-Nizia, C. 1997. La langue française aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Paris: Nathan. Price, G. 1961. Aspects de l’ordre des mots dans les Chroniques de Froissart. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 77(1): 15–48. Skårup, P. 1975. Les premières zones de la proposition en ancien français. Essai de syntaxe de position [Revue Romane. Numéro special 6]. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Vance, B. S. 1997. Syntactic Change in Medieval French: Verb-second and Null Subjects [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 41]. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Wehr, B. 2007. Syntaxe et pragmatique: marquage du topique en ancien français. In Actes du XXIVe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, D. Trotter (ed.), vol. 3, 477–501. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

278 Claude Muller

Appendix Encoding of subjects: Statistics JBP: 2080 clausal cells (tensed V). 337 S (subject noun phrases) 347 subject personal pronouns + 168 on = 515 of personal pronoun type Number of subject pronouns: 515 personal pronouns + 267 qui + 19 other subject relative pronouns Total: 515 + 286 = 801 subject pronouns (s). Total of realized subjects: S + s = 737 + 801 = 1538. Subjectless V: 2080 – 1538 = 542 (25% of all clauses). Position: pre-verbal S: 381 Insertions: SV: 368, SxV: 13 (3.4%) pre-verbal personal pronouns: 331 pre-verbal on: 131 Total S + s (without relative pronouns): pre-verbal subjects: 843

post-verbal S: 356 VS: 222 VxS: 134 (37.6%) post-verbal personal pronouns:   16 post-verbal on:   37 post-verbal subjects: 409 (32.6%)

Distribution in independent and subordinate clauses: Independent clauses: pre-verbal S: pre-verbal pers. pronouns: pre-verbal on: Total: pre-verbal subjects: Subordinate clauses: pre-verbal S: pre-verbal personal pronouns: pre-verbal on: Total (without relative pronouns): pre-verbal subjects

213   81   33 327

post-verbal S: post-verbal personal pronouns: post-verbal on: post-verbal subjects:

339   16   36 391 (54%)

168 post-verbal S:   17 250 post-verbal personal pronouns:    0   98 post-verbal on:    1 516 post-verbal subjects:   18 (3.4%)

Froissart (Livre IV, §1): 488 clausal cells. 208 subject noun phrases. 62 subject personal pronouns + 26 on = 88 subjects of personal pronoun type. Number of subject pronouns: 88 subject pronouns of personal + 72 qui + 11 other subject relative pronouns = Total: 171 subject pronouns. Total of realized subjects: S + s = 208 + 171= 379. Subjectless verbs: 488 – 379 = 109 (22.3% of all clauses).



Major constituent order, information packaging, and narrative structure 279

Position: pre-verbal S: 96 post-verbal S: 112 Insertions: SV: 90 SxV: 6 (5.5%) VS: 80 VxS: 32 (28.5%) pre-verbal personal pronouns:   54 post-verbal personal pronouns: 8 pre-verbal on: 25 post-verbal on: 1 Total S + s (without relative pronouns): pre-verbal subjects: 175 post-verbal subjects: 121  (40.8% of all subjects) Distribution in independent and subordinate clauses: Independent clauses: pre-verbal S: 53 post-verbal S: 108 pre-verbal personal pronouns: 24 post-verbal pers. pronouns:   7 pre-verbal on:   5 post-verbal on:    0 Total: pre-verbal subjects 82 post-verbal subjects:   15  (58% of all subjects) Subordinate clauses: pre-verbal S: 43 post-verbal S: 4 pre-verbal personal pronouns: 30 post-verbal personal pronouns: 1 pre-verbal on: 20 post-verbal on: 1 Total (without relative pronouns): pre-verbal subjects: 93 post-verbal subjects: 6  (6% of all subjects)

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Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives Edgar Onea and Klaus von Heusinger University of Stuttgart

In semantic theories of focus it is generally assumed that focus generates alternatives to the focused expression which are relevant in the interpretation process. One important issue of such theories is that focal alternatives have to be restricted to the relevant ones, whereby this job is mostly outsourced to the context. In this paper we will argue for an additional grammatical level of alternative-restriction that constrains the set of possible alternatives at the level of the semantic composition, hence making it possible to account for the effect of selectional restrictions, the presence of additional descriptive material predicated about the focused expression or gender restrictions arising from the presence of clitic pronouns. While the mechanism proposed here is cross linguistically relevant, it is illustrated on the case of Romanian clitic pronouns with fronted focused definite noun phrases.

Introduction Semantic theories of focus have been motivated by examples in which focus influences the truth conditional content of a sentence, as shown in (1) and (2). They have different truth conditions, because in a situation in which Peter introduced Bill to

. The research on this paper has been funded by the project C2 “Case and Referential Context” in the SFB 732 “Incremental Specification in Context” at the University of Stuttgart. A previous version of this paper has been presented at the conference “XXX. Deutscher Romanistentag” in the workshop “Fokus und Hintergrund in romanischen Sprachen / Focus and Background in Romance Languages” in Vienna, Austria. We would like to thank Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob for organizing the workshop and editing this volume. We would also like to thank Sofiana Chiriacescu, Udo Klein, Manfred Krifka and the participants of the workshop for useful comments and discussion. Finally we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped us significantly improve this paper.

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John and Mary while no other introductions have been made, (2) is true while (1) is false. (1) Peter only introduced Bill to [John]F. (2) Peter only introduced [Bill]F to John. The ability of English only to yield different truth conditions depending on the focused element has been dubbed ‘focus sensitivity’ or ‘association with focus’. Similar effects have been observed in the case of quantificational adverbs like always or usually, negation, because-clauses, counterfactuals, etc. One of the major semantic approaches to focus is the ‘structured meaning’ approach (Jacobs 1983, von Stechow 1982, 1991, Krifka 1991, 1992 etc.), which assumes that focus leads to a partition of the sentence meaning into two parts: focus and background, and focus sensitive operators are defined as operations on such a meaning partition, e.g. only conveys the information that any combination of the meaning of the background with anything else other than the meaning of the focused expression is false. The second important semantic theory is Alternative Semantics developed by Rooth (1985 and 1992). In this framework focus indicates the presence of alternatives to the focused expression (or to its denotation). Alternative Semantics does not assume a partition of meaning, but introduces an additional level of semantic composition instead: On the first level of semantic composition the ordinary meaning of an expression is computed, while on the second level an alternative semantic value is computed recursively in which the focused expression is replaced by the appropriate alternatives. Focus sensitive items like only are defined so that they operate on this alternative level of semantic representation. For a more detailed comparison of the frameworks see von Heusinger (1999) and Beaver & Clark (2008). Both approaches have the problem that a sentence like (3) doesn’t mean that Peter never saw anything in his life but Jane, i.e. no clouds, no houses, no sunglasses etc., but rather that concerning the people under discussion, Jane is the only one Peter saw. (3) Peter only saw [Jane]F. The general way to deal with this issue is that alternatives to the focused expression (in both approaches) are assumed to be restricted not only by the appropriate semantic type (e.g. individuals or properties) but also by the context. That is, focus sensitive operators only operate on alternatives that are relevant in a given context. The question arises, however, whether there are other means of alternative restriction at work as well. For instance, one could assume that alternatives for an argument that violate selectional restrictions of the main verb or that are incompatible with descriptive material inside determiner phrases are to be excluded already at the level of semantic composition. The problem is, however, that such a restriction is in all cases weaker than the contextual restriction, in the sense that it can be inferred from the contextual restriction. Assuming that focus sensitive items operate on already con-



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textually restricted alternatives, this prior level of alternative restriction might seem superfluous for practical purposes. However the assumption of an earlier, compositional level of alternative restriction may also lead to slightly different predictions. For instance, in the case of clitic pronouns which are not completely grammaticalized for focus-constructions it is predicted that to some extent the gender of the focused expression also constrains possible alternatives to the focused expression. Crucially, this constraint can be stronger than the contextual constraints which may allow alternatives of different gender, so that measurable effects on acceptability are predicted. In this paper we will propose such an analysis of alternative-restriction and compare the predictions made for a clitic-doubling language like Romanian with experimental results. The experimental results are in line with the prediction made by our proposal, but are not strong enough to confirm it. Therefore, this paper will also leave room for further research both regarding the Romanian data and also cross linguistic evidence. The structure of this paper is as follows: in Section 1 we present the general problem of the contextual and grammatical restriction of focal alternatives and in Section 2 we elaborate a formal mechanism of restricting focal alternatives at the level of semantic composition. Finally, in Section 3 we present the general picture regarding the distribution of clitic pronouns for focus constructions in Romanian and discuss the experimental results.

1.

Focal alternatives and contextual restrictions

Krifka (2007: 18) presents a simple definition of focus going back to the central claims of Rooth (1985, 1992): Focus indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions. One side of the story, as pointed out in Krifka (2007), is that such a definition of focus is compatible with any kind of grammatical marking of focus (prosodic highlighting of any kind, syntactic movement, morphological focus markers or even capital letters in written texts), and the semantic (or pragmatic) notion of focus is itself independent of the way it is marked but concentrates on what focus does (cross linguistically). The other side of the story is that the function of focus is nothing but indicating the presence of alternatives relevant to the interpretation of the expression under discussion. If we accept this definition, no matter what pragmatic or semantic use of focus we want to deal with, we may not attribute focus itself any other semantic contribution than indicating the presence of alternatives. Focus can be used in a number of semantic or pragmatic ways, i.e. to mark the answer to a wh-question, to mark a contrast, to mark exhaustivity, to generate scalar implicatures, to mark the scope of a focus sensitive operator, etc. According to the view assumed here, all these uses must be in some way directly related to the function of focus indicating the presence of alternatives. In this section we present one particular

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(and widely accepted) theoretical approach to such a unified treatment of focus, which assumes exactly such a semantic contribution of focus, namely the framework proposed in Rooth (1992), also known as Alternative Semantics. First, we present the general mechanism of alternative generation. In Rooth (1992) a complete formal mechanism is presented which will be used as a background in Section 2 of this paper, but at this point we will only discuss the general idea and leave the formal representation aside. For a more detailed and formal introduction, also see von Heusinger (1999: Chap. 4, 2007) or Beaver & Clark (2008: Chap. 2). In the next section we present the general idea of modelling different uses of focus based on generated focal alternatives and contextual restriction. Finally we will discuss an additional mechanism of restriction of focal alternatives at the level of semantic composition.

1.1

Focal alternatives

Alternative Semantics distinguishes between the ordinary and the alternative meaning of an expression. The ordinary meaning of an expression is its lexical entry or the compositional meaning derived from the lexical or compositional meanings of its constituents. At this level, the meaning of a focused expression and the meaning of a non-focused expression cannot be distinguished. The alternative meaning of an expression is an additional level of meaning representation: the meaning of non-focused expressions is a set containing their ordinary meaning, while the meaning of a focused expression is a set containing all entities of the same semantic type as the focused expression. If the focused expression is a name, its alternative meaning will be a set containing all individuals. If the focused expression is a noun denoting a property, its alternative meaning will include all properties, etc. The alternative meaning of a complex expression containing a focused and a non-focused expression, is a set in which the non-focused expression is combined with all alternatives one after the other. For example in (4) and (5), the ordinary meaning of John, regardless of whether John is focused or not, is the individual called John, or simply John. The alternative meaning of John in (4) is {Johnʹ} since John is not focused, while in (5), where John is focused, its alternative meaning is a set containing all possible alternatives to John: {Johnʹ, Maryʹ, Janeʹ…}. Similarly, the ordinary meaning of sleeps is the event of sleeping, while the alternative meaning is {sleepsʹ} if the expression is not focused as in (5) and a set containing all properties if the expression is focused as in (4): {sleepsʹ, walksʹ, whistlesʹ, redʹ, humanʹ etc.}. (4) John [sleeps]F. (5) [John]F sleeps. Combining these two expressions leads to one single ordinary meaning, regardless of whether any of these expressions are focused, namely that John sleeps. The alternative meaning of the two examples however differs: if sleeps is focused we get {John sleeps,



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John walks, John whistles etc.}, while if John is focused we get {John sleeps, Mary sleeps, Jane sleeps etc.}. The procedure is summarised in Table 1. Table 1.  Ordinary and alternative meaning Expression

Ordinary Meaning

Alternative Meaning

John [sleeps]F

John Sleeps

{Johnʹ} {sleepsʹ, whistlesʹ, walksʹ…}

John [sleeps]F. [John]F sleeps [John]F sleeps.

John sleeps. John Sleeps John sleeps.

{John sleeps, John walks, John whistles…} {Johnʹ, Maryʹ, Janeʹ…} {sleepsʹ} {John sleeps, Mary sleeps, Jane sleeps…}

1.2

Focus presupposition and focus interpretation

In the framework of Alternative Semantics focus not only generates alternatives, but also triggers a presupposition that a subset of these alternatives is available in the context. This is achieved in two steps: first, all possible alternatives are generated and second, the set of alternatives is restricted in the context. In Alternative Semantics it is never the alternative meaning itself that plays a role, but always the contextually restricted set; in other words: the alternatives that are available in the context and which satisfy the presupposition. This allows for a proper treatment of a number of uses of focus. This is illustrated on the question-answer paradigm and the case of only. One of the most prominent uses of focus is to mark the answer to wh-questions as in (6) or (7). Alternative Semantics models this by assuming that the meaning of a wh-question can be captured as a set of possible answers, as shown in (8). This is intuitive, since the question signals that for the speaker some ­answers are open and he would like to know which of them are true (according to the hearer). (6) Who did Peter kiss? Peter kissed [Mary]F. (7) What did Peter do to Mary? Peter [kissed]F Mary. (8) Who did Peter kiss? = {Peter kissed Mary, Peter kissed Jane,  Peter kissed Julia etc.} (9) Who did Peter kiss, Mary or Jane? = {Peter kissed Mary, Peter kissed Jane} Theories diverge with respect to the exact way in which possible answers are to be modelled, e.g. whether true or possible answers are included into this set, whether exhaustive answers or partial answers are included, or whether only atomic answers or also complex answers are allowed (see Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984, Beaver & Clark 2008 etc. for discussion). An additional problem is

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whether the set of possible answers is restricted by context, explicitly enumerated alternatives, as in (9), or unrestricted. For the sake of the argument we assume that there is a well defined mechanism generating the semantic value of questions, that all answers included are at least compatible with the speaker’s epistemic base and that the resulting set is somehow restricted. In addition we assume that possible answers to questions like (9) are restricted to the enumerated alternatives. If focus marks the answer to a question in Alternative Semantics then the question (being a set of possible answers) must satisfy the presupposition triggered by focus. In other words, the set of answers corresponding to the question must be a subset of the alternative meaning of the answer containing a focused expression. The procedure is illustrated in Table 2. See Rooth (1992) for further details. Table 2.  Question-answer paradigm Ordinary Meaning Peter kissed [Mary]F.

Focus presupposition Who did Peter kiss? Presupposition satisfaction

Alternative Meaning

Peter kissed Mary.

{Peter kissed Mary, Peter kissed Jane, Peter kissed John, Peter kissed Rex, Peter kissed Napoleon…} A subset of the alternative meaning must be present in the context. {Peter kissed Mary, Peter kissed Jane…} Ordinary meaning of the question is a subset of the alternative meaning of the answer.

Another prominent use of focus is its appearance in the scope of focus sensitive particles such as only. In English, the presence of focus can change the truth conditional meaning of a sentence containing a focus sensitive operator, as shown in (1) and (2). In this case, only is defined as an operator over the presupposed subset of the alternative meaning. The meaning of only can be paraphrased as follows: from the presupposed set of alternatives, it is none but the asserted one which, combined with the subject, yields a true proposition. Crucially, only is a verb phrase-level operator, which means that the alternatives it quantifies over must be of an appropriate type, i.e. they denote properties. Technically, this requirement is achieved by assuming that the presupposition induced by focus arises at the verb phrase-level and that the set of presupposed alternatives corresponds to the asserted verb phrase, whereby the focused expression is replaced by alternatives. The meaning of (1) can, therefore, be calculated as shown in Table 3.



Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives 287

Table 3.  Interpretation of focus sensitive operators Ordinary Meaning introduced Bill to [John]F Focus presupposition only introduced Bill to [John]F Peter only introduced Bill to [John]F Presupposition satisfaction

Alternative Meaning

introduced Bill to John

{introduced Bill to John, introduced Bill to Jack, introduced Bill to Peggy…} A subset of the alternative meaning of introduced Bill to [John]F must be available in the context. For every element of the presupposed subset, if x has this property, this property must be “introducing Bill to John”. For every element of the presupposed subset, if Peter has this property, this property must be “introducing Bill to John”. in the context, e.g. by the set: {introduced Bill to John, introduced Bill to Jack}

Similar to the case of the question-answer paradigm, in the case of focus sensitive operators, it is not the whole set of focal alternatives but the contextually restricted set that is relevant for the interpretation.

1.3

Grammatical restrictions of alternatives

Consider examples like (10). According to the system presented above, focus prima facie generates a number of alternatives that do not even match the selectional restrictions of the verb, like all individual stones, fried chickens or cars, just because they are of the same type as Mary. (10) John married [Mary]F. This, of course, is no problem for the mechanism of focus interpretation. Assume that (10) is an answer to the question Who did John marry? This question can be modelled as the set of its possible answers, and assuming that only logically true or contingent but no logically false answers can be considered ‘possible’ answers, the context automatically restricts the relevant set of focus alternatives to the individuals John could possibly marry. Since it is this contextual restriction and not the alternative meaning of the sentence itself that is relevant for the interpretation, the fact that focus generates cars and fried chickens as alternatives to Mary does not cause any problems for the framework. Nevertheless, if in ordinary composition there are grammatical mechanisms sorting out such compositional anomalies, one could expect the same grammatical mechanisms to apply to alternative composition as well. In other words, John married

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Jumbo (an elephant) should not be generated as an alternative to (10) exactly because John married Jumbo is itself in a certain sense at least semantically an anomalous sentence. Of course, one could argue that the issue does not even arise, since the very mechanism of syntactic or semantic composition rules out selectional restriction violations both at the level of ordinary meaning and of alternative meaning. John married Jumbo would be, however, predicted to be ungrammatical, uninterpretable or meaningless on such an approach. This problem has been widely discussed in the literature. If selectional restrictions are treated as a syntactic matter, expressions that violate selectional restrictions are predicted to be ungrammatical (Chomsky 1957). If selectional restrictions are treated as domain restrictions for predicates, expressions that violate selectional restrictions turn out to be uninterpretable in the sense of Heim & Kratzer (1998). Under both views John married Jumbo is not predicted as an alternative to (10). There are, however, examples showing that blocking semantic or even syntactic composition because of violations of selectional restrictions is too strong of a claim. For instance, even though there may be doubts about the grammaticality or meaningfulness of the old example of Russell in (11), the same would also be predicted to be true for (12), which in fact tends to be simply judged as a true sentence, cf. Lycan (1984). Similarly, if the verb to marry would not combine with an elephant, it is questionable how one can derive the meaning of (13). (11) Quadruplicity drinks procrastination. (12) It’s false that quadruplicity drinks procrastination; quadruplicity isn’t even animate, and procrastination is a habit people have, not a liquid. (13) Peter tried to marry Jumbo, but the priest wouldn’t agree. Another way to tackle the problem, without making any strong assumption about the way selectional restrictions are encoded into grammar, would be to assume that violation of selectional restrictions, just like presupposition failure, simply leads to falsity and argue that logically false alternatives are ruled out in the composition of alternative meanings. Indeed, at first sight it seems that logically false alternatives do not make any sense in the system, but this approach would predict (14) to be too strange because focus could not possibly signal the presence of alternatives in the context, since in (14) only logically false alternatives can be generated. This example shows that not only false but even necessarily false alternatives should actually be generated by the system. (14) Five plus three is [eight]F . Finally one could argue that introducing more complex type ontology into the system immediately solves the problem: only humans or human females are alternatives to Mary. The problem is, however, that for (15), a reading would be predicted such that Mike saw no other girls but Mary, whereby the speaker is silent about Mike seeing the



Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives 289

fried chicken, the stones and the cars, which is contrary to fact. Hence, restricting the alternatives to those that do at least match selectional restrictions is not a matter of complicating the type theory but a matter of semantic composition. The alternatives to [Mary]F should include elephants, but the alternatives to marry [Mary]F should not. (15) On a picture, there is a fried chicken, a girl called Jane, two stones, five cars and a girl called Mary. Mike, however, only saw [Mary]F . The moral of these examples is, that if one wants to modify Alternative Semantics in order to block the generation of focal alternatives that violate semantic restrictions at the level of semantic composition, the solution is a non-trivial modification of the framework. Crucially, what we need is a modification so that focus itself generates all possible alternatives of the same type, but the composition of the alternative semantic value rules out non-acceptable alternatives on the way. Given the difficulties of excluding such alternatives from the alternative meaning, the question arises, as Manfred Krifka (p.c.) pointed out to us, whether we actually need such a modification, since as shown above, the framework actually works fine despite over-generating alternatives in the first step because of the contextual restriction of alternatives. But it turns out that such a modification of the framework would in fact have different predictions than the standard model for cases in which the contextual restriction is weaker than the grammatical restriction. This is the case if a language marks grammatical gender of an argument on the verb by some means, provided that the gender feature is semantically interpretable. In such a case the standard model would predict no effect of gender on the pragmatic interpretation of sentences containing a focused expression whatsoever, while a system compositionally restricting the set of alternatives would predict that the alternative semantic value of the sentence only contains alternatives having the same grammatical gender. Arguably Romanian is such a language in which, under certain quite complex conditions, the use of clitic pronouns after a fronted focused constituent is not fully grammaticalized and hence it can be assumed that the gender feature carried by the clitic pronoun might be interpretable in the semantic composition. In the next section we develop the semantic model proposed including the formal details, and in Section 3 we discuss the case of Romanian, which although not completely conclusive seems to support our predictions.

2.

The treatment of backgrounded material in Alternative Semantics

Given the discussion above, we assume that the very general rule of creating focal alternatives needs additional restrictions. The notion of contextual restriction is most prominently implemented in Rooth (1992). Von Heusinger (2007) introduces some modifications regarding the proper treatment of the definite article in Alternative Semantics, pointing out that the number feature cannot contribute to the semantic

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composition of alternatives. The idea of accounting for selectional restrictions or features such as gender has not been technically implemented in Alternative Semantics so far. In this section we present such a technical solution that places grammatical restrictions into the restrictor of generated alternatives. In the first step we present the general idea of the procedure and we analyze one example including the presence of clitic pronouns after focused fronted arguments and one including selectional restrictions, and in the second step we introduce a formalism for the semantic composition of alternative semantic values.

