Call for papers: Subtypes of thetic expressions in cross-linguistic perspective

Fri Mar 15 16:07:15 UTC 2013

Dear Lingtyp subscribers,

please find below a call for papers for a themed session as part of the next LAGB annual meeting (SOAS, London).
The date for submission to the organisers is 5 April 2013. See below for details.

Please email the organisers directly for any questions.

Eva Schultze-Berndt (eva.schultze-berndt at manchester.ac.uk<mailto:eva.schultze-berndt at manchester.ac.uk>)
Jenneke van der Wal (gjv23 at cam.ac.uk)

Subtypes of thetic expressions in cross-linguistic perspective

Call for contributions to a Themed Session
2013 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain
SOAS, London, 28 – 31 August 2013

Organisers: Eva Schultze-Berndt (University of Manchester) and Jenneke van der Wal (University of Cambridge)

Description of topic
Despite a considerable body of research in the last decades, the identification and delimitation of “thetic” or sentence focus constructions – associated with “out of the blue” contexts, as illustrated in (1) and (2) – still poses considerable difficulties for cross-linguistic research.

(1) E’ arrivata una piacevole notizia (Italian)
         is arrived a pleasant piece.of.news
‘A pleasant bit of NEWS arrived’ (Sornicola 1995: 108)

(2)  Go-opela basadi (Tswana)
CL.17.SUBJ-sing CL2.women
‘There are women singing’ (Creissels 2011)

One of the difficulties lies in the existence of a bewildering range of morphosyntactic and prosodic strategies that can be employed for the marking of sentence focus (“thetic strategies” for short), including at least the following:

  *   VS word order (“subject inversion”) in otherwise subject-initial languages, as in (1) and (2)
  *   lack of subject agreement where otherwise required (as in (2)) (cf. van der Wal 2008 for Bantu languages and Bentley et al. 2012 for Romance languages)
  *   locative or other expletive subjects (as in the English translation of (2))
  *   subject accenting (as in the English translation of (1))
  *   subject incorporation, e.g. in Mohawk (Sasse 1987:544-552)
  *   nominalisation, e.g. in Trio (Carlin 2011; see also Sasse 1987: 552-554)
  *   equal assignment of prosodic prominences to all major constituents (Simard 2010, El Zarka 2011)
  *   cleft structures (see e.g. Lambrecht 1988a and Wehr 2000 for French)
  *   absence of a topic marker, e.g. in Japanese (Kuroda 1972, 1992)
  *   discontinuous noun phrases (see Kirkwood 1977 for English; Schultze-Berndt and Simard 2012 for Jaminjung)

It has been proposed that what unites all these thetic strategies is the salient absence of a bipartite division of clauses into a Topic and a Comment, termed “desubjectivization” by Sasse (1987: 24) and “Principle of Detopicalisation” by Lambrecht (2000), which distinguishes thetic from categorical sentences. Particularly wide-spread in the semantic literature on information structure is the alternative idea that thetic structures – or at least existential sentences – invariably have a locational or “stage” topic, even if it is not pronounced (e.g. Gundel 1974, Babby 1980, Erteschik-Shir 1997:241, McNally 1998). The presence/absence of a topic (expression) is hence one of the issues in theticity that are still unclear.

Furthermore, it is far from clear what motivates the existence of several thetic strategies in the same language (given that by definition they share the same focus structure), the choice of a particular subset of these thetic strategies over others in a given language, or the choice of one over the other available construction (e.g. VS or SV with accented subject) in a given context. Some authors have proposed correlations between the choice of thetic strategies and other characteristics of the language, e.g. configurationality (requiring a syntactic structure with an overt subject for both thetic and categorical sentences; É. Kiss 1995: 8-9). As for the co-existence of several strategies, this has been linked to differences in discourse function. However, frequently discussed subtypes of thetic sentences themselves, such as existentials and presentatives, pose difficulties of identification and delimitation (and are not even analysed as sentence focus constructions by all authors). Subclassifications based solely on discourse function such as Sasse’s (1987, 2006) “annuntiative”, “introductive”, “descriptive” and “interruptive”, likewise, have not been subject to much empirical or theoretical scrutiny so far.
Another difficulty for the identification of thetic structures lies in the frequently observed multiple use of one strategy, such as subject accenting in English which is employed to express both theticity and argument focus. A possible motivation is found in the status of the subject in thetic sentences, which may be underspecified as just ‘detopicalised’ or focused.
Finally, a major issue for the identification of thetic structures is that “we still don't know how informationally complex a thetic structure can be, nor even how to pose such a question in a precise way” (Leonetti 2008: 155). The problem is particularly salient in the case of what Lambrecht (1988) has termed “syntactic amalgamates” of the type there was a farmer had a dog, While these structures are non-standard in English, they are comparable to a salient construction type in French illustrated in (3), and also to expressions in English with two prosodic peaks (as in the translation of (3)). They are sentence-focus constructions with respect to their discourse function, but do not correspond to the prototypical thetic construction in that they contain a constituent which introduces a new referent into the discourse context which simultaneously serves as the topic of a regular predication (Lambrecht 2000: 655; Wehr 2000).

