Revisiting Prosodic Reconstruction: an Interface-Based Approach to Partial Focus and Topic Fronting in German
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Revisiting prosodic reconstruction: An interface-based approach to partial focus and topic fronting in German Marta Wierzba Dissertation, eingereicht bei der humanwissenschaftlichen Fakult¨at der Universit¨at Potsdam (2017) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License: Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivatives 4.0 International To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Published online at the Institutional Repository of the University of Potsdam: URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4- 403152 http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4- 403152 Acknowledgments This thesis would not exist without the invaluable feedback and encouragement by my supervisor Gisbert Fanselow. I would like to express my deepest thanks for all the support that I have received since the very beginning of my time in Potsdam. I would also like to thank Malte Zimmermann, who was constantly supportive throughout my undergraduate and graduate years. Furthermore, I want to thank Caroline F´ery for agreeing to be my external reviewer, and all members of my committee. During the first years of my linguistic training, I was lucky to be a part of the collabora- tive research center on information structure (SFB 632), which provided a very welcoming and constructive learning and research environment. I also had the possibility to profit from inspiring guest lectures within the SFB, for example by Kriszta Szendr˝oi, Caroline F´ery, Nirit Kadmon, Bal´azs Sur´anyi, and Michael Rochemont. In addition, the SFB made it possible that I shared my office with exceptionally kind and supportive colleagues for many years, who have become my friends: Mira Grubic, Claudius Klose, Anne Mucha, Agata Renans, and Radek Sim´ık.ˇ There are many other colleagues both within and outside of Potsdam who I would like to thank because they taught me the necessary theoretical and methodological basics to write this dissertation, and/or because they discussed ideas with me, among others: Maria Balbach, Nicole Deh´e, Suse Genzel, Doreen Georgi, Jana H¨aussler, Frank K¨ugler, Nele Salveste, Shravan Vasishth, Luis Vicente, and Val´eria Moln´ar. Special thanks go to Anja Gollrad for recording more than a 1000 sentences with me, and to Julia Bacskai-Atkari, Andreas Schmidt, and Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss for reading parts of this dissertation and helping me to improve it by their feedback. Joe, besides that, I also want to thank you for being a great friend from the beginning of my studies until today. The same goes for Verena Ehrenberg-Shen, Simone Pfeil, and Nadine Theiler. Finally, I thank my friends and family, especially—Alexej. i ii Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Outline...................................... 1 1.2 Structureofthethesis ............................. 3 2 Syntax-prosody mapping and syntactic movement 7 2.1 The prosody of structures without movement . .... 7 2.1.1 Prosodicasymmetries.......................... 7 2.1.2 Accountsbasedonlinearorder . 8 2.1.3 Accounts based on depth of embedding . 10 2.1.4 Accountsbasedonargumentstructure . 11 2.1.5 Accounts based on the distinction between phrases and non-phrases 15 2.1.6 Discussion................................ 17 2.2 The prosody of structures with movement . .. 21 2.2.1 Abriefhistoryofthedebate. 22 2.2.2 Evidence in favor of prosodic reconstruction . 25 2.2.3 Evidence against prosodic reconstruction . 37 2.3 Previous approaches to prosodic reconstruction . ..... 47 2.3.1 Logical possibilities . 47 2.3.2 Trace-based post-derivational implementations . .. 48 2.3.3 Cyclic implementations predicting prosodic reconstruction . 50 2.3.4 Cyclic implementations predicting surface-oriented prosody . ... 52 2.3.5 Cyclic implementations making mixed predictions . 55 2.3.6 Anoteonphase-basedapproaches. 57 2.3.7 Summary ................................ 59 iii CONTENTS 3 Prosodic reconstruction and the architecture of grammar 61 3.1 Goalsandchallenges .............................. 61 3.2 Implementationoptions ............................ 63 3.2.1 Basicidea ................................ 63 3.2.2 A post-derivational implementation of the V-O asymmetry . 65 3.2.3 A cyclic (phase-based) implementation of the V-O asymmetry . 67 3.2.4 Implementing reconstruction effects of sentence stress: unalterable prominencestatements . 70 3.3 Deriving the classic examples . 75 3.3.1 Wh-movement.............................. 75 3.3.2 VP-internalsubjects .......................... 77 3.3.3 Relativeclauses............................. 78 3.4 Outlookonotherconstructions . 81 3.4.1 Rightwardmovement.......................... 81 3.4.2 Non-reconstructingmovement . 84 3.4.3 Non-transformationaldependencies . 