2.1

The general idea

As pointed out above, one way to deal with selectional restrictions is to rule out their violation in the syntactic or semantic composition, such as by assuming that linguistic expressions are partial predicates. This treatment automatically rules out selectional restriction violations both for ordinary and alternative meaning. The other way of dealing with them is to regard them as a specific kind of lexical presupposition (e.g. Fillmore 1971 or Martin 1979). The general motivation of such approaches is that the difficulty of assigning truth values to sentences which violate selectional restrictions seems similar to classical presupposition failure related to factive verbs, definite descriptions, anaphoric pronouns, which are considered to be instances of semantic presuppositions. (Cf. e.g. Karttunen 1973 or Kempson 1975 for criticism. Such criticism led to the view that presuppositions are rather requirements on the common ground, cf. e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 2000.) Selectional restrictions of verbs are similar to presuppositions in that they license certain inferences even in contexts in which the predicate is not asserted, as in (16), in which even though it has not been stated that John actually married the professor, one can infer that the professor is female (at least in a country in which homosexual marriage is not defined). (16) Perhaps John married the professor. → The professor is female. But then again, as opposed to presuppositions, such inferences are not existential and the force of the inference is also significantly weaker than in the case of classical presuppositions. If we compare (17) and (18) it is obvious that the inferences triggered by presuppositions are much stronger than the inferences triggered by selectional restrictions. (17) #John did not marry the professor because there are no professors. (18) ?John did not marry the professor because the professor is male. Thus, the observation is that selectional restrictions are similar to presuppositions but treating them as proper presuppositions leads to problems. The solution adopted in



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this paper is to consider both presuppositions and selectional restrictions as instances of backgrounded material, a notion loosely inspired from the analysis of focus in Geurts & van der Sandt (2004). Lexically triggered presuppositions and e.g. selectional restrictions are present in the composition but they do not contribute to the proffered meaning of a sentence. Rather they can be considered as conditions of appropriateness, felicitousness and interpretability of sentences which interact with the common ground (or modal base), with respect to which the expression is interpreted. The term backgrounded material has nothing to do with the notion of background in the terminology of structured meaning approaches to focus, where focus triggers a partition of meaning into focus and background. Note that in ­Alternative Semantics it is not necessary to assume that focus turns the focus frame into a background, and – for that matter – we will not assume anything like that. Here, backgrounded material is to be understood as semantic material that is present in the composition (being entailed by some element) but not explicitly asserted and which can (to a certain extent) be retrieved even in cases in which the clause containing it is not asserted. As a convention, we will underline backgrounded material. Accordingly, backgrounded material includes but is not constrained to presuppositions. While there are a large number of presupposition triggers, backgrounded material other than classical presuppositions can be contributed by verbs both in finite and non-finite forms, by adjectives, by clitic pronouns and possibly by other items as well. For a verb like “marry” we assume that all not asserted information (that the arguments are in an appropriate age, have opposing gender etc.) is backgrounded information, while the only assertion is that the act of marriage actually takes place. In the case of clitic pronouns the major reason why we assume that they can contribute a backgrounded gender feature is that they can also be used for anaphoric cross sentential reference whereby they restrict the set of possible referents by means of their gender feature. In those cases the gender feature is part of the presupposition in order to allow the hearer to identify the presupposed referent. Therefore one has to clearly distinguish between the case in which clitic pronouns play a purely grammatical role as in the case of clitic doubling or clitic left dislocation, where the gender feature is purely syntactic and presumably non-interpretable, and cases in which the clitic pronoun is optional or has an anaphoric function, where the gender feature can be treated as backgrounded material. We will argue below that in the case of some focus constructions in Romanian the latter is the case. Generally, we assume that backgrounded material has some projection properties, meaning that not only presuppositions project, but predicative material as well. However the latter cannot project higher than the discourse representation level at which their arguments are established. In other words, such material sticks to its referent. Given this notion of backgrounded material and the architecture of alternative semantics, predicative backgrounded material is therefore expected to restrict the set of possible alternatives, i.e. it projects to the domain of alternative values. For example in (19) we assume that the verb ‘to write’ includes the backgrounded ­information about

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its agent argument that it is a sentient (probably human) being having the knowledge of writing etc. All this information, being backgrounded material, will project to the domain of alternative values and hence restrict possible alternatives to John to sentient human beings that are at least in principle able to write. Hence this sentence would not contrast John to, say, the dog Pluto, or to a fried chicken. (19) [John]F wrote a book. Interestingly, this is not true reciprocally, hence according to this idea one may contrast Pluto or for that matter a fried chicken to John, but not vice versa. The reason for this is that John does qualify as a good alternative to Pluto, because it is not ruled out by the backgrounded material, while Pluto is. And indeed (20) is significantly better than (21). (20) [Pluto]F wrote this book, and not John. (21) #[John]F wrote this book, and not Pluto. For the case of clitic pronouns, exactly the same mechanism should apply. In the Romanian example (22), the alternatives generated to handbag are all feminine because the clitic pronoun has a feminine feature. Hence, the system would predict that contrasting the handbag to some other feminine alternative such as Romanian pălăria ‘the hat’ should be judged as more natural than contrasting it to some neuter or masculine alternative like ceasul ‘the watch’. Some informants confirmed this contrast while others didn’t, although it is worth noting that no informants found (24) better than (23). (22) Maria [poşeta]F a uitat-o acasă. Mary handbag.def.fem has forgotten-cl.3.sg.fem at-home ‘Mary has forgotten her handbag at home.’ (23) Maria [poşeta]F a uitat-o acasă, şi nu pălăria. Mary handbag.def.fem has forgotten-cl.3.sg.fem at-home and not  hat.def.fem ‘Mary has forgotten her handbag at home, and not the hat.’ (24) Maria [poşeta]F a uitat-o acasă, şi nu ceasul. Mary handbag.def.fem has forgotten-cl.3.sg.fem at-home and not  watch.def.neut ‘Mary has forgotten her handbag at home, and not the watch.’

. Of course, the contrast between (20) and (21) can be explained in other terms as well, since it is quite hard to presuppose that Pluto might have written the book. Note, however, that our point is just that the idea of a grammatical restriction of focal alternatives simply does not rule out (20).



Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives 293

Of course, this contrast could be explained independently by means of ellipsis and reconstruction, since in (24) the reconstruction of the elided material involves a different clitic than in the first part of the sentence. Nevertheless this contrast is also predicted by the system proposed here and in Section 3 we will present additional data supporting our predictions. Note that the crucial assumption needed for this prediction is that the gender feature on the clitic pronoun is interpretable. We assume that this is only the case if the clitic placement is not obligatory or fully grammaticalized. If the clitic were clearly obligatory, one would not expect such an effect to arise, because one would expect the gender feature to be purely formal.

2.2 The formal analysis In this section we present the formal modification of alternative semantics advocated above. We formulate this as the Backgrounded Material Principle. Note that the Backgrounded Material Principle presented in the following is restricted to predicative backgrounded material and does not apply to classical presuppositions. Of course, one would expect that it can be generalized to presuppositions as well, but we will not discuss this possibility here, since the treatment of presuppositions in alternative semantics is a problematic field on its own.

Backgrounded Material Principle (BMP) If there is backgrounded material predicated over the referent introduced by a focused expression, this information will end up restricting the alternative meaning, i.e. it will appear as part of the condition predicate in a set builder form of the alternative meaning, via a specific compositional rule. In other words backgrounded material restricts focal alternatives at the level of semantic composition. Formally, using standard alternative semantics notational conventions, the system can be captured as follows: ||·||O an interpretation function computing the ordinary semantic value of an expression. ||·||A an interpretation function computing the alternative semantic value of an expression. If α is an expression and D is the discourse universe, then if α is not focused ||α||O = ||α|| and ||α||A = {||α||O} if α is focused ||α||O = ||α|| and ||α||A = DType ||α||O

. Note that the treatment of definite descriptions denoting unique individuals in alternative meaning leads to problematic predictions (cf. von Heusinger 2007); for the sake of simplicity we leave the issue open here, and treat the definite description simply as an individual having all individuals of the model as alternatives.

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If α and β are expressions, then the following compositional rules apply. ||α β||O = ||α||O(||β||O) ||α β||A = { α'(β') | α'Є||α||A, β'Є||β||A } At this point BMP adds an additional compositional rule: If φ is an expression of type <e,t> and P and Q are predicates of the same type, such that ||φ||O = λx [P(x) ^ Q(x)], and u is an expression denoting an individual (or a variable of type e), the following compositional rules apply: i. ||φ[u]F||O = P(||u||O) ^ Q(||u||O) ii. ||φ[u]F||A = {P(x) | x Є ||uF||A ^ Q(x)}

Given this principle, we predict that as soon as a focused expression is combined with a verb or a verb-clitic combination, backgrounded restrictions regarding gender, animacy etc. of the focused expression will restrict the set of alternatives in the compositional process. In other words, backgrounded material will not just make a whole amount of alternatives false but will rule them out of the composition in the first place. This way we can return to the simple example [John]F sleeps. For the sake of simplicity in the model M there are three individuals: a car abbreviated as C, and two boys: John and Jack. The alternatives are now generated as shown in Table 4, in which C is an alternative to John but as soon as John is combined with the predicate sleep, this alternative disappears, since it is ruled out by the selectional restriction ­[+animate] of the verb sleeps. Table 4.  Backgrounded material restrictions on focal alternatives Expression

Ordinary Meaning

Alternative Meaning

John [John]F Sleeps John sleeps. [John]F sleeps.

John John sleeps John sleeps John sleeps

{Johnʹ} {Johnʹ, Jackʹ, C} {sleepsʹ} {sleepsʹ (Johnʹ)} {sleepsʹ (Johnʹ), sleepsʹ (Jackʹ)}

Similarly, in the case of clitic doubling, as soon as the direct object is combined with a verb-clitic combination, only alternatives that match the gender of the direct object are computed. For (25), the focused expression bicicleta ‘bicycle’ itself will have both feminine and masculine alternatives, but as soon as it is combined with the verb-clitic combination only feminine alternatives remain. This is shown in Table 5. Note that in Table 5 the predicate fem is used as a simplification and is informally paraphrased in the last row, being then explained in the following. (25) Petru [bicicleta]F a lovit-o. Peter bicycle.def.fem has hit-cl.3.sg.fem ‘Peter hit the bycicle.’



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Table 5.  Grammatical restriction on focal alternatives in (25) Expression

Ordinary Meaning

Alternative Meaning

a lovit a lovit-o

λyλx [hitʹ (x,y)]

{λyλx [hitʹ (x,y)]}

λyλx [hitʹ (x,y) ^ fem (y)] ιx [bicycleʹ (x)] λx [hitʹ (x, ιy [bicycleʹ (y)]) ^ fem(ιy [bicycleʹ (y)])] Peter hit the bicycle

{λyλx [hitʹ (x,y) ^ fem(y)]} {De}1

[bicicleta]F [bicicleta]F a lovit-o Petru [bicicleta]F a lovit-o

{λx[hitʹ (x,y)| yЄDe^fem(y)}

{Peter hit y | y is an individual denoted by some expression having a feminine grammatical feature}

Two issues remain to be mentioned: first, backgrounded material related to gender can apply both to the natural gender, as was the case in (18), or to the grammatical gender as in the case of clitic doubling. Romanian distinguishes grammatical gender features for non-animate individuals as well, which makes this second aspect relevant. A model theoretic reflex of grammatical gender is not trivial, since grammatical gender is a feature of expressions and not a property of individuals in the model. In a simple model, however, in which there is a correspondence between nouns and individuals such that no individual can be referred to by several nouns, the predicate fem can be defined such that fem(x) is true exactly in case the noun referring to x has the grammatical feature [+feminine]. Of course, in reality the same individual may be denoted by several nouns having different grammatical gender. In order to apply BMP on clitic pronouns in Romanian in a formally respectable way, serious complications would be needed. However, this problem is not specifically induced by the framework presented here, since in any theory of pronominal reference the fact that pronouns use gender to identify their referent must be accounted for – we leave this issue open and assume that a formally adequate solution is possible. The second issue regards sentences like (13). If we assume that backgrounded material restricts alternative meaning as soon as it is combined with a focused argument, trying to marry would be predicted to rule out alternatives that may in fact be mentioned in a question, as e.g. in (26): (26) Who did John try to marry, Jane, Peter or his car? John tried to marry [Jane]F. We do not account for this by modifying the compositional rule presented above. It seems rather that if a question (or for that matter some other contextual mechanism) delivers a set that overlaps with the presupposed set, a very ‘cheap’ accommodation process is triggered, such that the effect is only a very weak pragmatic violation that is immediately resolved in the context. But if this is on the right track, the fact that we can only observe a very weak contrast between (23) and (24), comes out as actually predicted, because we can reconstruct both sentences as answers to appropriate

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­questions, and for (24) a cheap accommodation process is assumed that is triggered by the overlap between the alternative sets.

3.

The Romanian data

The presence of clitic doubling for direct objects in Romanian depends first of all on the presence of the differential object marker pe (glossed as “DOM”) and on topicality. In cases in which the focused and therefore left dislocated direct object is not pemarked and not topicalised, clitic doubling is generally excluded, except for the case of left dislocated focused definite non-human direct objects. We start the discussion of the Romanian data by presenting the general pattern of differential object marking in Romanian, which is a trigger of clitic doubling. Then, we discuss the impact of information structure on clitic doubling and the conditions of the placement of clitic pronouns after focused constituents. Finally we will present the experimental data related to the predictions of the BMP.

3.1

Differential object marking and clitic doubling

In Romanian, direct objects can or must be marked with the differential object marker pe depending on conditions that include animacy, referentiality and contextual information such as topicality. Generally, the more animate, referential and topical a direct object is, the more likely it is to be marked with pe. For the sake of simplicity we will assume that only human direct objects can be pe-marked in Romanian, even though there can be some exceptions to this generalization (cf. von Heusinger & Onea 2008 for a more detailed discussion). If the direct object is pe-marked it is always doubled with a clitic pronoun in present day Romanian. However, especially older speakers seem to accept some exceptions in which clitic doubling is missing despite pe-marking. Full personal pronouns (27) and proper names referring to humans (28) are always marked with pe. It should be noted that full personal pronouns are only used for

. Differential object marking is a phenomenon observed in many languages where the direct object is only morphosyntactically or lexically marked if certain conditions related to the referential properties of the direct object or the main verb are fulfilled. Cf. Bossong (1985), Aissen (2003) etc. for discussion. . Although, as pointed out by one of our reviewers, this would be an important question, and we do not present an actual analysis of the grammatical constraints or mechanisms leading to the presence of clitic pronouns in a whole number of partly different constructions in Romanian. We do assume that there is a connection between the presence of clitics and differential object marking, but the exact nature of clitic doubling goes way beyond the scope of this paper, see e.g. Klein (2007) for discussion.



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emphasis, while weak pronouns suffice for anaphoric reference. Of course, in such cases, clitic doubling is also obligatory. (27) L-am văzut *(pe) el. cl.3.sg.masc have seen dom he ‘I have seen him.’ (28) *(L)-am văzut *(pe) Mihai. cl.3.sg.masc have seen dom Michael ‘I have seen Michael.’ Most of the post-verbal human definite noun phrases get pe-marked if there are no semantic (cf. Dobrovie-Sorin 2007) or syntactic restrictions blocking it, as shown in (29). The most important and very common syntactic restriction is that the structure “pe + noun + definite article” without further modifiers is ungrammatical in Romanian. Some rather familiar functional expressions such as the mother, the teacher, the priest, the boss, etc. (as opposed to functional expressions that are rather official, as the director, the king, the president, etc.) are exceptions from this constraint. In the case of pre-verbal (topicalised) human definite noun phrases pe-marking is even more likely. Note that non-animate definite noun phrases do not get pe-marking (nor clitics), as shown in (30), except for special cases in colloquial speech. (29) L-am văzut pe profesorul tău. cl.3.sg.masc have seen dom professor.def.masc your ‘I have seen your professor.’ (30) (*L-)am văzut (*pe) autobuzul tău. cl.3.sg.masc have seen dom bus.def.masc your. ‘I have seen your bus.’ For post-verbal indefinite human direct objects differential object marking is optional if further factors are fulfilled, the most important being specificity as shown in (31) and (32) (cf. Farkas 1978, Dobrovie-Sorin 1994, Bende-Farkas 2002, Kamp & Bende-Farkas 2006), otherwise the result is ungrammatical. For pre-verbal topicalised indefinite human direct objects pe-marking is very likely, since specificity is automatically granted by topicalization (cf. Endriss 2007). (31) O caut pe o secretară. cl.3.sg.fem search dom a secretary.fem specific reading: ‘I am searching for a (specific) secretary.’ (32)

Caut o secretară. search a secretary.fem. specific reading: ‘I am searching for a (specific) secretary.’ non-specific reading: ‘I am searching for some secretary.’

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If the direct object is post-verbal, clitic doubling is relatively strictly correlated to the direct object marker pe, but for pre-verbal direct objects, clitic doubling is possible and may even be obligatory in cases in which pe-marking is excluded, e.g. if the direct object is non-human but definite and topicalised, as in (33). Note that both the addition of pe (34) and the lack of the clitic pronoun (35) would make the sentence ungrammatical. (33) Caietul de franceză l-am văzut. copybook.def.masc of French cl.3.sg.masc have.1.sg seen ‘I have seen the French copybook.’ (34) *Pe caietul de franceză l-am văzut. dom copybook.def.masc of French cl.3.sg.masc have.1.sg seen ‘I have seen the French copybook.’ (35) *Caietul de franceză am văzut. copybook.def.masc of French have.1.sg seen ‘I have seen the French copybook.’

3.2

Information structure and clitic pronouns

In Romanian the information structurally unmarked word order is SVO, however topicalization can be marked with left dislocation (36) and focus can be marked by intonation (37) or by intonation and word order (38): (36)

Ce s-a întâmplat cu maşina? ‘What happened with the car?’ Maşina am lovit -o. OTV car.def.fem have.1.sg crashed cl.3.sg.fem ‘As for the car, I have crashed it.’

(37)

Ce ai lovit, maşina sau autobuzul? ‘What did you crash, the car or the bus?’ Am lovit [maşina]F. VOF have.1.sg crashed car.def.fem ‘I crashed the car.’

(38)

Ce ai lovit, maşina sau autobuzul? What did you crash, the car or the bus? [Maşina]F am lovit -o. OFV car.have.1.sg crashed cl.3.sg.fem ‘I crashed the car.’

Note that in the examples above we have suppressed the subject due to the fact that in the case of left dislocation of the direct object, the subject needs to be inside the verb



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phrase. Otherwise we get an information structurally marked subject. We will not discuss this further complication at this point. If topicalization and left-dislocated focus co-occur, an information structurally marked word order arises that does not disambiguate grammatical roles. This is illustrated in (39) and (40) with an SOV and OSV word order respectively: (39) Petru pe Maria a văzut-o. [Peter]T dom [Mary]F have.3.sg seen cl.3.sg.fem ‘Peter has seen MARY.’ (40) Pe Petru Maria l-a văzut. dom [Peter]T [Mary]F cl.3.sg.masc have.3.sg seen ‘MARY has seen Peter.’ A left dislocated topicalised direct object expressed by a pronoun, a proper name or a definite noun phrase is repeated by a clitic pronoun agreeing in person, gender and number in any case, regardless of its animacy or pe-marking (cf. e.g. (33)). A topicalised human indefinite direct object is also repeated by a clitic pronoun, but nonhuman indefinite noun phrases are never repeated by clitic pronouns even if they are topicalised, as shown in (41). (41) Un caiet de franceză (* l-)am văzut. a copybook.masc of French cl.3.sg.masc have.1.sg seen ‘I have seen a French copybook.’ A left dislocated focused direct object is necessarily repeated by a clitic pronoun if it is pe-marked. This is the case for full pronouns, proper names, or definite human noun phrases. Note that human focused indefinite noun phrases cannot be pe-marked, which could in fact signal that focused indefinites cannot be specific. Indefinites are not repeated by clitic pronouns if they are focused under any circumstances. Non human definite noun phrases are mostly repeated by a clitic pronoun, as shown in (42), but the lack of the clitic pronoun is not completely ungrammatical (but dispreferred by many speakers). In fact, the conditions under which clitic doubling may be left out in sentences like (42) are exactly the issue we are interested in here. (42) [Bila roşie]F am văzut ?(-o). ball.def.fem red have.1.sg seen cl-3.sg.fem ‘I have seen the RED BALL.’ Before discussing the conditions of clitic pronouns for sentences like (42) in more detail, we summarize the findings so far in Table 6. The presence of a clitic is strictly correlated to the presence of the differential object marker if the direct object is postverbal or human. If the direct object is topicalised, the clitic pronoun is obligatory in all cases except for indefinite non-human direct objects, hence, the presence of the clitic pronoun is not strictly correlated to pe in this case. Since a clitic is obligatory in

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all other cases of topicalization, topicalization itself can be considered as a grammatical trigger for clitic pronouns (if further conditions are fulfilled). If the direct object is focused, clitics strictly co-occur with pe-marking, except for the case of definite non-human noun phrases. In this case, differential object marking is excluded and clitics are optional/preferred. This is the only case in which the presence of a clitic appears not to be triggered by an independent grammatical mechanism. Note that in many Romance languages, it is rather uncommon to find clitic pronouns after left dislocated focus. Table 6.  The presence of clitics depending on referential properties, animacy and syntactic position Syntactic position of DO →

Indef. NP

3.3

DO topicalised DO focused

[+dom] [+cl] [+dom] [+cl] [+cl] iff [+DOM] [+cl] iff [+DOM] [-dom] [-cl]

[+dom] [+cl] [+dom] [+cl] [+dom] [+cl] [+dom] [+cl] [-dom] [+cl]

[-dom] [-cl]

[-dom] [-cl]

→

Referential properties of DO Personal Pronoun Proper Name [+human] Def. NP Indef. NP [-human] Def. NP

DO post verbal

[+dom] [+cl] [+dom] [+cl] [+dom] [+cl] [-dom] [-cl] [-dom][+cl] preferred/optional [-dom] [-cl]

Conditions of clitic pronouns for non-human definite pre-verbally focused direct objects

In the following we will discuss only [+definite], [–human] direct objects like the book, the car etc, which are focused pre-verbally as shown in (42). In Romanian, the presence of clitics seems preferred in such cases. At this point some discussion about the data is needed. One of our anonymous reviewers argues that clitics are in fact obligatory in (42); the version without clitic simply not being Romanian. While we agree that many speakers do not accept the version without clitic doubling we found that at least in Transylvania there is a significant number of Romanian native speakers who not only accept but even prefer the version without clitic doubling in some cases. In a mini- experiment conducted with ten participants we asked Romanian native speakers to complete the missing verb in dialogues like the one presented in the following image, whereby the glosses can be found in (43). 1) A: Petru a furat bicicleta Mariei. B: Nu măi, Petru maşina Mariei _____________________şi nu bicicleta. (43) A: Petru a furat bicicleta Mariei. Peter has stolen bicycle.def.fem Mary.gen ‘Peter has stolen Mary’s bicycle.’



Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives 301

B: Nu măi, Petru maşina Mariei _______, şi nu bicicleta. No you, Peter car.def.fem Mary.gen ______ and not bicycle.def.fem ‘No way, Peter has stolen Mary’s car and not the bicycle.’ In the experiment eight participants exhibited a clear tendency to use clitics independent of gender, number and the other conditions we controlled, while two participants living in Transylvanian cities used no clitics under certain conditions. Note however, that there were also other Transylvanian participants who did use clitics. Given the small number of participants, this experiment does not allow any generalisations about eventual dialectal differences in present-day Romanian, but it does prove that at least for some speakers the version of (42) without clitic is acceptable. Crucially, this experiment does not show or imply that there would be any Romanian speakers who find the version with clitic ungrammatical or unacceptable. The exact factors facilitating the omission of the clitic pronoun if the direct object is focused are not totally clear to us and require a more detailed experimental investigation, but the general tendency, based on introspection, discussion with some informants and the mini-experiment presented above, seems to be the one summarized in Table 7: Table 7.  Conditions of the omission of clitics after non-animate definite focused direct objects +CL i. ii. iii. iv.

←– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – →

animate subject direct object highly affected subject and object have different gender the contextually available alternatives to focus have the same gender

–CL

non animate subject direct object less affected subject and object have the same gender the contextually available alternatives to focus have different gender

We assume that factors i–ii are connected to the notion of transitivity (Hopper & Thompson 1980) and, more generally speaking, to the force of the connection between the verb and the direct object. Transitivity has already been argued to be relevant for differential object marking in Romanian and it seems that the use of clitic doubling spreads along similar scales, cf. von Heusinger & Onea (2008) for details. Factor iii seems to be related to the disambiguation of grammatical roles: if the subject and the direct object have different gender and a clitic is present, the grammatical roles are disambiguated, however, if the subject and the object have the same gender, clitics do not overtly contribute to the disambiguation of the grammatical roles and, hence, seem more likely to be left out. Moreover, if the clitic is left out, this immediately disambiguates the grammatical roles, since clitic omission is not possible for topicalised direct objects at all. Accordingly, in (44) the clitic can be co-indexed both with the topic and the focus and hence the direct object could be both the car and the bicycle (of course the ii reading is more salient because of the more natural

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subject–object order). In (45) on the other hand, if the car (the topic) were the direct object, the omission of the clitic would not be grammatical. Therefore, only the reading is available in which the car is the subject. Note, however, that there are speakers who completely reject (45). (44)

Maşina bicicleta a lovit-o. car.def.fem bicycle.def.fem has hit cl.3.sg.fem reading i: ‘The bicycle hit the car.’ reading ii: ‘The car hit the bicycle.’

(45) Maşina bicicleta a lovit. car.def.fem bicycle.def.fem has hit ‘The car hit the bicycle.’ Factor iv seems a pragmatic restriction that might be directly correlated to the prediction made by the composition of alternative semantic values presented in Section 2. Let us consider for example a context in which there are two maids whose job it is to wash every piece of clothing in a hotel by hand. As a result they are very much interested in anything that may happen to the clothing in that particular hotel, and are vividly discussing an accident in the kitchen. One of them asks what the soup was spilled on. In this context, the acceptability of the answer containing a pre-verbally focused definite non-animate direct object and no clitic pronoun depends (among other things) on the alternatives included in the question, as shown in (46) and (47). Note that in this dialog all factors included in Table 11 have been matched: the subject is non-animate, the direct object is not highly affected, the subject and the object have the same gender, and the contextually available alternatives have a different gender. (46) Q: A:

Ce a murdărit supa vărsată, bluza sau pantalonul bucătăresei? ‘What did the spilled soup dirty, the blouse or the trousers of the cook?’ ?Supa vărsată bluza bucătăresei a murdărit, şi nu pantalonul. soup.def.fem spilled blouse.def.fem cook.gen has dirtied, and not  trousers.def.masc ‘The spilled soup dirtied the blouse of the cook and not the trousers.’

(47) Q: A:

Ce a murdărit supa vărsată, bluza sau fusta bucătăresei? ‘What did the spilled soup dirty, the blouse or the skirt of the cook?’ ??Supa vărsată bluza bucătăresei a murdărit, şi nu fusta. soup.def.fem spilled blouse.def.fem cook has dirtied,  and not skirt.def.fem ‘The spilled soup dirtied the blouse of the cook and not the trousers.’

For both (46) and (47), including the clitic pronoun is grammatical and generally preferred. However, it seems that even speakers who reject both as ungrammatical often acknowledge that (46) is better than (47). Hence, we conclude that if the clitic can be left out at all, then this is most likely to happen in case the gender of the focused



Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives 303

expression does not match the gender of the alternatives. Note that this is exactly the case for which the version with clitic is predicted to be worse by our compositional system. Therefore we interpret the difference in the acceptability between (46) and (47) not only as the conditions for the omission of a clitic being fulfilled but rather as a deterioration of the acceptability of the use of a clitic if the alternatives have different genders than the focused element. In other words, the fact that (46) is more acceptable than (47) derives from (48) violating a pragmatic constraint, while (49) does not violate any pragmatic constraint, although both (48) and (49) are perfectly grammatical in present-day Romanian. (48) Q: A:

Ce a murdărit supa vărsată, bluza sau pantalonul bucătăresei? ‘What did the spilled soup dirty, the blouse or the trousers of the cook?’ Supa vărsată bluza bucătăresei a murdărit-o, şi nu pantalonul. soup.def.fem spilled blouse.def.fem cook.gen has dirtied cl.3.sg.fem,  and not trousers.def.masc ‘The spilled soup dirtied the blouse of the cook and not the trousers.’

(49) Q: A:

Ce a murdărit supa vărsată, bluza sau fusta bucătăresei? ‘What did the spilled soup dirty, the blouse or the skirt of the cook?’ Supa vărsată bluza bucătăresei a murdărit-o, şi nu fusta. soup.def.fem spilled blouse.def.fem cook.gen has dirtied cl.3.sg.fem, and not skirt.def.fem ‘The spilled soup dirtied the blouse of the cook and not the trousers.’

In particular, we assume that in (48) the presence of the clitic pronoun restricts the alternatives to the focused expression to alternatives which have the same gender as the focused constituent. We will not give a complete semantic analysis of clitic doubling here, for details see e.g. Klein (2007), who analyzes clitics as anaphoric expressions, or Dobrovie-Sorin (1994), but we assume that at least in cases in which they are optional in the sense that they are not triggered by independent grammatical reasons, clitics contribute an interpretable gender feature to the semantic composition, which is responsible for the restriction of the alternative semantic value. This restriction is stronger than the restriction given by the context, i.e. the restriction to the enumerated alternatives in the question. The restriction by the context restricts the possible answers to the blouse and the trousers, but the presence of clitic rules out the trousers from the set of alternatives because of its different gender feature. In the terms of Rooth (1992) the focus-presupposition is not (completely) satisfied by the question, since the ordinary semantic value of the question only overlaps and is not a subset of the alternative meaning of the answer.

304 Edgar Onea and Klaus von Heusinger

3.4 Experimental data Given that the data are somewhat controversial we conducted an experiment in which we tried to gain a better understanding of the conditions of the presence of clitic pronouns in such cases. In the experiment question-answer pairs have been rated for acceptability by twenty-nine native speakers from the Transylvanian city Târgu Mureş and surroundings, aged 18 to 66 on a free scale. The questions presented two alternative non-animate, definite and modified direct objects and the answerers picked one out in an immediate pre-verbal position in different conditions depending on the gender match between the alternatives (±GM) (i.e. both feminine vs. one feminine and one masculine) presented in the question and the presence of the clitic pronoun (±cl). (46) and (47) are actual examples from the experiment for [–CL], and [–GM]/[+GM] respectively. (48) and (49) are examples from the experiment for [+CL], and [–GM]/[+GM] respectively. Note that in the experiment a significant number of fillers and sixteen different lexicalizations for each condition have been used such that each participant saw eight randomly selected items representing all conditions. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of magnitude estimation experiments, eight participants have been excluded for having obviously misunderstood the task. The results have been summarized in the following table, whereby positive numbers stand for higher acceptability. Note that the variance in the answers was very high, such that even though twenty-one participants have been statistically processed, the results cannot be considered statistically sound ­(p > 0.1). This is not really surprising, given the oddity of sentences containing non human subjects and objects and the eventual idiolectal or dialectal differences already described above. Of course, an experiment exhibiting such a high variation is not a valid proof of a theoretical claim, however it can be considered a good starting point for further empirical research, given that the results are both in line with general expectations and our predictions. Table 8.  Results of the experiment [+cl] [–cl]

[+GM]

[–GM]

16.2 –30.2

6.2 –7.1

The table shows, as generally predicted and assumed by one of our reviewers, that the use of the clitic is always preferred, which neatly accounts for the unacceptability of the version without clitic for many speakers. But the lack of a clitic is significantly more acceptable if the alternatives have different gender, even if it can be considered generally suboptimal. Moreover, the presence of the clitic is judged better if the gender features of the focused constituent and the alternatives match. And as a mirror



Grammatical and contextual restrictions on focal alternatives 305

to this, the “distance” in acceptability between the presence and absence of clitics is reduced if the gender features differ. These results are in line with our predictions because we do predict a deterioration of the acceptability of the clitic pronouns if the gender of the focused expression and the alternative given in the question differ. The differences should not be very high, since according to our model in such a case only a week pragmatic violation takes place – the overlapping of the alternative sets can lead to relatively easy accommodation. Moreover, it seems that the lack of the clitic pronoun improves in acceptance if the gender of the alternative and the focused expression differs. One of our anonymous reviewers has pointed out that this finding is closely related to an Optimality-theoretic framework and asked for further discussion. In terms of constraint based grammar, our view is that there are two constraints at work here: the first one blocks the lack of clitics and hence forces the use of clitics, whereas the other blocks the use of clitics in case they would lead to a pragmatic violation with regard to presupposition satisfaction. Assuming that the first constraint is ranked higher, Optimality Theory correctly predicts that the version with clitic wins in both cases, regardless of the gender match or mismatch. Crucially, what we are interested in is the relation between the optimal and the suboptimal candidate. The observation is that the lower ranked constraint still does have an impact on acceptability, even if it does not change the overall winner. This is not predicted by standard Optimality Theory. However, in our view this observation is not surprising. Differential object marking and clitic doubling can be viewed cross linguistically as phenomena influenced by a multitude of factors which often lead to relatively free alternation, i.e. optionality. Therefore it seems that it is not one single ranking of constraints that is decisive for this kind of phenomena but rather that the different influential factors can join up and influence acceptability, even if they are ranked lower. We do not argue that this cannot – in principle – be modeled in some versions of Optimality Theory, but it is important to note that the nature of the argument proposed here goes beyond the scope of Optimality Theory: it is not about predicting the optimal candidate but rather about general acceptability patterns also including suboptimal candidates. Finally, the observation that some speakers actually use no clitics after focused (and fronted) non-animate definite direct objects, while others accept it but do not use it, and that in the experiment the acceptability of both versions (with and without clitic) seems to depend on the gender match condition, suggests that the grammaticalization of the use of clitic pronouns after focused definite non-animate direct objects is not fully completed. This is not surprising, given that the use of clitic pronouns after full determiner phrase-direct objects is generally rather new (cf. von Heusinger & Onea 2008 for a diachronic discussion). To summarize, the Romanian data are perfectly in line with the predictions made by the proposal that there is a grammatical level of alternative restriction in alternative semantics. Nonetheless more research, both on Romanian and cross linguistically, seems necessary to fully confirm the claims.

306 Edgar Onea and Klaus von Heusinger

4.

Summary

In this paper we have shown how grammatical restrictions on focal alternatives can be modeled, and presented evidence from Romanian supporting the idea of grammatical restrictions in alternative semantics. In particular we have argued that in Romanian, in cases in which the presence of a clitic pronoun after a focused direct object is optional, i.e. not grammatically triggered by some independent mechanism such as differential object marking or topicalization, it contributes a backgrounded gender feature to the semantic composition, which restricts the set of alternatives to the focused expression at the grammatical level. We have shown how such an assumption accounts for differences in the acceptability of the omission of the clitic pronoun in answers to wh-questions which enumerate alternatives of different grammatical genders. In addition, we have shown that the mechanism postulated for backgrounded material in general not only accounts for the cases of clitic pronouns after focused arguments but is also compatible with an economic treatment of selectional restrictions contributed by verbs. In these cases, the Principle of Backgrounded Material blocks the composition of alternatives that violate selectional restrictions without predicting non-interpretability or ungrammaticality for cases in which selectional restrictions are violated in general. However, the Principle of Backgrounded Material presented in this paper is restricted to predicative backgrounded material. For further research the question arises whether it can be generalized to include existential presuppositions. In particular it has been argued that modeling definite descriptions in Alternative Semantics poses problems to semantic theories. The principle of backgrounded material therefore needs to be generalized to capture presuppositions as well, and with such a modification the system should predict the problematic behavior of definite descriptions in Alternative Semantics via projection properties of presuppositions. Finally, additional empirical research is necessary to check whether the predictions of assuming a level of grammatical alternative-restrictions are ultimately borne out or not. The Romanian data presented in this paper can only be considered as a first step.

References Aissen, J. 2003. Differential object marking: iconicity vs. economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21(3): 435–483. Beaver, D. I. & Clark, B. Z. 2008. Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Bende Farkas, Á. 2002. Specific indefinites in Romanian and the marker PE. Paper presented at “Semantische und syntaktische Aspekte von Spezifizität in Romanischen Sprachen”, Universität Konstanz.



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Bossong, G. 1985. Empirische Universalienforschung. Differentielle Objektmarkierung in den neuiranischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Narr. Chierchia, G. & McConnell-Ginet, S. 2000. Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. 2nd edn. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Chomsky N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. Dobrovie-Sorin, C. 1994. The Syntax of Romanian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Dobrovie-Sorin, C. 2007. Article-drop in Romanian and extended heads. In Pitar Mos: A Building with a View, G. Alboiu et. al. (eds), 99–107. Bucharest: Bucharest University Press. Endriss, C. 2007. Quantificational topics – a scopal treatment of exceptional wide scope phenomena. PhD dissertation, Universität Potsdam. Farkas, D. 1978. Direct and indirect object reduplication in Romanian. In Papers from the Fourteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 88–97. Chicago IL: University of Chicago. Fillmore, C. J. 1971. Types of lexical information. In Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, D. D. Steinberg & L. A. Jakobovits (eds), 370–392. New York NY: Holt. Geurts, B. & van der Sandt, R. 2004. Interpreting focus. Theoretical Linguistics 30(1): 1–44. Groenendijk, J. & Stokhof, M. 1984. Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers. PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Hamblin, C. L. 1973. Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language 10: 41–53. Heim, I. & Kratzer, A. 1998. Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell. Heusinger, K. von 1999. Intonation and Information Structure. The Representation of Focus in Phonology and Semantics. Habilitationsschrift. Universität Konstanz. http://elib.uni- stuttgart.de/opus/volltexte/2003/1396/. Heusinger, K. von 2007. Alternative semantics for definite NPs. In On Information Structure, Meaning and Form. Generalizations across Languages [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 100], K. Schwabe & S. Winkler (eds), 485–508. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Heusinger, K. von & Onea, E. 2008. Triggering and blocking effects in the diachronic development of DOM in Romanian. Probus 21(1): 67–110. Hopper, P. J. & Thompson, S. A. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56(2): 251–299. Jacobs, J. 1983. Fokus und Skalen. Zur Syntax und Semantik der Gradpartikeln im Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kamp, H. & Bende Farkas, Á. 2006. Specific indefinites: anchors and functional reading. Ms, Universität Stuttgart. Karttunen, L. 1973. Presuppositions of compound sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 4(2): 167–193. Karttunen, L. 1977. Syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 1(1): 3–44. Kempson, R. M. 1975. Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics. Cambridge: CUP. Klein, U. 2007. Encoding of argument structure in Romanian and Siswati. PhD dissertation, University of London. Krifka, M. 1991. A compositional semantics for multiple focus constructions. Proceedings of the First Conference on Semantic and Linguistic Theory (SALT 1): 127–158. Krifka, M. 1992. A framework for focus-sensitive quantification. In Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory II, C. Barker & D. Dowty (eds), 215–236. Columbus OH: Ohio State University.

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Krifka, M. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In Working Papers of the SFB632, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) 6, C. Féry, G. Fanselow & M. Krifka (eds), 13–56. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag. Lycan, W. G. 1984. Logical Form in Natural Language [Bradford Books]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Martin, J. N. 1979. Some misconceptions in the critique of semantic presuppositions. Theoretical Linguistics 6(2–3): 235–282. Popescu, A. 1997. Objektklitika und Argumentlinking im Rumänischen. Magisterarbeit, Universität Düsseldorf. Rooth, M. 1985. Association with focus. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Rooth, M. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1): 75–116. Stechow, A. von. 1982. Structured propositions. Arbeitspapier 59 des Sonderforschungsbereichs 99, Universität Konstanz. Stechow, A. von. 1991. Current issues in the theory of focus. In Semantik/Semantics. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung / An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, A. von Stechow & D. Wunderlich (eds), 804–825. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Verb placement in Old Portuguese Esther Rinke

Universität Hamburg

This contribution is concerned with word order variation in Old Portuguese. It aims to more closely examine the assumption made in the literature that Portuguese underwent a diachronic change from a verb-second to a non-verb-second language. Employing the results of a corpus-based analysis it is argued that such an assumption cannot be correct, as the texts investigated show a high number of verb-initial and verb-third orders that are incompatible with a verb-second grammar. However, inversion structures with a sentence-initial non-subject constituent – a typical feature of verb-second languages – are consistently ­attested. Such patterns are often interpreted as unequivocal evidence in favor of a verb-second analysis. We propose an alternative analysis assuming that the subject occupies its vP-internal base position and the finite verb moves only as high as to the T° node. In terms of its information structural interpretation, the post-verbal subject is interpreted as being focused or as part of a thetic sentence, as is the case in modern Portuguese as well. We conclude that Portuguese did not undergo a restructuring of its grammatical system from a verb-second to a non-verb-second grammar.

1.

Introduction

This paper deals with verb placement in thirteenth-century Old Portuguese declarative main and subordinate clauses. We start out from the assumption made in the literature that Old Portuguese had a verb-second (V2) grammar, comparable to Germanic languages such as German (Ribeiro 1995; Salvi 2001, 2004). In typical or strict verb-second languages like German, the finite verb occupies the second place in declarative main clauses. This placement rule is independent of the syntactic or information structural status of the sentence initial constituent, cf. the examples in (1) and (2). We can say that it is primarily grammatically determined.

. This paper is based, in part, on Chapter 2 of my dissertation (Rinke 2007).

310 Esther Rinke

(1) a. b. c. d. e. f.

Es hat heute ohne Unterlaß geregnet. (expletive subject) it has today without cease rained ‘It has rained today without cease.’ Heute hat es ohne Unterlaß geregnet. (adverb) today has it without cease rained Ohne Unterlaß hat es heute geregnet. (adverbial prepositional phrase) without cease has it today rained Geregnet hat es heute ohne Unterlaß. (participle) rained has it today without cease Ohne Unterlaß geregnet hat es heute. (verbal phrase) without cease rained has it today Geregnet ohne Unterlaß hat es heute. (verbal phrase with preposed  rained without cease has it today participle) (examples in Haider 1993: 69)

(2) a. b. c. d.

(Ich will dir was über Karl erzählen:) (‘I’d like to tell you something about Karl’) Karl hat einen wirklich netten Brief geschrieben. (topic) Karl has a really nice letter written ‘Karl has written a really nice letter.’ (Wen hat der Direktor für den Gastvortrag eingeladen?) (‘Who did the director invite for the lecture?’) Den Hans hat der Direktor dafür eingeladen. (information focus) the Hans has the director for this invited ‘The director has invited Hans for it.’ Rot will Max die Haustür streichen. (contrastive focus) red wants Max the front door paint ‘Max wants to paint the front door red.’ Leider hat Max dem Otto nicht geholfen. (unmarked, neither unfortunately has Max the Otto not helped topic nor focus) ‘Unfortunately, Max didn’t help Otto.’ (examples in Frey 2005)

Verb-second placement is generally analyzed as resulting from verb movement to the complementizer position followed by movement of some XP to SpecCP. (3) [CP Heute [C’ hat [TP es [T’ hat [VP ohne Unterlaß geregnet]]]]]. Verb-third and verb-first structures are generally not permitted in such a system, unless they represent systematic exceptions such as verb-initial yes/no-questions for which an interrogative operator could be assumed to occupy the sentence initial position. An analysis in terms of a verb-second grammar has been proposed for other medieval Romance languages as well, especially for Old French (Adams 1987, 1988;



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 311

Roberts 1993; Vance 1997 among many others). In fact, Old French as well as Old Portuguese show constructions with a sentence initial non-subject constituent and a post-verbal subject (XP-V-S-clauses), see (4a) and (4b). (4) a. b.

Old French Einsint revindrent li mesage en la vile then returned the messengers to the town ‘And then the messengers returned to the town.’ (Josfroi de Vileharduyn, La Conqueste de Costentinoble (13th c.)) Old Portuguese E a meu ffjnam(en)to daren meus criados a dom abbade hũua and at my end give my servants to Dom abbot a  colleita crop ‘And at my end my servants will give a crop to the abbot.’ (Orense Doc. 59 (1292); Maia 1986: 142)

However, as shown by Kaiser (2002), the systematic occurrence of verb-initial and verb-third clauses disapprove the verb-second analysis of Old French. (5) a. b.

é la parole Deu rélment fud óïé and the word of God really was heard  (qlr9: 1 Sam 3,1; Kaiser 2002: 139) Respundi li evesches answered the bishop (qlr9: 1, Sam 3,7; Kaiser 2002: 137)

In Rinke & Meisel (in press) we have argued with respect to Old French that apparent verb-second clauses as in (4a) do not result from a verb-second grammar but reflect instead the interplay of a null subject grammar with information structure. Although exceptions to the verb-second generalization in the texts have also been noted in the literature, Old Portuguese has nevertheless been analyzed as a verb-second language in the technical sense – that is, a language with verb-movement to C°. The picture we have just painted of the DSG [Diálogos de São Gregório (14th c.), my insertion] suggests that it is not a perfect verb-second text. However, we suggest that the OP [Old Portuguese, my insertion] grammatical system was verb second in the technical sense, a system in which C° has the feature [+Agr].  (Ribeiro 1995: 126)

Salvi (2004) suggests that the observable variation in the data may be explained as a reflex of the diachronic change in progress. According to this view, the individual speakers had two different grammatical systems at their disposal.

312 Esther Rinke

From a diachronic perspective, the question as to why medieval Galego-Portuguese should have developed a verb-second grammar and lost it relatively soon afterwards still remains puzzling, because (Vulgar-)Latin was not a verb-second language, nor was there substantial Germanic influence as has been argued for Old French. Given that there is variation in the texts, we would like to know to what extent Old Portuguese texts exhibit evidence against or in favor of a verb-second analysis. This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 gives a short review of existing accounts on verb-placement in Old Portuguese, focusing on work by Ribeiro (1995) and Salvi (2001, 2004). In Section 3, I examine a corpus of Old Portuguese documents. Drawing on the results obtained in the study, I argue in Section 4 that thirteenth-century Old Portuguese cannot be analyzed as a verb-second language. I propose an alternative account of apparent verb-second structures with an XP-V-S-order, which does not include the assumption of verb-movement to C°. According to this analysis, word order variation is not the result of a grammatical constraint on verb placement but is rather determined by the information structure. Section 5 summarizes the paper.

2.

Previous studies

For the text Diálogos de São Gregório (before 1385), Ribeiro (1995) provides the following quantitative results concerning word order variation in main and subordinate clauses: Table 1.  The order of constituents in Old Portuguese (Ribeiro 1995: 112) Order

S-V-(C)

XP-V-(S)

V-S-V

(C)

Total

Root Embedded Total

15

31

 3

 8

  57

19 34

12 43

 7 10

18 26

  56 113

Ribeiro (1995) notes that all 15 subject initial main clauses are compatible with a verbsecond as well as with a non-verb-second grammar. However, even in her relatively small data set, 31 out of 57 main clauses show the typical verb-second word order: XP-V-(S), cf. the examples in (6):

. Ribeiro (1995) gives the following additional comments concerning this table, which I will reproduce here in short: Root clauses are affirmative independent/matrix sentences, including transitive, intransitive and copula constructions and existential structures. XP-V-(S) and VS orders indicate that the subject is post-verbal, although this does not mean that it is always post-verbal when phonetically null. Clitics are disregarded in V(C)-clauses.



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 313

(6) a. b.

Ca assi temian todalas bestas a agua so then feared all-the beasts the water ‘So all the beasts feared the water.’ Daqueste miragre diz San Gregorio que … of-this miracle says San Gregorio that … ‘San Gregorio says of this miracle that …’ (Ribeiro 1995: 113)

Ribeiro (1995) argues that these sentences have to be analyzed as instances of verbsecond structures because either a VP-element or an adverbial clause occupies the sentence-initial position with the subject appearing post-verbally. In subordinate clauses, Ribeiro (1995: 118) detects evidence of verb-second placement as well. Out of a total of 56 subordinate clauses, 19 show S-V-(C) and 12 XP-V-(S) orders. Examples are provided in (7).

(7) a. b. c. d.

