Syntactic Focus Research Articles

Syntactic outcomes of socially (un)restricted bilingualism in Spain

Abstract The present study uses the apparent-time construct to analyze cross-generational variability of word order in unergative and unaccusative constructions in Basque (e.g., negar ein ‘to cry’ and heldu ‘to arrive’, respectively). It considers the results of an acceptability judgment as well as elicitation tasks carried out among two generations of Basque native speakers (55–75 years old, and 35–45 years old). Unlike the younger participants, the older participants lack the syntactic focus strategy. It is proposed that this lack among the older participants was conditioned by the socially restricted bilingualism that they experienced during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), while the younger participants appeared to have acquired (i.e. recovered) the syntactic focus strategy because they experienced the legitimacy and vitality of Basque in public life and in formal education following the Normalization Law of 1982. Studies in Basque sociolinguistics have identified language changes through feature loss, dialectal leveling and contact-induced change, but no studies to date have identified the recovery of a previously lost syntactic structure.

Preschoolers’ comprehension of exhaustive focus: The role of contextualization

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children’s comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an essentially identical logical structure, have been argued to stem not from the lack of their competence to compute the implicature itself, but from their immature contextualization abilities to identify relevant scalar alternatives. We address the question whether the same extraneous factor may underlie preschooler’s difficulties with focus exhaustification in a comprehension study of 5- to 6-year-old Hungarian children which investigated the effect of contextual cues on their focus interpretation. It was found that while the presence of an explicit Question Under Discussion significantly raises children’s accuracy in identifying the focus and its alternatives (sub-experiment 1), it fails to induce a similar increase in the proportion of exhaustive interpretations (sub-experiment 2). These results indicate that, in contrast to the case of scalar implicatures, children’s low rate of exhaustification of focus reflects a deeper, less context-dependent difference from adult-like comprehension, possibly rooted in the linguistic representation of focus exhaustivity.

Prosodic focus marking in clefts and syntactically unmarked equivalents: Prosody-syntax trade-off or additive effects?

Two experiments quantitatively investigated the interaction of prosody and syntax in marking focus in English. A production study with 28 participants (analyzing 919 utterances) found that the acoustic marking of subject focus vs broad focus, induced through a preceding context question, was generally the same in clefts as in sentences with unmarked syntax. Thus, results suggested that prosody is independent from syntax rather than showing a trade-off (weaker prosodic marking for clefts). Focus was marked with f0 range, f0 maxima, f0 minima, duration, and intensity. Maxima of focused subjects were not significantly higher, but they were earlier than in broad focus. In a perception experiment, 230 participants rated the suitability of 24 auditorily presented stimuli as answers to preceding context questions inducing subject focus or broad focus. Clefts and sentences prosodically marking the subject as focused were rated higher in subject focus than in broad focus contexts. Syntax and prosody did not interact, again suggesting the absence of a trade-off. Thus, both studies suggest an additive use of syntax and prosody: Prosodic focus marking was equally extensive and effective in the presence of syntactic focus marking as without.

Жанрово-коммуникативная специфика произведений В.М. Шукшина: композиционно-синтаксический аспект

The paper offers a look at the specifics of genres in the literary V.M. Shukshin’s works. The patterns of scenario transformation of his cinematic prose are analyzed. An original or secondary tales are set in the center of his genre system. They were created mainly for semiotic translation. The tales for theater and cinema reveal the syncretism of these art forms. The stories were the primary texts for the secondary scripts-tales. The main feature of their scenario transformation is the increase in its volume. It’s not so much due to the introduction of new episodes, but rather due to a change in the volume-pragmatic division, compositional and syntactic focusing of the perceptual visual field, and variation of the image plans. The main feature of the novel’s scenario transformation is the reduction of its volume. It’s due to the elimination of optional text fragments and statements and the diverse montage-driven composition technique. Shukshin’s work on scenario self-interpretation of prose was carried out not only at the macrotext level, but also at the statement’s microcomposition. It was associated with the change in their punctuation-graphic arrangement, with the choice of union or non-union syntactic connection and the means of its expression. The genre-communicative specificity of Shukshin’s works was motivated by his goal setting for their semiotic translation for theater or cinema, his deep understanding of the screenplay as a new kind of literature.

