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It-clefts in English, their French and German counterparts and pre-verbal focus in Hungarian have been claimed to be semantically related constructions. For example, É. Kiss (1998) terms them identificational focus and Destruel et al. (2015) coin them inquiry-terminating (IT) constructions. Despite their similarities, these constructions also exhibit one major distributional difference: Clefts are usually no natural answers to overt wh-questions whereas pre-verbal focus in Hungarian constitutes the default question-answering strategy. In this paper, I show that it is possible to account for this difference within the Rational Speech Act model (Frank & Goodman 2012) without assuming any semantic differences between the structures. Thereby, I capitalize on the number of alternative constructions that could be used to answer overt wh-questions in the various languages under discussion and on a remarkable semantic property of the constructions under discussion that relates to the way they encode exhaustivity.
It-clefts in English, their French and German counterparts and pre-verbal focus in Hungarian have been claimed to be semantically related constructions. For example, É. Kiss (1998) terms them identificational focus and Destruel et al. (2015) coin them inquiry-terminating (IT) constructions. Despite their similarities, these constructions also exhibit one major distributional difference: Clefts are usually no natural answers to overt wh-questions whereas pre-verbal focus in Hungarian constitutes the default question-answering strategy. In this paper, I show that it is possible to account for this difference within the Rational Speech Act model (Frank & Goodman 2012) without assuming any semantic differences between the structures. Thereby, I capitalize on the number of alternative constructions that could be used to answer overt wh-questions in the various languages under discussion and on a remarkable semantic property of the constructions under discussion that relates to the way they encode exhaustivity.
抽象的 本文通過兩項實證性的研究,再談漢語分裂式「是」句及幾類相關結構的語義。研究發現(i)不同於Paul & Whitman (2008)、Cheng (2008)等分析,句首、句中「是」字句以及「是」字句和「是……的」結構在焦點標記方式和窮盡性的表達等分裂句相關語義屬性上具有一致性,因此應該進行統一化的處理。(ii)分裂式「是」字句的核心語義表達唯一性識別,其預設焦點候選項集合中有且只有一個唯一為真的候選項並斷言其自身表達的命題(prejacent)為真。「是」字句的窮盡性來自於預設和斷言共同作用下的語義推理,而對比性則來自於語篇在此基礎上的進一步限制作用。(iii)「是」字句同幾類相關結構(如斷言命題句,真值焦點句等等)具有共同的語義內核,即表達唯一性識別,而其區別則主要來自於各類句型中焦點成分屬性的不同。這樣的分析不但有助於更精確的語言事實描寫,也可以幫助我們更加系統化的理解漢語分裂句系統。
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