On 9 Jun 2011, at 00:13, Reiko Vermeulen wrote:
GIST4: The FWO-Odysseus project GIST at Ghent University is pleased to announce a workshop on
The syntax of polarity emphasis: distribution and locus of licensing
This workshop brings together researchers who have worked on the syntactic analysis of a range of polarity emphasis phenomena in a number of languages. The goal is to achieve a systematic classification of such phenomena, as an overarching description of their typology, as well as a unified terminology, are still largely lacking.
While most of the expressions of polarity emphasis discussed in the literature so far appear to be main clause phenomena (MCP) or root transformations, that is, patterns by and large restricted to main clauses, possibly including a restricted set of subordinate clauses known to be transparent for such phenomena/to pattern with root clauses (see Hooper and Thompson 1973 and Emonds 1970, 1976 for early discussion), recent work has shown that other expressions of polarity emphasis have a freer distribution (Danckaert 2009, Breitbarth and Haegeman 2010, Danckaert and Haegeman to appear). This difference in distribution of polarity emphasising expressions has been noted before; Hyman and Watters (1984) in their large-scale study of several African languages on what they call 'auxiliary focus' - emphatic assertion as expressed through focus on the auxiliary - show that while in most languages, it is restricted to main clause types, potentially including embedded clause types that can be assimilated to main clauses (1984:256), emphatic assertion through auxiliary focus is generally available in all clause types in some languages. They propose that in languages in which auxiliary focus is what we call an MCP, 'focus marking is grammatically [...] controlled' (1984: 256), while in languages in which it is unrestricted, it is pragmatically controlled.
A number of recent papers have proposed accounts of those expressions of polarity emphasis which appear to be MCP in terms of specialized structure in an articulated left periphery (LP) Most of the phenomena in question have been argued by the relevant authors to implicate an operator in a left- peripheral functional projection (a.o. Holmberg 2001 on Finnish, Hernanz 2007, on Spanish, Martins 2007 on Portuguese, and Poletto 2009 on Italian). On the other hand, crosslinguistically emphatic polarity phenomena do not always display this restricted distribution, and are possibly what Hyman and Watters call 'pragmatically controlled'. The question then arises whether with respect to the observed cross-linguistic differences in the expression of polarity emphasis, the crucial distinction is between syntactically vs. pragmatically controlled phenomena, or whether a purely syntactic approach e.g. within the cartographic framework is sufficient. An approach of the latter type could for instance take the difference to reside in the different syntactic positions of the expressions of polarity emphasis, viz. within the left periphery (MCP) or within the TP-domain (unrestricted). Duffield's (2007) treatment of do insertion in English is an example of such an approach. Proposals of TP-internal focus phrases, made to account for other phenomena might be applied here with success (cf. the work of e.g. Jayaseelan 2001 or Belletti 2004). On the other hand, a purely syntactic account may not be able to capture the discourse effects associated with specific patterns and it could be that a radically pragmatic account may offer a closer fit to the data. The question arises, of course, whether certain types of polarity emphasis phenomena should be unattested for principled reasons, such as polarity emphasis phenomena syntactically encoded in the left periphery that are not restricted to main clauses, or polarity emphasis phenomena encoded at the TP level, but which are MCP. Clearly, such considerations have wider implications for our understanding of the general architecture of grammar, in particular for the cartographic enterprise, which aims at 'syntacticizing as much as possible the interpretive domains' (Cinque and Rizzi 2010: 63).
The contributions to this workshop will take a serious look at the nature of the empirical differences between polarity emphasis phenomena cross-linguistically, and work towards a unified analysis able to account for these differences.
The workshop takes place on 29 and 30 September 2011 in Ghent. The following speakers have agreed to participate in the event:
- Montserrat Batllori (Universidad de Girona) and Maria Lluïsa Hernanz
(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): Spanish and Catalan polarity emphasizers
- Anne Breitbarth and Liliane Haegeman (GIST, Ghent University): Flemish en
- Ernestina Carrilho (Universidade de Lisboa): Portuguese ele
- Nigel Duffield (University of Sheffield): Vietnamese có
- Anders Holmberg (Newcastle University): Finnish auxiliary fronting
- Jason Kandybowicz (Swarthmore College): Nupe ni:
- Aniko Lipták (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics): Hungarian igenis
- Ana Maria Martins (Universidade de Lisboa): Portuguese não/sim/verb doubling
- Cecilia Poletto (Università Ca' Foscari, Venice): Italian sentence-final NO
- Chris Wilder (Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim): English emphatic do
Anyone interested in attending the workshop is asked to inform the organisers by 1st July 2011 at the latest. There is a registration fee of 30EUR covering coffee and lunch breaks as well as photocopying. Further details, also concerning the location of the venue, travel and accommodation information etc. can be found on the workshop website: http://www.gist.ugent.be/polarityemphasis
Organising committee:
Lobke Aelbrecht
Anne Breitbarth (a.breitbarth@ugent.be)
Karen De Clercq (karen.declercq@ugent.be)
Liliane Haegeman (liliane.haegeman@ugent.be)
William Harwood
Rachel Nye
Amélie Rocquet
Reiko Vermeulen
References
Belletti, Adriana, 2004. Aspects of the Low IP Area. In Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP, 16-51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Breitbarth, Anne and Liliane Haegeman. 2010. 'En' en is níet wat we dachten: A Flemish discourse particle. Ms. Ghent University
Cinque, Guglielmo and Luigi Rizzi. (2010) The cartography of syntactic structures. In: The Oxford handbook of grammatical analysis, ed. Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog, 51-65. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Danckaert, Lieven. 2009. Polarity Focus and the Latin particle quidem in adverbial clauses. Paper presented at the conference on Root Phenomena, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, September 2009.
Danckaert, Lieven and Liliane Haegeman. To appear. Conditional clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis. In Advances in comparative Germanic syntax, eds. Caroline Heycock, Guido Vanden Wyngaerd and Robert Truswell. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Duffield, N. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45: 765-814.
Emonds, Joseph. 1970. Root and structure-preserving transformations. Ph.D.diss., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.
Hernanz, M. Lluïsa. 2007. From polarity to modality. Some (a)symmetries between bien and sí in Spanish. In Coreference, modality and focus, eds. L Eguren, Olga Fernández Soriano, 133-169. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Holmberg, Anders. 2007. Null subject and polarity focus. Studia Linguistica 61, 212-236.
Hooper, John and Sandra Thompson. 1973. On the applicability of root transformations. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 465-497.
Hyman, Larry M. and John R. Watters. 1984. Auxiliary Focus. Studies in African Linguistics 15/3:233-273.
Jayaseelan, K.A. 2001. IP-internal topic and focus phrases. Studia Linguistica 55, 39-75.
Martins, Ana Maria. 2007. Double realization of verbal copies in European Portuguese emphatic affirmation. In The Copy Theory of Movement, eds. Norbert Corver and Jairo Nunes, 77-118. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Poletto, Cecilia. 2009. The syntax of focus negation. Ms. University of Venice.
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