22.843, Confs: Linguistic Theories, Pragmatics, Syntax/Belgium

Sat Feb 19 21:59:39 UTC 2011

LINGUIST List: Vol-22-843. Sat Feb 19 2011. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 22.843, Confs: Linguistic Theories, Pragmatics, Syntax/Belgium

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1)
Date: 18-Feb-2011
From: Anne Breitbarth [anne.breitbarth at ugent.be]
Subject: Syntax of Polarity Emphasis

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2011 16:55:12
From: Anne Breitbarth [anne.breitbarth at ugent.be]
Subject: Syntax of Polarity Emphasis

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Syntax of Polarity Emphasis 

Date: 29-Sep-2011 - 30-Sep-2011 
Location: Gent, Belgium 
Contact: Anne Breitbarth 
Contact Email: anne.breitbarth at ugent.be 
Meeting URL: http://www.gist.ugent.be/polarityemphasis 

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Syntax 

Meeting Description: 

The FWO-Odysseus project GIST at Ghent University is pleased to 
announce the GIST4 workshop on

The syntax of  polarity emphasis: distribution and locus of licensing

This workshop brings together researchers who have worked on the 
syntactic analysis of a range of polarity emphasis phenomena in a number 
of languages. The goal is to achieve a systematic classification of such 
phenomena, as an overarching description of their typology, as well as a 
unified terminology, are still largely lacking. 

While most of the expressions of polarity emphasis discussed in the 
literature so far appear to be main clause phenomena (MCP) or root 
transformations, that is, patterns by and large restricted to main clauses,  
possibly including a restricted set of subordinate clauses known to be 
transparent for such phenomena/to pattern with root clauses (see Hooper 
and Thompson 1973 and Emonds 1970, 1976 for early discussion), recent 
work has shown that other expressions of polarity emphasis have a freer 
distribution (Danckaert 2009, Breitbarth and Haegeman 2010, Danckaert 
and Haegeman to appear). This difference indistribution of polarity 
emphasising expressions has been noted before; Hyman and Watters 
(1984) in their large-scale study of several African languages on what they 
call 'auxiliary focus' - emphatic assertion as expressed through focus on the 
auxiliary - show that while in most languages, it is restricted to main clause 
types, potentially including embedded clause types that can be assimilated 
to main clauses (1984:256), emphatic assertion through auxiliary focus is 
generally available in all clause types in some languages. They propose 
that in languages in which auxiliary focus is what we call an MCP, 'focus 
marking is grammatically [...] controlled' (1984: 256), while in languages in 
which it is unrestricted, it is pragmatically controlled.

A number of recent papers have proposed accounts of those expressions of
polarity emphasis which appear to be MCP in terms of specialized structure 
in an articulated left periphery (LP) Most of the phenomena in question 
have been argued by the relevant authors to implicate an operator in a left-
peripheral functional projection (a.o.  Holmberg 2001 on Finnish, Hernanz 
2007, on Spanish, Martins 2007 on Portuguese, and Poletto 2009 on 
Italian).. On the other hand, crosslinguistically emphatic polarity phenomena 
do not always display this restricted distribution, and are possibly what 
Hyman and Watters call 'pragmatically controlled'. The question then arises 
whether with respect to the observed cross-linguistic differences in the 
expression of polarity emphasis, the crucial distinction is between 
syntactically vs. pragmatically controlled phenomena, or whether a purely 
syntactic approach e.g. within the cartographic framework is sufficient. An 
approach of the latter type could for instance take the difference to reside in 
the different syntactic positions of the expressions of polarity emphasis, viz. 
within the left periphery (MCP) or within the TP-domain (unrestricted). 
Duffield's (2007) treatment of do insertion in English is an example of such 
an approach. Proposals of TP-internal focus phrases, made to account for 
other phenomena might be applied here with success (cf. the work of e.g. 
Jayaseelan 2001 or Belletti 2004). On the other hand, a purely syntactic
account may not be able to capture the discourse effects associated with
specific patterns and it could be that a radically pragmatic account may offer 
a closer fit to the data. The question arises, of course, whether certain 
types of polarity emphasis phenomena should be unattested for principled 
reasons, such as polarity emphasis phenomena syntactically encoded in the 
left periphery that are not restricted to main clauses, or polarity emphasis 
phenomena encoded at the TP level, but which are MCP. Clearly, such 
considerations have wider implications for our understanding of the general 
architecture of grammar, in particular for the cartographic enterprise, which 
aims at 'syntacticizing as much as possible the interpretive domains' 
(Cinque and Rizzi 2010: 63).

