The Grammar of Emphasis
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Final Report Abstract
In this project, I investigated to what extent emphatic focus or so-called ‘mirativity’ is encoded in grammar, and if this type of emphasis can be distinguished from other types of emphasis, such as information-structural emphasis (also called ‘emphasis for contrast’). I conducted large-scale acceptability studies to explore different aspects of this research topic, and I investigated the semantic notion of emphatic focus and its relation to sentence-type restrictions in more detail. In a first study, it could be shown that mirative contexts are particularly suitable for fronting constructions in German. Specifically, not only makes a mirative context fronting more felicitous than both corrective and (narrow) contrastive contexts, but the mirative context is also the only context where the fronted word order option is judged almost as good as configurations where the relevant constituent stays in situ. The empirical results indicate that mirative contexts are a very natural (and indeed the preferred) discourse situation for fronting constructions in German. In a second study, I addressed the often-cited infelicity of certain reactions to particular exclamation forms that express mirativity (e.g., strong denial in the context of wh-exclamatives). The results support the theoretical claim that semantic content featuring non-scalar expectations (as in dass-exclamatives) increases the acceptability of strong denial in the context of exclamations. As for theoretical work on emphatic focus, the project explored the new observation that the occurrence of scalar focus particles associated with so-called emphatic focus is subject to constraints at the level of sentence types. Specifically, in the domain of imperative speech acts, these particles are either confined to a subtype of imperatives (viz., advice uses) or cannot occur in imperative speech acts at all. Given that emphatic focus is a means to signal that a proposition is a particularly unlikely one with respect to its alternatives, the data investigated in this project demonstrate that the felicity conditions of imperative speech acts are sensitive to a likelihood threshold that has not been observed in the previous literature. As for research on particle elements, this part of the project adds further support to the idea that focus and discourse particles are closely related categories: not only discourse particles, but also focus particles can restrict the use of an utterance at the level of illocutionary force on the basis of their discourse-anaphoric semantics.
Publications
- 2017. The Grammar of Emphasis: From Information Structure to the Expressive Dimension. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Trotzke, Andreas
