Intonation influences processing and recall of left-dislocation sentences by indicating topic vs. focus status of dislocated referent

Abstract

We tested the effects of two intonation contours on the processing and cued recall of German sentences with a leftdislocated subject vs. object: (i) a rising accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a rising-falling hat contour on the main clause; (ii) a falling accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a falling accent plus subsequent deaccentuation. The contours had differential effects depending on the grammatical function of the dislocated phrase (subject/object) and, for the recall, on the cue type for the recall (subject/object), in certain conditions overriding the subject-before-object preference normally found in processing. To account for the findings, we propose: (1) Contour (i) signals the topic status of the referent of the dislocated phrase. Contour (ii) signals that referent's focus status.(2) Topics are referents that serve as an address in a structured discourse representation in working memory under which information about that referent is stored.(3) Subjects are default topics, whereas objects are not, so that topic-marking an object is motivated, which results in an object-before-subject preference for sentences with topical objects during processing. (4) Retrieval of information from an address incurs a lower processing load if the appropriate address is cued than if some other referent is cued.

Connectivity in left-dislocation and the composition of the left periphery

“…The discussion of 'topic constructions' in Cinque 1983 marked a point of departure for what has come to be known as the cartographic program (Cinque and Rizzi 2009). Cinque's conclusion that the Σ-κ relation is established in narrow syntax fed directly into Rizzi's (1997) highly influential study, which argues that Σs move to a dedicated left-peripheral position within the periphery of hc. The central observation is that LD and fronting of operators (foci and wh-phrases) can co-occur:…”

“…The relevant generalization, as stated most explicitly in Benincà and Poletto 2004, is that Σs connected to κ wind up leftmost, preceding the entire clause including 11. Rizzi (1997) argues that TopP in Italian is recursive, permitting multiple Σs as in (i) (see also Krapova and Cinque 2008 on Bulgarian); other authors (e.g. Benincà and Poletto 2004) dispute this claim, arguing instead that TopP is unique.…”

“…Consider the well-known generalization -to be qualified slightly below -that nonspecific QPs cannot be dislocated (e.g. Cinque 1990, Dobrovie-Sorin 1990Rizzi 1997;Arregi 2003…”

“…To my knowledge, no principled explanation exists in terms of a monosentential movement or base-generation analysis for either the facts in (71) or those in (76): if Σ is in a Binding Chain with κ (as in Cinque 1990;Rizzi 1997 andFrey 2004), or if κ is bound by Σ in some other way (e.g. by virtue of being a pronounced trace of Σ, as in Grohmann 2003), nothing should preclude binding of the pronoun by a non-specific QP or a wh-phrase; as pointed out by Demirdache (1991), the Σ-κ connection would simply be one of ordinary variable binding (as in No man i loves his i wife or Who i saw his i wife?).…”

Suspense and Authority amid Biblical Hebrew Front Dislocation

“…For FD, this is facilitated by the presence of cataphoric and anaphoric lexemes and/or morphemes linking the substantival unit and its resumptive element; for topicalization, this is facilitated by the absence of such morphosyntactic features (see notes 3 and 4). In an oral-aural medium, however, both the language-sender and the language-receiver have access to additional cognitive cues in the way of prosodic features such as length and pitch (see Cruttenden 1997:2-12, 175-77;Repp and Drenhaus 2015). By employing increased length and rising pitch amid an initial substantival unit, a language-sender can craft a cataphoric intonation group 98 and can thereby signal to the language-receiver the onset of a front dislocated construction.…”