Entendemos nós que a alma vive understand we that the soul lives ‘We understand that the soul lives.’ Dizemos que a alma recebe peãs say-1pl that the soul receives sufferings ‘We say that the soul undergoes sufferings.’ (Ribeiro 1995: 118) Soube que en aquela hora morrera knew-1sg that in that hour died-3sg ‘I knew that he had died at that time.’ E por esso diss’el que aqueles juizos de Deus and because-of that said he that those judgments of god pronunciara el que sairan ja da sa hoca uttered he which came-3pl already from his mouth ‘And because of that he said that he had uttered those judgments of God which had just come out of his mouth.’ (Ribeiro 1995: 119)

Ribeiro (1995) notes that the subject constituent is systematically empty or appears in the post-verbal position when another constituent occupies the sentence initial position. […] in the corpus analyzed, omission of the subject or its allocation to the postverbal position takes place when either a verb-subcategorized complement or a circumstantial occupies the first position in the sentence. (Ribeiro 1995: 123)

According to Ribeiro (1995: 121–122), verb-initial clauses are determined by special discourse functions reminiscent of verb-second languages like German. They represent directive constructions (8a–b), structures determined by discursive factors (8c) or sentences exhibiting Romance Free Inversion (8d). Sentences (8a) and (8b) are compatible with a verb-second grammar assuming an empty operator in the ­

314 Esther Rinke

clause-initial position (SpecCP). For (8c), which includes an unaccusative verb, ­Ribeiro argues that a phonetically empty pronominal (pro) occupies the initial place. (8) a. Conven, Pedro, que te cales suits Pedro that refl silent-2sg ‘It is convenient that you be quiet, Pedro.’ b. Ide-vos a bõa ventura go-you with good luck ‘Go and good luck.’ c. Diremos nós ora, padre, que … say-fut.1pl we now father that … ‘We will say now, father, that …’ d. … levaron-nos aa pousada homens que hi estavan took-1pl-us to the lodging men who there be.pst-3pl ‘… men who were there took us to the lodging.’ (Ribeiro 1995: 121) Verb-third order, which should not be found in a verb-second language, only occurs under very specific conditions, especially with certain sentence-initial adverbials as those seen in (9a) and (9b). OSV-orders are not attested in Ribeiro’s data base, with an S-XP-V order only being attested once. (9) a. b.

E assi o santo homen defendeu os seus discipulos and thus the saintly man defended the his disciples ‘And the saintly man thus protected his disciples.’ E enton hũũ homen siia en sa pousada and then a man sat-down in his inn ‘Then a man sat down in his inn.’ (Ribeiro 1995: 124)

In sum, the following generalizations can be derived from Ribeiro’s (1995) study: 1. The majority of main clauses represent the typical verb-second main clause word order XP-V-(S). 2. The subject – when realized – occupies either the sentence-initial position immediately preceding the finite verb or a post-verbal position, with another constituent preceding the verb. 3. Verb-third or verb-first sentences are lexically restricted or occur under certain discourse conditions. Ribeiro (1995) interprets these generalizations as evidence of Old Portuguese being a verb-second language. She proposes analyzing XP-V-S-sentences as the result of verb-movement to C°. The author considers the existence of an agreement feature in the complementizer-position to be the trigger for this movement. Additional evi-



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 315

dence for this assumption is the fact that clitic object pronouns may be interpolated in Old Portuguese: they may be separated from the finite verb and occur adjacent to conjunctions as shown in example (10) (cf. Tomaselli 1990). (10) mandou que o non dissessen a nengũũ … ordered-3sg that it not said-subj-3pl to no one ‘He ordered them not to say it to anyone …’ (Ribeiro 1995: 127) Like Ribeiro (1995), Salvi (2001) ascribes a verb-second grammar to Old Portuguese and to the medieval Romance languages in general. He assumes that the finite verb occupies the second position after a sentence-initial topic or focus constituent. ­According to Salvi (2001), an overtly realized subject which is not sentence-initial occupies the post-verbal position after a finite auxiliary (11). (11) a. Verb-second main clauses (Salvi 2001: 299) XTheme/Focus Vfin (S) [T/F’’ Messe e matines [T/F’ ad [I’ li reis tV escultét tO]]] mass and matins has the king heard ‘The king has heard the mass and the matins.’ (Old French, La chanson de Roland (11th/12th c.), cited in Salvi 2001: 99) b. Verb-second subordinate clauses que XTheme/Focus Vfin (S) [C’’ ... [C’ que [T/F’’ ... [T/F’ V [I’’ S [I’ tV ... ]]]]]] Like Ribeiro (1995), Salvi (2001) observes some variation concerning verb placement in Old Portuguese. He notes that some sentences do not obey the verb-second requirement. According to Salvi (2001), such clauses represent archaic sentences, in which the finite verb only moves to a higher functional projection if it is focused. This corresponds to the Latin sentence structure which competes with the innovative Romance verb-second grammar. (12) a. Archaic main clauses (a) Focus X … V X …: [F’’ X [F’ Ø [I’’ … V]]] (b) Verb in focus or operator in F’’: [T/F’’ … [T/F’ V [I’’ … S … tV … ]]] b. Archaic subordinate clauses que Focus X … V X …: [C’’ … [C’ que [F’’ X’’ [F’ [I’’ … S … V]]]]] (Salvi 2001)

. With respect to word order and information structure in Latin, cf. Devine & Stephens (2006).

316 Esther Rinke

Salvi (2001) describes Old Portuguese word order variation as a complex interplay of two different parameters which are specified in different ways for archaic and innovative patterns. The first parameter concerns the placement of the constituents in the propositional part of the clause and the second parameter the different options of verb movement. In Salvi’s system, verb-second patterns are explained as part of the verbsecond grammar and conflicting word orders are part of another and more archaic grammatical system. The problem with such an unrestricted system is, however, that any potential word order pattern could theoretically be explained and that it remains unclear how the two mutually exclusive systems could be kept distinct in their usage in order to be learnable during the process of language acquisition. In the following section, I will provide the results of an empirical investigation that questions the assumption that Old Portuguese has verb-second properties.

3.

Corpus based analysis

3.1

Data and methods

The database consists of 93 juridical documents from the second half of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century. They stem from the North of Portugal, from Galicia and from the center of Portugal (Lisbon region). The documents were chosen on the basis of the following criteria: first, they constitute the earliest documents in Portuguese. To my knowledge, there are no other reliable narrative sources for this early period which could be used for syntactic studies on word order variation. Second, the documents are not copies or translations of other manuscripts. Third, they all contain the place and date of issue. Finally, they are published in excellent editions, specifically those of Maia (1986) and Martins (2001), which were composed for the purpose of linguistic research. Juridical documents contain formulaic expressions which usually appear in the introduction and conclusion of the document. These formulas were excluded for the purpose of this study. With respect to the data analysis, I distinguished between different types of ­subjects (nominal, pronominal or empty) in order to be able to explain possible ­differences between their behaviors. XP-V-clauses are set apart from XP-V-S-clauses, because they are not considered to be clear cases of verb-second inversion (contra Ribeiro 1995). Clitic elements were not counted as independent syntactic constituents. Coordinated main clauses with an (empty) identical subject were not taken into consideration, nor were sentences without a finite verb. Because the editions are very faithful to the manuscripts, sentence boundaries had to be identified.



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 317

3.2

Results

Table 2 gives an overview of the position of the finite verb in main clauses. I analyzed a total of 776 declarative main clauses. Table 2 shows that the finite verb appears in the first, second and third position. Two or more constituents precede the finite verb in >V3–clauses. In 25.3% of all main clauses (196 examples), the subject appears in the clause-initial position immediately followed by the finite verb. As rightly stated by Ribeiro, such examples are compatible with both a verb-second and a non-verb-second grammar. The same is true for all verb-initial sentences with a null subject (182 examples) because it is a priori not clear where the empty subject is represented, as well as for null-subject clauses with an initial adjunct clause, with direct or indirect objects or with adverbial phrases (169 examples), which can either be analyzed as verb-second or as verb-third sentences. 41 sentences show an XP-V-S-order, 31 with a post-verbal DP subject and 10 with a post-verbal pronominal subject. The sentence-initial position of these sentences is occupied in 5 cases by an adjunct clause, in 12 cases by a direct object (13a) and in 24 examples by an adverbial phrase (13b). (13) a. b.

O q(u)al casar rezebio o uosso frade frey Johã Ssauaschaez por that house received your brother Johã Sanchez for  jur de uos promise of your ‘Your brother Johã Sanchez received that house due to your promise …’ (Doc. 26, Lugo (1281); Maia 1986: 76) (e) por seer mays firme mãdou o Conue˜to poer y seu and in order to be more firm ordered the convent affix there its  segelo. seal ‘and in order to make it more firm, the convent ordered to affix its seal there.’ (Doc. 115, Lisboa (Chelas) (1273); Martins 2001: 351)

Sentences such as (14a) with an XP-V-S-order and an initial adjunct clause are no longer grammatical in modern Portuguese (14b).

. S = subject, Vf = finite verb, XP/YP = any constituent.

197 25.4

 2

postverbal

Total %

 –

Prono­minal presubjects verbal

182

13

postverbal

Null subjects

 –

preverbal

Nominal  subjects

196 25.3

 –

–

  34

–

162

SV(X)

Subject-Vf

V1

Vf/ e(t) Vf

XP-V-(S)

210 27.1

169

10

 –

31

 –

28 40 5.2

44 5.7

4

–

8

–

39

1

–

4

–

 3 0.4

 3

0

–

0

–

XPV(S)-total Adjunct-clause-Vf Direct-object-Vf Indirect-object-Vf

Table 2.  Verb placement in main clauses (13th and 14th c.s) (Rinke 2007)

123 15.8

  99

 5

 –

  19

 –

Adverbial-phrase-Vf

>V3

173 22.3

  26

 2

  20

 6

119

XP-YP-Vf

776 100

377

14

  54

50

281

Σ

318 Esther Rinke



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 319

(14) a. b.

& se p(er) uent(ur)a eu nõ posso me auíj’r cõuosco ena and if accidentally I not can me agree-on with-you in-a ue˜zõ ou eno supenoram(en)to, póérm(os) eu un meu compensation or in-the payment nominate I a my amigo & uos out(r)o uosso … friend and you other yours ‘And in case I cannot come to an agreement with you about the compen- sation or the payment, I will name one of my friends and you one of yours.’ (Doc. 19, Lugo (1255); Maia 1986: 68) *Se ela tivesse tido o tempo, teria a mulher lido if she had had the time would-have the woman read o livro. the book (Kaiser 2002: 4)

Sentences such as (14a), however, cannot be considered as unequivocal evidence of the verb-second grammar of Old Portuguese because the post-verbal placement of the subject is by no means obligatory, as shown in (15a) and (15b) (cf. Kaiser 2002: 160). (15) a. b.

Quando Paunuçio dizia estas cousas e outras taaes, todos aquelles when Paunuçio said these things and others such all that que hy estavõ fazyam planto. which there were did lamentation ‘When Paunuçio said these things and others of this sort, everybody who was there lamented.’ (Kaiser 2002: 160) E sse nõ adubar a dauãdicta vinha (e) nõ pagar and if not cultivate the aforementioned vineyard and not pay os dauãd(i)ctos dineyros assy como d(i)cto e. a the aforementioned monies as how said is the dauãd(i)cta Steph(ã)ina perez deue dar ssa vinha aforementioned Stephaina Perez must give her vineyard a q(ue)n q(ui)ser … to whom wants ‘And if she does not cultivate the aforementioned vineyard or not pay the aforementioned monies as contracted, the aforementioned Stephaina Perez must hand over her vineyard to somebody who wants it …’ (Doc. 114, Lisboa (Chelas) (1273); Martins 2001: 350)

Verb-third order is a frequent phenomenon in the database. 119 examples show a nominal subject with at least one additional preverbal constituent. In 20 cases, a preverbal pronoun occurs together with another constituent. An example showing OSV order is presented in (16).

320 Esther Rinke

(16)

o qual casal a d(i)ta dona Mayor ue˜egas por sua alma e en this house the aforementioned Dona Mayor Vegas for her soul and in remijme˜to d(e) seus pecados mandou ao d(i)to Most(eir)o. repentance of her sins ordered to-the aforementioned monastery ‘The aforementioned Dona Mayor Vegas handed this house over to the aforementioned monastery for the good of her soul and in repentance of her sins.’ (Doc. 20, Noroeste (Mosteiro de S. Salvador de Moreira) (1282); Martins 2001: 143)

Examples (15) and (16) show that in our database subject inversion is not obligatory when another constituent occupies the sentence initial position. Moreover, verb-third order is by no means an inconsequential phenomenon in main clauses. 173 sentences (22.3%) show more than one constituent preceding the finite verb. It is important to note that such clauses are not restricted to certain lexical elements or special discourse contexts. The sentence initial position of verb-third clauses is occupied by adjunct clauses, direct and indirect objects, predicative adjectives and different types of adverbials. Verb-initial clauses, especially those with null subjects, are also found frequently. One example is given in (17). Example (17) does not include an imperative or a directive meaning. & maenfestam(os) & conoszem(os) q(ue) rezibem(os) de uos por and manifest and acknowledge that received from you for p(re)zu do sobred(i)to h(er)dam(en)tu dozentus & price of-the aforementioned manor two hundred and cinq(u)aenta s(oldo)s … fifty Soldos ‘And we manifest and acknowledge that we received from you the price of two hundred and fifty Soldos for the aforementioned manor.’ (Doc. 07, A Coruña (Puentedeume) (1282); Maia 1986: 49)

(17)

Table 3 gives an overview of verb placement in subordinate clauses.

. We only took subordinate clauses introduced by a complementizer into consideration. Relative clauses were excluded. Conditional clauses were excluded as well. In contrast to all other types of subordinate clauses, they very frequently exhibit an SOV order.

218

42.6

Total

%

36.5

187

 –

*C-Vf = Complementizer – finite verb.

195

 –

   4

postverbal

Null subjects

  66

 –

 –

121

8.0

41

40

 0

–

 1

–

 9  9 1.8

 2 0.4

 0

–

 0

–

C-direct object-Vf

XP-V-(S)

 2

 0

–

 0

–

C-subject-Vf XP-V-(S)-total C-adjunct-clause-Vf

SV(X)

preverbal

  19

postverbal

Prono- minal subjects

 –

Nominal presubjects verbal

C-Vf*

V1

Table 3.  Verb placement in subordinate clauses (13th and 14th c.s) (Rinke 2007)

0.4

 2

 2

 0

–

 0

–

5.5

28

27

 0

–

 1

–

12.9

66

 9

 0

 5

 0

52

C-indirect C-adverbial-phrase-Vf C-XP-YP-Vf object-Vf

>V3

100

512

244

   4

  71

  20

173

Σ

Verb placement in Old Portuguese 321

322 Esther Rinke

I analyzed 512 subordinate clauses. The finite verb occurs in the first, second and third position. There are, however, clearly a smaller number of examples showing inversion or verb-third order than in the main clauses. Only one example exhibits an XP-V-Sorder with a post-verbal nominal subject and a preverbal adverbial phrase (18). (18) …

q(ue) p(er)ante my Joam iohanes Juyz da Giar d(e) sousa fez that in-front-of me John Ioanes judge of Aguiar de Souza did ó Abbade d(e) Cety e o cõuentu d(e)manda d(e) dous the abbot of Cety and the convent enforcement of two casáes á Móór eanes … claims about Moor Eanes ‘… that the abbot of Cety and the convent filed two complaints about Moor Eanes in front of me, John Ioanes, judge of Aguiar de Souza’ (Doc. 10, Noroeste (Mosteiro de S. Pedro de Cete) (1273); Martins  2001: 120)

On the other hand, there are a relatively large number of verb-third subordinate clauses (66 examples, 52 with preverbal nominal subjects, 5 with preverbal pronominal subjects and 9 with a null subject). In summary, a corpus-based analysis of 776 main and 512 subordinate clauses has shown that main clauses with XP-V-S orders do not constitute the most frequent word order pattern (41 out of 776 sentences). The subject is not necessarily placed post-verbally when a non-subject constituent occupies the sentence initial position. Verb-third orders are frequently found in main clauses (173 out of 776) and do also occur in subordinate clauses (66 out of 512). The same is true for verb-first clauses. Verb-third and verb-first clauses are not compatible with a verb-second grammar. In conclusion, on the basis of the data analysis, Old Portuguese cannot be characterized as a verb-second language. If it is, however, true that Old Portuguese is not a verb-second language, what type of alternative analysis can explain the XP-V-S clauses?

4.

Discussion

I believe that the key to answering this question may lie in a comparison of Old Portuguese inversion with modern Portuguese inversion. As previously mentioned, all word order patterns found in Old Portuguese are fundamentally also possible in modern Portuguese with the exception of sentence-initial adjunct clauses, such as seen in (14a). Are the conditions under which post-verbal subjects occur in Old Portuguese the same as in modern Portuguese or do they differ? In order to answer this question, we will first have a closer look at inversion structures in modern Portuguese. I will discuss three prominent accounts of inversion in



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 323

modern Portuguese, before concluding with an analysis of the Old Portuguese generalizations.

4.1

Inversion in modern Portuguese

The occurrence of post-verbal subjects in Romance null-subject languages like Portuguese has been called Romance or Free inversion. Ambar (1992: 185) notes that inversion is not really free, insofar as inversion structures necessarily involve a particular interpretation. According to Ambar (1992), the post-verbal subject in modern Portuguese sentences such as (19) represents the information focus of the sentence (see also Martins 1994; Costa 1998, 2004). (19)

(Quem comeu o bolo?) (‘Who ate the cake?’) Comeu o João. ate the João ‘João ate (it)./It was João who ate it.’ (Ambar 1992: 185)

Ambar (1992) also notes that in the context of (19), the post-verbal position of the subject is not only possible but obligatory. A pre-verbal subject would be inappropriate, even if it was stressed. (20) *?A JOANA comeu. The post-verbal placement of the subject becomes more natural when a topical element occupies the sentence initial position (Ambar 1992, 1999). (21) O chocolate comeu o João. the chocolate ate the João Martins (1994) observes that post-verbal placement is appropriate not only in contexts in which the subject represents the information focus but also in thetic sentences, cf. (22). (22) a. b.

Está lá um gato no jardim. is there a cat in-the garden ‘There is a cat in the garden.’ O gato está lá no jardim. the cat is there in-the garden ‘The cat is there in the garden.’

Sentence (22b) displays a topic-comment-structure, in which the preverbal subject represents the topic (in the sense of ‘what the sentence is about’). Sentence (22a) is a thetic or presentational clause and provides the description of a situation. It does

324 Esther Rinke

not include a topic-comment structure. A thetic interpretation of the sentence with a post-verbal subject, however, is dependent on the verb or construction type, as shown by Pinto (1997) for Italian. According to Pinto, the verbs that allow for this interpretation with a post-verbal subject are typically intransitive, especially verbs of motion (e.g. some but not all unaccusative verbs such as Italian arrivare ‘to arrive’), some unergatives (such as telefonare ‘to phone’), and copula verbs in predicative sentences as seen in example (22a). Although the placement and interpretation of the post-verbal subject is dependent on the relevant context, the grammar must provide this structural option. There are several different syntactic accounts of this phenomenon: Ambar (1992, 1999) proposes that the finite verb in modern Portuguese inversion structures moves as high as the CP field and that the post-verbal subject occupies the specifier position of IP. Martins (1994) assumes that the post-verbal subject stays in SpecTP with the finite verb in Σ°, which the author assumes to be the highest functional node in the IP domain. Costa (1998, 2004) argues that the finite verb moves to I°. The post-verbal subject is localized in its base position (SpecVP). Costa & Duarte (2002) assume that two post-verbal subject positions are available below the position of the finite verb (AgrS°): SpecTP for thetic subjects and SpecVP for focused subjects. It is obvious that the different proposals cannot be easily compared with one another, because they are based on the assumption of different sentence structures, especially with respect to the existence of different functional projections. I assume a reduced sentence structure, which only contains the functional projections CP, TP, and vP, but no additional agreement projections. I will briefly mention some possible arguments and tests which can be helpful in comparing the modern Portuguese findings to the Old Portuguese data on the basis of the adopted sentence structure. The possible placement of post-verbal subjects between a finite auxiliary and a participle as seen in example (23), taken from Ambar (1992: 80), could be interpreted as an argument in favor of verb movement to C° in inversion sentences. (23)

Nesse dia, tinha a Maria/ela emprestado os seus melhores discos ao that day had the Maria/she lent the her best records to Pedro. Pedro ‘On this day, Maria/she lent her best records to Pedro.’

This word order is reminiscent of that of verb-second languages such as German (An diesem Tag hatte Maria/sie ihre besten Platten Pedro geliehen). However, there are two differences with respect to German word order restrictions: First, in Portuguese, the subject may be placed after the participle as well as in front of it (Costa 1998, 2004), cf. (24a), and second, the initial position of the adverbial phrase does not obligatorily trigger inversion, cf. (24b), as it would be the case in German.



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 325

(24) a. b.

Tinha comido o Paulo maçãs. had eaten the Paulo apples ‘Paulo had eaten apples.’ (Costa 2004: 26) Nesse dia, a Maria / ela tinha emprestado os seus melhores discos that day the Maria / she had lent the her best records ao Pedro. to Pedro ‘On this day, Maria / she lent her best records to Pedro.’

An additional argument against verb-movement to C° is provided by Costa (1998, 2004), who notes that inversion is not restricted to main clauses but also occurs in subordinate clauses. In (25), the verb cannot occupy C° because this position is already taken by the complementizer que. (25) O Paulo disse que comeu a Maria a sopa. The Paulo said that ate the Maria the soup ‘Paulo said that Maria ate the soup.’ (Costa 2004: 26) Under the assumption that the finite verb moves only as high as the T-head, a restrictive model of sentence structure such as the one adopted here predicts that the post-verbal subject is placed in the vP-domain. This is additionally supported by the placement of short adverbs like bem ‘well’. According to Costa (1998: 125–126, 2004: 28–29), such adverbs, which mark the left edge of the verbal phrase, are placed to the left of post-verbal subjects: (26) a. *Bem comeu o Paulo maçãs. well ate the Paulo apples b. ?*Comeu o Paulo bem maçãs. c. *Comeu o Paulo maçãs bem. d. Comeu bem o Paulo maçãs. (Costa 2004: 28) Romance Free Inversion has been associated with the null-subject property (Rizzi 1982, Raposo 1992). The structural possibility of having a post-verbal subject placed in its base position can be derived from structural economy. Inversion is syntactically free in these languages because it constitutes a grammatical option made available on the basis of a [+pronominal] agreement system (Chomsky 1982). According to Barbosa (1995), pronominal agreement enables the checking of the EPP-feature of

. In Costa & Duarte (2002), this judgement is revised insofar as the authors claim that the post-verbal subject of a thetic sentence may occur to the left of bem (Costa & Duarte 2002: 172): Comeu o João bem as maçãs. The authors assume that the finite verb moves to an AgrS head and that two post-verbal positions are available, viz. SpecTP and SpecVP.

326 Esther Rinke

the T-head via verb-raising to T°. Free Inversion thus reflects ­derivational economy, as the subject is not forced to move for checking reasons and can therefore stay in its post-verbal base position (SpecvP) as long as it is compatible with an interpretation as the information focus or part of a thetic sentence. Its incompatibility with such an interpretation would cause the subject to move to the pre-verbal position. In summary, it can be said that post-verbal subjects in modern Portuguese are either focused or part of a thetic sentence (with inversion verbs). I have pursued an analysis according to which the finite verb moves to T° and the post-verbal subject occupies a low structural position, possibly its base position (SpecvP).

