30.3733, Review: Romance; Syntax: García García, Uth (2018)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3733. Thu Oct 03 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.3733, Review: Romance; Syntax: García García, Uth (2018)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Peace Han, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Julian Dietrich
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 14:25:05
From: Vlastimil Rataj [pato.yapoq at seznam.cz]
Subject: Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36505857


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-312.html

EDITOR: Marco  García García
EDITOR: Melanie  Uth
TITLE: Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Companion Series 201
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Vlastimil Rataj, Charles University in Prague

SUMMARY

The book “Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond” consists of 11 studies and
an introductory chapter concerned with realization and interpretation of
different types of focus and related meanings in mainly Spanish, but also
other Romance and non Romance languages, taking an interdisciplinary point of
view. The volume is an outcome of a workshop on “Focus Realization and
Interpretation in Romance and Beyond” held at the University of Cologne in
2014. As mentioned in the Preface and more thoroughly elaborated in the
introductory chapter, studies on focus in Romance languages, in different
linguistic fields, have been based on different theoretical approaches,
conceptualizations of focus categories and different or incongruent
methodologies, and have often come to incomparable or even contradictory
results, and thus “we are still far away from solving the question of how
different focus types are realized in different (Romance) languages”
(Preface). The contributions in the present volume address these issues by
taking an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach.

Apart from the introductory chapter, the eleven contributions (chapters) of
the volume are organized into five parts: I Prosody and word order, II
Prosody, focus, and related pragmatic functions, III Modality and
exclamatives, IV Cleft constructions, and V Focus and language acquisition;
each part contains two papers, with the exception of the first part with three
chapters.

The introductory chapter “Introduction: Core issues of focus realization in
Romance” written by Melanie Uth and Marco García García, editors of this
volume, is concerned with some of the problems related to focus realization in
Romance languages and approaches taken in different studies on this topic. The
authors first focus on methodological diversity regarding types of data
collection and types of focused constituents under study. It is further shown
that differences in type or degree of embedding of focused constituents
contribute to difficult comparability of different studies as well. Another
section deals with terminological and conceptual differences regarding focus
categories (such as narrow, broad, neutral, contrastive, corrective, etc.).
Finally the authors turn to syntactic and prosodic diatopic variation in
Spanish. The chapter concludes with an outline of the volume and summaries of
the chapters.

In “Language variation at the prosody-syntax interface: Focus in European
Spanish”, Maria del Mar Vanrell and Olga Fernández-Soriano investigate
prosodic and syntactic realization of focus in four Spanish varieties. In the
experiment, a semi-spontaneous picture-based task was used to elicit both
information and contrastive/corrective narrow focus on subject and direct
object in sentences with indirect object or adjunct. The data were then
analysed for intonational pattern and  syntactic strategy used. The results
show that prosodic marking depends rather on the position of the focused
constituent (and not on the variety or focus type). On the other hand,
syntactic marking of each focus type (informational vs. contrastive) rather
depends on the variety, although it clefts are preferred only for contrastive
focus. The findings also reveal that Canarian Spanish differs from other
varieties in marking of both types of focus, while object fronting with
information focus is clearly preferred only in Basque Spanish (L1 Spanish).
The authors also performed a judgment task experiment; the results seem to
confirm the results of the production task. It is thus shown that diatopic
variability must be taken into account in studies on Spanish focus marking.

Two varieties of Mexican Spanish are compared in Melanie Uth’s paper “Focus
realization at the prosody-syntax interface: Yucatecan Spanish opposed to
Standard Mexican Spanish”. Data for Yucatecan Spanish (YS) were taken from two
picture-based production experiments and an acceptability judgment test. Data
for Standard Mexican Spanish (MS) were obtained from literature and the three
experiments conducted with a control speaker of this variety. An analysis of
the collected data with regard to prosodic realization of focus is provided in
the next section, along with a comparison to MS. The subsection on word order
deals with focus fronting in YS and other Spanish varieties on basis of
findings from other literature. The author shows that in YS there is a
tendency for focus fronting and falling pitch accent, while MS prefers placing
focused constituents at the end of sentence with different rising pitch
accents (and focus fronting is marginal). After the analysis of the data, Uth
turns to discuss the relationship between prosody and syntax. According to
her, the syntactic strategy and pitch accent in each variety do not co occur
incidentally, but are due to articulatory reasons: falling accents are best
realized before downstep, at the beginning of the sentence, while rising
accents, after downstep, at the end of sentence. Based on this, Melanie Uth
claims that YS should be considered a different type of language than standard
(Mexican) Spanish with regard to focus realization. Finally, the author
provides an insight into the language contact between Yucatecan Maya (YM) and
Yucatecan Spanish, as well as YM tonal system and prosody, and concludes that
the prosodic particularities of YS are probably due to influence of YM.

