Ā-Movement and conventional implicatures: About the grammatical encoding of emphasis in German

Frey, Werner

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2008.09.016

Cited by 57 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…However, there is no consensus as to whether mirativity must be treated as a separate category (Aikhenvald 2004, Torres Bustamante 2012 or as an overtone or extension of evidential markers (Lazard 1999, Rett & Murray 2013. The issue is particularly difficult to tackle in light of the wealth of different phenomena that manifest an unexpectedness import across languages: most notably exclamative clauses (see, a.o., Zanuttini & Portner 2003, Rett 2011, Peterson 2010, Giurgea 2014, exclamations (Rett 2011), European Portuguese "evaluative fronting" (Ambar 1999), (some uses of) GermanĀ-fronting (Frey 2010), unembedded dass-clauses in German (Grosz 2011), the mirative use of the imperfect in Spanish (Torres Bustamante 2012, and mirative evidentials (Rett & Murray 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Bianchi

Bocci

Cruschina

2016

S&P

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This paper discusses the fronting of a focal constituent to a clauseinitial position which, in various languages, is associated with an import of unexpectedness. We provide prosodic and syntactic evidence from Italian showing that this phenomenon has distinctive grammatical properties with respect to other instances of "focus fronting". We argue that the fronted constituent bears narrow focus, and that the unexpectedness import conveys that the asserted proposition is less likely than one or more distinct focus alternatives (see Grosz 2011). We characterize this import as a conventional implicature, and we argue that likelihood is interpreted with respect to an informative modal base which is shared by the conversational community (the context set). We show that the unexpectedness import expressed by a speaker can be accepted or rejected by the other discourse participants: thus, it qualifies as an evaluative commitment of the speaker and, when accepted by the interlocutors, it can give rise to a shared evaluation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Bianchi

Bocci

Cruschina

2016

S&P

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“…2 See also Frey (2010) for the view that this operation is associated with a conventional implicature that leads to an emphatic reading in German.…”

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confidence: 99%

Focus and the exclusion of alternatives: On the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference

Skopeteas

Fanselow

2011

Lingua

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“…2), it is not reasonable to claim that the relevant pragmatic interpretation can be captured by the notion of contrast alone. Interestingly, in a recent reconsideration of his account, Frey (2010) comes to a similar conclusion when looking at the pragmatics of certain instances of movement to the left periphery in more detail.…”

Section: The Derivation Of Emphatic Fronting In Germanmentioning

confidence: 75%

“…In particular, cases such as the following demonstrate, according to Frey (2010), a speaker-related notion of emphasis or mirativity, in addition to information structural effects (for related cross-linguistic evidence, cf. Verloren in both marked (63a) and unmarked word order (63b) is the answering term to the question in (63), and thus the information focus; however, (63a) sounds more felicitous in this context.…”

Section: The Derivation Of Emphatic Fronting In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Particle topicalization and German clause structure

Trotzke

Quaglia

2016

J Comp German Linguistics

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In this paper, we provide a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of topicalizing verb particles in German. Based on the data we discuss, we argue that only a version of the Split-CP hypothesis for the German clause can account for the observations. Section 1 critiques previous accounts of particle topicalization and discusses some properties of particles that are potentially relevant to topicalization. We conclude that a particle's ability to be topicalized depends more on its ability to be contrasted with other particles than on the semantic autonomy of the particle per se. Section 2 discusses unexpected cases of non-contrastable particles in the left periphery. In this context, we introduce a previously unnoticed phenomenon in which particle verbs denoting strongly emotionally evaluated situations allow their particles to be topicalized, even if the particle does not receive a contrastive interpretation. In Sect. 3, we show that an elaborated syntax of the German left periphery of the kind argued for in cartographic approaches is uniquely able to predict the distribution of topicalized particles.

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Ā-Movement and conventional implicatures: About the grammatical encoding of emphasis in German

Cited by 57 publications

References 16 publications

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Focus and the exclusion of alternatives: On the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference

Particle topicalization and German clause structure

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