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Contrastive Topic: Meanings and Realizations University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Fall November 2014 Contrastive Topic: Meanings and Realizations Noah Constant University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Constant, Noah, "Contrastive Topic: Meanings and Realizations" (2014). Doctoral Dissertations. 171. https://doi.org/10.7275/5694973.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/171 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CONTRASTIVE TOPIC: MEANINGS AND REALIZATIONS A Dissertation Presented by NOAH CONSTANT Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2014 Department of Linguistics © Copyright by Noah Constant 2014 All Rights Reserved CONTRASTIVE TOPIC: MEANINGS AND REALIZATIONS A Dissertation Presented by NOAH CONSTANT Approved as to style and content by: Angelika Kratzer, Chair Elisabeth Selkirk, Member Seth Cable, Member Adrian Staub, Member John Kingston, Department Head Department of Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The ideas in these pages—all the good ones at least—are the fruit of conversations. The most numerous and the most enjoyable of these were conversations with my committee members, so first and foremost, I’d like to thank them. It’s hard to convey the extent to which my committee provided all the essential seeds, from which the work grew. Thinking back, I’m still astonished and humbled by their dedication of time and critical thought. In a better world, the thesis would have incorporated more of their suggestions, and taken on more of their challenges. Angelika Kratzer was much more than an advisor. Her conviction that I had something useful to say, especially in the early stages of this project, was a huge motivation. I will miss our long conversations, and her kind and firm way of explaining what’s what. These talks changed the way I think and work. Lisa Selkirk took me under her wing early on, and made me feel at home among the prosody crowd at UMass and beyond. In thinking out problems, she always encouraged me to find a hat and hang it somewhere. Her boldness of analysis is something that I still strive for. Seth Cable has an uncanny ability to break unmanageable problems into manage- able pieces. This is a service in high demand, and one that I availed myself of more than my fair share of. I’m grateful for his enthusiasm, attention to detail, care with data, and most of all his generosity. Adrian Staub was a spectacular outside member, and I’m grateful for his detailed reading of the work and his insightful questions about the data and generalizations within. Adrian also took the time to help me work through a statistical analysis iv which, although it didn’t find a place in the thesis, was extremely helpful to my understanding of statistical methods. Meeting with Jim Huang was always a pleasure, and our discussions led to major revisions in my analysis of Mandarin -ne. Beyond serving as a consultant on my committee, Jim also went out of his way to connect me with colleagues in China, and to invite me to present at a Harvard workshop, both to the benefit of the dissertation. Many others, at UMass and beyond, have contributed their thoughts and feedback to this project. These people include: Klaus Abels, Aoju Chen, Chris Davis, Emily Elfner, Tom Ernst, Donka Farkas, Kai von Fintel, Lyn Frazier, Chloe Chenjie Gu, Christine Gunlogson, Martin Hackl, Nancy Hedberg, Irene Heim, Caroline Heycock, Li Julie Jiang, Kyle Johnson, Hans Kamp, Ezra Keshet, John Kingston, Haixia Man, Barbara Partee, Chris Potts, Kyle Rawlins, Floris Roelofsen, Mats Rooth, Philippe Schlenker, Roger Schwarzschild, Radek Šimík, Juan Sosa, Yasutada Sudo, Anna Szabolcsi, Satoshi Tomioka, Maziar Toosarvandani, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Michael Wagner, Yimei Xiang, Kristine Yu, Malte Zimmermann, and audiences at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Barcelona, SALT 22, WCCFL 30, GLOW 35, NACCL 23 and WPSI 4. For help with judgments, I am deeply grateful to Martina Achieng’, Rui Guo, Chloe Chenjie Gu, Masashi Hashimoto, Misato Hiraga, Li Julie Jiang, Angelika Kratzer, Chi-Ming Louis Liu, Xiaoxia Ma, Haixia Man, Milton Joshua Obote, Ming Shao, Radek Šimík, Satoshi Tomioka, Martin Walkow, and especially, Bitian Zhang. The department at UMass is a special place, where people from all over the world come together to engage the hardest problems in linguistics with creativity and a col- laborative spirit. Building and maintaining this tight, supportive community has been the work of many