On different kinds of contrast

Molnár, Valéria

doi:10.1515/9783110922011.197

Cited by 106 publications

(34 citation statements)

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“…Cross-linguistic evidence supports the necessity of a distinction between different types of focus, which is syntactically encoded (cf. Molnár, 2006;Bentley, 2007;Cruschina, 2012;Bianchi and Bocci, 2012;Bianchi, 2012). To illustrate, the syntactic position of CF and IF tend to be different across languages.…”

Section: The Focused Constituent: a Multifactorial Approach To Differmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, though this can be the case for Italian, Spanish G-Tops (especially in SPS) exhibit different behaviour, which leads me to suggest that G-Tops in focus fronting constructions move to Spec-TP. 13 First, as standardly assumed (Enç, 1991;Erteschik-Shir, 1997Diesing, 1992Diesing, , 1997Jayaseelan, 2001;Molnár, 2006;Leonetti, 2004Leonetti, , 2008Aboh, 2010;Frascarelli, 2007), specificity is one of the main properties of topics. Hence, a G-Top is supposed to always be specific.…”

Section: Evidence For G-tops and Preverbal Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Towards a typology of focus: Subject position and microvariation at the discourse–syntax interface

Jiménez-Fernández

2015

Ampersand

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Section: The Focused Constituent: a Multifactorial Approach To Differmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Evidence For G-tops and Preverbal Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a typology of focus: Subject position and microvariation at the discourse–syntax interface

Jiménez-Fernández

2015

Ampersand

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“…Allen et al, 2015). As an information-structural category, contrasts involve the presence of an alternative referent in the context of an utterance (Molnár, 2006). The advantage of contrast eff ects is that they do not necessarily require speakers to take the addressee's perspective into account.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because all references that we elicited were direct responses to the wh-element in the elicitation question, they were all focal. For our types of elicited responses, one could argue that we elicited contrastive foci in the onecontrast context and contrastive topics in the two-contrast context (Molnár, 2006). Although we explicitly avoided ambiguity in our experimental design, contrasts can, in principal, also help children become more sensitive to potential ambiguity in their references, because ambiguity potentially arises in those situations where there is more than one potential referent available (cf.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Referential Choices and Specific Language Impairment: Sensitivity to Contrast Levels and Grammatical Role

Stegenwallner-Schütz¹,

Adani²

2016

discours

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“…É. Kiss 1998, Kenesei 2006, Molnár 2006, Horvath 2010. The answer in (2b) to an open question like (2a), without a closed candidate set mentioned in the discourse or present in the speaker and hearer's minds, could, in principle, be interpreted exhaustively or nonexhaustively.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The relationship between meaning and intonation in non-exhaustive answers: Evidence from Basque

Elordieta¹,

Irurtzun²

2010

The Linguistic Review

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In this paper we analyze the intonational properties of a type of focus construction that has been understudied, represented by answers to wh-questions in which the constituent that fills the variable does not do so exhaustively, that is, it does not provide an exhaustive answer because the speaker cannot commit to asserting that the other potential alternative candidates to fill the variable are cancelled. This type of narrow focus, Non-Exhaustive Narrow Focus (NENF), is different from Exhaustive Narrow Focus (ENF), in which a constituent fills the variable of the question exhaustively, with a concomitant cancellation of the rest of the focal alternatives. Our claim is that natural languages have the means to distinguish ENF and NENF unambiguously through prosodic means. In the present study, we show that speakers of (Northern Bizkaian) Basque assign particular intonational features to answers to wh-questions that should be interpreted non-exhaustively. In our experiment, we measured peak scaling of accents in the subject and the verb in ENF and NENF utterances. The results show that NENF is distinguished from ENF in having a pitch accent on the verb with a higher F0 value, almost as if the verb were focalized. In fact, we compared the intonational patterns of NENF with Verum Focus constructions, in which the polarity of the event expressed by the verb is focalized, and there were no significant differences in the verbal peaks in NENF and VF. There were no significant differences in peak scaling in the subject's stressed syllable between ENF and NENF, and neither were there any differences between NENF and VF. The paper offers a semantic analysis of the differences between ENF and NENF, by claiming that NENF is a split focus construction, in which both the subject and the polarity (or rather, the pairing between the subject and the polarity) constitute the focus of the utterance.

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On different kinds of contrast

Cited by 106 publications

References 0 publications

Towards a typology of focus: Subject position and microvariation at the discourse–syntax interface

Towards a typology of focus: Subject position and microvariation at the discourse–syntax interface

Referential Choices and Specific Language Impairment: Sensitivity to Contrast Levels and Grammatical Role

The relationship between meaning and intonation in non-exhaustive answers: Evidence from Basque

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