TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wierzba, Marta
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
T1  - Factors influencing the acceptability of object fronting in German
JF  - The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics
N2  - In this paper, we address some controversially debated empirical questions concerning object fronting in German by a series of acceptability rating studies. We investigated three kinds of factors: (i) properties of the subject (given/new, pronoun/full DP), (ii) emphasis, (iii) register. The first factor is predicted to play a crucial role by models in which object fronting possibilities are limited by prosodic properties. Two experiments provide converging evidence for a systematic effect of this factor: we find that the relative acceptability of object fronting across subjects that require an accent (new DPs) is lower than across deaccentable subjects (pronouns and given DPs). Other models predict object fronting across full phrases (but not across pronouns) to be limited to an emphatic interpretation. This prediction is also borne out, suggesting that both types of models capture an empirically valid generalization and can be seen as complementing each other rather than competing with each other. Finally, we find support for the view that informal register facilitates object fronting. In sum, our experiments contribute to clarifying the empirical basis concerning a phenomenon influenced by a range of interacting factors. This, in turn, informs theoretical approaches to the prefield position and helps to identify factors that need to be carefully controlled in this field of research.
KW  - German
KW  - Object fronting
KW  - Prefield
KW  - Givenness
KW  - Emphasis
KW  - Register
KW  - Experiments
KW  - Acceptability
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-020-09113-1
SN  - 1383-4924
SN  - 1572-8552
VL  - 23
IS  - 1
SP  - 77
EP  - 124
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Genzel, Susanne
A1  - Ishihara, Shinichiro
A1  - Suranyi, Balazs
T1  - The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian
JF  - Lingua : international review of general linguistics
N2  - This paper reports the results of a production experiment that explores the prosodic realization of focus in Hungarian, a language that is characterized by obligatory syntactic focus marking. Our study investigates narrow focus in sentences in which focus is unambiguously marked by syntactic means, comparing it to broad focus sentences. Potential independent effects of the salience (textual givenness) of the background of the narrow focus and the contrastiveness of the focus are controlled for and are also examined.
 The results show that both continuous phonetic measures and categorical factors such as the distribution of contour types are affected by the focus-related factors, despite the presence of syntactic focus marking. The phonetic effects found are mostly parallel to those of typical prosodic focus marking languages like English. The prosodic prominence required of focus is realized through changes to the scaling and slope of F0 targets and contours. The asymmetric prominence relation between the focus and the background can be expressed not only by the phonetic marking of the prominence of the focused element, but also by the phonetic marking of the reduced prominence of the background. Furthermore, contrastiveness of focus and (textual) givenness of the background show independent phonetic effects, both of them affecting the realization of the background. These results are argued to shed light on alternative approaches to the information structural notion of contrastive focus and the relation between the notions of focus and givenness. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
KW  - Hungarian
KW  - Prosody
KW  - Focus
KW  - Background
KW  - Givenness
KW  - Contrast
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.07.010
SN  - 0024-3841
SN  - 1872-6135
VL  - 165
SP  - 183
EP  - 204
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krifka, Manfred
T1  - Basic notions of information structure
N2  - This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground(CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS.
KW  - Information Structure
KW  - Focus
KW  - Topic
KW  - Givenness
KW  - Contrast
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19603
SN  - 978-3-939469-88-9
SN  - 1614-4708
SN  - 1866-4725
SP  - 13
EP  - 55
PB  - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY  - Potsdam
ER  -