April 27

We made a case for a distinction between contrastive focus and newness (informational) focus and argued that only the former type of focus is represented in the grammar. Prominences that have been categorized as newness focus in the past are prominences that come about by the regular phonology running its course. Only contrastive focus would be expected to have any semantic/pragmatic effects, then. What are those effects? And how exactly are those effects generated? The lecture did not attempt to answer this question in full generality, but rather presented some considerations that may help answer it. The slides are here.

April 21

This was one of those Tuesdays when UMass was following a Monday schedule. The topic of the lecture was Verum Focus. The handout for the lecture is here. In the Focus group, Jesse and Radek presented their semester project proposals.

April 6

The question of how linguistic theory should break down the dimension of “information structure” that includes contrastiveness, newness and givenness continues to be a subject of debate. We defended the three-way distinction between given, new, and focus of contrast originally proposed in Chafe 1976. This proposal echoes a recent proposal by Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006 and developed in Selkirk 2007.

Evidence from patterns of prosodic prominence in English were presented that supports the hypothesis that the theory of grammar makes a representational distinction between contrastive focus and discourse-newness in the syntax and in its interface with phonology/phonetics. The phonological/phonetic evidence came from an experimental investigation (Katz and Selkirk, 2006, in preparation) which compared the prosody of productions of all-new sentences with the prosody of sentences that combine putative contrastive focus constituents and constituents qualifying only as discourse-new. It turned out that while the distribution of pitch accents in these different sentence types is the same, the pattern of relative phonological/phonetic prominence in these sentences varies according to their composition in terms of contrastive and/or new constituents.

We suggested in addition that a system which gives morphosyntactic representation to focus of contrast (FoC-marking) and to givenness (G-marking) but which leaves newness morphosyntactically unmarked has the right consequences for theories of the interfaces of syntax with sentence prosody on the one hand and with semantics on the other. On the phonology side, it was shown that all-new sentences receive a phonological interpretation that is based on general phonological principles, without any appeal to morphosyntactic features indicating 'focus'. On the semantics side, renditions of the Rooth 1992 theory of alternatives focus and the Schwarzschild 1999 theory of givenness were combined with a set of syntax/semantics interface constraints to provide an account of the interpretation and distribution of constituents which are FoC-marked, G-marked, and/or unmarked for either.

The typological predictions of our proposal were briefly explored: whether FoC-marking or G-marking are expressed in sentence prosody varies (independently) from one language to the next. Some languages show no prosodic reflexes of these morphosyntactic contrasts at all, instead defaulting to the types of unmarked sentence prosody found in all-new sentences.

In the focus group, Chris Davis reported on the combination of sentence final boundary tones with the discourse particle yo in Japanese.

March 30

Both sessions were about discourse particles. In the main session, Angelika reported on her 1999 work on German discourse particles and on more recent work on Salish discourse particles in collaboration with Lisa Matthewson. The handout is here. In the focus session, Pasha Siraj reported on discourse particles in Singapore English.

My (= Angelika's) work on discourse particles started with a comment on Kaplan's ouch and oops paper that I was asked to deliver at Cornell in 1999. Kaplan's paper is still not publicly available, but you can watch one of the instantiations of the ouch and oops talk on YouTube. The handout for my 1999 Cornell comments is here. Since I couldn't think of anything to say about ouch and oops in my reply to Kaplan, I looked for a grammatically more active phenomenon that might be linked to expressive meanings in Kaplan's sense. After a while, it occurred to me that German discourse particles like ja and doch provide a perfect arena for exploring expressive meanings. The feature of Kaplan's theory of descriptive and expressive meanings that I found most intriguing at the time was that descriptive and expressive contents of sentences could now be of the same kind: they could both be run-of-the-mill propositions.

The core of Kaplan's proposal about descriptive and expressive meanings can be implemented in various ways. In my 1999 comment, I construed the expressive content of a sentence of the form ja α in a context c as the set of possible situations in which the descriptive content of α in c might be known to the addressee of c. As a consequence, we can say that sentences of the form ja α are expressively correct in a context c just in case their expressive content in c is true in the situation of c, that is, in the utterance situation.

