The Grammar of Emphasis

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Trotzke
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2016 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289319643

In this project, I investigate to what extent the linguistic notion of emphasis is encoded in grammar and if certain types of emphasis can be distinguished from information-structural emphasis. Specifically, I examine marked word orders that express an evaluation of the speaker concerning the proposition of the utterance. The central aim of this project is to identify evidence in the domain of marked word order that cannot be explained in terms of information structure only. An instructive body of phenomena are cases involving elements that do not fulfill any discourse-semantic function in the clausal left periphery or cannot fulfill such a function alone, but only pars-pro-toto. Another domain of research is the phenomenon of co-constituency of discourse particles and wh-elements in the left periphery of the German clause. I will investigate these two empirical domains by means of both large-scale acceptability studies and the methodology provided by the recent field of corpus pragmatics.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Christopher Potts