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The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax
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In: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics; Vol 6, No 1 (2021); 3 ; 2397-1835 (2021)
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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; 2016), 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.
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Keyword:
answers to questions; contrast; conventional implicature; correction; exhaustivity; focus fronting; general linguistics; information structure; mirativity; pragmatics; syntax
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URL: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1100
https://www.glossa-journal.org/jms/article/view/1100
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Les constructions à verbe support en latin ; : Support verb constructions in Latin
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In: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01979665 ; Colette Bodelot; Olga Spevak. France. Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2018, Cahiers du LRL 7, 978-2-84516-823-7 (2018)
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