“Acceptability and frequency in Spanish focus marking”, written by Steffen
Heidinger, differs from the preceding studies in that it deals only with the
syntactic interface. The author examines, on one data set, the frequency of
occurrence of both information and contrastive focus in initial, internal and
final positions, and on a different data set, the acceptability of both types
of focus in these positions. The results reveal that the initial position is
rather rare in frequency data, and although all three positions are highly
acceptable for the participants of the judgment task, the initial position
receives the lowest score. In both acceptability and frequency data sets,
internal position has a higher ranking over final position for contrastive
focus, and both positions rank similarly for information focus. The author
thus demonstrates that frequency aligns with acceptability for both
information and contrastive focus, and that frequent options are also more
acceptable and vice versa, although focused constituents in initial position
are infrequent, but judged acceptable as well.

The study “Prosodic nuclear patterns in narrow and broad focus utterances:
Pragmatic and social factors in Central Mexican Spanish”, written by Pedro
Martín Butragueño and Érika Mendoza, is the last paper on Spanish prosody, and
the first one of the second part of the volume that turns from syntactic
variation to other aspects. The study deals with Central Mexican Spanish (CMS)
and uses reanalysed data from various previously collected data sets with
narrow and broad foci in final position. The data reveal that there is a
number of different pitch accents in CMS that show a great variability in both
focus domains, and although non raising pitch accents (overall less common in
both domains) tend to appear with broad focus and rising accents are preferred
with narrow focus, both narrow and broad focus can be marked by any pitch
accent. Further analyses allow the authors to demonstrate that this
variability is partially due to factors not related to information structure
that also use prosody for marking: expressivity and some communicative
functions of the focus, different discourse types or certain sociolinguistic
factors. On the basis of results of all these analyses, the authors also
provide and discuss a set of 13 prosodic constraints on broad and narrow foci
in CMS accompanied by an indication of their statistical significance.

Jacopo Torregrossa’s paper “Distinguishing contrast and focus at PF: A view
from Italian” is concerned with the question that contrast might be a notion
of information structure separate from focus and topic. He argues that
although both focus and contrast serve for evoking alternatives, they work in
different domains: while focus generates alternatives with respect to new
information, contrast generates alternatives within the background. In order
to confirm the hypothesis, Torregrossa performed a reading task with three
participants from Rionero (Basilicata region) which consisted of ten sentences
with a pre final in situ constituent that received different interpretation
depending on the context. The results of the experiment seem to confirm that
both broad focus and (narrow) focus, and (narrow) focus and contrast have
different prosodic realizations (although each of the three participants was
using different strategies to mark them), which allows the author to argue in
favour of a three-way model of information structure that comprises topic,
focus and contrast as three different categories.

In “Presupposed modality”, Uli Reich provides a new insight into the
linguistic treatment of the meanings called “surprise” and “obviousness”. The
author develops, in the form of language games, a theory of presupposed modal
operators that add an additional dimension to the information structure. To
start with, he provides several examples, from existing literature, of
phonological, morphological and syntactic means of expression of surprise and
obviousness in different languages; this overview serves Reich to demonstrate
that the meanings of all the exemplified expressions are related to the
information structure. The information structure, according to the author,
“does not only adjust asserted propositions to states of affairs and events
that are presupposed to be true in the common ground, it also expresses their
‘presupposed modality’” (p. 214). Reich shows that when a proposition is
uttered with a phonological, morphological or syntactic means that expresses
obviousness or surprise, “we must add a presupposed modal operator to a copy
of the at issue meaning in the common ground” (p. 216) in order to get the
full meaning. Means that express obviousness thus trigger a presupposition
with a modal operator of certainty or necessity, while those expressing
surprise are related to an operator of impossibility or prohibition. Moreover,
surprise and obviousness seem to appear with contrastive focus, while the
unmarked option (neither surprise nor obviousness), with the information
focus, according to the author.

