Szendroi, K;
(2016)
The Syntax Of Information Structure And The PF Interface.
Glossa
, 2
(1)
, Article 32. 10.5334/gjgl.140.
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Abstract
Focus movement to a left-peripheral position has been posited for both Hungarian and Italian. In this paper I argue against a unified cartographic treatment of focus movement, which analyses both as instances of movement to [Spec, Focus0]. I raise some theoretical issues for cartography, such as the proliferation of focus heads and the difficulties with accounting for optionality. Empirically, I show that a set of properties distinguish Hungarian and Italian left-peripheral focus movement suggesting a different syntactic analysis for the two constructions. Following Hamlaoui & Szendrői’s (2015) proposal for the syntax-prosody mapping of clauses, I show that Hungarian focus movement is prosodically motivated in that it is movement targeting the position that main stress is assigned to in the prosody. I show how the same proposal extends to right-peripheral and string-medial focus in Italian and heavy NP shift in English. I discuss the typological predictions of the that it follows from the proposal that left-peripheral focus movement is always accompanied by verb movement, while right-peripheral focus movement will target a position lower than the surface position of the finite verb. Finally, I propose that Italian left-peripheral focus movement is motivated by contrastivity. This accounts for the different characteristics of the two constructions: (i) that Hungarian, but not Italian, focus movement is accompanied by the movement of the finite verb; (ii) that Hungarian left-peripheral focus is prosodically unmarked, while Italian left-peripheral focus comes with marked prosody; and (iii) that Hungarian focus movement is pragmatically unmarked, in the sense that it can answer a wh-question, while Italian focus movement is explicitly contrastive (or perhaps even mirative or corrective).
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Syntax Of Information Structure And The PF Interface |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.5334/gjgl.140 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.140 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | focus, syntax-prosody interface, focus movement, information structure |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1515805 |
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