| ROA: | 257 |
|---|---|
| Title: | OT-interactions between Focus and Canonical Word Order: Deriving the Crosslinguistic Typology of Structural Contrastive Focus |
| Authors: | Vieri Samek-Lodovici |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 31 |
| Abstract: | OT-interactions between Focus and Canonical Word Order: Deriving the Crosslinguistic Typology of Structural Contrastive Focus Vieri Samek-Lodovici Konstanz University (Germany) A crosslinguistic survey of structural contrastive focus within VP which also takes into account a language canonical word order reveals the variety of patterns listed in (1) below, including languages uniformly realizing focused constituents at the left- and respectively right-edge of VP, languages with mixed patterns where leftward and rightward focus cooccur in complementary distribution, languages lacking structural focus altogether, and languages where structural focus is only partial, affecting objects and indirect objects but not subjects. (1) SVO: VSO: Leftward: Western Bade Podoko Rightward: Italian Spanish (VSO varieties) Left&Right (left default): Kanakuru - Right&Left (right default): - - No structural focus: French Scottish Gaelic Partial focus: English (optionally) - This work presents a principled account of the above typology where all language specific properties Qsuch as presence vs. absence of structural focus, its uniform vs. non-uniform nature, and whether it may or may not affect subjectsQ are never directly encoded within the analysis, but rather follow from the interaction between two constraints requiring VP-alignment of focused constituents and three independently motivated constraints affecting a language canonical word order. In particular, each typological slot will correspond to a ranking of the five constraints at issue. Moreover, the unattested typological slots in (1) above (marked as '-'), as well as Tuller's (1992) generalization banning object incorporation within VSO languages with leftward focus, will all follow as theorems of the analysis. The analysis will also show that word order related conditions do constrain structural focus, defeating the intuitive but incorrect perception that since structural focus is by definition an alteration of a language canonical word order, no word order condition should constrain it. * This work was financed through the NSF grant 'NSF SBR 95 11891'. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |