Research, Hubert Truckenbrodt
| interface interactions –– wh-questions –– sentence types –– intonational meaning –– modals –– syn.-phon. interface –– f0 height –– for teachers –– neurolinguistics |
Research, Hubert Truckenbrodt |
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This page presents some recent work in which prosodic or information-structure effects interact with LF-related phenomena. The interactions, which must be mediated by the syntax, are interesting for the analysis of the respective phenomena across the modules of grammar. See also "wh-questions" for more work of this kind, presented on a separate page.
LF- and PF-reconstruction. Since Chomsky (1993), LF-reconstruction is standardly analyzed in terms of the copy theory of movement (which received a revised shape in the theory of internal merge in Chomsky (2008)). The current paper supports that analysis in a particular way. It maintains that the syntactic copy that is left behind by syntactic movement also has an effect at the interface to PF. This results in stress reconstruction. Stress reconstruction is the current analysis of interaction of stress-assignment with syntactic movement that was first analyzed in Bresnan (1971, 1972). The analysis is supported by interactions of LF-reconstruction effects with stress reconstruction.
Hubert Truckenbrodt. In press. Notes on stress reconstruction and syntactic reconstruction. In Manfred Krifka and Mathias Schenner, (eds.) Reconstruction effects in relative clauses. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
Edges for prosody and for F-interpretation
The distinction between extraposition on the one hand and right dislocation and afterthought on the other hand shows a right edge of the clause that allows neither prosodic phenomena not the semantic scope of a focus to go across it. It seems to be this simultaneity of blocking prosodic and F-related phenomena, that gives the observations on obligatory pause in B. Downing (1970) and the observations on 'separate focus-background structures' in related cases in the literature on German a great amount of coherence.
The following paper on these issues also outlines a deletion-analysis of right dislocation and afterthought. It further confirms the correlate analysis from the literature and integrates it into the account.
Hubert Truckenbrodt. 2016. Some distinctions in the right periphery of the German clause. In Werner Frey, André Meinunger und Kerstin Schwabe (eds.) Inner-sentential propositional pro-forms: syntactic properties and interpretative effects. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, p.105-145.
The following paper with Werner Frey integrates some of his results on peripheral adverbial clauses and some of my results on the right periphery in a coherent set of assumptions across the syntactic structure, the prosody, and some suggestions about the role of speech-acts.
Werner Frey and Hubert Truckenbrodt. 2015. Syntactic and prosodic integration and disintegration in peripheral adverbial clauses and in right dislocation/afterthought. In Andreas Trotzke and Josef Bayer (eds.), Syntactic conplexity across interfaces. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Intonation phrases and speech acts. Selkirk (2011) takes a remark by Potts (2005) a step further and suggests that the unembedded root sentences of B. Downing (1970) are 'illocutionary clauses'. In other words, clauses that are speech acts trigger obligatory intonation phrase boundaries. In the following paper this suggestion is tested in German, employing sentence adverbs and modal particles to test for speech acts. Intonation phrases are assessed by way of intuitions about the presence of sentence stress that rest on the upstep phenomenon discussed in my tonal-height papers. The discussion includes coordinated DPs, coordinated V2-clauses, appositive relatives, appositions, right dislocation and afterthought, multiple focus, peripheral adverbial clauses, and parentheticals. It is argued that
(a) Selkirk is right: speech act CPs are mapped to intonation phrases, but
(b) expanding on Dehe (2009), there are many cases that are unexpectedly neither intonation phrase triggers nor speech acts, including certain coordinated V2-sentences, certain appositions, certain cases of pronoun resumption and certain parentheticals.
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2015. Intonation phrases and speech acts. In Marlies Kluck, Dennis Ott and Marc de Vries (eds.), Parenthesis and ellipsis: cross-linguistic and theoretical perspectives. Mouton de Gruyter.
[This paper is also listed under 'Syntax-phonology interface' on this web-site.]