The New Sesquipedalian

Noah Constant (UMass, Amherst) is here today to discuss his work on contrastive topic. Come by the Greenberg Room at 3:30 to hear his talk!

Deriving the Diversity of Contrastive Topic Realizations
Information structural notions like topic/focus, given/new and contrastive/non-contrastive have a diverse range of effects on sentence structure and pronunciation. In this talk, I look at Contrastive Topic (CT) constructions, and present a novel account of their meaning and structure that can make sense of the range of CT marking strategies attested in the world’s languages. I will cover languages that mark CT prosodically (e.g. English), those that employ a discourse particle (e.g. Mandarin), and those that have a dedicated CT position in the syntax (e.g. Czech).

A typical example of contrastive topic is given in (1). The object is pronounced with falling prosody, marking ‘the beans’ as the answer to the question of what Fred ate. The subject, on the other hand, bears a distinct rising contour, marking ‘Fred’ as a contrastive topic. The effect is to imply additional questions about what other people ate.

(1) (What about FRED? What did HE eat?)
FRED … ate the BEANS.

I review Büring’s (2003) account of CT and point out several challenges for it—for example, it doesn’t extend to CT questions (attested in Japanese) and it fails to account for effects of CT marking on word order and prosodic phrasing. In its place, I introduce a new model of contrastive topic that posits a Topic Abstraction operator in the left periphery, and defines CT as the focus associate of this operator. In English, the abstraction operator is lexicalized as a tonal clitic to an intonational phrase. The influence of information structure on phrasing is captured via a scope-prosody correspondence constraint requiring the operator and its associate to be realized within a single prosodic domain.

The topic abstraction account is supported by a range of typologically diverse data. For one, it provides a simple way of understanding the possibility of dedicated CT positions in the syntax. Additionally, the account predicts the existence of CT morphemes that occur at a distance from the topic phrase itself, which are attested in Mandarin and Paraguayan Guaraní.

After the colloquium today, stick around the Greenberg room for a spring-themed social, hosted by the first years. As usual, there will be drinks, snacks, and fun times for all!

Natalia writes:

Next Tuesday (2/26) we’ll be meeting at 2pm to discuss Toosarvandani’s Gapping is VP ellipsis: A reply to Johnson, abstract below. Come for syntax and dessert!

Johnson (2009) argues that the gapping — e.g. Some had ordered mussels, and others swordfish— does not arise through VP-ellipsis because gapping has properties that VP-ellipsis does not. He proposes instead that the gap in gapping arises through ‘low coordination’ and across-the-board movement. I first show that Johnson’s across-the-board movement account fails to generate gapping in coordination structures with corrective but (Vicente 2010, Toosarvandani, to appear-b). I then revive a version of the ellipsis account in which VP-ellipsis applies to low-coordination structures. This correctly generates gapping in corrective but sentences. Once the information-structural properties of low coordinations are taken into consideration— low coordinates must have parallel focus structures— it also derives the unique properties of gapping.

Join us in welcoming Anita Szakay, a new postdoctoral researcher in the department. Anita got her PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2012, and she’ll be working with Rob Podesva in the Interactional Sociophonetics Lab. Her office is in the lab (460-021), so stop by and say hi!

We extend our heartiest congratulations to Tanya Nikitina (PhD 2008) who has accepted the position of Researcher at the CNRS in Paris in the LLACAN laboratory (Langage, Langues et Cultures d’Afrique Noire), starting January 2013.

For those of you out there who have taught introductory phonology…