4.2 Inversion in Old Portuguese With respect to Old Portuguese, we are faced with two problems. First, not all classification criteria could be applied because not all the relevant constructions are attested. Auxiliary-participle constructions of the type seen in (23) do not occur. Second, it is difficult to identify the information-structural status of the constituents because the typical question-answer pairs as presented in (19) are not available. Because the corpus analysis in 3.2 raised doubts as to whether Old Portuguese can be analyzed as a verb-second language, I will start out from the null hypothesis that Old Portuguese inversion is determined by the same factors as in modern Portuguese. This means concretely that first, the verb does not move to the C-domain and that second, the post-verbal subject occupies a low structural position, which I assume to be SpecvP. I will argue that in this position, it is likely that the subject represents new information. Unfortunately, we cannot be sure whether inversion regularly occurs in main clauses and subordinate clauses in Old Portuguese, because in our texts, inversion is only attested in one embedded sentence, viz. example (18), repeated below as (27): (27)

q(ue) p(er)ante my Joam iohanes Juyz da Giar d(e) sousa fez ó that in-front-of me Joam Ioanes judge of Aguiar de Souza did the Abbade d(e) Cety e o cõuentu d(e)manda d(e) dous casáes á abbot of Cety and the convent enforcement of two claims about Móór eanes … Moor Eanes

. See Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou (1998) and Kato (1999) for similar proposals along these lines. . In earlier accounts, the post-verbal subject was not localized in SpecvP because the base position of the subject was not considered to be a possible position to fulfill case-checking requirements (see Martins 1994, and Belletti 2001 for Italian). In more recent accounts, casechecking is seen as an effect of the operation Agree (Chomsky 2001). The post-verbal subject in SpecvP is accessible to this operation, because it occupies the left edge of the verbal phase (Costa 2004: 99).



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 327

‘… that the abbot of Cety and the convent filed two complaints about Moor Eanes in front of me, Joam Ioanes, judge of Aguiar de Souza …’ (Doc. 10, Noroeste (Mosteiro de S. Pedro de Cete) (1273);  Martins 2001: 120) With respect to the placement of so-called vP-peripheral adverbs, Martins (2002: 238– 239) shows that adverbs such as sempre ‘always’ in Old Portuguese follow the finite verb, as in (28). She concludes that the finite verb has left the verbal phrase. E rogo que cada uno destes añiuersarios facan sempre en dia and I-request that each one of-these anniversaries do always in day de mia morte... of my death ‘And I request that a religious ceremony be always performed in celebration of the anniversary of my death.’ (from Castro 1991: 199 (1214), cit. in Martins 2002: 239) (28)

Martins’ (2002) argument with respect to the position of the finite verb can also be applied to the placement of the subject. Example (29) shows that a post-verbal subject occurs to the right of sempre. If sempre marks the left edge of the verbal phrase, the subject occupies a vP-internal position. (29)

& esta grana sobredjta more senp(re) un nosso frade and this dairy-farm aforementioned inhabits always one our brother por jur do mosteyro … for right of-the monastery ‘And this dairy farm will always be inhabited by one of our brothers with the right of the monastery.’ (Doc. 026, Lugo (1281); Maia 1986: 76)

Syntactically, the possibility of the subject occupying its vP-internal base position results from the fact that Old Portuguese is a null-subject language with a pronominal agreement system like modern Portuguese (cf. the high number of empty subjects in the texts). The next question concerns the information structure of the different word order variants. A first dimension of information structure relates to the characterization of the sentence. With respect to modern Portuguese we have seen that sentences divide into those with a topic-comment structure and those without one (thetic or presentational sentences). In unmarked sentences with a topic-comment organization the topic corresponds to the syntactic subject. With respect to Old Portuguese, the first empirical observation is that the quantitative distribution of subjects exhibits a general preference for the pre-verbal position. In main clauses, 335 subjects occur pre-verbally with only 64 in post-verbal position. In subordinate clauses, 244 subjects are placed before the verb and 25 post-verbally. Given that subjects preferentially comprise the topic of the sentence, this quantitative distribution would be expected if

328 Esther Rinke

the pre-verbal subject position is associated with a topic interpretation as in modern Portuguese. We may also conclude that the post-verbal position is an uncommon position for the subject as it is a non-topic position. With respect to their interpretation, some (especially verb-initial) clauses with post-verbal subjects can be identified as thetic sentences, cf. (30): (30)

Regnaua ĩ Leom e ĩ Castella & na Andaluzia rey dom Affonso. governed in Leon and in Castile and in Andalusia king Dom Affonso ‘It governed in Leon and in Castile and in Andalusia King Affonso.’ (Doc. 25, Lugo (1278); Maia 1986: 75)

With respect to the interpretation of the post-verbal subject another dimension of information structure comes into play. We have seen that in modern Portuguese postverbal subjects are focused. If we operate with the oppositional couples focus-background and topic-comment, we can say that a topic interpretation of the subject and an interpretation as the focus are mutually exclusive, although, of course, the notions of background and topic and comment and focus overlap. Both a topic and a focus interpretation of the subject have correlates at different linguistic levels. Because question-answer pairs are not at our disposal, we can make use of these correlates when we try to find out the information structural interpretation of the post-verbal subject. One indication could be its combination with a definite or indefinite article. Although this generalization is much too coarse, we can roughly say that in general, definite noun phrases correlate with a topic interpretation and indefinite noun phrases with a non-topic or focus interpretation. In our database, an interesting asymmetry arises with respect to the distribution of definite and indefinite subjects. In general, indefinite subjects are rare. In our texts, all instances are attested in post-verbal position. In terms of example (29), it is obvious that the indefinite subject has a non-specific interpretation. It clearly represents new information in this context and is not interpreted as the topic of the sentence. For the indefinite subject in example (31), it is clear from the context that the noun phrase uma procuração represents new information because the sentence reports on the appearance of this text, which had not been mentioned in the preceding context. (31) … e˜ Lixbõa p(er)dant(e) Affonso ean(e)s … pareceu hũa p(ro)c(ur)açõ in Lisbon in-front-of Affonso Eanes appeared a procuration da Condesa donna Tareyia ssanchis … of-the Condessa Dona Tareyia Sanchis … ‘In Lisbon in front of Affonso Eanes … appeared a procuration of the Condessa Dona Tareya Sanchis …’ (Doc. 147, Lisboa (Chelas) (1306); Martins 2001: 397) To a certain extent, though not in every case, the context can provide the relevant information. In the following sentence, the post-verbal subject of the OVS clause is



Verb placement in Old Portuguese 329

clearly introduced into the discourse at this point. (32a) is the sentence immediately preceding the relevant clause (the first sentence of the text). (32) a. b.

Context: Conuzuda cousa seya a q(u)antos esta carta viré como eu dona Tereyga Uasquez … rezebyo de uos, dõ Domj~go P(ere)z, abade, & do (con)uéto do moosteyro de Santa Maria de Ssobrado de Galjza pra téér de uos & por uos en mja vida tã ssolaméte a uossa g(r)ana de Queyroga cõ todas ssuas p(er)tenézas & cõ aquel casar q(ue) uos eu dy en t(er)ra de Caldelas en lugar que dizé Ljmjares. ‘Everybody reading this letter should know that I, Dona Teresa Vasques … received from you, Dom Domingo Perez, abbot, and from the con- vent of the monastery of Santa Maria of Sobrado in Galicia, in order to keep it from you and for you in my whole life, your farm in Queyroga with all its accompanying lands and with that house that I gave to you in the region of Caldelas, in a place which is called Limiares.’ O q(u)al casar rezebio o uosso frade frey Johã the this house received the your brother brother Johão Ssauaschaez por jur de uos. Sanchez for promise of you ‘Your brother Johão Sanchez received that house due to your promise.’ (Doc. 026, Lugo (1281); Maia 1986: 76)

The noun phrase o q(u)al casar ‘this house’ is the topic of sentence (32b). The rest of the sentence provides additional information about this topic. In contrast to the topic itself, which was mentioned in the preceding sentence, the subject o uosso frade frey Johã Ssauaschaez ‘your brother João Sanchez’ represents new information and is part of the comment. We conclude that in (32b) the post-verbal subject is the focus of the sentence or at least part of the focus domain. The placement of pronominal subjects represents another possible source of information with regard to information structure. Third person pronouns quite consistently refer to the previous discourse because they represent anaphoric information. They are therefore only expected in post-verbal position if they are contrastively focused. In modern Portuguese, post-verbal pronominal subjects are possible unless they occur in the sentence-final position (cf. the ungrammaticality of (33b), Ambar 1992: 80). (33) a.

Nesse dia, tinha a Maria/ela emprestado os seus melhores that day had the Maria/she lent the her best discos ao Pedro. records to Pedro ‘On this day, Maria/she lent her best records to Pedro.’

330 Esther Rinke

b.

Nesse dia, tinha emprestado os seus melhores discos ao Pedro that day had lent the her best records to Pedro A MARIA/??a Maria/*ela/?*ELA MARIA/Maria/she/SHE

With respect to Old Portuguese, a post-verbal pronominal subject is not attested in sentence final position. Post-verbal subjects are realized more often as full noun phrases than as pronouns (main clauses: 50 post-verbal nouns and 14 post-verbal pronouns; subordinate clauses: 21 post-verbal nouns and 4 post-verbal pronouns). Among the rare examples of post-verbal pronominal subjects, only 3 are third person pronouns. For all of these examples, it seems clear that the subject pronoun is stressed contrastively, cf. the examples in (34): (34) a. b. c.

E por isto q(ue) nos dem(os) e outorgam(os) a esse P(ri)or; and for that what we give and transfer to this prior deu ele a nos … o Casal de Lourido. gave he to us … the house of Lourido ‘And for what we give and transfer to this prior, he gives in exchange the house of Lourido to us.’ (Doc. 23, Noroeste (Mosteiro de S. Miguel de Vilarinho) (1287); Martins 2001: 146) Mando o meu salteyro grande a Jo(han) Ean(e)s, ... q(ue) o I-order the my heel cutter big to Johan Eanes that it aia elle en sua uida & poys sua mort(e) q(ue) fique ao has he in his life and after his death that remains to-the m(o)est(e)i(r)o… monastery ‘I transfer my big heel cutter to Johan Eanes,..., so that he owns it during his life and after his death it remains in possession of the monastery...” (Doc. 55, Orense (1281); Maia 1986: 133) E isto fex ela ao dito P(edr)o Hean(e)s p(or) and this did she to-the aforementioned Pedro Eanes for muyto ceruyço & p(or) muyta ajuda q(ue) el sempre fez e great service and for great help that he always did and ffaz ao dito moesteyro. does to-the aforementioned monastery ‘And she did this for Pedro Eanes in return for the great assistance and help that he gave and gives to the monastery.’ (Doc. 141, Douro Litoral (1289); Maia 1986: 251)

In summary, structural and information structural properties of post-verbal subjects in Old Portuguese indicate that their distribution is subject to the same conditions as in modern Portuguese: the post-verbal subject occupies a low structural position in the clause where it is interpreted as the information focus or part of the focus domain.



5.

Verb placement in Old Portuguese 331

Conclusions

This paper has shown that the analysis of word order variation in historical records has to take into consideration the information structural status of the sentence itself and of its constituents in order to give a better account for the underlying grammatical system. The paper has focused on verb placement in thirteenth-century Old Portuguese with the central question of whether Old Portuguese has verb-second properties as proposed in the literature (Ribeiro 1995, Salvi 2000, 2004). Through a text-based investigation, I have argued that it is not plausible to analyze Old Portuguese as a verbsecond language. The main empirical argument for this assumption is the frequent occurrence of verb-third and verb-first sentences. These sentences are not restricted to certain lexical items or to special discourse conditions, as they would be in a verbsecond language. Nevertheless, there are cases of inversion in the texts which demand an alternative explanation. Given that modern Portuguese also allows for XP-V-S structures, I started out from the null hypothesis that Old Portuguese inversion structures are determined by the same factors. It has been argued for modern Portuguese that inversion represents derivational economy and is a result of the null subject property. I have followed an analysis according to which the post-verbal subject occupies a low structural position and is interpreted as focused or part of the focus domain. I have argued that the same holds true for Old Portuguese. According to this analysis, word order variation is expected with respect to the position of the subject because it is not the result of a grammatical constraint on verb placement but is rather determined by the information structural interpretation of the subject.

References Adams, M. 1987. From Old French to the theory of pro-drop. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5(1): 1–32. Adams, M. 1988. Parametric change: empty subjects in Old French. In Advances in Romance Linguistics, D. Birdsong & J.-P. Montreuil (eds), 1–16. Dordrecht: Foris. Alexiadou, A. & Anagnostopoulou, E. 1998. Parametrizing AGR: word order, v-movement and EPP-checking. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16(3): 491–539. Ambar, M. M. 1992. Para uma Sintaxe da Inversão Sujeito-Verbo em Português. Lisboa: Colibri. Ambar, M. M. 1999. Aspects of the syntax of focus in Portuguese. In The Grammar of Focus [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 24], G. Rebuschi & L. Tuller (eds), 23–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barbosa, P. 1995. Null subjects. PhD dissertation, MIT. Belletti, A. 2001. ‘Inversion’ as focalization. In Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar [Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax], A. Hulk & J.-Y. Pollock (eds), 60–90. Oxford: OUP. Castro, I. 1991. Curso de História da Lingua Portuguesa. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta. Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.

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Chomsky, N. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale. A Life in Language, M. Kenstowicz (ed.), 1–52. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Costa, J. 1998. Word Order Variation. A Constraint-Based Approach. The Hague: HAG. Costa, J. 2004. Subject Positions and Interfaces: The Case of European Portuguese [Studies in Generative Grammar 73]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Costa, J. & Duarte, I. 2002. Preverbal subjects in null subject languages are not necessarily dislocated. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 1(2): 159–175. Devine, A. M. & Stephens, L. D. 2006. Latin Word Order. Structured Meaning and Information. Oxford: OUP. Frey, W. 2005. Zur Syntax der linken Peripherie im Deutschen. In Deutsche Syntax: Empirie und Theorie, F. J. d’Avis (ed.), 147–171. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Kaiser, G. A. 2002. Verbstellung und Verbstellungswandel in den romanischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kato, M. A. 1999. Strong and weak pronominals in the null subject parameter. Probus 11(1): 1–37. Maia, C. de Azevedo. 1986. História do Galego-Português. Coimbra: INIC. Martins, A. M. 1994. Cliticos na História do Português. PhD dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa. Martins, A. M. 2001. Documentos Portugueses do Noroeste e da Região de Lisboa: Da Produção Primitiva ao Século XVI. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. Martins, A. M. 2002. The loss of IP-scrambling in Portuguese: clause structure, word order variation and change. In Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change, D. W. Lightfoot (ed.), 232–248. Oxford: OUP. Pinto, M. 1997. Licensing and Interpretation of Inverted Subjects in Italian. PhD dissertation, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS. Raposo, E. P. 1992. Teoria da Gramática. A Faculdade da Linguagem. Lisboa: Caminho. Ribeiro, I. 1995. Evidence for a verb-second phase in Old Portuguese. In Clause Structure and Language Change [Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax], A. Battye & I. Roberts (eds), 110–139. Oxford: OUP. Rinke, E. 2007. Syntaktische Variation aus synchronischer und diachronischer Perspektive: Die Entwicklung der Wortstellung im Portugiesischen. Frankfurt: Vervuert. Rinke, E. & Meisel, J. M. In press. Subject-inversion in Old French: syntax and information structure. In Proceedings of the Workshop ‘‘Null-subjects, expletives and locatives in Romance’’, G. A. Kaiser & E.-M. Remberger (eds). Konstanz: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Konstanz. Rizzi, L. 1982. Issues in Italian Syntax [Studies in Generative Grammar 7]. Dordrecht: Foris. Roberts, I. 1993. Verbs and Diachronic Syntax. A Comparative History of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Salvi, G. 2000. La formazione del sistema V2 delle lingue romanze antiche. Lingua e Stile 35: 665–692. Salvi, G. 2001. The two sentence structures of early Romance. In Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essays Offered to Lorenzo Renzi, G. Cinque & G. Salvi (eds), 297–312. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Salvi, G. 2004. La formazione della struttura di frase romanza. Ordine delle parole e clitici dal latino alle lingue romanze antiche. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Tomaselli, A. 1990. Comp as a licensing head: an argument based on cliticization. In Grammar in Progress. GLOW Essays for Henk van Riemsdijk, J. Mascaró & M. Nespor (eds), 433–455. Dordrecht: Foris. Vance, B. S. 1997. Syntactic Change in Medieval French: Verb-Second and Null-Subjects [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 41]. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses Vieri Samek-Lodovici

University College London

This paper examines the structural and discourse status of object DPs located immediately after left-peripheral focus. The goal is to determine whether these DPs share the properties of pre-focus left-peripheral topics, as predicted by Rizzi (1997, 2004), or whether they share the properties of clause-externally dislocated background items, as predicted by Samek-Lodovici (2006) building on Vallduví (1992) and Cardinaletti (2001, 2002). The examined properties – including interpretative aspects, strong island sensitivity, clitic-doubling, and licensing of epithets and null pronouns – all show post-focus object DPs patterning with right-dislocated phrases and diverging from left-peripheral topics, thus supporting an analysis of Italian clauses where focus occurs clauserightmost even when descriptively non-final, with optional post-focus material formed by right-dislocated background constituents.

1.

Introduction

When viewed in terms of linear order, Italian contrastive focus and new-information focus appear remarkably free, occurring in clause-initial, clause-internal, and clausefinal position. For example, the three sentences in (1), with stress in capitals and focus marked via the ‘F’ subscript, are all grammatical as replies to the statement you gave the winners a T-shirt in which case they contrastively focus the object. Once stripped of the initial no, the same three sentences are also found acceptable by many speakers as answers to the question what did you give to the winners? which identifies the object as new information focus.

. I would like to thank audiences at LAGB 2007, NELS 38, Going Romance 2007, and CIL18 for their useful questions and discussions. A special thank to Lisa Brunetti and Anna ­Cardinaletti for their accurate and informative comments to an earlier version of this paper. Any mistake is, of course, just mine.

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(1) a. b. c.

(No.) Abbiamo dato ai vincitori una MEDAGLIAF. no (we) have given to-the winners a medal ‘No. We gave the winners a MEDAL.’ (No.) Gli abbiamo dato una MEDAGLIAF, ai vincitori. no (we) to-them have given a medal to-the winners ‘No. We gave a MEDAL to them, the winners.’ (No.) Una MEDAGLIAF, abbiamo dato ai vincitori. no a medal (we) have given to-the winners ‘No. A MEDAL, we gave to the winners.’

Is it possible to provide a uniform analysis of such a loose distribution of focus? In this paper I argue that it is and provide new evidence for the analysis in Samek-Lodovici (2006) where focus, even when non-final, remains rightmost in its clause. Under this analysis, apparent non-final focus arises when focus is followed by background constituents that are displaced clause-externally by an independently attested and highly productive process of right-dislocation (described, among others, by Antinucci & Cinque 1977; Benincà et al. 1988; Vallduví 1992; Cecchetto 1999; and Cardinaletti 2001, 2002). This paper extends the above analysis to sentences where focus occurs left-peripherally and immediately preceded or followed by a non-focused object DP, as illustrated in (2) below. (2) a. DP Focus ... b. Focus DP ... I will show that only object DPs preceding left-peripheral focus, as in (2a), constitute genuine left-peripheral topics à la Rizzi (1997), adding further evidence to that provided in Benincà (2001) and Benincà & Poletto (2004) in the context of a different analysis (see also Krapova 2002 and Vermeulen 2007 for similar claims for Bulgarian and Japanese). Furthermore, I will show that object DPs immediately following left-peripheral focus, as in (2b), share the properties of background constituents right-dislocated in clause-external position, hence departing on this aspect from Benincà & Poletto 2004, who maintain that these constituents are focused, as further discussed in Section 5. Overall, pre- and post-focus object DPs (henceforth shortened in ‘pre-’ and ‘postfocus DPs’) will be shown to behave exactly as predicted by the unified analysis of Italian focus described above, where syntactic constituents following focus are necessarily background phrases dislocated clause-externally. I start in Section 2 with a

. This study only examines left-peripheral object DPs to facilitate the comparison with Rizzi (1997), where left-peripheral topics are very frequently object DPs, and because the evidence from clitic/epithet resumption and island insensitivity in Sections 3.3, 3.5, and 3.6 requires object DPs.



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 335

brief review of the focus and right-dislocation analysis in Samek-Lodovici (2006). In Section 3, I examine how that analysis differs from Rizzi (1997, 2004) and present the evidence in its support. Section 4 shows how the clitic-doubling properties associated with post-focus DPs, which diverge from those of more common instances of right-dislocation, also follow from the proposed right-dislocation analysis. Finally, Section 5 critically examines some conceivable alternative accounts, followed by the conclusions in Section 6.

2.

A unified analysis of Italian focus

The cartographic literature has generally interpreted the multiple linear positions descriptively available to Italian focus as reflecting distinct syntactic locations. Consequently, clause-internal focus has been accounted for through a dedicated focus projection right above VP (Belletti 2001, 2004) while left-peripheral focus has been viewed as evidence for a left-peripheral focus projection within a decomposition of CP into multiple functional projections (Rizzi 1997, 2004). There are empirical problems with the predictions made by these analyses, some of which are examined in detail later in Section 3, while others have already been discussed in Samek-Lodovici (2006). Most important here is the observation that these analyses do not explain why Italian focus allows for so many distinct positions. The hypothesis that contrastive focus is restricted to a CP-level projection and new-information focus to a TP-level (Belletti 2004) may at first appear to address this issue, but it is inconsistent with empirical observations. Under this hypothesis the distribution of each focus type should be restricted to a single position, but as the data in (1) above show contrastive and new-information focus both occur in multiple positions (in fact even more positions than shown in (1) when the clause size and complexity are further increased). The same hypothesis also predicts that the distributions of contrastive and new-information focus do not overlap, but as the data in (1) show they do overlap. Clearly, unless we are willing to maintain that every attested focus occurrence corresponds to a distinct focus projection – which would raise the issue of why Italian has such a peculiarly complex focus syntax – we need to identify among the observed linear positions of focus which are genuinely informative about its structural position and which are actually derived by the independent movement of other constituents around focus. There are compelling reasons for identifying clause-final focus as expressing the natural location of Italian focus, and left-peripheral and clause-internal foci as derived. First of all, rightmost focus is an extremely productive focusing strategy in Italian, . Some speakers do not accept new-information focus in clause-initial position (see discussion in Brunetti 2003), but even these speakers accept both focus types in clause-internal and clause-final position.

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available to contrastive and new-information focus alike (see among others Antinucci & Cinque 1977; Bonet 1990; Calabrese 1992; Vallduví 1992; Saccon 1993; Belletti & Shlonsky 1995; Samek-Lodovici 1996, 2005; Zubizarreta 1998). Second, instances of non-final focus, including left-peripheral and clause-internal focus, are naturally reducible to rightmost-focus once we take into account that Italian also allows for the independent and extremely productive process of right-dislocation optionally displacing background constituents to the right of focus (Antinucci & Cinque 1977; Benincà et al. 1988; Vallduví 1992; Cecchetto 1999; Cardinaletti 2001, 2002; Samek-Lodovici 2006). The greater the number of right-dislocated constituents, the closer focus appears to the clause left-edge and away from the clause right-edge. For example, when uttered as a reply to (3a), sentence (3b) contrastively focuses the temporal adverb ieri ‘yesterday’ in clause-final position. Since Maria ‘Mary’ and gli orecchini ‘the earrings’ are background information, they can be right-dislocated in clause-final position, yielding sentence (3c). Their dislocated status is confirmed by the presence of the object clitic li, as Italian disallows clitic-doubling within the same clause. Their dislocated status is also confirmed by their occurrence after main stress (in capitals) and by the intonation break and optional pause preceding them, henceforth represented as a comma. The clause-internal position of focus in (3c) is thus determined by the independent occurrence of right-dislocation. Since dislocated phrases occur clause-externally, on which more in Section 4, focus constitutes the rightmost item in its clause, and is thus as much clause-final in (3c) as it is in (3b). (3) a. b. c.