The syntax of weak and strong pronouns in Dagbani and Kusaal

AbstractAlthough studies in Dagbani and Kusaal have distinguished between weak and strong pronouns, their syntactic peculiarities remain largely uninvestigated. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting a systematic investigation of the distribution of these pronouns drawing data from these two languages. We demonstrate that strong pronouns have dedicated syntactic positions including left peripheral focus, predicate focus, and fragmentary answers where pronominals are required. We further show that Dagbani and Kusaal behave differently regarding the distribution of strong and weak pronouns in two domains (i) conjunct ordering of pronouns in conjoined noun phrases and in (ii) fragmentary or elliptical answers. We contend that the ban on weak pronouns in positions of syntactic focus is attributable to their prosodic deficiency.

Properties of Syntactic Focus in Some Free Word Order Languages

This study proposes that a certain type of focus involving exhaustive interpretation triggers syntactic movement and further examines its semantico-pragmatic factors across free word order languages such as Hungarian, Korean, Japanese, and Russian. Given that the focus item, which is interpreted as exhaustive, occupies dislocated positions in the four languages, the focus is claimed to bear a strong feature [+exhaustive] in numeration and to undergo syntactic movement in order to have the feature checked off before Spell-out. Under this claim, the syntactic movement is naturally linked with the focus interpretation, avoiding the violation of Inclusiveness Principle. Furthermore, the current study discusses parametric differences in realizing exhaustive focus from the syntactic perspective.

Focus effects on quantifier domains in a visual verification task

In a visual verification study we investigated how syntactic focus affects the interpretation of quantifiers. We compared the effect of syntactic focus on the truth conditions of sentences with the quantificational adverbonlyand the superlative quantifiermostin Polish. In this language, the scopal properties ofmostas well as the syntactic construction of the sentence final focus allowed us to predict parallel focus association patterns for both quantifiers. We found that, indeed, syntactic focus is able to guide the attention during visual verification. It is known that prosodic focus is immediately integrated during semantic processing, our study is the first to demonstrate that syntactic focus can facilitate the verification of the truth of a sentence, by guiding attention towards the more salient information in the picture, i.e., the set of focus alternatives.

Imperfect Acquisition of a Related Variety? Residual Clefting and What It Reveals about (Gradient) Bilectalism

This paper explores the concept of gradient bilectalism by capitalizing on insights from recent developments in Second Language Acquisition, particularly the suggestion that aspects of the syntax-discourse interface that are not easily accessible to the learner may lead to fossilization, even at end state. I explore the implications of this suggestion for bilectal grammars by examining the ways in which speakers of Cypriot Greek do syntactic focusing in Standard Greek. The phenomenon is structurally different in the two varieties of Greek examined: clefting is the Cypriot syntactic focusing strategy par excellence while in Standard Greek the relevant strategy is movement of the focused item to an immediately preverbal position. Ιnterestingly, this focusing strategy is largely unattested in the acrolectal or standard-like production of bilectal Greek Cypriot speakers; on the contrary, the preferred strategy for syntactic focusing appears to be clefting, as is indicated by data from spontaneous speech. Quantitative data from a questionnaire survey presented in this paper confirm that such ‘residual clefting’ is all-pervasive even at end state, which in turn suggests imperfect acquisition of the relevant structural aspect of Standard Greek, the second variety of these otherwise bilectal speakers. The data invite an approach couched within the Interface Hypothesis and the argument is put forward that, being a structure at the interface between syntax and other modules or cognitive domains (semantics, pragmatics, discourse), focusing in the target variety is vulnerable as regards acquisition.

Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws

New dialect emergence and focusing in language contact settings is difficult to capture and date in terms of global structural dialect stabilization. This paper explores whether diachronic power law frequency distributions can provide evidence of dialect evolution and new dialect focusing, by considering the quantitative frequency characteristics of three diachronic Indian English (IE) corpora (1970s–2008). The results demonstrate that IE consistently follows power law frequency distributions and the corpora are each best fit by Mandelbrot’s Law. Diachronic changes in the constants are interpreted as evidence of lexical and syntactic collocational focusing within the process of new dialect formation. Evidence of new dialect focusing is also visible through apparent time comparison of spoken and written data. Age and gender-separated sub-corpora of the most recent corpus show minimal deviation, providing apparent time evidence for emerging IE dialect stability. From these findings, we extend the interpretation of diachronic changes in the β coefficient—as indicative of changes in the degree of synthetic/analytic structure—so that β is also sensitive to grammaticalization and changes in collocational patterns.

Syntactic devices expressing focus in English and Kurdish: A comparative study

Languages can have different devices to express different types of information such as focus, in which certain elements in a sentence are given a special prominence to represent the most important new information in that sentence. Hence, the present paper deals with syntactic aspects of focus in English and Kurdish. The study comprises three chapters. Chapter one is devoted to the analysis and discussion of syntactic aspects of focus in English. It covers different devices that are used to express focus in English including: passsivization, cleft constructions, topicalization, postponement, extraposition and existential construction. Chapter two presents an analaysis of Kurdish Syntactic focus. It explores Syntactic devices in Kurdish to express focus which include: Interrogtaive and Exclamative sentences, complements, passivization and topicalization. Chapter three conducts a comparative analysis of syntactic focus in English and Kurdish and highlights some points of similarity and difference between the two languages. Finally, the most important findings of the paper are presented.

Syntactic and prosodic focus marking in contact varieties of South African English

The article presents results of an elicited-production study investigating syntactic and prosodic consequences of language contact on two varieties of multilingual Black speakers of South African English, namely Black South African English (BlSAfE) and a newly emerging variety by Black speakers (“crossing over variety”). The results indicate that contact varieties of South African English share syntactic traits of General South African English (GenSAfE) relating to focus marking. At the same time, BlSAfE also shows differences in the frequency of use of the syntactic structures. The differences cannot be accounted for solely by L1 influence. Also, in prosody, significant differences between the varieties emerge. For BlSAfE, the differences can be related to L1 influence. A language can exert its influence differently on different areas of another language’s grammar: With respect to syntax the “crossing over” variety groups with GenSAfE, with respect to prosody it is in-between GenSAfE and BlSAfE.

The interaction of prosody and syntax in Samoan focus marking

This paper presents the first study of prosodic and syntactic focus marking in Samoan, an Austronesian VSO language. It is shown that while Samoan appears to use syntax to mark focus, focus marking in Samoan actually fits well within the generalisation that focus must be maximally prosodically prominent. Seven native speakers were recorded answering questions about pictures depicting simple events. The questions were designed to elicit agent or object focus, and question-under-discussion (QUD) focus or contrastive focus. Results showed different speakers had different focus-marking strategies. Two consistently used a cleft construction to front the focused constituent. Two speakers fronted focused agents, but not objects. The final three used basic verb-agent-object ordering in all focus conditions. Prosody was analysed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework. The initial phonological phrase was always the most prominent. Therefore, when the focus was fronted, it was maximally prominent, making Samoan a language with prosodically motivated syntactic movement, like Spanish and Hungarian. In the verb-agent-object sentences, the verb and agent were in the initial phrase. Speakers raised the accent on the object in object focus, and lowered it in agent focus; although they did not do this consistently. There was no prosodic marking of focus on the agent. This is interestingly opposite the asymmetry between focus marking on the subject and object in English and Romance languages, with the same prosodic motivation.

