Volume 27, Fall 2011

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https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/100059

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Browsing Volume 27, Fall 2011 by Subject "Focus (Linguistics)"

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    Focus marking in a language lacking pragmatic presuppositions
    (University of Calgary, 2011-09) Koch, Karsten A
    This study investigates the effect of a language-wide lack of pragmatic resuppositions on focus marking (often taken to be inherently presuppositional). The language of investigation is Nɬeʔkepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). I show that discourse participants treat presuppositions triggered by focus in the same way as lexical presuppositions. Addressees do not challenge presuppositions that they do not share (strikingly unlike in English). Speakers, however, typically avoid using presuppositions not shared by the addressee. As a result, speakers avoid using their own utterances to mark narrow focus at all, a striking difference from English. I argue that this is due to another pragmatic constraint subject to cross-linguistic parameterization: while the speaker’s own utterance counts as being in the common ground for the purposes of marking presuppositions in English, Salish speakers do not generally mark presuppositions unless they have overt evidence that the addressee shares these presuppositions. This results in a radically different focus marking strategy within a discourse turn as opposed to across discourse turns.
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    Hungarian information structure: a comparison of Lexical-Functional Grammar and cartography
    (University of Calgary, 2011-09) Hracs, Lindsay
    A comparison of a Lexical-Functional Grammar analysis and a Cartography-based analysis of information structure suggests that Lexical-Functional Grammar can better account for phenomena associated with information structure. Also, Lexical-Functional Grammar seems to better capture the fact that the subject and topic roles do not have to coincide. Ultimately, Cartography lacks a method of expressing the interactions with respect to syntax, semantics, and prosody in a systematic way. This is because Cartography deals with information structure as a phenomenon of the peripheries. Principles and Parameters based theories such as Cartography do not exhibit an interface between PF and LF, which is important for Hungarian. In Hungarian, prosody can affect scope-based interpretation. Lexical-Functional Grammar on the other hand, fully integrates c-structure, f-structure, i-structure, and p-structure in the Correspondence Architecture allowing for an interface between all of these components. Thus, Lexical-Functional Grammar is better suited to deal with the phenomena associated with information structure in Hungarian.