Context: Mary bought the earrings last Sunday. (No.) Maria ha comprato gli orecchini IERIF. no Mary has bought the earrings yesterday ‘No. Mary bought the earrings YESTERDAY.’ (No.) Li ha comprati IERIF, gli orecchini, Maria. no them has bought yesterday the earrings Mary ‘No. She bought them YESTERDAY, the earrings, Mary.’

Crucially, while non-final focus is reducible to rightmost focus followed by background phrases dislocated clause-externally, the opposite hypothesis, namely that . As in English, Italian focus may also occur in situ, followed by equally in-situ destressed constituents (Cardinaletti 2001, 2002). These cases, where the affected phrases are said to have been marginalized, are structurally different from the right-dislocation cases examined in this paper. In particular, Cardinaletti shows that marginalized phrases must occur in-situ. Since the post-focus DPs discussed in this study are fronted rather than in-situ, marginalization does not apply and therefore is henceforth ignored. For further discussion of the properties distinguishing marginalization from right-dislocation see Cardinaletti (2001, 2002) and Samek-Lodovici (2006). See also the extraposition cases in Frascarelli (2000), which resemble Cardinaletti’s marginalization cases, as well as the analysis of destressing in Szendrői (2001, 2002), which potentially integrates Cardinaletti’s marginalization cases with Zubizarreta’s insight on the role of main stress in driving Italian clause-final focus (Zubizarreta 1998).



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 337

rightmost focus might be reducible to left-peripheral or clause-internal focus, runs into serious empirical problems. Consider for example the contrastively focused negative subject nessuno in (4b), uttered as a reply to (4a). In Italian, negative words like nulla ‘nothing/anything’ and nessuno ‘nobody/anybody’ in postverbal position behave as negative polarity items and must be licensed at surface by an appropriate c-commanding licenser such as the negative marker non ‘not’ (Zanuttini 1991, 1997). This requirement is illustrated in (4b), where the licenser non is necessary to license both the object and the focused indirect object. Now assume that left-peripheral focus is the only possible position for contrastive focus and consider the impact of this analysis on (4b). Since the indirect object must lie in the CP-level focus projection, the entire TP preceding it must have raised to an even higher position, as shown in (4c). This movement, however, destroys the c-command relation between non and nessuno necessary for licensing, thus incorrectly predicting (4b) to be ungrammatical (see also Cardinaletti 2001, who independently developed the same argument for focused negative subjects in postverbal position). The rightmost focus analysis, on the other hand, does not suffer from this problem, since the negative indirect object occurs in its base-generated position even if focused and thus remains licensed by the c-commanding neg-marker. (4) a. b. c.

Context: You did not give anything to Mark. No. Non ho dato nulla a NESSUNOF. no (I) not have given anything to anybody ‘No. I did not give anything to ANYBODY.’ [XP [TP non ho dato nulla ti ]k Xº [FocP [a NESSUNO]i Focº tk]]

In conclusion, the free interaction of rightmost focus and right-dislocation provides a potential unified and principled explanation of the complex distribution of Italian focus. Focus occurs rightmost in its clause, except when followed by background phrases right-dislocated in clause-external position. As the next section shows, the properties of post-focus DPs in left-peripheral focus sentences provide further evidence in support of this analysis.

3.

Topic, focus, and right-dislocated background phrases

When applied to left-peripheral focus, the proposed rightmost focus analysis gives rise to the structure in (5a) below, with focus rightmost in its clause, followed by background constituents dislocated in clause-external position. As we will see in Section 4, left-peripheral focus might occur fronted to a position higher than TP, even though it remains the rightmost overt item in its clause. Yet two fundamental differences distinguish this analysis from the analysis in Rizzi (1997) sketched in (5b). First, in (5a) focus does not c-command the constituents at its right, whereas it does so in Rizzi’s (5b). Second, in (5a) pre-focus and post-focus DPs are predicted

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to have different ­properties: pre-focus DPs are expected to share the properties of Rizzi’s left-peripheral topics whereas post-focus DPs are expected to share those of right-dislocated background constituents. The same is not true under Rizzi’s analysis, where pre- and post-focus DPs are all left-peripheral topics and hence should show identical properties. (5) a. [Topic* [ Focus ]] Right-dislocated phrases*  b. [Topic* [ Focus [ Topic* [ …

(Samek-Lodovici 2006) (Rizzi 1997, 2004)

The absence of c-command between focus and post-focus constituents is examined in Samek-Lodovici (2006) and is therefore ignored here, except where immediately relevant. In the following sections I will instead concentrate on the divergence between pre-focus and post-focus DPs predicted by the right-dislocation analysis. I will start in Section 3.1 by briefly considering the different interpretations associated with preand post-focus DPs. Then in Sections 3.2–3.5 I will consider four additional properties distinguishing left-peripheral topics from right-dislocated phrases and show that pre-focus DPs pattern with left-peripheral topics whereas post-focus DPs pattern with right-dislocated phrases, exactly as predicted by the right-dislocation analysis. Finally in Section 3.6 I will examine the peculiar clitic-doubling properties of post-focus DPs, showing how they too follow from the right-dislocation analysis.

3.1

Interpretation asymmetries

Pre- and post-focus DPs differ in their possible interpretations. Consider for example the sentences in (6) and (7) below, both of which may occur as answers to the question Who did you give the flowers to?. As is typical of contrastive topics, the pre-focus DP i fiori ‘the flowers’ in (6) suggests that this sentence is just a partial answer to the more general question Who did you give X to?, which presupposes the existence of a set of distinct presents with each present given to a different recipient (Büring 2007). Sentence (7), on the other hand, neither evokes nor may occur as a partial answer of the more general question just mentioned. As a post-focus DP, i fiori in (7) only reminds the hearer of the discourse-given background in which (7) is asserted, thus matching the typical interpretation of Italian right-dislocated phrases. (6) I fiori, a MARIAF, li abbiamo dati. the flowers to Mary, (we) them have given ‘As for the flowers, to MARY, we gave them.’

. For further information about the discourse-related properties distinguishing left-peripheral topics from right-dislocation see the discussion of links (i.e. topics) and tails (i.e. discourse givenness) in Vallduví (1992). See also the discussion of topichood and givenness in Büring (2007) and Krifka (2007) and references therein.



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 339

(7) A MARIAF, i fiori, abbiamo dato. to Mary the flowers (we) have given ‘To MARY, we gave them, the flowers.’ In the above examples and throughout the paper, focus is identified by the subscript ‘F’, main stress is shown in capitals (usually coinciding with focus), and pre- and postfocus object DPs are shown in bold. Commas express the intonational break and potential short pause following left-peripheral topics, left-peripheral focus, and background phrases that have been right-dislocated independently from one another.

3.2

Contrastive list-reading

Genuine left-peripheral topics allow for a contrastive list reading (Büring 1997, 2007), whereas the same is not true for right-dislocated phrases (Benincà & Poletto 2004), arguably because contrastivity involves a degree of focalization that must be disallowed in constituents whose only function is to remind speakers and hearers of the shared discourse-given background. This asymmetry is shown in (8b) and (8c), both uttered as replies to (8a) and involving a rightmost ­focused subject (in capitals). The contrasted objects, in bold, are grammatical when occurring as left-peripheral topics in (8b), but not when occurring as right-dislocated objects in (8c), even though each of the two clauses forming (8c) is grammatical when utterred in isolation, i.e. with no contrast on the dislocated object. (8) a. b. c.

Context: Any news about John and Andrew? Are they coming to the party? Gianni, lo abbiamo invitato NOIF; mentre Andrea, lo hanno John him have invited we whereas Andrew him have invitato i tuoi AMICIF. invited the your friends ‘John, WE invited him; whereas Andrew, your FRIENDS invited him.’ *Lo abbiamo invitato NOIF, Gianni; mentre lo hanno invitato him have invited we John whereas him have invited i tuoi AMICIF Andrea. the your friends Andrew ‘John, WE invited him; whereas Andrew, your FRIENDS invited him.’

Note that clitic doubling by lo in (8b) confirms that the object is a topic and not a focus, as left-peripheral focused objects disallow clitic doubling (Cinque 1990; Rizzi 1997). Likewise, the presence of clitic-doubling in (8c) confirms the right-dislocated status of the object, as clitic doubling is possible with right-dislocated objects but unavailable with non-dislocated ones (Cecchetto 1999; Cardinaletti 2001, 2002). Furthermore, like all right-dislocated phrases, the objects in (8c) also follow main stress.

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When tested with respect to contrastive list reading, pre- and post-focus DPs in sentences with left-peripheral focus show the exact same asymmetry differentiating left peripheral topics from right-dislocated phrases. Pre-focus DPs allow for a contrastive reading. Post-focus DPs disallow it. The contrast is illustrated in (9b) and (9c). In assessing these data, and similar data in the following sections, native speakers of Italian should take particular care to check that main stress has been correctly assigned to the constituent in capitals, as it is fairly easy to accidentally make sentence (9c) grammatical through different stress patterns expressing other focus configurations unrelated to the one investigated here. (9) a. b. c.

Context: Did you invite John and Andrew to the party? Gianni, MARCOF, lo ha invitato; mentre Andrea, MARIAF John Mark him has invited whereas Andrew Mary lo ha invitato. him has invited ‘John, MARK invited him; whereas Andrew, MARY invited him.’ *MARCOF, Gianni, (lo) ha invitato; mentre MARIAF, Andrea, (lo) Mark John him has invited whereas Mary Andrew him ha invitato. has invited ‘John, MARK invited him; whereas Andrew, MARY invited him.’

Sentence (9c) is ungrammatical with or without the clitic shown in brackets. As we will see in Sections 3.6 and 4, the presence vs. absence of clitic-doubling is itself a property distinguishing between pre- and post-focus DPs. The invariant ungrammatical status of (9c), however, shows that post-focus DPs disallow a contrastive reading independently from the presence/absence of clitic-doubling.

3.3

Strong-island sensitivity

Italian left-peripheral DP topics are insensitive to strong islands (see also Zeller to appear for Zulu, and Vermeulen 2007 for Japanese). This is illustrated by the examples in (10) and (11), the first showing insensitivity to subject islands and the second to complex-NP islands. In both sentences, focus is clause-wide. (10) Giannii , non sappiamo se [riveder-loi] ti AIUTERÀ. John (we) not know whether [to-again-see him] you will-help ‘John, we don’t know whether seeing him again will help you.’ (11) Giannii , abbiamo presentato [una persona che loi conosce bene] a MARIA. John (we) have introduced [a person who him knows well] to Mary ‘John, we introduced a person who knows him well to MARY.’



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 341

Right-dislocated background phrases, on the other hand, are sensitive to strong-islands, as shown in (12) for subject islands and (13) for complex-NP islands. In these examples, focus remains sentence-wide, with the item carrying main stress shown in capitals and the item carrying secondary stress within the sentential subject or the complex NP ­underlined. Sentence (12a) shows a sentence where right-dislocation does not apply. Sentence (12b) shows that dislocation within the sentential subject is unproblematic, with the object dislocated within the boundaries of the sentential subject. Sentence (12c), on the other hand, shows that dislocation outside the subject island is ungrammatical. The same pattern applies in (13) relative to complex-NP islands, with (13a) dislocation free, (13b) showing that right-dislocation within an NP-island is possible, and (13c) showing that right-dislocation outside the NP-island is ungrammatical. (12) a. [Incontrare mia figlia] mi ha aiutato MOLTO. to-meet my daughter me has helped much ‘Meeting my daughter has helped me CONSIDERABLY.’ b. [Incontrar-la, mia figlia] mi ha aiutato MOLTO. to-meet-her my daughter me has helped much ‘Meeting her, my daughter, has helped me CONSIDERABLY.’ c. *[Incontrar-la] mi ha aiutato MOLTO, mia figlia.   to-meet-her me has helped much my daughter (13) a. b. c.

Ho presentato [una persona che può terminare questo lavoro] (I) have introduced a person who can to-finish this work a MARIA. to Mary ‘I introduced a person who can complete this work to MARY.’ ?Ho presentato [una persona che può terminar-lo, questo (I) have introduced a person who can to-finish-it this lavoro], a MARIA. work to Mary ‘I introduced a person who can complete it, this work, to MARY.’ *Ho presentato [una persona che può terminar-lo] a MARIA, (I) have introduced a person who can to-finish-it to Mary questo lavoro. this work

When shifting to left-peripheral focus, we find that pre-focus DPs are insensitive to strong islands, thus sharing the properties of left-peripheral topics, whereas post-focus DPs remain sensitive to them, confirming their right-dislocated status. The two sentences in (14) illustrate the asymmetry relative to subject islands, with a grammatical pre-focus DP in (14a) and an ungrammatical post-focus DP in (14b). The examples in (15) make the same point for complex-NP islands. As in the previous section, the post-focus DP examples are shown with and without a clitic in the

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a­ rgument position of the DP, to exclude the clitic’s presence/absence as a possible cause for the ungrammatical status of these sentences. As in all other examples, ensuring that stress falls on the focused items is essential to a proper assessment. (14) a. L’invito, a MARCOF, crediamo che [ricever-lo] the invitation to Mark (we) believe that to-receive it farebbe piacere. would-make pleasure ‘As for the invitation, we believe that receiving it would please MARK.’ b. *A MARCOF, l’invito, crediamo che [ricever-e/-lo] to Mark the invitation (we) believe that to-receive/-ø/-it farebbe piacere. would-make pleasure ‘As for the invitation, we believe that receiving it would please MARK.’ (15) a. Il progetto, a MARIAF, abbiamo presentato [una persona the project to Mary (we) have introduced a person che lo conosce bene]. who it knows well ‘As for the project, we introduced a person who knows it well to MARY.’ b. *A MARIAF, il progetto, abbiamo presentato [una persona che to Mary the project (we) have introduced a person who (lo) conosce bene]. it knows well ‘As for the project, we introduced a person who knows it well to MARY.’

3.4 Licensing of null subjects In many languages, Italian included, pro subjects undergo a stricter licensing condition than overt pronominal subjects. Their referents must be discourse topics in the sense of Reinhart (1981), involving a higher discourse salience than other discoursegiven referents (Calabrese 1982, 1986; Samek-Lodovici 1996). Italian left-peripheral topics satisfy this condition. They express the new discourse topic and therefore they can license pro subjects in following sentences (Calabrese 1982, 1986; Samek-Lodovici 1996; Cole 2007; Frascarelli 2007; see also Vermeulen 2007 for Japanese). In contrast, pro licensing is unavailable with dislocated background phrases, arguably because they are not sufficiently salient, especially when competing against highly salient constituents such as overt preverbal subjects. This licensing asymmetry is illustrated in examples (16) and (17) below, both involving clause-wide focus in all sentences. In (16), the left-peripheral topic in sentence (a) succesfully acts as the referent for the pro subject in sentence (b). In (17), the same



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 343

DP occurs as a right-dislocated phrase in sentence (a) and is no longer able to license pro in sentence (b). (16) a. b. (17) a. b.

L’ambasciatorei, [il primo ministro lo incontra questa MATTINA]F. the ambassador the prime minister him meets this morning ‘As for the ambassador, the prime minister meets him this morning.’ [Più tardi proi incontrerà la REGINA]F. (proi = the ambassador) more late (he) will-meet the queen ‘Later, he will meet the Queen.’ [Il primo ministro lo incontra questa MATTINA]F, l’ambasciatorei. the prime minister him meets this morning the ambassador ‘The prime minister meets him this morning, the ambassador.’ *[Più tardi proi incontrerà la REGINA]F. (proi = the ambassador) more late (he) will-meet the queen ‘Later, he will meet the Queen.’

Pre- and post-focus DPs display the same licensing asymmetry, with pre-focus DPs licensing pro, like topics, and post-focus DPs failing to license it, like right-dislocated DPs. The corresponding data are respectively provided in (18) and (19) below. The (a) sentences now involve narrow focus in left-peripheral position; once again stressing focus is essential to a proper assessment. (18) a. b.

L’ambasciatorei, il PRIMO MINISTROF, lo incontra questa the ambassador the prime minister him meets this mattina. morning ‘As for the ambassador, the PRIME MINISTER meets him this morning.’ Più tardi proi incontrerà la regina. more late (he) will-meet the queen ‘Later, he will meet the Queen.’

(19) a. b.

Il PRIMO MINISTROF, l’ambasciatorei, incontra questa mattina. the prime minister the ambassador meets this morning ‘The PRIME MINISTER meets him this morning, the ambassador.’ *Più tardi proi incontrerà la regina. more late (he) will-meet the queen ‘Later, he will meet the Queen.’

3.5

Licensing of epithets

A similar asymmetry is also found with respect to the licensing of epithets. Left-peripheral topics can be doubled by epithets rather than clitics (Benincà 2001), see (20)

344 Vieri Samek-Lodovici

below. Epithets however may not replace clitic-doubling in right-dislocation constructions, see (21). In both sentences focus is clause-wide with rightmost stress. (20)

Giannii [mi tocca presentare quel criminalei a mia John to-me (it) is-necessary to-introduce that criminal to my MOGLIE]F. wife ‘As for John, unfortunately I have to introduce that rascal to my WIFE.’

(21)

*[Mi tocca presentare quel criminalei a mia MOGLIE]F, to-me (it) is-necessary to-introduce that criminal to my wife Giannii. John ‘Unfortunately I have to introduce that rascal to my WIFE, John.’

The same asymmetry is found across pre- and post-focus DPs, as shown in (22). Like left-peripheral topics, pre-focus DPs can be doubled by an epithet, see (22a). Postfocus DPs, instead, may not, thus sharing yet another property with right-dislocated background phrases; see (22b). The two sentences in (23) illustrate the same point, with the epithet occurring in subject rather than object position. As in all other examples, stressing focus is essential. (22) a. Giannii, A MIA MOGLIEF, mi tocca presentare quel John to my wife to-me (it) is-necessary to-introduce that criminalei! criminal ‘As for John, unfortunately I have to introduce that rascal to my WIFE!’ b. *A MIA MOGLIEF, Giannii, mi tocca presentare quel to my wife John to-me (it) is-necessary to-introduce that criminalei! criminal ‘As for John, unfortunately I have to introduce that rascal to my WIFE!’ (23) a. b.

Giannii, UN’ALTRA FESSERIAF, temiamo che quell’idiotai John an other foolish-action (we) fear that that idiot possa fare! might do ‘As for John, we fear that that idiot might do something FOOLISH again!’ *UN’ALTRA FESSERIAF, Giannii, temiamo che quell’idiotai an other foolish-action John (we) fear that that idiot possa fare! might do ‘As for John, we fear that that idiot might do something FOOLISH again!’



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 345

3.6 Clitic doubling The last asymmetry concerns clitic doubling. As mentioned earlier, left-peripheral object topics are obligatorily clitic doubled, see (24) where the clitic cannot be omitted. According to Rizzi, the clitic is necessary to bind the empty category in object position, which would otherwise have no legitimate status as it can neither be a variable (left-peripheral topics being non-quantificational), nor pro, PRO, or a DP-trace (see discussion in Rizzi 1997: 292). (24) I fiori, [*(li) abbiamo dati a MARIA]F. the flowers (we) themclitic have given to Mary ‘As for the flowers, we gave them to MARY.’ Obligatory clitic-doubling holds of pre-focus DPs, confirming their left-peripheral topic status, but not of post-focus DPs, as also observed in Benincà (2001), Benincà & Poletto (2004), and Belletti (2004). Consequently the object clitic is obligatory in (25a) below, whereas it is obligatorily absent with the post-focus DP in (25b). (25) a. b.

I fiori, a MARIAF, li abbiamo dati. (clitic obligatory) the flowers to Mary (we) themclitic have given ‘As for the flowers, to MARY, we gave them.’ A MARIAF, i fiori, abbiamo dato. (clitic obligatorily absent) to Mary the flowers (we) have given ‘To MARY, we gave them, the flowers.’

These data raise a serious challenge to Rizzi’s analysis. If post-focus DPs shared the same status of pre-focus topics they should share the same property with respect to clitic doubling as well. Note that it is not possible to derive the above asymmetry from the hypothesis that some hypothetical property frees post-focus topics from requiring a clitic. If this were the case, clitic-doubling would be optional in (24) as well, since its left-peripheral topic could be in any of the topic projections assumed to precede and follow left-peripheral focus, including the post-focus clitic-less ones. Rizzi’s analysis cannot explain the asymmetry in (25) above, which thus provides further evidence for the non-topic status of post-focus DPs, a point also noted in Benincà & Poletto (2004).

4.

Post-focus DPs as right-dislocated background phrases

The properties discussed in the above section provide direct and immediate evidence for the right-dislocated status of post-focus DPs, as each shows pre-focus DPs behaving like left-peripheral topics, and post-focus DPs like right-dislocated background phrases. The last property, concerning clitic-doubling, supports the non-topic status

346 Vieri Samek-Lodovici

of post-focus DPs too, but a full account of the absence of clitic-doubling requires a more detailed discussion of the structural properties of right-dislocation.

4.1

The structure of right-dislocation

As already mentioned, right-dislocation is an extremely productive process that applies to any syntactic category expressing background information, TPs and CPs included. Right-dislocated phrases are easily recognizable because (i) they always follow the item carrying main stress (hence always following focus too), (ii) they are introduced by an intonation break and an optional short pause, (iii) they may occur in any order, and (iv) they allow for clitic-doubling whenever an appropriate clitic exists (Antinucci & Cinque 1977; Cecchetto 1999; Cardinaletti 2001, 2002; Samek-Lodovici 2006). For example, in (26a) the object, subject, and temporal adverb constitute rightdislocated phrases, as revealed by their post-stress placement, the intonational break and pause preceding them (represented as commas), their free, non canonical order, and the presence of the object clitic. The same right-dislocated constituents are visible in (26b) under a different word order and any other order is possible too. (26) a. b. c.

Context: What did Mary eventually decide about the earrings yesterday? [Alla fine non li ha COMPRATI]F, gli orecchini, ieri, at-the end not them has bought the earrings yesterday Maria. Mary ‘Eventually she did not BUY them, Mary, the earrings, yesterday.’ [Alla fine non li ha COMPRATI]F, ieri, Maria, at-the end not them has bought yesterday Mary gli orecchini. the earrings

Cardinaletti (2001, 2002) and Samek-Lodovici (2006) revised the earlier analysis in Cecchetto (1999) and showed that agreement, binding, and negative polarity licensing properties all indicate that right-dislocated phrases are located clause-externally. Consider for example negative polarity licensing (henceforth ‘NPI-licensing’). In sentence (27a), where focus is clause-wide and no constituent is right-dislocated, the object in the lower clause is licensed by the main clause neg-marker non (Zanuttini 1991, 1997). The same NPI-licensing relation, however, fails in (27b), where focus falls on voglia and the lower clause is right-dislocated, as confirmed by the corresponding clitic in the main clause. If the dislocated clause were located in a projection lower than T, as proposed in Cecchetto, licensing by the matrix neg-marker should be possible and the sentence should remain grammatical. Its ungrammatical status is instead accounted for if the lower clause is dislocated in a clause-external position, hence outside the licensing c-command domain of the neg-marker.