The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

This paper reports the results of a production experiment that explores the prosodic realization of focus in Hungarian, a language that is characterized by obligatory syntactic focus marking. Our study investigates narrow focus in sentences in which focus is unambiguously marked by syntactic means, comparing it to broad focus sentences. Potential independent effects of the salience (textual givenness) of the background of the narrow focus and the contrastiveness of the focus are controlled for and are also examined.The results show that both continuous phonetic measures and categorical factors such as the distribution of contour types are affected by the focus-related factors, despite the presence of syntactic focus marking. The phonetic effects found are mostly parallel to those of typical prosodic focus marking languages like English. The prosodic prominence required of focus is realized through changes to the scaling and slope of F0 targets and contours. The asymmetric prominence relation between the focus and the background can be expressed not only by the phonetic marking of the prominence of the focused element, but also by the phonetic marking of the reduced prominence of the background. Furthermore, contrastiveness of focus and (textual) givenness of the background show independent phonetic effects, both of them affecting the realization of the background. These results are argued to shed light on alternative approaches to the information structural notion of contrastive focus and the relation between the notions of focus and givenness.

A-11 * Impact of Contextual Language Cues and Cognitive Functioning on Verbal Encoding BOLD Activation in Older Adults

Objective: We compared activation related to contextual cues (semantic versus syntactic information) while older adults encoded verbal information. We hypothesized that semantic-focus would positively correlate with cognition and elicit greater activation within left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), pars triangularis (PT), and middle orbitofrontal gyrus (MOFG). Syntactic focus would negatively correlate with cognition and elicit greater activation within bilateral pars operculus (PO) and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG). Method: 32 older adults (ages 65–85) completed the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS). BOLD activation within bilateral regions of interest (ROIs) was measured during a verbal encoding task: Participants read short phrases and categorized each by semantic (man-made versus nature related) or syntactic (present versus past tense) context. Intensity and number of voxels activated (per region and condition) were examined. Correlations between fMRI activation and cognition (RBANS scores) was examined. Results: Syntactic over semantic activation was observed within bilateral PO (p < .05 FWER) and MTG (uncorrected p < .001). Semantic over syntactic activation was observed within left ROIs and right MFG, MOFG, and MTG. Results demonstrated no correlation of RBANS scores and syntactic over semantic activation. Semantic over syntactic activation within left MOFG, left PO, and left PT (cluster = > 8 voxels, p < .05 FWER), and right MTG and PO (uncorrected p < .001) correlated positively with RBANS score. Conclusion(s): Findings support research describing older adult cortical dedifferentiation and increased activation during higher-level processes. Results suggest explicit semantic over implicit syntactic context as higher-level eliciting increased resources in older adults during encoding.

Focus marking in Bura: semantic uniformity matches syntactic heterogeneity

The present article introduces a theory of (morpho-)syntactic focus marking on nominal categories in Bura, a Central Chadic SVO language spoken in the northeast of Nigeria. Our central claim is that the particle an plays a crucial role in the marking of subject and non-subject focus. We put forward a uniform analysis of an as a focus copula that selects for syntactic predicates of type and a focused constituent of type . This uniform semantic representation is transparently mapped onto different syntactic structures: In a clause with a focused subject, the focus copula appears between the subject in SpecTP and the predicative VP. On the other hand, syntactically focused non-subjects are fronted and appear in a bi-clausal cleft structure that contains the focus copula and a relative cleft-remnant. The non-uniform analysis of focus marking is further supported by the structure of predicative constructions, in which the focus copula separates the focused subject and the adjectival or nominal predicate. It is also shown that alternative unified analyses fail to account for the full range of Bura data. The latter part of the article provides an analysis of the Bura cleft construction. Based on syntactic and semantic evidence, we come to the conclusion that the clefted constituent is base-generated in its initial surface position, and that an empty operator moves within the relative clause. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the potential conceptual reasons behind the observed subject/non-subject asymmetry in Bura.

Dialectology, typology, diachrony, and contact linguistics: a multi-layered perspective in Purepecha

Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore the relations between four domains dealing with linguistic variation: dialectology, typology, diachrony, and contact linguistics. I will contribute to dialectal research that includes syntactic questions by exploring the typological and geographical variations in the position of the indefinite article in the noun phrase in Purepecha. I show that a syntactic focus in dialectal research reveals the dynamic of Purepecha, displaying diachronic change and synchronic variation and revealing social and historical particularities. This dialectal perspective is dynamic and multi-dimensional, with a multi-layered organization.

