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'.