(3) qu'y-a-t-il donc? – C'est la Palmyre qui a une attaque!  (French)
     what’s.the.matter PART it:is DEF P. who has a fit
   ‘What’s the matter? – PalMYRE’s had a FIT!’ (Zola, La Terre; Wehr 2000: 262)

Call for papers
The proposed themed session as part of the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain aims at both deepening and broadening our understanding of sentence focus (thetic) constructions by bringing together case studies, or cross-linguistic studies, on the coexistence of several thetic strategies in a number of languages, including lesser known languages and varieties. We welcome contributions from any theoretical angle as long as they are based on a range of empirical data. Questions that could be addressed in these case studies include the following:

  *   Can the multiple thetic strategies identified in the language under investigation be assigned to any of the functions of thetic sentences proposed in the literature, or does their employment depend on other factors (e.g. the nature of the predicates involved)?
  *   What are the constraints on each individual strategy in terms of the lexical class of predicates (e.g. intransitives, unaccusatives, motion and existence…), number and definiteness of arguments (the famous Definiteness Effect), etc.?
  *   To what extent can the employment of particular strategies be said to follow from other morphosyntactic or prosodic characteristics of the language in question (e.g. a requirement for overt subjects leading to locative subjects; a constraint on de-accenting of constituents preventing a subject accenting strategy)?
  *   Conversely, do certain functions appear to favour certain strategies?
  *   Do the strategies identified support the Detopicalization Principle or the existence of a “stage-topic” in thetic sentences, or can they be motivated in other ways?
  *   Methodologically, what diagnostics are valid to identify thetic sentences? Can certain informationally complex, bipartite structures be considered thetic?
Maximally 6 abstracts can be accepted as part of the themed session proposal, to be submitted as a single document by the organisers. Even if the themed session proposal is not accepted for the conference, individual papers will automatically be considered on their own merits for the general session. Conversely, abstracts that are not included in the proposal by the organisers can still be submitted to the general session.

Abstracts, including any examples, should be no longer than 1 A4 page in font size 12; single spacing is permitted. References should be added on a separate page. For details of the process and any other information on the LAGB 2013 please see
http://www.lagb.org.uk/lagb2013/home.

Timeline

  *   5 April 2013: Submission of abstracts as an email attachment to both organisers: gjv23 at cam.ac.uk; eva.schultze-berndt at manchester.ac.uk<mailto:eva.schultze-berndt at manchester.ac.uk>
  *   12 April 2013: Notification of inclusion in the themed session proposal
  *   15 April 2013: Submission of themed session proposal and individual papers
  *   May/June 2013: Notification of acceptance of themed session / individual papers
  *   28–31 August 2013: Conference

References
Babby, Leonard. 1980. Existential Sentences and Negation in Russian. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma.
Bentley, Delia, Francesco Maria Ciconte, and Silvio Cruschina. 2012. Microvariation in subject agreement: The case of existential pivots with split focus in Romance. Italian Journal of Linguistics.
Carlin, Eithne B. 2011. Theticity in Trio (Cariban). International Journal of American Linguistics 77: 1–31.
Creissels, Denis. 2011. Tswana locatives and their status in the inversion construction. Africana Linguistica XVII.
El Zarka, Dina. 2011. Leading, linking, and closing tones and tunes in Egyptian Arabic – what a simple intonation system tells us about the nature of intonation. In Ellen Broselow & Hamid Ouali (Hgg.) Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics: Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic Linguistics. Volume XXII-XXIII: College Park, Maryland, 2008 and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2009, 57–74. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 1997. The Dynamics of Focus Structure Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
É. Kiss, Katalin. 1995. Introduction. In Katalin É. Kiss (ed.), Discourse Configurational Languages, 3–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gundel, Jeanette. 1974. The role of topic and comment in linguistic theory. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.
Kirkwood, H.W. 1977. Discontinuous Noun Phrases in Existential Sentences in English and German. Journal of Linguistics 13: 53-66.
Kuroda, S.-Y. 1972. The categorical and the thetic judgment. Evidence from Japanese syntax. Foundations of Language 9: 153-185.
Kuroda, S.-Y. 1992. Judgment forms and sentence forms. In  S.-Y. Kuroda (ed.) Japanese Syntax and Semantics: Collected Papers, 13–77. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1988a. Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French. In:,John Haiman and Sandra A. Thompson, (eds), Clause combining in grammar and discourse, 135–179. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1988b. There Was a Farmer Had a Dog: Syntactic Amalgams Revisited Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 319-339.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Topic, focus and the mental representations of discourse referents Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lambrecht, Knud. 2000. When subjects behave like objects: an analysis of the merging of S and O in sentence-focus constructions across languages. Studies in Language 24: 611-682.
McNally, Louise. 1998. Stativity and theticity. In Susan Rothstein (ed.) Events and Grammar, 293–307. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1987. The thetic/categorical distinction revisited. Linguistics 25: 511-580.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 2006. Theticity. In  G Bernini & M Schwarz (eds), Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe, 255-308. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schultze-Berndt, Eva and Candide Simard. 2012. Constraints on noun phrase discontinuity in an Australian language: the role of prosody and information structure. Linguistics 50(5): 1015–1058.
Simard, Candide. 2010. The Prosodic Contours of Jaminjung, a language of Northern Australia. Manchester: University of Manchester.
Sornicola, Rosanna. 1995. Theticity, VS order and the interplay of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 48: 72-83.
van der Wal, Jenneke. 2008. Agreement in thetic sentences in Bantu and Romance. In C. De Cat and K. Demuth (eds) The Bantu-Romance Connection. A comparative investigation of verbal agreement, DPs and information structure, 323-350. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
van der Wal, Jenneke. 2012. Unpronounced locatives in inversion constructions. Paper presented at the Manchester Symposium on Existentials, 28-29 June 2012.
Wehr, Barbara. 2000. Zur Beschreibung der Syntax des français parlé (mit einem Exkurs zu "thetisch" und "kategorisch"). In Diskursanalyse. Untersuchungen zum gesprochenen Französisch. Akten der gleichnamigen Sektion des 1. Kongresses des Franko-Romanisten-Verbands (Mainz, 23.-26. September 1998), Wehr, Barbara & Thomaßen, H. (eds), 239-289. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
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