Τμήμα Φιλολογίας

Η διάλεξη θα πραγματοποιηθεί στα Ελληνικά

Syntactic constructions that are sensitive to information structure may appear in different arrays of contexts depending on language: while cleft constructions are associated with contrastive focus in English, they appear in a larger array of contexts in French.A part of the cross-linguistic variation may be accounted for through prosodic differences, under the assumption that the prosodic possibilities of a given language determine the array of focus structures that can be mapped onto one and the same syntactic configuration.

In the present study, we compare four languages representing different prosodic types:

• languages with flexible pitch accent placement (English, German)
• a language that relies on prosodic phrasing (French)
• a language with lexical tones (Mandarin Chinese)

In a speech production experiment, we examine the prosodic realization of corrective focus on canonical sentences and cleft constructions and identify prosodic reflexes of focus in all languages. Hence, the presence of different phonetic reflexes of focus suggests that – anything else being equal – the same syntactic constructions should be possible in the same array of contexts in these languages.

In a second experiment, we elicited judgments of contextual felicity of canonical and cleft constructions in contexts licensing different corrective focus domains. The obtained judgments reveal a typological distinction between languages with flexible pitch accent placement (English, German) and languages with other types of reflexes of focus (French, Chinese). The former languages (but not the latter) use canonical constructions without contextual restrictions; the use of cleft constructions with a focus in the cleft clause (in corrective contexts) has an advantage in the former languages compared to the latter. This outcome supports a conservative view about prosodic phenomena, distinguishing between two classes of prosodic entities with different semantic-pragmatic import: while the possibility of flexible pitch accent placement is relevant for determining the array of possible focus structures in a given language, this does not hold for further prosodic correlates of focus.