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 347

Sentences (27c) and (27d) further support the analysis by showing that NPI-licensing failure is the only possible cause for the ungrammaticality of (27b) since once this cause is removed the sentence becomes grammatical again. In (27c) this is obtained by replacing the object with the referential phrase Roma, which is not subject to NPI-licensing. Sentence (27d) instead successfully licenses the polarity object by supplying a neg-marker within the dislocated clause itself, yielding a grammatical sentence with a double negative interpretation. (27) a. [Non ho voglia di visitare ALCUNA CITTÀ]F. (I) not have wish of to-visit any city ‘I don’t want to visit any city.’ b. *Non (ne) ho VOGLIAF, di visitare alcuna città. (I) not of-it have wish of to-visit any city ‘I don’t WANT to visit any city.’ c. Non (ne) ho VOGLIAF, di visitare Roma. (I) not of-it have wish of to-visit Rome ‘I don’t WANT to visit Rome.’ d. Non (ne) ho VOGLIAF, di non visitare alcuna città. (I) not of-it have wish of not to-visit any city ‘I don’t WANT not to visit any city.’ There are various conceivable structural analyses of clause-external right-dislocation and a complete review goes beyond the goals of this paper. Here I adopt, with some minor adaptations concerning the names of the syntactic categories involved, the antisymmetric analysis originally proposed at a 1995 Harvard lecture by Kayne and discussed at length in Samek-Lodovici (2006). Under this analysis discoursegiven constituents may optionally move to the specifier of a higher projection GP (for ‘Given’), followed by remnant movement of the rest of the clause to the specifier of a higher projection XP. For example, sentence (27c) would be derived as in (28), where the ‘G’ subscript identifies discourse-given phrases. The final structure follows in (29). Note how the dislocated lower clause no longer sits in the c-command domain of the negative marker of the main clause, explaining the ungrammaticality of (27b) above. Note furthermore that focus remains the rightmost overt item in its TP.

. Samek-Lodovici (2006) also provides further discussion about the problematic aspects affecting alternative representations of right-dislocation as well as some informed speculations about its possible English correlates. . The derivation relies on the presence of remnant movement, which is necessary to prevent c-command between dislocated and non-dislocated constituents in the final surface structure. Remnant movement is thus motivated by the empirical properties of the syntactic construction under investigation, see Samek-Lodovici (2006) for further discussion.

348 Vieri Samek-Lodovici

(28) i. Base generation: [Non ho VOGLIAF [di visitare Roma]G ] ii. Disloc. to specGP: [di visitare Roma]i øG [non ho VOGLIAF ti] iii. Remn. mov. to specXP: [non ho VOGLIAF ti ]k øX [GP [di visitare  Roma]i øG tk ]] (29)

XP [TP non ho VOGLIAF ti ]k

øX GP [CP di visitare Roma]i øG tk

Under this analysis of right-dislocation, left-peripheral focus follows from the rightdislocation of the entire clause except focus itself. For example, consider sentence (30) and assume that it occurs as an answer to the question Who did you meet?. The question marks GIANNI as focused, but under a model of givenness à la Schwarzschild (1999) it also marks the entire clause as discourse-given, making it a potential target for right-dislocation. Sentence (30) is the product of such right-dislocation and it is derived according to the steps in (31). The base structure in (31.i) shows the object and the entire clause respectively marked as ‘F’ and ‘G’ to represent their focused and discourse-given status. Since dislocated phrases may not contain the main focus of the sentence, focus is fronted in (31.ii), whether into TP-adjoined position, as assumed here, or in the specifier of a higher projection. TP may then right-dislocate, as shown in (31.iii), followed by remnant movement of the outer TP shell into specXP, as indicated in (31.iv). (30) GIANNIF, ho incontrato. John (I) have met ‘JOHN, I met.’ (31) i. ii. iii. iv.

Base: [TP ho incontrato GIANNIF]G Focus fronting: [TP GIANNIj,F [TP ho incontrato tj ]G ] Disloc. to specGP: [TP ho incontrato tj ]i øG [TP GIANNIj,F ti] Remnant mov.: [TP GIANNIj,F ti]k øX [GP [TP ho incontrato tj ]i øG tk ]

. An alternative possible cause for focus fronting emerges from the discourse template analysis of focus and topic scrambling in Dutch developed in Neeleman & van de Koot (2008) and further pursued in Neeleman, Titov, van de Koot & Vermeulen (to appear). Under their approach, focus fronting would occur in order to mark the TP to which it adjoins as discoursegiven background, which in turn makes the TP a possible target for right-dislocation.



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 349

Though fronted, focus remains the rightmost overt item in its TP and does not c-command the material to its right, unlike the fronted focus of Rizzi (1997). Furthermore, the constituent from which the dislocated TP is extracted in order to dislocate into specGP contains no clitic hosting head and therefore clitic-doubling is impossible. This latter observation is key in understanding why post-focus DPs disallow cliticdoubling and is explained in detail in the next section.

4.2 Absence of clitic-doubling for post-focus DPs Consider again the sentences involving post-focus DPs, such as (25b) above repeated in (32) below. This sentence contains two intonational breaks and potential short pauses: one before the object i fiori ‘the flowers’ and the other before the TP abbiamo dato ‘we have given’, showing that the object and the TP have right-dislocated independently from one another. (32) A MARIAF, i fiori, abbiamo dato. to Mary the flowers (we) have given ‘To MARY, we gave them, the flowers.’

(clitic obligatorily absent)

Since genuine right-dislocated constituents may occur in any order, the object and TP in (32) should be able to switch place without affecting grammaticality. This is indeed possible, see (33), but under this order the object clitic becomes possible again, triggering agreement on the past participle (only possible, not obligatory, as right-dislocation does not always require obligatory clitic-doubling). (33) A MARIAF, (li) abbiamo dato/dati, i fiori.(clitic possible) to Mary (we) them have given.sg/given.pl the flowers ‘To MARY, we gave them, the flowers.’ The alternation between (32) and (33) shows that the order in which the two constituents are dislocated determines whether clitic-doubling may or may not be present. This correlation between the possibility of a clitic and the order of the post-focus constituents is correctly predicted by the right-dislocation analysis introduced in the previous section. Consider first the derivation for sentence (33) where the object dislocates first and ends up in sentence final position. The derivation starts with the TP and the object both marked as discourse given and hence as independent targets for right-dislocation as shown in (34.i). Focus is then fronted in (34.ii), followed by movement of the object into specGP in (34.iii). Like any other case of object right-dislocation from within a TP, this operation licenses the presence of a clitic in Tº. The TP is then itself dislocated in a second, higher GP projection, see (iv), followed by remnant movement in (v) yielding the final word order.

350 Vieri Samek-Lodovici

(34) i. ii. iii. iv. v.

Base: [TP aux V DPG IOF]G Focus fronting: [TP IOj,F [TP aux V DPG tj ]G ] Object dislocation: DPi øG [TP IOj,F [TP (cl)-aux V ti tj ]G ] TP dislocation: [TP (cl)-aux V ti tj ]n øG [GP DPi øG [TP IOj,F tn ] ] Remnant mov.:[TP IOj,F tn]k øX [GP [TP (cl)-aux V ti tj ]n øG [GP DPi øG tk]]

Next, consider the derivation of sentences with post-focus DPs like (32) above, where the object precedes TP and must therefore dislocate after TP. If movement only targets the root (Chomsky 1995), both the object and the focused indirect object must be fronted prior to the dislocation of TP, as shown in (35.ii). TP then dislocates as in (iii), followed by the dislocation of the object to a second higher GP projection in (iv), followed by remnant movement of what is left of the original TP in (v), yielding the final order. (35) i. Base: [TP aux V OG IOF ]G ii. Fronting: [TP Oi [TP IOj,F [TP aux V ti tj ]G ]] iii. Dislocation of TP: GP [TP aux V ti tj]n

iv. Dislocation of O:

øG [TP Oi [TP IOj,F tn]]

GP Oi øG GP [TP aux V ti tj]n øG [TP ti [TP IOj,F tn ]]

v. Remnant movement: XP

[TP ti [TP IOj,F tn]]k øX GP Oi øG GP [TP aux V ti tj]n øG tk



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 351

Crucially, the clitic-hosting head Tº is part of the TP that gets dislocated at step (iii). Therefore, when the object is itself dislocated, at step (iv), it is extracted from a TP that contains the two TP layers created by the object and indirect-object TP-adjunctions at step (ii), but does not contain the original TP (now dislocated) nor its clitic-hosting head Tº. This makes clitic-doubling impossible, as no head may host the clitic, thus correctly predicting the absence of clitics characterizing post-focus DPs. Clitic-doubling is possible only when the object dislocates from a TP not deprived of its head, but this in turn is only possible when the object dislocates first, yielding the order of dislocated items shown in sentence (33).

5.

Alternative analyses and other issues

It is natural to wonder whether the complex antisymmetric analysis proposed in the previous section could be replaced by a simpler analysis where right-dislocated phrases are simply right-adjoined to TP. The alternation in (32) and (33) linking the availability of clitic-doubling to the order of right-dislocated items shows that this is not possible. Under right TP-adjunction, object right-dislocation involving cliticdoubling as in (36a) would receive the analysis in (36b), thus necessarily allowing for clitic-doubling whenever the object is dislocated from a TP still containing its clitichosting head Tº, as in any other analysis. (36) a. [ Li ho VISTI]F, i fiori. (I) them have seen the flowers ‘I have SEEN them, the flowers.’ b. [TP [TP pro cl-aux V ti ] DPi ] This property becomes problematic when considering sentences with post-focus DPs. The new analysis would have to derive them by dislocating the object first, as shown in (37.iii), and TP second, as in (37.iv). Since the object dislocates from a complete TP, clitic-doubling becomes possible, failing to capture its obligatory absence with post-focus DPs. (37) i. ii. iii. iv.

Base: [TP V DPG IOF]G Focus fronting: [TP IOj.F [TP V DPG tj ]G ] Object dislocation: [TP [TP IO j.F [TP cl-V ti tj ]G ] DPi ] TP dislocation: [TP [TP [TP IO j.F tn ] DPi ][TP cl-V ti tj ]n]

It follows that right-adjunction is not a viable analysis of right-dislocation (see Samek-Lodovici 2006 for further discussion).

352 Vieri Samek-Lodovici

5.1

Benincà & Poletto (2004)

An interesting alternative analysis is proposed in Benincà & Poletto (2004), who claim that post-focus DPs are clitic-less because they are foci rather than topics. This ­analysis, however, cannot explain why post-focus DPs show the properties of rightdislocated phrases as shown in Section 3. Furthermore, post-focus DPs would then be expected to share the properties of other focused constituents, but this is not the case. For example, both contrastive focus and new-information focus allow for ­contrastivelist reading – see (38) where the two contrasted objects in (b) count as new-information foci since they answer the question in (a) – whereas post-focus DPs do not, as already shown in Section 3.2. (38) a. b.

Context: Who did you invite? NoiF abbiamo invitato GIANNIF, mentre i tuoi amiciF hanno we have invited John whereas the your friends have invitato MARIAF. invited Mary ‘We invited JOHN, whereas your friends invited MARY.’

Another reason to doubt the focus status of post-focus DPs comes from the distribution of Italian negative quantifiers. As (39b) and (39c) show, negative quantifiers can be focused and even fronted, provided that they are licensed by a suitable negative polarity licenser when focused post-verbally (Zanuttini 1991, 1997). If post-focus DPs were fronted foci, as proposed by Benincà & Poletto’s analysis, we would expect negative quantifiers to be able to occur as post-focus DPs as well. As (40a) shows, this is not the case. (39) a. b. c.

Context: What did you see? Non ho visto NIENTEF / NESSUNOF. (I) not have seen nothing / nobody ‘I saw NOTHING / NOBODY.’ NIENTEF / NESSUNOF, ho visto. nothing / nobody (I) have seen ‘I saw NOTHING / NOBODY.’

(40) a. b.

*GIANNIF, niente / nessuno, ha visto. John nothing / nobody has seen ‘JOHN, saw it, nothing.’ *[Non ho VISTO]F, niente / nessuno. (I) not have seen nothing / nobody ‘I SAW it, nothing.’

In fact the ungrammaticality of post-focus negative quantifiers provides yet another piece of evidence for the right-dislocated status of post-focus DPs, since it follows immediately from the ungrammaticality of right-dislocated negative quantifiers. The



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 353

latter is illustrated in (40b), showing that negative quantifiers cannot dislocate to the right of an entire clause because clause-external dislocation places them outside the c-command domain of their pre-focus licenser. (Once again, stress on the initial focus is essential to the correct assessment of (40a). When stress falls on the negative quantifier the sentence becomes grammatical, but this is unsurprising as this intonation focuses the negative object and treats the initial subject as a left-peripheral topic.) Benincà & Poletto’s analysis also cannot explain why post-focus DPs occur in contexts that appear to exclude a focused interpretation. Consider the following example, adapted from Ruff (2006). Sentence (41a) marks the object the pie as discourse-given and can naturally be followed by (41b). The background status of the object is confirmed by (41b), where the object is successfully right-dislocated, as shown by the presence of clitic-doubling. If post-focus DPs were foci, we would expect the interpretation of (41c) to differ markedly from (41b) because the pie now occurs as a post-focus DP. We would also expect (41c) to be infelicituous in the context of (41a). Instead the two sentences share the same interpretation and are both fine in the context of (41a). If the object is instead right-dislocated in (41c), as claimed in this study, the observed similarity follows straightforwardly. Indeed (41b) and (41c) are structurally identical to sentences (32) and (33) examined in Section 4.2. They only differ in the order in which the post-focus object and the clause are dislocated, but not relative to their right-dislocated status. (41) a. b. c.

Context: John ate the pie and Mary finished the biscuits. No. MARCOF, l’ha mangiata, la torta. no Mark it has eaten the pie ‘No. MARK ate it, the pie.’ No. MARCOF, la torta, ha mangiato. no Mark the pie (he) has eaten ‘No. MARK ate it, the pie.’

An important argument put forward by Benincà & Poletto (2004) in support of their analysis concerns the presence of weak crossover effects in sentences like (42) below. The same grammaticality effects, however, are present in (43), where the object ­Giorgio and the subject sua madre ‘his mother’ can only have right-dislocated status due to the clitic-doubling of the object. Thus the presence of these effects cannot be taken as a property distinguishing focused from right-dislocated background phrases. (42) *A MARIAF, Giorgioi, suai madre presenterà. to Mary George his mother will-introduce ‘To MARY, his mother will introduce him, George.’ (43) ??[Lo presenterà a MARIA]F, Giorgioi, suai madre. (she) him will-introduce to Mary, George, his mother ‘She will introduce him to MARY, his mother, George.’

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In fact, the presence of a preverbal subject within the dislocated clause, as is the case in (42) above, appears to be sufficient to severely degrade a ­sentence acceptability. This is shown in (44), which forms a minimal pair with (42) and is equally unacceptable despite the absence of a weak crossover configuration. When considered together these data show that the ungrammaticality effects uncovered by Benincà & Poletto in (42) are unrelated to weak crossover and therefore may not be interpreted as evidence for the focus status of post-focus DPs. (44) *A MARIAF, Giorgioi, il presidente presenterà. to Mary George the president will-introduce ‘To MARY, the president will introduce him, George.’ Post-focus DPs should thus be analyzed as right-dislocated background phrases and not as unstressed foci. In this respect, the asymmetric analysis of right-dislocation proposed in the previous sections makes the correct predictions with respect to the interpretative and structural properties of post-focus DPs.

5.2

Types of left-peripheral topics

Finally, it is worth considering how the evidence presented in this paper fits the further subdivision of Rizzi’s left-peripheral topics into clitic-left-dislocated ­ topics (CLLD) and hanging topics (HT) proposed in Cinque (1983, 1990), Benincà (2001), and Benincà & Poletto (2004). These two topic classes, which have a non empty intersection in left-peripheral object DP topics, express the same discourse function, but their syntactic properties differ. CLLD topics may be expressed by any syntactic category (DP, AP, VP, CP), may only be resumed by a pronominal clitic (not by tonic pronouns or epithets), and are sensitive to strong islands. HTs are instead restricted to DPs and NPs, may be resumed by tonic pronouns and epithets, and are insensitive to strong islands (see Cinque 1990 and Benincà 2001 for other, here less relevant, differences). It is thus natural to wonder whether the properties of post-focus DPs examined in this study might follow from their hypothetical HT or CLLD status, in which case we would have a potential alternative to the right-dislocation analysis proposed so far. As it happens, neither hypothesis is successful. Consider first the possibility that post-focus DPs actually constituted non-dislocated HTs rather than right-dislocated phrases. In this case they should show the typical properties of HTs, namely: contrastive topic interpretation even when occurring in isolation, contrastive list reading,

. The names assigned to these two topic classes vary across the literature. CLLD and HT topics are respectively called ‘CLLD’ and ‘LD’ (left-dislocation) in Cinque (1990), and ‘LD’ and ‘HT’ in Benincà (2001). I chose to keep the unambiguous ‘CLLD’ and ‘HT’ labels, while avoiding the ambiguous ‘LD’ which identifies HT in Cinque (1990) but CLLD in Benincà (2001).



Topic, focus, and background in Italian clauses 355

island insensitivity, pro licensing, and clitic/epithet resumption. But they do not, as demonstrated at length in Sections 3.1–3.6. Likewise, consider the possibility that post-focus DPs constituted non-dislocated CLLD topics. Again, they would be expected to show the corresponding properties, namely contrastive topic interpretation in isolation, contrastive list reading, pro licensing, and clitic resumption. Yet, as sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, and 3.6 showed, postfocus DPs show none of these properties, patterning instead with right-dislocated phrases. Thus they may not be analyzed as non-dislocated CLLD topics either. All in all, the subdivision of left-peripheral topics in distinct subclasses is irrelevant to the analysis of post-focus DPs.

6.

Conclusions

As the above sections showed, DPs immediately preceding and following left-peripheral focus are distinguished by a rich set of properties. Pre-focus DPs pattern with Rizzi’s left-peripheral topics, thus allowing for contrastive topic interpretation, multiple contrastive topics, insensitivity to strong islandhood, null-subject licensing, resumption by epithets, and obligatory clitic-doubling. Post-focus DPs, instead, pattern with right-dislocated phrases, thus disallowing all the properties listed above. As this study showed, all of these asymmetries follow straightforwardly once we maintain that postfocus DPs are discourse-given DPs right-dislocated in clause-external position. This in turn entails that left-peripheral focus constitutes the last overt item before the right edge of its clause, thus providing support for a unified account of Italian focus where focus is structurally clause-rightmost even when not so in linear terms, as proposed in Samek-Lodovici (2006) on the base of Vallduví (1992) and Cardinaletti (2001, 2002). What forces Italian focus to always occur clause-rightmost? An interesting answer is provided in Zubizarreta (1998), who tied the position of focus to the position of stress. In her analysis Italian clause-final focus is clause-rightmost because focus needs stress and Italian stress occurs clause-rightmost. This study showed that ­Zubizarreta’s insight generalizes to non-final focus as well (caveat Cardinaletti’s marginalization cases). Focus, even when left-peripheral, remains the rightmost overt item in its clause and is thus assigned main stress consistently with Zubizarreta’s analysis. Put differently, even though non-final in linear terms, focus remains structurally final with respect to its own clause, since the background phrases following it are dislocated in clause-external position.

References Antinucci, F. & Cinque, G. 1977. Sull’ordine delle parole in italiano: l’emarginazione. Studi di Grammatica Italiana 6: 121–146.

356 Vieri Samek-Lodovici

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Index

A aboutness  4, 35 accommodation  100, 189, 295– 296, see also presupposition adjunction  8, 211–214, 217–220 AGREE  133–137, 140–141 agreement  129–130, 133–134, 141–142, 146–147, 233, 314, 349 all-focus  67, 99, see also allnew, theticity all-new  99, 105, 175–176, 185, 250, see also all-focus, theticity all-new cleft  105, 113–114, see also informativepresupposition cleft, presentational cleft alternative meaning  5, 284– 290, 293–295 alternative semantic value  5, 282, 289–290, 293, 302–303 Alternative Semantics  5–6, 48–49, 177, 181, 214, 282, 284–286, 289–291, 293 altruistic movement  174 animacy  296, 299–300 antisymmetry  347, 351 association with focus  282 B background  5–12, 33–40, 47–51, 66–67, 85, 99–102, 110, 173–174, 178, 180, 185, 190–191, 215, 251, 282, 291–295, 333–348 Backgrounded Material Principle (BMP)  293–296 Bally, Charles  2 bare quantifier  158, 165–166, see also quantified noun phrase

Belletti, Adriana  132, 150, 152, 326, 335 Benincà, Paola  165, 167, 203, 236, 334, 339, 343, 352–354 Bolinger, Dwight  4 Büring, Daniel  6, 213–214, 218, 338–339 C Catalan  10, 12, 158, 166 Chafe, Wallace  4–5, 35, 251 Chomsky, Noam  6, 8–9, 124–125, 133–134, 288, 325– 326, 350 Cinque, Guglielmo  44, 124, 156–158, 165–167, 354 cleft  11–12, 51–53, 83–115, 123–152, see also all-new cleft, cohesive cleft, infinitival cleft, informative-presupposition cleft, presentational cleft, pseudo cleft, reduced cleft, semi pseudo cleft cleft copula  69–70, 87–89, 126–127, 129–131, 146–147, 151–152 clitic  44–45, 134, 155–157, 159–162, 165–167, 173–174, 224, 233, 247, 283, 289–306, 333–355 clitic dislocation  155–162, 173–174, see also Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD), Clitic Right Dislocation clitic doubling  159, 283, 294– 305, 345–346, 349–351, 353 Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD)  45, 354–355, see also clitic dislocation

Clitic Right Dislocation  67, see also clitic dislocation cohesive cleft  103–104, 109, see also informativepresupposition cleft comment  3, 5, 35, 47, 173–174, 250–251, 323–324, 328 communicative dynamism  3, 251–252 comparison  20, 29, 31, 39 complementizer  137, 140, 146, 148–149, 310 concession  28–29, 31, 39 conditional  19–40 contextual restriction  168, 190, 281–284, 289–290 contrast  7, 20, 29, 48–50, 54–57, 65, 69–71, 73–74, 101, 125, 150, 156–157, 161–163, 181, 186–190, 217, 251, 329, 335–336, 339– 340, 352 contrastive focus  7, 125, 127–128, 155–156, 161, 163, 173, 208, 335, 337 contrastive topic  101, 207, 216, 251, 338, 354–355 cross-linguistic influence 220– 224, 232–235 D Dancygier, Barbara  22–23, 26–29 default case  132 demonstrative  71–72, 103, 143, 167, 170, 173 Diez, Friedrich  1 differential object marking  296–306 direction of influence  223–225 discursive sequence  254, 273

360 Focus and Background in Romance Languages

E emphasis  1–2, 5, 158, 169, 175–180, 182, 190, 261 English  51, 85–90, 93, 99, 126–130, 177, 196–197, 199 enunciative (uses of) conditionals  25–27, 30–31, see also speech act (uses of) conditionals epistemic stance  21–23, 34 epithet  343–344 EPP  132–138, 325 exhaustivity  7, 95–98, 181–192, 251 F focus, semantics and pragmatics of  5–12, 37, 48–79, 92–93, 99–101, 124–127, 132–134, 150– 151, 161–163, 174–179, 181, 208, 251, 281–287, 293–294, 323, 335–355, see also contrastive focus, identificational focus, informational focus, polarity focus, verum focus focus accent  8–9 focus feature  9, 138, 146, 218 focus fronting  43–79, 114, 133, 155–195, 203–204, 336–337, 348–349 focus particle  7–8, 72–73, 204–236, see also focussensitive operator focus projection  8–9, 92, 335, 337 focus-sensitive operator  208, 282–283, 286–287, see also focus particle Ford, Cecilia E.  37 frame  25–28, 30–34, 39–40, 244, 254, 267, see also transitional frame Free Inversion, see Romance Free Inversion French  2, 19–40, 67, 84, 88, 93, 104, 109, 112–113, 126, 128, 133, 139, 151, 157, 205–236, 252–253, see also Old French, Middle French fronted focus, see focus fronting Full interpretation  133

