The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax

Abstract

The most debated syntactic reflex that is typically associated with contrast is the movement of a contrastive constituent to a dedicated, left-peripheral position. For Italian and Spanish, it has been claimed that focus fronting (FF) must be sanctioned by a contrastive interpretation of the focus, while non-contrastive focus generally occurs postverbally (see, e.g., Rizzi 1997;Zubizarreta 1998;Belletti 2004;López 2009). Only sentences with a postverbal focus are thus judged as pragmatically felicitous answers to the corresponding wh-questions. Some scholars, however, have recently reported different views and data, showing that non-contrastive preverbal foci are indeed accepted by native speakers in answers to wh-questions. In this paper, I argue that a solution to this problem can be found if the binary distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive focus is abandoned, and different 'degrees' or 'types' of contrastive focus are identified, depending on the way the set of alternatives is pragmatically exploited (Krifka 2007;Cruschina 2012). I show that languages are syntactically sensitive to specific types of focus with which special operations (e.g. FF) associate. Following Bianchi, Bocci & Cruschina (2015;, I then argue that FF is in fact triggered not by contrast per se, but by the conventional implicature that is associated with a specific type of focus.

Constructions clivées en Français L1 et L2 (Italien L1). Premiers résultats d’une étude expérimentale

“…Les fonctions identificative et corrective sont considérées en littérature comme les pôles d'un continuum de focalisation contrastive (Cruschina 2021 ;Molnar 2002 ;Repp 2010Repp , 2016, l'identification étant le cas le moins marqué (ou, selon les auteurs, pas marqué par un contraste) et la correction le cas de contraste le plus marqué. La structure clivée partage donc des domaines de fonctions avec d'autres structures de focalisation étroite, voire contrastée, telle que le focus fronting, ou autres structures à ordre marqué ou à prosodie marquée.…”

Parametric variation in Romance synchronic V2 through a French lens

“…There is an extensive literature on focus fronting in Romance ( 24), and quite some debate as how to classify and characterize these structures (see references in Jiménez-Fernández & Camacho Taboada 2014, Jiménez-Fernández 2015, Bianchi et al 2015, Cruschina & Remberger 2017, Cruschina 2021).…”

“…(24) Manzanas compró Pedro (y no peras) apples bought.3SG Pedro (and not pears) 'Pedro bought apples, and not pears.' (Spanish, Zubizarreta 1999: 4239) Cruschina ( 2021) offers a detailed cross-linguistic overview of focus fronting, arguing that variation is an effect of the existence of different types of focus, depending on the nature of the set of alternatives typically involved in focus (Krifka 2007, Cruschina 2021): it can be a "contextually open set (information focus), unexpectedness with respect to more likely alternatives (mirative focus) or a correction of given alternatives (corrective focus). A special subtype of information focus, namely, exhaustive focus, additionally implies the exhaustive identification or the exclusion by identification with respect to the relevant set of alternatives" (Cruschina 2021: 2).…”

“…7 However, these notions are not used in other work on XVS in Romance, which hinders comparison across analyses of different Romance languages. Thirdly, in those cases where XVS in present-day standard French is included in a diachronic analysis of V2 in French (Wolfe 2021) or in a synchronic analysis of XVS in Romance (Leonetti 2017, Cruschina 2021, the scope and extension of the works often entail a non-exhaustive description of French, which also blurs the comparison to some extent.…”

“…Against this backdrop, the goal of this article is to bridge the gap between (i) existing analyses of XVS in French, which do not incorporate a comparative Romance and diachronic perspective, and which are not based on recent conceptual frameworks for topic and focus, and (ii) (synchronic) comparative Romance analyses (Cruschina & Remberger 2017, Leonetti 2017, Cruschina 2021, and (diachronic) French analyses (Wolfe 2021), which do not take into account the finer details of French XVS. Taking into account both the morphosyntactic (section 2) and discourse-pragmatic (information-structural) status (section 3) of the fronted constituent, I will argue that XVS in French, whether X is an adverbial phrase (1-2) or an adjectival phrase (an adjectival attribute) (3), is a subset of two classes of XVS attested in Romance: resumptive preposing (section 3.1) and focus preposing (section 4).…”