Interface Strategies

Abstract

In this monograph Tanya Reinhart discusses strategies enabling the interface of different cognitive systems, which she identifies as the systems of concepts, inference, context, and sound. Her point of departure is Noam Chomsky's hypothesis that language is optimally designed—namely, that in many cases, the bare minimum needed for constructing syntactic derivations is sufficient for the full needs of the interface. Deviations from this principle are viewed as imperfections. The book covers in depth four areas of the interface: quantifier scope, focus, anaphora resolution, and implicatures. The first question in each area is what makes the computational system (CS, syntax) legible to the other systems at the interface—how much of the information needed for the interface is coded already in the CS, and how it is coded. Next Reinhart argues that in each of these areas there are certain aspects of meaning and use that cannot be coded in the CS formal language, on both conceptual and empirical grounds. This residue is governed by interface strategies that can be viewed as repair of imperfections. They require constructing and comparing a reference set of alternative derivations to determine whether a repair operation is indeed the only way to meet the interface requirements. Evidence that reference-set computation applies in these four areas comes from language acquisition. The required computation poses a severe load on working memory. While adults can cope with this load, children, whose working memory is less developed, fail in tasks requiring this computation.

Dutch scrambling and the nature of discourse templates

“…Thus, the information structure in (11b) is ruled out, while that in (11a) is well-formed (topic is followed by a Kleene star in order to indicate that there may be multiple topics). (For relevant discussion, see Prince 1981;Reinhart 1981Reinhart , 1995Vallduví 1992;Lambrecht 1994;and Hajičová, Partee, and Sgall 1998 We should emphasize that (11a,b) are information structures, and not syntactic configurations. Given that the mapping between syntax and information structure need not be isomorphic, the ban on the embedding of a topic-comment structure in a background will not directly restrict syntactic structure.…”

“…However, this is not sufficient to capture the fact that the order of constituents interpreted as topic and focus is free when they remain in situ, but rigid as soon as movement is involved. In particular, a focus cannot move out of a constituent containing an in-situ 40 There is a strong tendency for discourse-anaphoric constituents to be destressed (see Selkirk 1984Selkirk , 1996Williams 1997;Schwarzschild 1999;and Reinhart 2006 for discussion). Neeleman and Reinhart (1998) argue that the tendency for discourse-anaphoric material to undergo scrambling in Dutch can be understood from the fact that it facilitates anaphoric destressing.…”

“…A-scrambling operations typically mark the scrambled DP as discourse-anaphoric (marked throughout by wavy underlining); see Reinhart (1995), Neeleman and Reinhart (1998), and Choi (1999), among others, for discussion. In (3), for example, Haegeman's book is mentioned in the initial question, and consequently scrambling of the coreferential DP in the answer is favored.…”

“…We are not the first to explore this style of theorizing. Various authors have analyzed topic, focus, and discourse anaphoricity as interface phenomena, among them Vallduví (1992), Wagner (2006), andReinhart (2006).…”

Alternatives in different dimensions: a case study of focus intervention

“…4.3 for the availability of the existential closure operator). Following Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002), we further assume that modals are combined with an existential closure operator, which we take to freely apply to VP or IP (see also Reinhart 2006;Dong 2009;Chierchia 2001;Lin 2004). The definitions of the existential closure operators (adapted from Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, p.…”