generations, but a few of the people who particularly contributed to my feeling at home and having a great time were: Kathy Adamczyk, Rajesh Bhatt, Seth Cable, Chris Davis, Amy Rose Deal, Meg Grant, Clint Hartzell, Kyle Johnson, Angelika Kratzer, Suzi Lima, Barbara Partee, Aynat Rubinstein, Anisa Schardl, and v Lisa Selkirk. Also, thanks to my cohort, Anisa, Chloe, Emerson, Muhammad, and Vera, for all the good times. Aside from UMass, there are two other special linguistics programs I’d like to mention. The MIT linguistics department, where I finished writing the thesis, was an amazing place to work and learn. I especially want to thank the participants in my fall 2013 seminar on information structure for being such a wonderful class, and pushing me to understand discourse structure better. I’m also grateful to the faculty, for welcoming me and offering their advice and support, especially David Pesetsky, Martin Hackl, Sabine Iatridou, Kai von Fintel, Irene Heim and Norvin Richards. Second, I owe a deep gratitude to the department that introduced me to linguistics, UC Santa Cruz. Their phenomenal undergraduate program nestled in the redwoods was where I learned the thrill of finding puzzles, formulating theories, and asking about their consequences. People there who contributed to my development as a linguist include Judith Aissen, Sandy Chung, Donka Farkas, Jorge Hankamer, Jim McCloskey, Paula Menéndez-Benito, and Jaye Padgett. This research was assisted by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. I dedicate this work, with love, to family. To my family in China, for taking me in, and putting up with me. To John and Ilona, for their endless enthusiasm and support. To Nuria, for always pushing to get to know me better, and helping me to understand myself. To Danuta, for showing me a world of possibilities. To Michael, for helping me think through the details of practically every problem I’ve ever worked on, and always pushing me in the right direction. Finally to Tiantian, for more than words of any language can express. vi ABSTRACT CONTRASTIVE TOPIC: MEANINGS AND REALIZATIONS SEPTEMBER 2014 NOAH CONSTANT B.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ M.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Angelika Kratzer This dissertation develops a theory of contrastive topics (CTs)—what they mean, and how they are realized. I give a compositional semantics for CT constructions, built on the idea that CT marks anaphora to a complex question in the discourse. The account allows us to maintain an inclusive view of what counts as a contrastive topic, making reasonable predictions about sentences with CT phrases of difference types, in various combinations, and across various speech acts. Empirically, the dissertation focuses on contrastive topic marking in English and Mandarin Chinese. In English, CT phrases are typically realized with a “rising” prosody. I offer an explicit model that predicts the intonational features of English sentences containing contrastive topics. In Mandarin, sentences with CTs often exhibit the discourse particle -ne.I provide a detailed description of the particle’s distribution, and offer the first sustained argument that -ne is a CT marker. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................. iv ABSTRACT ......................................................... vii LIST OF FIGURES.................................................. xii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................. 1 1.1 Overview ........................................................ 1 1.2 Structure of the Dissertation ....................................... 8 2. CONTRASTIVE TOPIC ......................................... 11 2.1 The Potluck .................................................... 12 2.1.1 Conventions for Prosodic Transcription ...................... 13 2.1.2 Contrastive Topic and Exhaustive Focus ..................... 16 2.2 A Mapping Principle ............................................. 18 2.3 The d-Trees Model .............................................. 28 2.3.1 Alternative Semantics ..................................... 28 2.3.2 QUD Stacks, Discourse Strategies, and d-Trees ................ 31 2.3.3 CT-Values and CT-Congruence ............................. 35 2.4 Properties of CT ................................................ 47 2.4.1 Resists Thoroughly Exhaustive Answers ...................... 48 2.4.2 Resists Maximal Elements.................................. 51 2.5 Japanese CT -wa ...............................................
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