The aim of the paper “NP exclamatives and focus” by Marco García García is to
investigate the relations between Spanish noun phrase (NP) exclamatives («¡Las
GALLETAS que se ha comido!») and the notion of focus. It is shown that while
exclamatives share some properties with focus-marking constructions,
exclamatives cannot express contrastive focus, yet their function still seems
to be related to focus expression because their interpretation depends on the
existence of alternative domains of quantification. The author goes on to
analyse the relations between focus and illocutionary force. He argues that
focus-marking devices interact with illocutionary force, and unlike with
assertive speech acts, in exclamatives they point to the non propositional
level. Formal focus-marking means, shared with cleft and focus-fronting
constructions, in NP exclamatives thus express “a non contrastive focus that
indicates the presence of non fulfilled speaker expectations” (p. 249).

Anna-Maria De Cesare and Davide Garassino’s paper “Adverbial cleft sentences
in Italian, French and English: A comparative perspective” is a corpus-based
comparative study of adverbial cleft sentences, such as «It’s with ease that
Stella reads Kant.», dealing them with regard to their information structure
and syntactic and semantic categorization of the clefted constituent («with
ease»). The corpus used for the analysis was selected with regards to mutual
comparability and consisted of articles from electronic French, English and
Italian daily newspapers. The findings of the analysis show that there are
similarities between the languages with regard to the syntactic and semantic
types of the clefted constituent. Prepositional phrases were found as the most
frequent syntactic type in all languages, followed by clausal phrases (except
in Italian) and noun phrases. Regarding semantic categories, the most frequent
were clefts expressing time. More significant differences between the three
languages were found in the informational structure. While all these languages
share a strong preference for cleft sentences with new information in the
subordinate clause, Italian and French differ from English with regard to
whether the clefted constituent expresses new (English) or given information
(Italian and French). On the basis of the results, the authors conclude that
French adverbial clefts differ from those found in English and Italian, namely
in being frequent and more flexible in French, and suggest an explanation in a
greater grammaticalization of clefts in this language.

“Cleft sentences in the history of French and English: A case of pragmatic
borrowing?”, by Carola Trips and Achim Stein, deals with historical contact
between French and English. The authors analysed syntactically-annotated
corpora of Old and Middle French and Old and Middle English. For
methodological reasons, besides cleft-tagged constructions, they also included
unmarked predicative constructions. The results of the analysis reveal that
both types of constructions were part of the grammars of both languages and
that predicative constructions were much more frequent in earlier stages of
Middle English than later. As the predicative constructions are semantically
ambiguous enough to be interpreted as clefts, the authors propose that their
higher frequency influenced the increase of pronominal it clefts and their
discourse function was borrowed from French and associated with these English
it clefts, which is considered as a case of pragmatic borrowing by the
authors.

Christine Dimroth and Sandra Benazzo are authors of the study entitled
“Developing strategies for encoding additive and contrastive relations in
French and German child narratives”. They part from findings of recent
investigations which show that these languages differ in the information unit
used for establishing additive (and contrastive) relations in the discourse.
The study’s main task is to determine at which age first-language learners of
French and German start using the preferred strategy of the corresponding
language in an adult-like way. According to the results of a picture-based
task, German speaking children start using the adult-like strategy already at
the age of 4 years, while French speaking children at 7 years. The authors
argue that this difference is not because the assertion-based strategy were
conceptually easier, but rather because French speaking children must first
master other grammatical means.

In “Focus, prosody, and subject positions in L3 Spanish: Analyzing data from
German learners with Italian and European Portuguese as heritage languages”,
Christoph Gabriel and Jonas Grünke investigate the acquisition of
focus-induced change in word order in learners of Spanish with German as
dominant language. Monolingual learners are compared to learners with Italian
or European Portuguese as heritage language. Data consisted of three types: a
picture-based production task, a grammaticality judgment task, and a
semi-structured interview with participants focused on their metalinguistic
awareness and attitude towards their heritage language. It was hypothesized
that the heritage languages, typologically similar to Spanish, positively
influenced both production and acceptability of post-verbal focussed subjects
in multilingual learners, and that acceptance would be higher than production
in all three groups. While the third hypothesis was confirmed in the
experiments, the influence of heritage language was not proved with regard to
production of focussed post-verbal subjects, and only partially with respect
to their acceptability. In order to shed some light on the results, the
authors repeated the production task with multilingual speakers also in their
heritage languages. The authors conclude that a heritage language
typologically similar to the target language does not guarantee a better
performance in the target language, but a positive transfer rather depends on
the speaker’s proficiency in the heritage language and metalinguistic
awareness.

