The syntax of information structure and the PF interface

Abstract

Focus movement to a left-peripheral position has been posited for both Hungarian and Italian. In this paper I argue against a unified cartographic treatment of focus movement, which analyses both as instances of movement to [Spec, Focus 0 ]. I raise some theoretical issues for cartography, such as the proliferation of focus heads and the difficulties with accounting for optionality. Empirically, I show that a set of properties distinguish Hungarian and Italian left-peripheral focus movement suggesting a different syntactic analysis for the two constructions. Following Hamlaoui & Szendrői's (2015) proposal for the syntax-prosody mapping of clauses, I show that Hungarian focus movement is prosodically motivated in that it is movement targeting the position that main stress is assigned to in the prosody. I show how the same proposal extends to right-peripheral and string-medial focus in Italian and heavy NP shift in English. I discuss the typological predictions of the that it follows from the proposal that left-peripheral focus movement is always accompanied by verb movement, while right-peripheral focus movement will target a position lower than the surface position of the finite verb. Finally, I propose that Italian left-peripheral focus movement is motivated by contrastivity. This accounts for the different characteristics of the two constructions: (i) that Hungarian, but not Italian, focus movement is accompanied by the movement of the finite verb; (ii) that Hungarian left-peripheral focus is prosodically unmarked, while Italian left-peripheral focus comes with marked prosody; and (iii) that Hungarian focus movement is pragmatically unmarked, in the sense that it can answer a wh-question, while Italian focus movement is explicitly contrastive (or perhaps even mirative or corrective).

Focus in wh-questions

“…Similarly, interface-driven approaches reject the postulation of a syntactically encoded focus feature, as well as the existence of the corresponding projection in the syntactic structure, attributing the syntactic and prosodic phenomena that are generally associated with focus to independent pragmatic or prosodic requirements (see, e.g. Szendrői 2001Szendrői , 2017Horvath 2007Horvath , 2010.…”

Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks

“…French, specifically colloquial French, is known to use different syntactic constructions and most notably clefting (Lambrecht 1994;Destruel 2013), while languages like Japanese, Korean, and Gùrùntùm use morphological markers (Hartmann & Zimmermann 2009). Finally, languages like Italian or Hungarian use syntax to alter the word order so that the focal constituent occupies a structurally prominent position, often either by moving the focus to the left periphery or by scrambling other constituents to leave the focus rightmost (Rizzi 1997;Zubizarreta 1998;Szendrői 2017). This last strategy is what has been argued to happen in Spanish.…”

Deconstructing information structure

“…According to Šimík and Wierzba, Czech Given phrases avoid stress, but, unlike English Given phrases, they move to left-peripheral positions to escape the canonical, rightmost, sentence stress position in Czech. Šimík and Wierzba's work establishes a bridge to the work of Reinhart (2006) and Szendrői (2001;2017a;2017b), pointing to the possibility that the [G]-feature, and possibly also the [FoC]-feature in some languages, might drive movement that aims at creating an output that conforms to general prosodic constraints for a language.…”

“…It is only needed to establish the relation between pitch accent and the informational structure of the sentence." Those authors all see a remedy in representations via metrical trees or metrically annotated syntactic trees, along with Ladd (1980;, Reinhart (2006), Szendrői (2001;2017a;2017b), Wagner (2005;, Calhoun (2010), Williams (2012), and Büring (2015b).…”