The new proposal I made in my 1999 comment concerned the architecture of the semantic interpretation component: descriptive and expressive contents of sentences should be represented on different tiers. We would have a two-dimensional semantics, then, along the lines of Karttunen & Peters 1979, or now, Potts 2003. The overall approach predicts the peculiar properties of German discourse particles: (a) the particles can occur in embedded sentences, as long as they are either factive or reported speech contexts; (b) you cannot bind into the scope of a discourse particle; (c) discourse particles do not take semantic scope over other discourse particles.

There is much discussion in the literature on German discourse particles about just what the expressive contents of those particles are. See e.g. Malte Zimmermann's handbook article or Grosz 2005. Most contemporary work on German discourse particles (including Kratzer 1999) assumes them to be dependent on hearer knowledge in some way. In joint work with Lisa Matthewson, we found that German discourse particles are not necessarily dependent on hearer knowledge after all. This resolves a puzzle about discourse particles in St'át'imcets (Lillooet Salish): St'át'imcets has discourse particles whose expressive correctness conditions are very much like those of the German ones. But as Matthewson has argued, St'át'imcets otherwise lacks any 'global' meaning components (like presuppositions or conventional implicatures) that systematically depend on hearer knowledge. See e.g. Matthewson 2006.

March 23

The lecture addressed some of the analytical challenges of parsing tonal sequences. In intonational languages (as opposed to lexical tone languages), one of the biggest, and easily overlooked, challenges consists in separating morphemic from phonologically determined tones, hence tones that might potentially be meaningful from tones which do not carry meaning, but which are predictably placed, or whose quality is predictably determined, by the phonology. In the focus group, Noah Constant reported on his work on English Rise-Fall-Rise.

Readings for the lecture: Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990; Selkirk 2004/2007; Yip 2002. Reading for the focus group: Constant 2009; Büring 2003. For a reality check: Hedberg 2006 and Hedberg & Sosa 2007.

Advanced seminar: Meaning & Intonation

This seminar will be taught as a research seminar with all the uncertainties that come with it: The emphasis will be on a few 'hot' areas of current research: What is the relation between prosody and syntax? What is the relation between information structure and syntax? Are intonational meanings presuppositions or conventional or conversational implicatures? Are intonational meanings inherently speaker or hearer dependent? Do we have to distinguish between contrastive and information focus? Do discourse particles have the same kind of meanings as certain intonational contours? Are there expressions that are lexically specified to associate with focus, or is association with focus an epiphenomenon? Is there a special connection between focus and questions? Why is there so much interest in second occurrence focus?

There will be readings from different traditions, and this means that you have to be ready to reconceptualize and play with what you read, preserving and acknowledging the insights while taking a fresh and new perspective. We will all be groping in the dark a lot of the time. You have to develop survival skills. Registered students will focus on their semester project right from the start and will be guided and monitored all the way through.

Except for the first session on January 26 and the final sessions where the semester projects will be presented, each session of the seminar will be divided into two parts: a lecture session for everyone who wants to participate or just sit in, and a small focus group for registered students and everyone who wants to actively participate in a hands-on practicum. The focus group will meet in the Partee room right after the lecture session.

Readings: David I. Beaver & Brady Z. Clark (2008). Sense & Sensitivity. How Focus Determines Meaning. You can order the book for $35.96 from the publisher with the LSA discount code 97381 until February 11. We will also provide two copies for registered students to borrow. The book will provide necessary background throughout the seminar. Additional readings can be downloaded from this website. Use your UMail user name and password to access the electronic reserve library for the seminar.

Intonational meanings have been claimed to contribute presuppositions, conversational implicatures, or conventional implicatures. There are exciting new developments in all three of those areas, and this is why our electronic reserve library also contains cutting edge work on presuppositions (Schlenker), conversational implicatures (Chierchia, Fox, and Spector), and conventional implicatures (Potts), as well as critical commentaries and reviews on those authors' works. We will probe into the nature of intonational meanings and their interaction with 'ordinary' meanings throughout the seminar.

Requirements: Attendance, readings, participation. A semester project on a topic that is - in some way or other - relevant to the topic. Final presentation and term paper. Please tell us during the first two weeks whether you plan to invoke the 2-paper rule for the seminar.