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Focus as prosodic alignment

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Abstract

This article demonstrates that the most common prosodic realization of focus can be subsumed typologically under the notion of alignment: a focused constituent is preferably aligned prosodically with the right or left edge of a prosodic domain the size of either a prosodic phrase or an intonation phrase. Languages have different strategies to fulfill alignment, some of which are illustrated in this paper: syntactic movement, cleft constructions, insertion of a prosodic boundary, and enhancement of existing boundaries. Additionally, morpheme insertion and pitch accent plus deaccenting can also be understood as ways of achieving alignment. None of these strategies is obligatory in any language. For a focus to be aligned is just a preference, not a necessary property, and higher-ranked constraints often block the fulfillment of alignment. A stronger focus, like a contrastive one, is more prone to be aligned than a weaker one, like an informational focus. Prominence, which has often been claimed to be the universal prosodic property of focus (see Truckenbrodt 2005 and Büring 2010 among others), may co-occur with alignment, as in the case of a right-aligned nuclear stress, but crucially, alignment is not equivalent to prominence. Rather, alignment is understood as a mean to separate constituents with different information structural roles in different prosodic domains, to ‘package’ them individually.

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Notes

  1. Selkirk (2009) uses Match constraints, which require that syntactic constituents be contained entirely in prosodic domains. These constraints predict that both edges of a syntactic domain are aligned with edges of the same prosodic domain. A further aspect of her proposal is that it allows recursion of prosodic domains: a syntactic XP entirely contained inside of a larger XP is matched with a φ-phrase entirely contained inside of a larger φ-phrase. Match constraints make different predictions from Wrap, a constraint from Truckenbrodt (1999). Wrap always requires that a syntactic constituent be contained in a single prosodic constituent. It does not demand that a smaller embedded syntactic constituent be contained in a prosodic constituent at the same time. Recursion of prosodic phrases corresponding to recursion of syntactic phrases is generally blocked because of the effect of Nonrecursivity, a constraint explicitly banning recursion of prosodic structure. Nevertheless recursion can be obtained if Align is ranked higher than Wrap and Wrap is still active by being ranked lower than Nonrecursivity (see Truckenbrodt for Kimatuumbi). In Selkirk’s approach (as in mine here), recursion is the default outcome, whereas in Truckenbrodt’s Wrap approach, it is the marked case.

  2. McCarthy (2003) compares gradient alignment constraints with absolute/categorical ones, and shows that gradience can be eliminated from grammar. Following his proposal, all constraints used here are interpreted in an absolute way: if an element is not aligned, it is marked with one violation mark, regardless of the number of elements separating it from the edge.

  3. Two further conditions (selection and confirmation) were also recorded but are not considered here.

  4. Altogether, 18 languages have been tested with Anima. The experimenter was in most cases a native speaker who is trained as a linguist. The languages not addressed in this paper are Greek, Yucatec Maya, Mawng, Quebec French, American English, Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, Prinmi, Arabic, North Sotho, and Aja. The data are available online (http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/~d1/annis/).

  5. “Right dislocated phrases are easily recognized because they can be doubled by a clitic, may freely follow locative and temporal adjuncts, are always preceded by an intonational break, and can be preceded by an optional pause (here represented by a comma). Crucially, focus must always precede right dislocated constituents” (Samek-Lodovici 2005:703).

  6. Swerts et al. (2002) demonstrate experimentally that no deaccenting takes place in the nominal phrase in Italian; see also Ladd (2008) for the lack of deaccenting in Italian.

  7. Cleft sentences do not always have this prosodic form in French. They can also be eventive sentences and be realized in one ι-phrase. These latter sentences differ from the one shown in (15a).

  8. The constraint Subject is low ranking in Italian, and adding it below Head-ι-R does not modify the tableau T1.

  9. The notions of syntactic inputs and syntactic candidates in OT are far from being resolved issues. Here I follow Hamlaoui (2009a, 2009b) in assuming that the input is best understood as a predication without numeration and without linearization. In this way, cleft sentences are allowed in the set of candidates.

  10. A similar construction to the cleft formation resulting in focus alignment to the right of an φ-phrase illustrated for French is the so-called Predicate Cleft, which involves copying and fronting of a predicate. It is found in Trinidad dialectal English (Cozier 2006), where Predicate Cleft expresses contrastive or verum focus on the verb.

    1. (i)
      figure o

    In Haitian Creole (Piou 1982), a focused predicate is also copied and fronted; see (ii).