The contributions to this workshop will take a serious look at the nature of
the empirical differences between polarity emphasis phenomena
cross-linguistically, and work towards a unified analysis able to account for
these differences.

The workshop takes place on 29 and 30 September 2011 in Ghent. The 
following speakers have agreed to participate in the event:

- Montserrat Batllori (Universidad de Girona) and Maria Lluïsa Hernanz
(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): Spanish and Catalan polarity 
emphasizers
- Anne Breitbarth and Liliane Haegeman (GIST, Ghent University): Flemish 
en
- Ernestina Carrilho (Universidade de Lisboa): Portuguese ele
- Nigel Duffield (University of Sheffield): Vietnamese có
- Anders Holmberg (Newcastle University): Finnish auxiliary fronting
- Jason Kandybowicz (Swarthmore College): Nupe ni:
- Aniko Lipták (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics): Hungarian igenis
- Ana Maria Martins (Universidade de Lisboa): Portuguese não/sim/verb 
doubling
- Cecilia Poletto (Università Ca' Foscari, Venice): Italian sentence-final NO
- Chris Wilder (Norwegian University of Science and Technology 
Trondheim): English emphatic do

Anyone interested in attending the workshop is asked to inform the 
organisers by 15 June 2011 at the latest. There is a registration fee of 
30EUR covering coffee and lunch breaks as well as photocopying. Further 
details, also concerning the location of the venue, travel and 
accommodation information etc. can be found on the workshop website: 
http://www.gist.ugent.be/polarityemphasis

Organising committee:
Anne Breitbarth (a.breitbarth at ugent.be)
Karen DeClercq (karen.declercq at ugent.be)
Liliane Haegeman (liliane.haegeman at ugent.be)

References

Belletti, Adriana, 2004. Aspects of the Low IP Area. In Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The
Structure of CP and IP, 16-51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Breitbarth, Anne and Liliane Haegeman. 2010. 'En' en is níet wat we 
dachten: A Flemish discourse particle. Ms. Ghent University

Cinque, Guglielmo and Luigi Rizzi. (2010) The cartography of syntactic
structures. In: The Oxford handbook of grammatical analysis, ed. Bernd 
Heine and Heiko Narrog,  51-65. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Danckaert, Lieven. 2009. Polarity Focus and the Latin particle quidem in
adverbial clauses. Paper presented at the conference on Root Phenomena, 
Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, September 2009.

Danckaert, Lieven and Liliane Haegeman. To appear. Conditional clauses, 
Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis. In Advances 
in comparative Germanic syntax, eds. Caroline Heycock, Guido Vanden 
Wyngaerd and Robert Truswell. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Duffield, N. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: separating tense
from assertion. Linguistics 45: 765-814.

Emonds, Joseph. 1970. Root and structure-preserving transformations. 
Ph.D.diss., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.

Hernanz, M. Lluïsa. 2007. From polarity to modality. Some (a)symmetries 
between bien and sí  in Spanish. In Coreference, modality and focus, eds. L 
Eguren, Olga Fernández Soriano, 133-169. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Holmberg, Anders. 2007. Null subject and polarity focus. Studia Linguistica 
61, 212-236.

Hooper, John and Sandra Thompson. 1973. On the applicability of root
transformations. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 465-497. 

Hyman, Larry M. and John R. Watters. 1984. Auxiliary Focus. Studies in 
African Linguistics 15/3:233-273.

Jayaseelan, K.A. 2001. IP-internal topic and focus phrases. Studia 
Linguistica 55, 39-75.

Martins, Ana Maria. 2007. Double realization of verbal copies in European
Portuguese emphatic affirmation.  In The Copy Theory of Movement, eds. 
Norbert Corver and Jairo Nunes, 77-118. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John 
Benjamins.

Poletto, Cecilia. 2009. The syntax of focus negation. Ms. University of 
Venice.

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