Functional Sentence Perspective  3 G German  90, 93, 106–113, 128, 175, 177, 205–236, 309, 312–313, 324 givenness  5, 35, 101, 338, 348 Gundel, Jeanette K.  5, 101 H Haiman, John  35–37 Halliday, Michael A. K.  4–5, 35, 208 hanging topic (HT)  156, 354, see also frame, topic Hartmann, Katharina 213–214, 218 Heavy Inversion  249, see also inversion Hungarian  9, 74 hypothetic (uses of) conditionals  27–28, 31, 39 I identificational focus  7, 251 imperative  198 infinitival cleft 88, see also cleft information packaging  4–5, 97–99, 101, 239, see also information structure information structure  4–5, 35, 49–50, 67, 100, 173–175, 215–218, 250–252, 263–264, 298–303, 327–329 informational focus  124, 126, 164–165, 174, 185 informative-presupposition cleft  99–100, 112, see also all-new cleft, cohesive cleft, presentational cleft inverse that-cleft  127, 130, 137–139, 141–142, 144–145, 149, see also that-cleft inverse pseudo cleft  127, 129– 130, 136, see also pseudo cleft inversion  1, 10–11, 88, 148, 161, 165, 167, 174, 176, 178, 196, 241–242, 244–249, 252–254, 263, 266, 273, 313, 316, 320, 323–331, see also Heavy

Inversion, locative inversion, Romance Free Inversion, Stylistic Inversion irony  199–200 island constraint  46 Italian  2, 9, 43–79, 84–85, 90, 93, 99, 112–113, 126, 128, 132, 150, 157–158, 162–163, 167, 224, 324, 333–355 it-cleft, see cleft J Jacobs, Joachim  207–209, 282 K Kayne, Richard  219, 233, 242, 347 König, Ekkehard  73, 207–208 Krifka, Manfred  8, 99, 177, 203, 207, 216, 250–251, 283 L Lambrecht, Knud  2, 11, 35, 92–93, 100, 110, 127–128, 154, 175–176 langue analogique  2 Latin  2, 7, 262, 312, 315 left-peripheral focus  333–339, 345, 348, see also focus fronting left-peripheral topic  334, 338–345, 354–355, see also topic light verb phrase (vP)  216–220, 324–325 locative inversion  199, 253, see also inversion M Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm  1 Middle French  239–276, see also French, Old French modal particle  110, 115 N narrative sequence  250, 265–275 negation  57, 108, 143, 177, 188, 193–194, 196, 198, 217, 247, 282 Negative Preposing  195–197



non-final focus  334, 336, see also rightmost focus non-specificity 166, 297, 328, see also specificity null subject  92–93, 126, 128, 132, 148, 150–151, 222, 311, 317–322, 325, 327, 342–343 null subject language  92–93, 132, 148, 150–151, 222, 323, 327 O Old French  241–242, 244–245, 247, 249, 262, 274, 310–312, 315, see also French, Middle French Old Portuguese  128, 143–152, 309–331, see also Portuguese ordinary meaning  5, 282, 284–288, 293–294 ordinary semantic value, see ordinary meaning P periphery  9, 50, 92, 132, 140–141, 150, 162, see also left-peripheral focus, leftperipheral topic personal pronoun  247–249, 273–274, 296, see also pronominal subject polarity focus  77–78, 177, see also verum focus Poletto, Cecilia  334, 352–354 polysemy  20 Portuguese  3, 88, 90, 93, 112, 123–152, 158, 202, 309–331, see also Old Portuguese postposed protasis  36–37 Prague School  3–4 presentational cleft  105, see also all-new cleft, informative-presupposition cleft, theticity presupposition  6, 52–53, 73–74, 124, 226, 285–293, 305 Prince, Ellen F.  51, 85, 87, 99–100 pronominal subject  92, 94, 241–242, 247–248, 273–278,

Index 361

317–322, 329–330, see also personal pronoun pseudo cleft 83, 89–90, 134–135, 140–141, 143–147, 149, see also inverse pseudo cleft psychological subject  3 Q quaestio  4 Quantificational Fronting  168, see also bare quantifier quantified noun phrase  63–66, 165–167, see also bare quantifier R reduced cleft  129–131, 142, 146–152 resumptive clitic  42, 156–157, 161, 165–166, 174, 199, see also clitic Resumptive Preposing  158, 167–168, 170, 187 rightmost focus 336, see also non-final focus Rizzi, Luigi  9, 46–47, 334–335, 337–339, 345 Romance Free Inversion  313, 325–326, see also inversion Romanian  7, 10, 292, 295–305 Rooth, Mats  5, 8, 37, 48, 208, 214, 282–284 S Samek-Lodovici, Vieri  47, 333–338, 346–347 Sardinian  162, 175 scalar properties  194 selectional restrictions  287–291 semantic composition  282– 284, 288–290, 293, 303 semi pseudo cleft 140–141, see also pseudo cleft Sicilian  162 small clause (SC)  134–137, 144 Spanish  2, 6, 10, 43–79, 84–85, 90, 93, 112–113, 126–127, 155–202 speaker involvement  21–23

specificity  166, 184, 297, see also non-specificity speech act (uses of) conditionals  25–26, 28, 30, 38–39, see also enunciative (uses of) conditionals strong island  340–341, 354 structured meaning approach  282, 291 Stylistic Inversion  246–247, 249, 252–253, see also inversion stylistic rule  148, 150–151 subject focus  93, 126–127, 132–134, 231–232, 249, 258 subject pronoun, see personal pronoun, pronominal subject subject–verb inversion, see inversion Sweetser, Eve E.  22–23, 26–29 T tense concord  129–130, 142 that-cleft  124–149, see also cleft thème and propos  2 theme and rheme  3 theticity  134, 175–178, 250, 323–328, see also all-new Thompson, Sandra A.  37 topic  3, 5, 34–37, 47, 63, 72–73, 99, 101–102, 161, 166, 174–178, 193, 196, 250, 254–258, 263– 264, 315, 323–324, 327–329, 337–345, 354–355 topicalization  45, 109, 213, 215, 218, 273, 297–300 transitional frame  30, 32, 34, see also frame U unaccusativity  133, 314, 324 V verb second (V2)  7, 10–11, 109, 128, 143–144, 214, 217, 241–249, 253–254, 309–331 verum focus  77, 177–183, 190, 194–202, see also Verum Focus Fronting (VFF)

362 Focus and Background in Romance Languages

Verum Focus Fronting (VFF)  77, 179–202 vP, see light verb phrase W weak crossover effect  9, 165, 353 wh-cleft, see pseudo cleft

wh-interrogative, see  wh-question wh-question  45, 49, 58, 124, 131, 147–149, 163, 285 Y yes/no-interrogative, see  yes/no-question

yes/no-question  182, 184, 186, 310 Z Zubizarreta, Maria L.  45–46, 124, 126, 336

Studies in Language Companion Series A complete list of titles in this series can be found on the publishers’ website, www.benjamins.com 113 Comrie, Bernard, Ray Fabri, Elizabeth Hume, Manwel Mifsud, Thomas Stolz and Martine Vanhove (eds.): Introducing Maltese Linguistics. Selected papers from the 1st International Conference on Maltese Linguistics, Bremen, 18–20 October, 2007. 2009. xi, 422 pp. 112 Dufter, Andreas and Daniel Jacob (eds.): Focus and Background in Romance Languages. 2009. vii, 362 pp. 111 Polguère, Alain and Igor A. Mel’čuk (eds.): Dependency in Linguistic Description. 2009. xxii, 281 pp. 110 Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. (ed.): Coding Participant Marking. Construction types in twelve African languages. 2009. xvi, 389 pp. 109 Narrog, Heiko: Modality in Japanese. The layered structure of the clause and hierarchies of functional categories. 2009. xxii, 277 pp. 108 Barðdal, Jóhanna and Shobhana L. Chelliah (eds.): The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic, and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case. 2009. xx, 432 pp. 107 Butler, Christopher S. and Javier Martín Arista (eds.): Deconstructing Constructions. 2009. xx, 306 pp. 106 Vanhove, Martine (ed.): From Polysemy to Semantic Change. Towards a typology of lexical semantic associations. 2008. xiii, 404 pp. 105 Van Valin, Jr., Robert D. (ed.): Investigations of the Syntax–Semantics–Pragmatics Interface. 2008. xxiv, 484 pp. 104 Mushin, Ilana and Brett Baker (eds.): Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages. 2008. x, 239 pp. 103 Josephson, Folke and Ingmar Söhrman (eds.): Interdependence of Diachronic and Synchronic Analyses. 2008. viii, 350 pp. 102 Goddard, Cliff (ed.): Cross-Linguistic Semantics. 2008. xvi, 356 pp. 101 Stolz, Thomas, Sonja Kettler, Cornelia Stroh and Aina Urdze: Split Possession. An areallinguistic study of the alienability correlation and related phenomena in the languages of Europe. 2008. x, 546 pp. 100 Ameka, Felix K. and M.E. Kropp Dakubu (eds.): Aspect and Modality in Kwa Languages. 2008. ix, 335 pp. 99 Høeg Müller, Henrik and Alex Klinge (eds.): Essays on Nominal Determination. From morphology to discourse management. 2008. xviii, 369 pp. 98 Fabricius-Hansen, Cathrine and Wiebke Ramm (eds.): 'Subordination' versus 'Coordination' in Sentence and Text. A cross-linguistic perspective. 2008. vi, 359 pp. 97 Dollinger, Stefan: New-Dialect Formation in Canada. Evidence from the English modal auxiliaries. 2008. xxii, 355 pp. 96 Romeo, Nicoletta: Aspect in Burmese. Meaning and function. 2008. xv, 289 pp. 95 O’Connor, Loretta: Motion, Transfer and Transformation. The grammar of change in Lowland Chontal. 2007. xiv, 251 pp. 94 Miestamo, Matti, Kaius Sinnemäki and Fred Karlsson (eds.): Language Complexity. Typology, contact, change. 2008. xiv, 356 pp. 93 Schalley, Andrea C. and Drew Khlentzos (eds.): Mental States. Volume 2: Language and cognitive structure. 2007. x, 362 pp. 92 Schalley, Andrea C. and Drew Khlentzos (eds.): Mental States. Volume 1: Evolution, function, nature. 2007. xii, 304 pp. 91 Filipović, Luna: Talking about Motion. A crosslinguistic investigation of lexicalization patterns. 2007. x, 182 pp. 90 Muysken, Pieter (ed.): From Linguistic Areas to Areal Linguistics. 2008. vii, 293 pp. 89 Stark, Elisabeth, Elisabeth Leiss and Werner Abraham (eds.): Nominal Determination. Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence. 2007. viii, 370 pp. 88 Ramat, Paolo and Elisa Roma (eds.): Europe and the Mediterranean as Linguistic Areas. Convergencies from a historical and typological perspective. 2007. xxvi, 364 pp.

87 Verhoeven, Elisabeth: Experiential Constructions in Yucatec Maya. A typologically based analysis of a functional domain in a Mayan language. 2007. xiv, 380 pp. 86 Schwarz-Friesel, Monika, Manfred Consten and Mareile Knees (eds.): Anaphors in Text. Cognitive, formal and applied approaches to anaphoric reference. 2007. xvi, 282 pp. 85 Butler, Christopher S., Raquel Hidalgo Downing and Julia Lavid (eds.): Functional Perspectives on Grammar and Discourse. In honour of Angela Downing. 2007. xxx, 481 pp. 84 Wanner, Leo (ed.): Selected Lexical and Grammatical Issues in the Meaning–Text Theory. In honour of Igor Mel'čuk. 2007. xviii, 380 pp. 83 Hannay, Mike and Gerard J. Steen (eds.): Structural-Functional Studies in English Grammar. In honour of Lachlan Mackenzie. 2007. vi, 393 pp. 82 Ziegeler, Debra: Interfaces with English Aspect. Diachronic and empirical studies. 2006. xvi, 325 pp. 81 Peeters, Bert (ed.): Semantic Primes and Universal Grammar. Empirical evidence from the Romance languages. 2006. xvi, 374 pp. 80 Birner, Betty J. and Gregory Ward (eds.): Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning. Neo-Gricean studies in pragmatics and semantics in honor of Laurence R. Horn. 2006. xii, 350 pp. 79 Laffut, An: Three-Participant Constructions in English. A functional-cognitive approach to caused relations. 2006. ix, 268 pp. 78 Yamamoto, Mutsumi: Agency and Impersonality. Their Linguistic and Cultural Manifestations. 2006. x, 152 pp. 77 Kulikov, Leonid, Andrej Malchukov and Peter de Swart (eds.): Case, Valency and Transitivity. 2006. xx, 503 pp. 76 Nevalainen, Terttu, Juhani Klemola and Mikko Laitinen (eds.): Types of Variation. Diachronic, dialectal and typological interfaces. 2006. viii, 378 pp. 75 Hole, Daniel, André Meinunger and Werner Abraham (eds.): Datives and Other Cases. Between argument structure and event structure. 2006. viii, 385 pp. 74 Pietrandrea, Paola: Epistemic Modality. Functional properties and the Italian system. 2005. xii, 232 pp. 73 Xiao, Richard Zhonghua and Tony McEnery: Aspect in Mandarin Chinese. A corpus-based study. 2004. x, 305 pp. 72 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Adam Hodges and David S. Rood (eds.): Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. 2005. xii, 432 pp. 71 Dahl, Östen: The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. 2004. x, 336 pp. 70 Lefebvre, Claire: Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 2004. xvi, 358 pp. 69 Tanaka, Lidia: Gender, Language and Culture. A study of Japanese television interview discourse. 2004. xvii, 233 pp. 68 Moder, Carol Lynn and Aida Martinovic-Zic (eds.): Discourse Across Languages and Cultures. 2004. vi, 366 pp. 67 Luraghi, Silvia: On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases. The expression of semantic roles in Ancient Greek. 2003. xii, 366 pp. 66 Nariyama, Shigeko: Ellipsis and Reference Tracking in Japanese. 2003. xvi, 400 pp. 65 Matsumoto, Kazuko: Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation. Syntactic, informational and functional structures. 2003. xviii, 215 pp. 64 Butler, Christopher S.: Structure and Function – A Guide to Three Major Structural-Functional Theories. Part 2: From clause to discourse and beyond. 2003. xiv, 579 pp. 63 Butler, Christopher S.: Structure and Function – A Guide to Three Major Structural-Functional Theories. Part 1: Approaches to the simplex clause. 2003. xx, 573 pp. 62 Field, Fredric: Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Contexts. With a foreword by Bernard Comrie. 2002. xviii, 255 pp. 61 Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.): Meaning and Universal Grammar. Theory and empirical findings. Volume 2. 2002. xvi, 337 pp. 60 Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.): Meaning and Universal Grammar. Theory and empirical findings. Volume 1. 2002. xvi, 337 pp. 59 Shi, Yuzhi: The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar. The formation of the resultative construction and its effects. 2002. xiv, 262 pp.

58 Maylor, B. Roger: Lexical Template Morphology. Change of state and the verbal prefixes in German. 2002. x, 273 pp. 57 Mel’čuk, Igor A.: Communicative Organization in Natural Language. The semantic-communicative structure of sentences. 2001. xii, 393 pp. 56 Faarlund, Jan Terje (ed.): Grammatical Relations in Change. 2001. viii, 326 pp. 55 Dahl, Östen and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (eds.): Circum-Baltic Languages. Volume 2: Grammar and Typology. 2001. xx, 423 pp. 54 Dahl, Östen and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (eds.): Circum-Baltic Languages. Volume 1: Past and Present. 2001. xx, 382 pp. 53 Fischer, Olga, Anette Rosenbach and Dieter Stein (eds.): Pathways of Change. Grammaticalization in English. 2000. x, 391 pp. 52 Torres Cacoullos, Rena: Grammaticization, Synchronic Variation, and Language Contact. A study of Spanish progressive -ndo constructions. 2000. xvi, 255 pp. 51 Ziegeler, Debra: Hypothetical Modality. Grammaticalisation in an L2 dialect. 2000. xx, 290 pp. 50 Abraham, Werner and Leonid Kulikov (eds.): Tense-Aspect, Transitivity and Causativity. Essays in honour of Vladimir Nedjalkov. 1999. xxxiv, 359 pp. 49 Bhat, D.N.S.: The Prominence of Tense, Aspect and Mood. 1999. xii, 198 pp. 48 Manney, Linda Joyce: Middle Voice in Modern Greek. Meaning and function of an inflectional category. 2000. xiii, 262 pp. 47 Brinton, Laurel J. and Minoji Akimoto (eds.): Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English. 1999. xiv, 283 pp. 46 Yamamoto, Mutsumi: Animacy and Reference. A cognitive approach to corpus linguistics. 1999. xviii, 278 pp. 45 Collins, Peter and David Lee (eds.): The Clause in English. In honour of Rodney Huddleston. 1999. xv, 342 pp. 44 Hannay, Mike and A. Machtelt Bolkestein (eds.): Functional Grammar and Verbal Interaction. 1998. xii, 304 pp. 43 Olbertz, Hella, Kees Hengeveld and Jesús Sánchez García (eds.): The Structure of the Lexicon in Functional Grammar. 1998. xii, 312 pp. 42 Darnell, Michael, Edith A. Moravcsik, Michael Noonan, Frederick J. Newmeyer and Kathleen M. Wheatley (eds.): Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics. Volume II: Case studies. 1999. vi, 407 pp. 41 Darnell, Michael, Edith A. Moravcsik, Michael Noonan, Frederick J. Newmeyer and Kathleen M. Wheatley (eds.): Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics. Volume I: General papers. 1999. vi, 486 pp. 40 Birner, Betty J. and Gregory Ward: Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English. 1998. xiv, 314 pp. 39 Wanner, Leo (ed.): Recent Trends in Meaning–Text Theory. 1997. xx, 202 pp. 38 Hacking, Jane F.: Coding the Hypothetical. A comparative typology of Russian and Macedonian conditionals. 1998. vi, 156 pp. 37 Harvey, Mark and Nicholas Reid (eds.): Nominal Classification in Aboriginal Australia. 1997. x, 296 pp. 36 Kamio, Akio (ed.): Directions in Functional Linguistics. 1997. xiii, 259 pp. 35 Matsumoto, Yoshiko: Noun-Modifying Constructions in Japanese. A frame semantic approach. 1997. viii, 204 pp. 34 Hatav, Galia: The Semantics of Aspect and Modality. Evidence from English and Biblical Hebrew. 1997. x, 224 pp. 33 Velázquez-Castillo, Maura: The Grammar of Possession. Inalienability, incorporation and possessor ascension in Guaraní. 1996. xvi, 274 pp. 32 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt: Grammaticalization of the Complex Sentence. A case study in Chadic. 1996. xviii, 501 pp. 31 Wanner, Leo (ed.): Lexical Functions in Lexicography and Natural Language Processing. 1996. xx, 355 pp. 30 Huffman, Alan: The Categories of Grammar. French lui and le. 1997. xiv, 379 pp.

29 Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth, Michael Fortescue, Peter Harder, Lars Heltoft and Lisbeth Falster Jakobsen (eds.): Content, Expression and Structure. Studies in Danish functional grammar. 1996. xvi, 510 pp. 28 Herman, József (ed.): Linguistic Studies on Latin. Selected papers from the 6th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics (Budapest, 23–27 March 1991). 1994. ix, 421 pp. 27 Abraham, Werner, T. Givón and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.): Discourse, Grammar and Typology. Papers in honor of John W.M. Verhaar. 1995. xx, 352 pp. 26 Lima, Susan D., Roberta Corrigan and Gregory K. Iverson: The Reality of Linguistic Rules. 1994. xxiii, 480 pp. 25 Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.): Semantic and Lexical Universals. Theory and empirical findings. 1994. viii, 510 pp. 24 Bhat, D.N.S.: The Adjectival Category. Criteria for differentiation and identification. 1994. xii, 295 pp. 23 Comrie, Bernard and Maria Polinsky (eds.): Causatives and Transitivity. 1993. x, 399 pp. 22 McGregor, William B.: A Functional Grammar of Gooniyandi. 1990. xx, 618 pp. 21 Coleman, Robert (ed.): New Studies in Latin Linguistics. Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, Cambridge, April 1987. 1990. x, 480 pp. 20 Verhaar, John W.M. S.J. (ed.): Melanesian Pidgin and Tok Pisin. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles in Melanesia. 1990. xiv, 409 pp. 19 Blust, Robert A.: Austronesian Root Theory. An essay on the limits of morphology. 1988. xi, 190 pp. 18 Wierzbicka, Anna: The Semantics of Grammar. 1988. vii, 581 pp. 17 Calboli, Gualtiero (ed.): Subordination and Other Topics in Latin. Proceedings of the Third Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, Bologna, 1–5 April 1985. 1989. xxix, 691 pp. 16 Conte, Maria-Elisabeth, János Sánder Petöfi and Emel Sözer (eds.): Text and Discourse Connectedness. Proceedings of the Conference on Connexity and Coherence, Urbino, July 16–21, 1984. 1989. xxiv, 584 pp. 15 Justice, David: The Semantics of Form in Arabic. In the mirror of European languages. 1987. iv, 417 pp. 14 Benson, Morton, Evelyn Benson and Robert F. Ilson: Lexicographic Description of English. 1986. xiii, 275 pp. 13 Reesink, Ger: Structures and their Functions in Usan. 1987. xviii, 369 pp. 12 Pinkster, Harm (ed.): Latin Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Proceedings of the 1st International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, Amsterdam, April 1981. 1983. xviii, 307 pp. 11 Panhuis, Dirk G.J.: The Communicative Perspective in the Sentence. A study of Latin word order. 1982. viii, 172 pp. 10 Dressler, Wolfgang U., Willi Mayerthaler, Oswald Panagl and Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel: Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology. 1988. ix, 168 pp. 9 Lang, Ewald and John Pheby: The Semantics of Coordination. (English transl. by John Pheby from the German orig. ed. 'Semantik der koordinativen Verknüpfung', Berlin, 1977). 1984. 300 pp. 8 Barth, E.M. and J.L. Martens (eds.): Argumentation: Approaches to Theory Formation. Containing the Contributions to the Groningen Conference on the Theory of Argumentation, October 1978. 1982. xviii, 333 pp. 7 Parret, Herman, Marina Sbisà and Jef Verschueren (eds.): Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics. Proceedings of the Conference on Pragmatics, Urbino, July 8–14, 1979. 1981. x, 854 pp. 6 Vago, Robert M. (ed.): Issues in Vowel Harmony. Proceedings of the CUNY Linguistics Conference on Vowel Harmony, May 14, 1977. 1980. xx, 340 pp. 5 Haiman, John: Hua: A Papuan Language of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea. 1980. iv, 550 pp. 4 Lloyd, Albert L.: Anatomy of the Verb. The Gothic Verb as a Model for a Unified Theory of Aspect, Actional Types, and Verbal Velocity. (Part I: Theory; Part II: Application). 1979. x, 351 pp. 3 Malkiel, Yakov: From Particular to General Linguistics. Selected Essays 1965–1978. With an introduction by the author, an index rerum and an index nominum. 1983. xxii, 659 pp. 2 Anwar, Mohamed Sami: BE and Equational Sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. 1979. vi, 128 pp. 1 Abraham, Werner (ed.): Valence, Semantic Case, and Grammatical Relations. Workshop studies prepared for the 12th International Congress of Linguists, Vienna, August 29th to September 3rd, 1977. 1978. xiv, 729 pp.