Focus Particles in German
Syntax, prosody, and information structure
1st Edition
Published on 24. March 2010
XIII, 335 pages
978-90-272-8856-1 (ISBN)
Description
This study explores the grammar of focus particles in German. It gives a thorough description and analysis of focus particle constructions and links their syntactic, semantic, and information structural properties to their prosodic characteristics. The study also shows that focus particles present a particularly well-suited subject for the investigation of the modularity of grammar in general. The first part of the book deals with the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of focus particle constructions and results in a modular account of the relation between their word order, information structure, and meaning. The second part presents a corpus study and several speech production and perception experiments investigating the prosodic realization of the constructions. The integration of these two lines of research results in a comprehensive theory of focus particles and of the interaction of grammar and information structure in German.
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Content
- Focus Particles in German
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Dedication page
- Table of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and notational conventions
- Introduction
- 1.1. Scope and goals
- 1.2. Organization of this study
- Theoretical background
- 2.1. Focus particles
- 2.2. Syntax
- 2.3. Information structure
- 2.4. Prosody
- 2.5. Summary
- The semantics of focus particles
- 3.1. Overview
- 3.2. Compositional semantics: Association with focus
- 3.2.1. Syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic theories
- 3.2.2. John only introduced Bill to Sue: Alternative Semantics and Structured Meanings
- 3.2.3. The restriction of the alternatives
- 3.2.4. Assertions, presuppositions, implicatures
- 3.3. Lexical semantics: Subgroups of focus particles
- 3.3.1. The traditional classification
- 3.3.2. A cross-classification of focus particles
- 3.4. Summary
- Focus particles, syntax, and information structure
- 4.1. Focus particles in German: A descriptive survey
- 4.1.1. Positions of focus particles and their domains
- 4.1.2. The location of the sentence accent
- 4.1.3. Contrastive uses of focus particles
- 4.2. Syntactic analyses of focus particle constructions
- 4.2.1. Focus particles as adverbials
- 4.2.2. Focus particles as crosscategorial operators
- 4.2.3. The role of information structure
- 4.2.4. Summary
- 4.3. An alternative proposal
- 4.4. Focus particles as adjuncts to VP and AP
- 4.4.1. The syntactic status and the position of focus particles
- 4.4.2. Association with the sentence focus
- 4.4.3. Movement of (parts of) a focus particle's domain
- 4.4.4. An argument against adjunction to the root CP
- 4.4.5. Focus particles as adjuncts to AP
- 4.4.6. Summary
- 4.5. Stressed additive focus particles
- 4.5.1. Previous analyses
- 4.5.2. A movement account of stressed auch
- 4.5.3. Arguments against a movement account
- 4.5.4. Summary
- 4.6. Focus particles as adjuncts to XP
- 4.6.1. Adjunction to DP, PP, and CP
- 4.6.2. Arguments against adjunction to XP
- 4.6.3. Adjunction to XP and information structure
- 4.6.4. Summary
- 4.7. Summary
- The scope of focus particles
- 5.1. Syntactic restrictions on the scope of focus particles
- 5.2. Relative scope of focus particles and other scope-bearing elements
- 5.2.1. Negation
- 5.2.2. DPs and adverbials
- 5.2.3. Multiple focus particles
- 5.3. The (no) reconstruction argument against adjunction to XP
- 5.4. Summary and consequences
- The prosody of sentences with stressed additive focus particles
- 6.1. Starting points and first observations
- 6.2. Corpus study
- 6.2.1. The corpus
- 6.2.2. Syntactic description of the corpus material
- 6.2.3. Intonational analysis
- 6.2.4. Discussion
- 6.3. Experimental pilot study
- 6.3.1. Hypotheses
- 6.3.2. Experiment 1: Speech production
- 6.3.3. Experiment 2: Speech perception
- 6.3.4. General discussion
- 6.4. Experiment 3: Stressed auch in speech production
- 6.4.1. Hypotheses
- 6.4.2. Data elicitation
- 6.4.3. Data analysis
- 6.4.4. Qualitative results
- 6.4.5. Quantitative results
- 6.4.6. Discussion
- 6.5. Experiment 4: The perception of utterances containing stressed auch (1)
- 6.5.1. Hypotheses
- 6.5.2. Method
- 6.5.3. Results and discussion
- 6.6. Experiment 5: The perception of utterances containing stressed auch (2)
- 6.6.1. Hypotheses
- 6.6.2. Method
- 6.6.3. Results and discussion
- 6.7. General discussion and summary
- Focus particles and contrast
- 7.1. Focus particles, the focus-background partition, and contrast
- 7.2. Prosodic correlates of contrastive focus
- 7.3. Experiment 6: Focus particles and contrast in speech production
- 7.3.1. Experimental conditions and hypotheses
- 7.3.2. Data elicitation
- 7.3.3. Data analysis
- 7.3.4. Results: Control conditions
- 7.3.5. Results: Conditions with focus particles
- 7.3.6. Discussion
- 7.4. Experiment 7: Contrast in speech perception
- 7.4.1. Hypotheses
- 7.4.2. Method
- 7.4.3. Results and discussion
- 7.5. General discussion and summary
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- a.1. Sources of the spoken language corpus analyzed in Section 6.2
- a.2. Materials of Experiment 1
- a.2.1. Critical items
- a.2.2. Filler items
- a.3. Materials of Experiment 2
- a.4. Materials of Experiment 3
- a.4.1. Critical items
- a.4.2. Filler items
- a.5. Materials of Experiment 4
- a.6. Materials of Experiment 6
- Bibliography
- Name index
- Subject index
- The series Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today
