From focus to syntax

Donati, Caterina; Nespor, Marina

doi:10.1016/s0024-3841(03)00015-9

Cited by 26 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Would this be the case in other, syntactically different and similar, languages? Donati and Nespor (2003) argue that intonational focus and syntactic structure tend to be related: the more prominence can move around in the intonational phrase the more rigid the word-order properties of the language are. Thus, on the one hand, the role of prosodic prominence for focus placement is very high in languages where word order cannot be used for such functions.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tonal features, intensity, and word order in the perception of prominence

Vainio

Järvikivi

2006

Journal of Phonetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The perception of prominence as a function of sentence stress in Finnish was investigated in four experiments. Listeners judged the relative prominence of two consecutive nouns in a three-word utterance, where the accentuation of the nouns was systematically varied by tonal means. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated both the tonal features underlying the subjects' responses as well as the influence of word order on the perceived prominence of the two accented words. The results showed that similar tonal features regardless of other phonetic differences conditioned the subjects' judgments of prominence. They further showed that changing the word order influenced the distribution of responses in the two experiments. Two further experiments were administered to check the possible influence of slight tonal and intensity differences in the first two experiments. Only intensity was found to affect the distribution of judgments. Furthermore, the influence was local and only affected the last of the two words. Overall the results suggest that the most important tonal features responsible for the perception of prominence form a so-called flathat pattern. That also indicates that different kinds of focus structure influence the perception of prominence even when the judgments are based on decisions about the place of sentence stress. r

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tonal features, intensity, and word order in the perception of prominence

Vainio

Järvikivi

2006

Journal of Phonetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…at IP left edges or in the middle of IP) would indicate in which portion of the sentence different orders are allowed. A relatively free word order may in turn give some information about the obligatoriness of specific complements (see also Donati & Nespor, in press). While the location of prominence within the phonological phrase may cue the relative order of the constituents of a syntactic phrase, the location of prominence within the intonational phrase may cue the relative order of syntactic phrases within a sentence.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic structure and syntactic acquisition: the case of the head‐direction parameter

Christophe

Nespor

Guasti

et al. 2003

Developmental Science

Self Cite

123

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads and complements in their language before they know many words, on the basis of prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6-12-week-old infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head direction and its prosodic correlate, but have otherwise similar phonological properties (i.e. French and Turkish). This result supports the hypothesis that infants may use this kind of prosodic information to bootstrap their acquisition of word order.

show abstract

“…The example in (45) (from Donati and Nespor 2003) shows the impossibility of associating informational focus with a focus smaller than a word. 45 Brunetti (2003) offers an interesting argument to show that the apparent unavailability of subparts of words being informationally focussed should not be taken as an inherent grammatical difference between the two.…”

Section: Against Prosodically Motivated Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sentential stress and information structure emphatic/contrastive prominence cannot project (see e.g. Kiss 1998;Donati and Nespor 2003). A corollary of the claim that contrastive focus does not project is that it cannot be larger than a word.…”

Section: Abbreviationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Syntax of Sentential Stress

Kahnemuyipour¹

2009

102

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The theoretical focus of this series is on the interfaces between subcomponents of the human grammatical system and the closely related area of the interfaces between the different subdisciplines of linguistics. The notion of "interface" has become central in grammatical theory (for instance, in Chomsky's recent Minimalist Program) and in linguistic practice: work on the interfaces between syntax and semantics, syntax and morphology, phonology and phonetics etc. has led to a deeper understanding of particular linguistic phenomena and of the architecture of the linguistic component of the mind/brain. The series covers interfaces between core components of grammar, including syntax/morphology, syntax/semantics, syntax/phonology, syntax/ pragmatics, morphology/phonology, phonology/phonetics, phonetics/speech processing, semantics/pragmatics, and intonation/discourse structure as well as issues in the way that the systems of grammar involving these interface areas are acquired and deployed in use (including language acquisition, language dysfunction, and language processing). It demonstrates, we hope, that proper understandings of particular linguistic phenomena, languages, language groups, or inter-language variations all require reference to interfaces. The series is open to work by linguists of all theoretical persuasions and schools of thought. A main requirement is that authors should write so as to be understood by colleagues in related subfields of linguistics and by scholars in cognate disciplines. In this monograph, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour explores the consequences of a particular architecture for the phonology/syntax interface: a multiple spellout system where each spell-out point is sensitive to local "chunks" of syntactic structure. These chunks are identified as phases of the syntactic derivation, and the book argues that sentence stress can be predicted partly on the basis of these. The book also argues for a particular view of how the informationstructure/syntax interface is organized, and builds a theory of the interaction of the two interfaces.

show abstract

From focus to syntax

Cited by 26 publications

References 15 publications

Tonal features, intensity, and word order in the perception of prominence

Tonal features, intensity, and word order in the perception of prominence

Prosodic structure and syntactic acquisition: the case of the head‐direction parameter

The Syntax of Sentential Stress

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About