The derivation and interpretation of left peripheral discourse particles*

Bayer, Josef; Trotzke, Andreas

doi:10.1075/la.226.02bay

Cited by 66 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 58 publications

(33 reference statements)

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“…I will illustrate my argument based on German data because German is rich in discourse-related syntactic operations (certain scrambling options) that can provide a more fine-grained view on explaining subextraction. The following data are experimentally confirmed by Jurka (2010Jurka ( , 2013: Extraction out of subjects that appear to the right of a German discourse particle such as denn (9a) is indeed more acceptable than out of subjects that appear to the left of such a particle (9b); was-für split is considered a reliable diagnostic for identifying extraction domains in German: Note that the different placement of the indefinite subject in (9a) vs. (9b) has a discourse effect: As soon as the indefinite subject appears to the left of the particle (9b), it receives a topical interpretation (Bayer and Obenauer, 2011;Bayer and Trotzke, 2015). My point is that the pattern in (9) could be taken to show that it is illicit to extract from a topical constituent.…”

Section: Syntactic Cyclicity and The Syntax-discourse Interfacementioning

confidence: 99%

Constructions in Minimalism: A Functional Perspective on Cyclicity

Trotzke

2020

Front. Psychol.

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This article presents a perspective on syntactic cyclicity in minimalism that is compatible with fundamental ideas in construction-grammar approaches. In particular, I outline the minimalist approach to syntactic structure building and highlight that units of potentially any phrasal size can be atomic items in the syntactic derivation, showing that the opposition between simplex linguistic items ("words") and more complex ones ("phrases") in minimalism is in principle as artificial as in many construction-grammar approaches. Based on this perspective on structure building, I focus on the empirical domain of subextraction patterns out of complex subjects, adjuncts, and complements, and I demonstrate that the acceptability patterns in this domain can be explained by a functional approach to syntactic cyclicity: Unacceptable patterns are ruled out not for configurational (and hence syntactic) reasons, but rather they systematically follow from infelicitous interpretations at the syntax-discourse interface. This raises the question of whether syntactic cyclicity is (at least in part) motivated by performance (read: "language-in-use") constraints, which I consider another area for fruitful interaction between construction-grammar and usage-based accounts on the one hand and minimalism on the other hand.

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Section: Syntactic Cyclicity and The Syntax-discourse Interfacementioning

confidence: 99%

Constructions in Minimalism: A Functional Perspective on Cyclicity

Trotzke

2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…As a last point, let us hasten to add that the representation in (19) might still be too restrictive to capture all the emphatic cases where a fronted linguistic object is given prominence by virtue of being selected from the upper range of a scale. For instance, some languages that feature discourse particles in wh ‐questions display emphatic word orders where the discourse particles leave their original positions and show up in the left periphery in V2 configurations (see Bayer & Trotzke, for German and Trotzke & Monforte, for Basque examples). Crucially, discourse particles are functional categories that cannot be contrasted and, for that matter, cannot be contrastively stressed (i.e., there are no semantic focus alternatives to the respective particle).…”

Section: Emphasis For Intensity By Word Order Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conveying emphasis for intensity: Lexical and syntactic strategies

Beltrama

Trotzke

2019

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Emphasis is a widely investigated notion in linguistics. In this article, we focus on emphasis for intensity, a general linguistic strategy whereby linguistic objects are given prominence by virtue of being selected from the upper range of a scale. We consider two linguistic domains where emphasis for intensity can be observed: the lexical domain, where it is conveyed via a variety of intensifiers, and the domain of syntax, where it can be conveyed via different types of non-canonical word order. While distinct in many respects, such families of constructions can be seen as conveying a unified effect, raising a number of issues concerning how the relation between emphasis and scalarity is best captured across languages and constructions.

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“…On the other hand, the particle al cannot occur in the same sentence with any other particles: Typologically there is no such restriction. In fact, more than one particle can occur in the same sentence in languages such as Catalan (Prieto & Rigau 2007), Mandarin, Cantonese and Wenzhounese (Li 2006, Kuong 2008, Japanese (Kuwabara 2013), German (Bayer and Trotzke 2015) and Swedish (Swerf 2017) .…”

Section: Compatibility With Other Particlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Question particles in Basque

Monforte¹

2019

isogloss

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This article proposes separate analyses for the question particles-a and al in Basque, which occur only in polarity questions, within the framework of Generative Grammar. I will propose that the former one, used in the eastern dialects, is the head of FiniteP and that the latter one, used in the central dialects, occupies the head of Particle Phrase located between TP and the CP field. I provide the following evidence in support of this dual analysis: 1)-a can be used with ote but no other particle can appear at the same time with al; 2) al is compatible with allocutivity but-a is not; 4) and, finally, al can be used in embedded clauses, whereas-a cannot. The fact that-a is not allowed to occur in indirect questions and that it is incompatible with the allocutive verbal paradigm shows that it is in complementary distribution with the head of CP and, therefore, that-a occupies such a head; on the other hand, the impossibility of al to appear with other particles suggest that they must occur in the same position and, since it can appear in embedded questions and with allocutive forms, it does not occupy the head of the CP, but the head of a phrase below.

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The derivation and interpretation of left peripheral discourse particles*

Cited by 66 publications

References 58 publications

Constructions in Minimalism: A Functional Perspective on Cyclicity

Constructions in Minimalism: A Functional Perspective on Cyclicity

Conveying emphasis for intensity: Lexical and syntactic strategies

Question particles in Basque

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