86 3.5 Outlookonotherlanguages .......................... 87 4 Partial fronting of foci and CTs in German 89 4.1 Thephenomenon ................................ 89 4.2 The mapping between prosody and information structure . ..... 92 4.2.1 The prosodic correlate of focus and givenness . 92 4.2.2 The prosodic correlate of contrastive topics . 95 4.2.3 Summary ................................ 99 4.3 Previousfindings ................................ 99 4.3.1 Partialfrontingoffoci . .. .. 100 4.3.2 Partial fronting of contrastive topics . 109 4.3.3 Summaryofthegeneralizations . 116 4.4 Previousaccounts................................ 117 4.4.1 Operatormovement. .. .. 117 4.4.2 Parsprototomovement . 118 4.4.3 Focusexponents ............................ 119 4.4.4 Cyclic linearization . 120 4.4.5 Othertriggersformovement . 122 4.4.6 Discussion................................ 123 iv CONTENTS 4.5 New proposal: reconstruction for prosody-interpretation mapping . 123 4.5.1 Prosody-interpretation mapping principles . 123 4.5.2 Illustrating reconstruction for focus mapping . 124 4.5.3 Illustrating reconstruction for CT mapping . 127 4.5.4 Rephrasing vs. non-rephrasing approaches . 128 4.5.5 Deriving the partial fronting generalizations . 129 4.5.6 Architecture............................... 130 5 New experiments on German 133 5.1 Preliminary remarks: aim and scope . 133 5.2 Participantsandprocedure. 136 5.3 Experiment 1: replicating partial focus movement . 136 5.3.1 Goals................................... 136 5.3.2 Designandmaterials .......................... 137 5.3.3 Results.................................. 139 5.3.4 Discussion................................ 140 5.4 Experiment 2: extending the data set of partial focus movement ...... 142 5.4.1 Goals................................... 142 5.4.2 Designandmaterials .......................... 142 5.4.3 Results.................................. 143 5.4.4 Discussion................................ 145 5.5 Experiment 3: replicating and extending partial CT fronting . .... 145 5.5.1 Goals................................... 145 5.5.2 Designandmaterials .......................... 146 5.5.3 Results.................................. 148 5.5.4 Discussion................................ 150 5.6 Experiment4:wh-movement. 152 5.6.1 Goals................................... 152 5.6.2 Designandmaterials .......................... 152 5.6.3 Results.................................. 154 5.6.4 Discussion................................ 156 5.7 Experiment 5: prenuclear and postnuclear deaccentuation . ....... 158 5.7.1 Goals................................... 158 5.7.2 Designandmaterials .......................... 158 5.7.3 Results.................................. 160 v CONTENTS 5.7.4 Discussion................................ 162 5.8 Aviewonthewholedataset ......................... 162 5.8.1 Modelingmethodology . .. .. 162 5.8.2 Modeling all data from experiments 1–5 . 164 5.8.3 Furtherfactors ............................. 180 5.9 Methodological limitations . 181 5.9.1 Materials ................................ 181 5.9.2 Task ................................... 186 5.10 Towardsamodelofacceptability . 188 6 Conclusion 191 References 193 List of Figures, List of Tables 209 Appendix A Supplementary experiment information 213 A.1 Experimentinstructions ............................ 213 A.2 Phonetic details of the materials . 216 vi Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Outline The central empirical phenomenon investigated in this thesis is partial fronting of infor- mation-structural categories in German. The basic observations are illustrated in (1): when a direct object is fronted to the left periphery in German, it is still possible to interpret the whole VP as the focus (observed e.g. by H¨ohle 1982, Krifka 1998; tested empirically a.o. by F´ery & Drenhaus 2008) or a contrastive topic (observed by B¨uring 1997, Jacobs 1997; tested empirically by Wierzba 2011). (1) Was hat Maria am Nachmittag gemacht? ‘What did Maria do in the afternoon?’ a. Ein Buch hat sie [ ein Buch gelesen ]foc. a book has she a book read ‘She read a book.’ b. Ein Buch hat sie jedenfalls nicht [ ein Buch gelesen ]CT... a book has she anyway not a book read ‘As for reading a book, that’s not what she did...’ Previous experiments on partial fronting of information-structural categories yielded a puzzling finding: a broad focus interpretation is possible when the object carries sentence stress, but not when the subject does (even if it is a full discourse-new phrase and not just a pronoun as in (1)). This is at odds with the common assumption that sentence stress is usually assigned to the rightmost argument under broad focus. In this thesis, I develop a novel account of this observation. It is based on the idea that interface mapping rules apply under reconstruction. For (1a), this would mean that sentence stress on the 1 CHAPTER 1.