Focus marking asymmetries in Colloquial and Standard French: A stochastic optimality-theoretic account

Destruel, Émilie

doi:10.1017/s0959269515000265

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Visual inspection of Figure 2 reveals an asymmetry in clefts' ratings for French in the non-contradictory context (bottom right graph): Object clefts (black circles) appear clearly lower than subject clefts (red circles) (μ = 3.68 vs. μ = 5.43, respectively). This asymmetry relating to argument hierarchy is in line with the past literature and recent empirical evidence that suggest subject focus obligatorily induces a non-canonical structure while object focus only optionally does so since objects appear by default rightward, where prominence is assigned in French (Lambrecht, 2001; Destruel, 2016). We note that evidence for such an asymmetry is also provided cross-linguistically in languages such as Spanish (Buring and Gutierrez-Bravo, 2001), Northern Sotho (Zerbian, 2007), Georgian and Hungarian (Skopeteas and Fanselow, 2010b).…”

Section: The Studiessupporting

confidence: 89%

It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English

2019

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While much prior literature on the meaning of clefts—such as the English form “it is X who Z-ed”—concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (“nobody/nothing other than X Z”), we report on experiments examining the role of the doxastic status of alternatives on the naturalness of c'est -clefts in French and it -clefts in English. Specifically, we study the hypothesis that clefts indicate a conflict with a doxastic commitment held by some discourse participant. Results from naturalness tasks suggest that clefts are improved by a property we term “contrariness” (along the lines of Zimmermann, 2008 ). This property has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.

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Section: The Studiessupporting

confidence: 89%

It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English

2019

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“…In other words, the focusmarking strategy employed in these languages depends on the position of the focused constituent. Evidence of this focus-marking asymmetry has been found for French (Lambrecht 2001;Destruel 2016), Hausa (Hartmann & Zimmermann 2007), West Chadic languages (Zimmermann 2008), several Kwa and Gur languages (Schwarz & Fiedler 2007), Northern Sotho (Zerbian 2007), and Georgian (Skopeteas & Fanselow 2010). Crucially, this asymmetry implies that if a language marks non-subjects explicitly, then it must mark subjects explicitly as well (Skopeteas & Fanselow 2010: 170).…”

Section: Focus Realization In Spanish: Theoretical Insightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks

Hoot

Leal

Destruel

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The literature on focus in Spanish contains a divide between theoretical claims and quantitative empirical evidence: While Spanish is often regarded as resorting to syntactic movement to mark focus, quantitative and/or experimental data often do not support this claim. Research focusing on non-final objects within the VP can provide valuable clarity to the empirical picture, especially when evidence is gathered using multiple methods, a practice known as triangulation. In this article, we use three different tasks (judgments, sentence processing, and production) to provide evidence of object focus marking in Spanish. We found that: (i) canonical orders (object in-situ) were preferred overall; (ii) marking object focus via movement strategies is possiblewe find a relationship between object-focus marking and non-canonical (S)VPPO order, as predicted by mainstream syntactic accounts; and (iii) Spanish focus is not marked asymmetrically by position (subjects vs. non-subjects). Overall, results show canonical orders (i.e., SVOPP) can be used to realize focus on any constituent, while their non-canonical counterparts are contextually restricted. This finding suggests mainstream syntactic accounts in which information structure triggers syntactic movement may need to be revised to include alternative focus-marking mechanisms.

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“…It is not the case that constructions with low scores are impossible. For instance, canonical sentences with a subject focus are possible albeit not the preferred option in French ( Destruel, 2013 : 162, Destruel, 2016 : 310); cleft constructions with a focus in the embedded clause are possible in French ( Dufter, 2009 : 105, 114) and Chinese ( Yan and Calhoun, 2019 ).…”

Section: Contextual Felicity Of Syntactic Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This result confirms intuitions about a constraint against focus on preverbal subjects in French ( Lambrecht, 2001 : 492; Hamlaoui, 2007 ), which is accounted for by the general preference of French for aligning the focus with the right edge of the intonation phrase ( Féry, 2013 : 698). Studies on speech production show that subjects are mostly focused through cleft constructions ( Destruel, 2013 : 162; Destruel, 2016 : 310). Similar effects are reported for Chinese: canonical SVO sentences are typically mapped on a Topic-Comment articulation, which has specificity effects on the interpretation of preverbal subjects ( Huang et al, 2009 : 200).…”

Section: Contextual Felicity Of Syntactic Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correction by Focus: Cleft Constructions and the Cross-Linguistic Variation in Phonological Form

Greif

Skopeteas

2021

Front. Psychol.

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A challenging issue of cross-linguistic variation is that the same syntactic construction may appear in different arrays of contexts depending on language. For instance, cleft constructions appear with contrastive focus in English, but in a larger array of contexts in French. A part of the cross-linguistic variation may be due to prosodic differences, since prosodic possibilities determine the array of focus structures that can be mapped onto one and the same syntactic configuration. In the present study, we compare languages with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German), with languages that do not use this prosodic strategy (French, Mandarin Chinese). In a speech production experiment, we examine the prosodic realization of contrastive focus and identify prosodic reflexes of focus in all languages. 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 an acceptability study with written questionnaires, we examined the felicity of cleft constructions in contexts licensing a focus within the cleft clause. This focus structure is orthogonal to the preferred focus structure of cleft constructions and can appear in cases of second-occurrence foci (in contexts of correction). The obtained judgments reveal a distinction between languages with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German) and languages with other types of reflexes of focus (French, Chinese): languages of the former type have an advantage in using cleft constructions with a focus within the cleft clause, which shows that the array of contexts of using clefts in English and German is not a proper subset of the array of contexts applying to the same constructions in French and Chinese. The obtained differences can be explained by the role of prosodic devices and corroborate the view that prosodic reflexes of focus have different semantic-pragmatic import: it is easier to establish a focus structure that is orthogonal to the syntax in a language with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German); this does not hold for prosodic correlates of focus that reinforce the articulation of prosodic constituents (French) or the articulation of lexical tones (Chinese).

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Focus marking asymmetries in Colloquial and Standard French: A stochastic optimality-theoretic account

Cited by 6 publications

References 45 publications

It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English

It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English

Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks

Correction by Focus: Cleft Constructions and the Cross-Linguistic Variation in Phonological Form

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