TY - JOUR A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros A1 - Verhoeven, Elisabeth A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert T1 - Discontinuous noun phrases in Yucatec Maya JF - Journal of linguistics : JL / publ. for the Linguistics Association of Great Britain N2 - Languages differ in whether or not they allow discontinuous noun phrases. If they do, they further vary in the ways the nominal projections interact with the available syntactic operations. Yucatec Maya has two left-peripheral configurations that differ syntactically: a preverbal position for foci or wh-elements that is filled in by movement, and the possibility to adjoin topics at the highest clausal layer. These two structural options are reflected in different ways of the formation of discontinuous patterns. Subextraction from nominal projections to the focus position yielding discontinuous NPs is possible, but subject to several restrictions. It observes conditions on extraction domains, and does not apply to the left branch of nominal structures. The topic position also appears to license discontinuity, typically involving a non-referential nominal expression as the topic and quantifiers/adjectives that form an elliptical nominal projection within the clause proper. Such constructions can involve several morphological and syntactic mismatches between their parts that are excluded for continuous noun phrases, and they are not sensitive to syntactic island restrictions. Thus, in a strict sense, discontinuities involving the topic position are only apparent, because the construction involves two independent nominal projections that are semantically linked. KW - discontinuous noun phrases KW - focus movement KW - left dislocation KW - possessor KW - extraction KW - split topicalization Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226720000419 SN - 0022-2267 SN - 1469-7742 VL - 58 IS - 3 SP - 609 EP - 648 PB - Cambridge University Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Verhoeven, Elisabeth A1 - Kügler, Frank T1 - Accentual preferences and predictability: An acceptability study on split intransitivity in German JF - Lingua : international review of general linguistics N2 - The difference in the default prosodic realization of simple sentences with unergative vs. unaccusative/passive verbs (assigning early nuclear accent with unaccusative/passive verbs but late nuclear accent with unergative verbs) is often related to the syntactic distinction of their nominative arguments as starting off in different hierarchical positions. Alternative accounts try to trace this prosodic variation back to asymmetries in the semantic or pragmatic contribution of the verb to an utterance. The present article investigates the interaction of the assignment of default nuclear accent with the predictability of the verb. In an experimental study testing the acceptability of nuclear accent assignment, we confirmed that the predictability of the verb influences accentual preferences (such that highly predictable verbs are preferably not accented). However, the experiment also reveals that the unaccusativity distinction cannot be accounted for by means of pragmatic phenomena of this type: the two verb classes are associated with distinct accentual patterns in the baseline condition, that is, without the predictability manipulation. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Nuclear accent KW - Prosodic phrasing KW - Unaccusativity KW - Unergative verbs KW - Predictability KW - Information structure Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.09.013 SN - 0024-3841 SN - 1872-6135 VL - 165 SP - 298 EP - 315 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros A1 - Verhoeven, Elisabeth T1 - The interaction between topicalization and structural constraints : evidence from Yucatec Maya N2 - This article deals with the syntactic and pragmatic properties of left dislocated constituents in Yucatec Maya. It has been argued that these constituents are topics, which implies that a particular structural configuration, namely left dislocation displays a 1:1 correspondence to a particular discourse function. We present evidence that the discourse properties of left dislocation are not uniform: only a subset of the left dislocated constituents qualify as topics in the strict sense, while other instances of left dislocation are better explained if we assume a structural constraint that bans the postverbal occurrence of subject constituents in a particular syntactic configuration. Our empirical findings show that though the occurrence of word order possibilities in discourse is not random, it is not necessarily determined by a unique licensing condition. Y1 - 2009 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/tlir U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/tlir.2009.009 SN - 0167-6318 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kügler, Frank A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros A1 - Verhoeven, Elisabeth T1 - Encoding Information structure in Yucatec Maya: on the Interplay of Prosody and Syntax Y1 - 2007 ER -