Prominence in Hungarian: the prosody-syntax connection

An element can be emphasised by occupying a specific syntactic position or by bearing an appropriate intonational contour. Determining how these two types of prominence signalling and the information they encode are related raises a number of important issues concerning the interaction of syntax, prosody and meaning. A language such as Hungarian, in which discourse functions and different kinds of semantic operator are associated with certain syntactic positions, provides data that enable the connection between prosody, syntax, information structure and semantics to be investigated. Analysis of elicited spoken data reveals that (i) syntactic focus and prosodic prominence do not always align in Hungarian, and (ii) the location of prosodic prominence is determined by semantics, specifically scope, but relative scope is not computed on the basis of prosody alone. I seek to address weaknesses identified in a previous formalisation by capturing the relevant generalisations within a constraint-based, parallel grammatical architecture.

Focus and noun phrase anaphors in spoken language comprehension

Two experiments employed a lexical decision task and a delayed cued recall task to investigate whether and how syntactic focusing affects the online processing and long-term encoding of repeated and non-repeated definite NP anaphors in spoken language comprehension. For discourses with repeated anaphors (Experiment 1), focus facilitated lexical decisions but resulted in poorer recall performance. Discourses with non-repeated anaphors (Experiment 2) showed focus facilitation in lexical decision but no effects in recall. These results show that, similar to reading, spoken language comprehension is impeded by repeated reference to a focused discourse referent. The finding that repetition initially facilitates processing but then interferes with the resulting memory representation is consistent with theories that view referential processing as consisting of multiple stages that can be differentially impacted by repetition.

Syntactic focus marking in Khoekhoe ("Nama/Damara")

Khoekhoe syntax exhibits an unusually flexible constituent structure. Any constituent with a lexical head can be preposed into the focal initial slot immediately before the PGN-marker that marks the subject position. Two strategies of focalisation by foregrounding need to be distinguished: inversion and fronting. Inversion amounts to an inversion of subject and predicate in their entirety. Such sentences have two readings, though, according to their underlying constituent structure: "predicative" or "copulative". Fronting amounts to the preposing of a lexical constituent into the focal initial slot, with subsequent dislocation of the lexical specification of the subject from that slot.&#x0D; &#x0D; The present analysis has wider implications, particularly: The generally accepted view that Khoekhoe has coreferential/equational "copulative" sentences of the type NPsubject = NPcomplement is a fallacy. Such sentences actually are sentences with their predicate fronted into the focal initial slot. They amount to cleft constructions.&#x0D; &#x0D; The fact that the primary focal position is immediately before the PGNmarker of the subject is further independent evidence for the "desentential hypothesis", according to which subject and object NPs in the underlying matrix sentence consist of only an enclitic PGN-marker, and for the claim that Khoekhoe underlyingly is a SVO language, not a SOV language as generally held. By implication these findings affect the analysis of other Central Khoesaan languages.&#x0D;

Readers' sensitivity to linguistic cues in narratives: how salience influences anaphor resolution.

Despite the general assumption that anaphoric inferences are necessary inferences, Levine, Guzmán, and Klin (2000) concluded that the probability of resolving noun phrase anaphors depends both on the degree of accessibility in memory of the antecedent concepts and the extent to which resolution is necessary to create a coherent discourse representation. Four experiments are presented in which the factors that influence readers' standard of coherence are investigated. We examine the hypothesis that readers are more likely to resolve anaphors that are perceived as salient; salience was manipulated both with a syntactic focusing structure (wh- clefts) and with the addition of prenominal adjectival modifiers. The results of a probe recognition time task provide support for the hypothesis that a variety of linguistic cues serve as mental processing instructions (Givón, 1992), which instruct readers as to how much attention to devote to processing.