EVALUATION

The volume presents a dozen of studies on focus in some Romance and non
Romance languages written with a multidisciplinary approach. However, it is
not a cross-disciplinary overview of expression and interpretation of focus in
Romance (and other) languages, as one might think, but a collection of mostly
empirical studies, each taking its own perspective on one or more languages.
Nevertheless, this does not undermine the value of the contributions and of
the volume as a whole, on the contrary. Each chapter brings new insights into
the study of focus and related phenomena in one or more aspects, be it the
relation of focus to another part of grammar, diatopic variability,
methodology or theoretical issues. The variability of approaches taken in the
studies is considerable: focus is dealt in relation with prosody, syntax,
semantics, information structure, modality, speech acts, language acquisition,
language contact/transfer (including one historical study), discourse type and
sociolinguistic aspects. Several Romance and non Romance languages are covered
in the volume, although with a bias towards Spanish because 6 of the 11
studies deal with different varieties of this language. Other Romance
languages dealt with in detail are Italian and French (Portuguese appears only
as a heritage language in a study on Spanish). Some of the contributions are
comparative, comparing not only different varieties of Spanish or different
Romance languages, but also Romance (Italian, French) and non Romance
languages (English, German). Finally, Quechua is the only non Indo-European
language more thoroughly discussed, in the study on presupposed modality, and
Yucatecan Maya is taken into consideration as a language that influenced
Yucatecan Spanish.

There are a few weak points to mention. What is common to several studies is
the low number of participants in experiments. The question arises of whether
the sample of data gathered in the experiments is really representative for
the examined language variety. This is clearly visible in the results of the
study on contrast and focus in Italian (Chapter 6), where each of the three
participants uses his own strategy to mark these categories. Nevertheless,
some of the authors tried to back up the results in one or another way, e.g.
by conducting an additional experiment taking different approach or by
comparing data from different sources. Related to this issue is the low number
of tokens found in some experiments. Further, despite the claim in the
introductory chapter that diatopic variability should be taken into account,
data from several Spanish varieties were lumped together into one data set in
Heidinger’s contribution (Chapter 4), namely and most strikingly data from
Argentinian Spanish (one source) with those from European Spanish (more
sources). The results showed that Argentinian Spanish differed significantly
from European Spanish, which was mentioned in the study (p. 117), but not
discussed with regard to the reasons of this difference. Finally, there are
some deficiencies in the references in the introductory chapter (e.g.
Muntendam 2013 is missing in the list of references, as well as some cited
papers included in the volume), and some of the references from a Krifka’s
paper have page numbers from an edition different from that in the list of
references. Moreover, it is not clear what the acronym “PF” in the title of
Torregrossa’s paper stands for.

Although the articles on prosody might be somehow puzzling for readers that
are not familiar with Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) annotation system, the
chapters are written in a clear and systematic way, and used methodology is
thoroughly described in each study. The book also contains an index, which is
very helpful to easily find places where the included topics are discussed.
There is a large amount of referenced literature on different topics in
individual chapters, and thus what might be useful as well would be a
comprehensive list of books and papers organized with regard to the topics
and/or languages covered in them.

In general, besides the interdisciplinary approach, one must also highlight
the attention to some methodological and theoretical aspects that were
addressed in the introductory chapter and whose importance was proved
throughout the contributions. Among these aspects that should be considered in
the studies are dialectal variability, language contact (both synchronically
and diachronically), sociolinguistic factors, distinction of different types
of focus and focused constituents and their embedding in the sentence,
discourse type of the data in the corpus and methods to collect them, possible
need for a more fine-grained prosodic analysis, or interaction of focus
expression with modality and pragmatic functions.

The book “Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond” is a valuable resource not
only for Romanists, but also for scholars interested in the study of, among
other topics, prosody, syntactic variation, information structure, modality or
dialectology. Besides new findings presented in the studies, it also touches
some theoretical questions and draws attention to important methodological
aspects that should be taken into account in future works. Each chapter
individually and the volume as a whole thus contributes to our knowledge about
focus in Romance and beyond.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Vlastimil Rataj obtained PhD degree in Romance Linguistics at Charles
University (Prague, Czech Republic), with a dissertation on “Andean Spanish as
a product of contact with Quechua and Aymara”. His main research interests are
Andean and Spanish linguistics, esp. Quechua (whole family, but especially
Southern Quechua), Aymara and Andean Spanish. He also teaches a course of
Quechua for linguists at Charles University.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3733	
----------------------------------------------------------