    1. (ii)
      figure p

    In the case of the so-called Predicate Doubling illustrated in (iii) with Gungbe (Kwa; see Aboh 2004), the focus marker wὲ is to the right of the preposed verb (see below for similar examples).

    1. (iii)
      figure q

  11. Varga (2002:127ff and 138ff) claims that all constituents have major stress in an all-new sentence, like (19a). According to him, only the preverbal focus has main stress (major stress), as in (19b); see also Vogel and Kenesei (1987:245) for this position.

  12. The constraint Align-Foc-ι-R is not eliminated from the competition, but it is now low ranking. Its effect cannot be felt anymore, as it is dominated by Align-Foc-ι-L.

  13. In Truckenbrodt (1995), a different analysis was provided for the same data. One constraint required that a focus have the highest prominence in its domain, and another demanded alignment between the head of a prosodic phrase and its right edge. In other words, the focus was not directly aligned to a prosodic edge, but rather it was the need to be prominent which forced alignment, as was explained above with Italian, French and Hungarian.

  14. Only a stronger focus on the hierarchy given in (6) can have the effect of lifting this restriction.

  15. Dutch and English behaved like German in the Anima experiment.

  16. Depending on the location of the accent, it can stand just for itself or project to a larger syntactic constituent (see Selkirk 1995; Rochemont 1986; Uhmann 1991; Cinque 1993 and many others). This property has been called ‘integration’ by Fuchs (1976) and Jacobs (1993), and ‘subordination’ by Wagner (2005) who proposes a different explanation of this property than the one shown in this section. The rules underlying the faculty of an accent to project to a larger constituent have been discussed a number of times in the literature. I refer the reader to Gussenhoven (1992), Truckenbrodt (2007) and Féry (2011) for OT analyses.

  17. It should be noted that this subject/non-subject asymmetry was already observed for German, Italian, French and Chicheŵa above, where it was shown to correlate with canonical vs. non-canonical word order.

  18. The language’s name is sometimes written Fɔn or Fongbe in the literature.

  19. From Fiedler et al. (2010:237): “The class of morphological focus markers is not homogeneous but comprises at least the following list of formal elements, many of which also occur independently in non-focus contexts: (i) invariant information-structural particles; (ii) particles agreeing in gender with the focused NP/DP; (iii) copulas; and (iv) nominal affixes.”

  20. Reineke (2007) shows for another Gur language, Byali, that an ex-situ focus strategy has an identificational function for non-subjects. An informational role is expressed by in-situ focus (see É.Kiss 1998 for the distinction between informational and identificational). A subject in Byali is always focused by means of an ex-situ strategy. Like in Ditammari, the focus constituent is followed by a focus marker in all cases.

  21. Reineke (2006b:163) claims that both Ditammari and Byali use syntactic, morphological and phonological reflexes of focus.

  22. In Fiedler et al.’s account the position of the focus is motivated in the syntax: a focus targets the position immediately following the verb.

  23. In particular, the absence of a prosodic boundary after a focus constituent in lab speech with given word orders cannot be used to falsify the FA approach, which is designed for spontaneous or semi-spontaneous speech.

  24. Alignment can be compared to the notion of ‘given before new’ from Clark and Haviland (1977), also proposed by Chafe (1976). Alignment replaces the uni-directionality intrinsic to this principle and replaces it with a more flexible property, namely the need to be at an edge of a prosodic constituent.

  25. We saw in (39) that Truckenbrodt requires ‘highest prominence’ for focus, but this does not refer to the highest F0 value.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented at the XXth Colloquium on Generative Grammar in Barcelona in March 2010, and I would like to thank the organizers, Josep Quer and Pilar Prieto, for giving me the opportunity to present my views on focus there. People who have had an influence on the content of this paper are numerous. Among them are Anja Arnhold, Kirsten Brock, Gisbert Fanselow, Fatima Hamlaoui, Shin Ishihara, Gerrit Kentner, Frank Kügler, Sara Myrberg, Fabian Schubö, Lisa Selkirk, Stavros Skopeteas and Malte Zimmermann. But this list is far from being exhaustive. I would also like to thank three reviewers for NLLT, two anonymous ones and Hubert Truckenbrodt, for generous and helpful comments on a first version of this paper.

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    Caroline Féry

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Féry, C. Focus as prosodic alignment. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 683–734 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9195-7

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