Conf. Kratzer&Selkirk, ArchiG-UMR7023

[Léa Nash]

L'équipe ARCHITECTURE GRAMMATICALE de l'UMR 7023 a le plaisir de vous  
convier dans le cadre de son séminaire mensuel

le lundi 9 novembre 2009, 10h00-12h00

Université Paris VIII, 2, rue de la liberté,

93200 Saint-Denis (métro Saint-Denis Université, ligne 13), bâtiment  
D, salle D 143

http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article86


à une conférence de

Angelika Kratzer & Lisa Selkirk (Université de Massachusetts Amherst)

intitulée

Distinguishing contrastive, new and given information

RESUME

The question of how linguistic theory should break down the dimension  
of “information structure” that includes contrastiveness, newness and  
givenness continues to be a subject of debate. This talk will defend  
the three-way distinction between given, new, and focus of contrast  
originally proposed in Chafe 1976. Phonological and phonetic data are  
presented from English which support this three-way contrast. We will  
argue that the status of a constituent as new is unmarked in the  
grammar, while constituents which are given or are a focus of  
contrast are marked as such in the syntactic representation which  
mediates between sound and meaning. This proposal echoes a recent  
proposal by Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006.

We will show that a system which gives morphosyntactic representation  
to focus of contrast (FoC-marking) and to givenness (G-marking) but  
which leaves newness morphosyntactically unmarked has the right  
consequences for theories of the interfaces of syntax with sentence  
prosody on the one hand and semantics on the other. On the semantics  
side, renditions of the Rooth 1992 theory of alternatives focus and  
the Schwarzschild 1999 theory of givenness are combined with a set of  
syntax/semantics interface constraints to provide the interpretation  
and distribution of sentences whose constituents are FoC-marked, G- 
marked, and/or unmarked for either. On the phonology side, it is  
shown that all-new sentences receive a phonological interpretation  
that is based on general phonological principles, without any appeal  
to the morphosyntactic feature make-up of the sentence.

We will also explore some of the typological predictions of our  
proposal: whether FoC-marking or G-marking are expressed in sentence  
prosody varies (independently) from one language to the next. Some  
languages show no prosodic reflexes of these morphosyntactic  
contrasts at all, instead defaulting to the types of unmarked  
sentence prosody found in all-new sentences.






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