TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
A1  - Lenertova, Denisa
T1  - Left peripheral focus mismatches between syntax and information structure
JF  - Natural language & linguistic theory
N2  - In Czech, German, and many other languages, part of the semantic focus of the utterance can be moved to the left periphery of the clause. The main generalization is that only the leftmost accented part of the semantic focus can be moved. We propose that movement to the left periphery is generally triggered by an unspecific edge feature of C (Chomsky 2008) and its restrictions can be attributed to requirements of cyclic linearization, modifying the theory of cyclic linearization developed by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). The crucial assumption is that structural accent is a direct consequence of being linearized at merge, thus it is indirectly relevant for (locality restrictions on) movement. The absence of structural accent correlates with givenness. Given elements may later receive (topic or contrastive) accents, which accounts for fronting in multiple focus/contrastive topic constructions. Without any additional assumptions, the model can account for movement of pragmatically unmarked elements to the left periphery ('formal fronting', Frey 2005). Crucially, the analysis makes no reference at all to concepts of information structure in the syntax, in line with the claim of Chomsky (2008) that UG specifies no direct link between syntax and information structure.
KW  - Czech
KW  - German
KW  - Focus
KW  - Topic
KW  - Information structure
KW  - Intervention effects
KW  - Cyclic linearization
KW  - A-bar-movement
KW  - Prosody-syntax interface
KW  - Accentuation
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-010-9109-x
SN  - 0167-806X
VL  - 29
IS  - 1
SP  - 169
EP  - 209
PB  - Springer
CY  - Dordrecht
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Skopeteas, Stavros
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
T1  - Focus and the exclusion of alternatives on the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference
JF  - Lingua : international review of general linguistics
N2  - The claim that focus evokes a set of alternatives is a central issue in several accounts of the effects of focus on interpretation. This article presents two empirical studies that examine whether this property of focus is independent of contextual conditions. The syntactic operation at issue is object-fronting in German, Spanish, Greek, and Hungarian licensed by contexts involving focus on the object constituent. This operation evokes the intuition that the fronted referent excludes some or all relevant alternatives. The presented experiments deal with the question whether this interpretative property obligatorily accompanies the operation at issue or not. The empirical findings show that in German, Spanish, and Greek this intuition depends on properties of the context and is sensitive to the interaction with further discourse factors (in particular, the predictability of the referent). Hungarian displays a different data pattern: our data does not provide evidence that the syntactic operation at issue depends on the context or interacts with further discourse factors. This finding is in line with the view that evoking alternatives is inherent part of constituent-fronting in this language.
KW  - Focus
KW  - Word order
KW  - Pseudocleft
KW  - Exclusion of alternatives
KW  - Pragmatic inference
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2011.05.005
SN  - 0024-3841
VL  - 121
IS  - 11
SP  - 1693
EP  - 1706
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -