Topic and Focus: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation

T OPIC AND FOCUS

STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY

VOLUME 82

Managing Editors GENNARO CHIERCHIA, University of Milan KAI VON FINTEL, M.I.T., Cambridge F. JEFFREY PELLETIER, Simon Fraser University

Editorial Board JOHAN VAN BENTHAM, University of Amsterdam GREGORY N. CARLSON, University of Rochester DAVID DOWTY, Ohio State University, Columbus , GERALD GAZDAR University of Sussex, Brighton IRENE HEIM, M.I.T., Cambridge EWAN KLEIN, University of Edinburgh BILL LADUSAW, University of California, Santa Cruz TERRENCE PARSONS , University of California, Irvine

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

TOPIC AND FOCUS CROSS-LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES ON MEANING AND INTONATION

edited by

CHUNGMIN LEE Seoul National University Seoul, Republic of Korea

MATTHEW GORDON University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA and

..

DANIEL BURING University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-10 ISBN-13

1-4020-4795-9 (HB) 978-1-4020-4795-4 (HB) 1-4020-4796-7 (e-book) 978-1-4020-4796-7 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Gorka Elordieta Constraints on Intonational Prominence of Focalized Constituents Ardis Eschenberg Polish Narrow Focus Constructions David Gil Intonation and Thematic Roles in Riau Indonesian Matthew Gordon The Intonational Realization of Contrastive Focus in Chickasaw Carlos Gussenhoven Types of Focus in English Nancy Hedberg and Juan M. Sosa The Prosody of Topic and Focus in Spontaneous English Dialogue Emiel Krahmer and Marc Swerts Perceiving Focus Manfred Krifka The Semantics of Questions and the Focusation of Answers Chungmin Lee Contrastive (Predicate) Topic, Intonation, and Scalar Meanings Kimiko Nakanishi Prosody and Scope Interpretations of the Topic Marker ‘wa’ in Japanese Ho-Hsien Pan Focus and Taiwanese Unchecked Tones Elisabeth Selkirk Bengali Intonation Revisited: An Optimality Theoretic Analysis in which FOCUS Stress Prominence Drives FOCUS Phrasing Mark Steedman Information-Structural Semantics for English Intonation Klaus von Heusinger Discourse Structure and Intonational Phrasing

vii 1 23 41 69 83 101 121 139 151 177 195 215

245 265

PREFACE

During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The workshop was designed to lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts between linguists devoted to the study of meaning and linguists engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. This volume contains papers emerging from the Santa Barbara Workshop on Topic and Focus. A wide variety of methodologies and research interests related to topic and focus are represented in the papers. Some works present results of phonetic studies, either acoustic or perceptual, on the expression of topic and/or focus; others examine semantic or pragmatic features of topic and/or focus, while others are concerned with the interface between intonation and meaning. Data from several different languages are represented in the papers, including several languages with relatively little documentation particularly in the venue of topic and focus, e.g. Basque, Chickasaw, Indonesian, Polish, Taiwanese. The broad sample of languages coupled with the wide variety of research topics addressed by the papers promise to enrich our typological understanding of topic and focus phenomena and provide an impetus for further research. The following paragraphs offer brief summaries of the papers contained in this volume: Gorka Elordieta’s paper describes prosodic conditions governing focus in a dialect of Basque with pitch accents. He finds that narrow focus is only intonationally marked for words carrying a pitch accent. Unaccented words rely on contextual information rather than intonational cues to signal focus, unlike in Japanese, in which unaccented words are free to express focus prosodically. Ardis Eschenberg’s paper explores the role of word order and prosody in the expression of focus in Polish. She shows that intonation and word order are used in different capacities depending on the focused element and the type of focus. Eschenberg discusses the implications her research has for various syntactic and semantic theories of focus. David Gil’s paper focuses on the role of intonation in signalling thematic roles in the Riau dialect of Indonesian, a language with relatively free word order and no obligatory case or agreement marking. Based on an analysis of data from a naturalistic corpus of utterances, Gil finds that intonation is not used to cue thematic roles. Drawing on this result, Gil proposes a model of Indonesian syntax and semantics lacking traditional morphosyntactic categories. Matthew Gordon’s paper is a phonetic study of the effect of focus on fundamental frequency and duration in Chickasaw, a language in which focus is morphologically marked. Gordon finds considerable variation between speakers in the use of f0 and duration as correlates of focus, with temporal disjuncture between elements playing a more important role than f0 in the expression of focus. Based on

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PREFACE

these results, Gordon suggests that focus may be marked phonetically even in a language in which focus has an overt morphological realization. Carlos Gussenhoven’s work provides an overview of how various types of focus are expressed syntactically and prosodically. Basing his classification on data from several languages, Gussenhoven suggests that focus may differ along a number of pragmatically conditioned dimensions. He finds that different categories of focus are expressed through different intonational contours, with identificational focus seeming to occupy a special status in its reliance on morphological as opposed to prosodic cues. Nancy Hedberg and Juan Sosa investigate the evidence for a prosodic distinction between topic accents and focus accents in their paper. In an analysis of naturally occurring English speech, they do not find any differences in pitch accent type pointing to separate categories of topic and focus accent. On the other hand, they find extensive marking of information structure categories with high pitch accents. In their paper, Emiel Krahmer and Marc Swerts discuss a dialogue reconstructing experiment designed to examine the role of pitch accents in perceiving focus in two languages, Dutch and Italian, differing in the importance of pitch accents as a marker of focus. Krahmer and Swerts find that Dutch listeners rely more on pitch accent cues to reconstruct focus than Italian listeners, in keeping with the greater role of pitch in signalling focus in Dutch. Results of an audiovisual experiment employing talking heads suggest that visual cues can also play a role in the perception of focus, though primarily when pitch cues are indecisive. Manfred Krifka’s paper explores the proper semantic treatment of focus patterns in response to constituent questions. He finds that neither the framework of Alternative Semantics nor a theory that works with givenness rather than semantic focus as a basic concept offers an adequate analysis of focus arising in answers to questions. On the other hand, Krifka argues that the theory of Structured Meaning provides a superior account of this type of focus. In his paper, Chungmin Lee characterizes Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Predicate Topic, particularly in connection with their ‘conventional’ scalar implicatures. He distinguishes a typical kind that evokes a ‘conventional’ implicature from list contrastive topics, which lack any implicature. The Contrastive Topic marker in Korean gets a high tone responsible for focality, analogously to the fall-rise contour in English. Lee’s paper explores the scalar meaning of type-subtype scalarity and subtype, arguing for the inherent tendency of subtype scalarity even in entities. It also explores scope relations between scope bearers and Contrastive Topic and CT’s narrow-scope nature. The apparent non-narrow-scope of CT is claimed to be a topicalization effect. Predicates are claimed to be inherently subtype-scalar when CT-marked just like numerals and quantifiers. In conclusion, the uttered part is a concessive admission with the intent of conveying a forceful implicature in the unuttered part. In her paper, Kimiko Nakanishi examines the prosodic and semantic properties associated with the Japanese topic marker wa. She shows that the two pragmatic functions of wa, as a marker of theme and contrast, are distinguished prosodically. She further claims that the theme vs. contrast distinction is accounted for by an

PREFACE

ix

Alternative Semantics analysis, in which the two functions of wa correspond to different scope interpretations and pragmatic functions. Ho-hsien Pan’s paper explores the influence of focus on fundamental frequency and duration in Taiwanese, a language with lexical tone. Parallel to languages in which tone is not used at the lexical level, Pan finds that increased duration and expanded pitch range are both associated with narrow focus. However, duration turns out to be a more reliable marker of focus than f0, a result which Pan suggests may be due to the high functional load of f0 height in distinguishing lexical items in Taiwanese. Elisabeth Selkirk’s paper develops an Optimality Theoretic analysis of focus constituency in Bengali, which is typologically unusual in requiring that focused elements be delimited on both sides by phonological phrase boundaries. In order to account for the Bengali focus facts, Selkirk proposes a theory of the prosody-syntax interface in which a family of focus prominence constraints requires a focused morphosyntactic structure to contain a phonological prominence within a specified prosodic constituent. Selkirk shows that a member of this focus prominence contraint family, working in conjunction with other hierarchically ranked tonal and prosodic alignment constraints, offers a principled account of the complex tonal phonology of Bengali. Mark Steedman’s paper builds on his earlier work to develop a new theory of intonation structure in which intonational tones are reduced to a small set of semantically grounded binary oppositions. Steedman’s theory assumes a distinction between the beliefs that the speaker attributes to the hearer by the literal meaning of his or her utterance, and those that the hearer is actually committed to. Steedman shows that this division is crucial in offering an adequate account of situations in which the speaker and hearer do not mutually believe a proposition that the speaker assumes is shared. Klaus von Heusinger’s paper explores the function of intonational phrasing in discourse, finding that semantics plays an important role in determining prosodic constituency in discourse. He argues that discourse relations may hold between relatively small subclausal units, which are defined in terms of their functions as arguments in discourse. Von Heusinger argues that a version of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory is equipped to handle the mutual relations holding between discourse units. The editors gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation’s support of the Santa Barbara workshop on Topic and Focus through grant BCS-0104212. In addition, we would like to thank the Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute and the Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research for their logistical and administrative support of the workshop. Thanks are also extended to Ed Luna for his editorial assistance in preparing the manuscripts for publication. Chungmin Lee Matthew Gordon Daniel Büring January 2006

GORKA ELORDIETA

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE OF FOCALIZED CONSTITUENTS*

1. INTRODUCTION Across languages, in narrow contrastive focus constructions one or more cues (morphological, syntactic, intonational) are used by speakers in order to express the intended meaning correctly, singling out the focalized element or constituent from the rest of the elements in the sentence. However, in this article I will provide evidence that in the pitch-accent dialects of Basque classified as Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB, Hualde, Elordieta, Gaminde and Smiljanic 2002) narrow focus expressions may be left unexpressed through these cues. There are cases in which focalized words cannot be identified on the basis of syntax or intonation alone (morphology does not play a role as a focus cue in Basque). They may satisfy the necessary syntactic conditions, but they do not satisfy the necessary conditions imposed by the intonational grammar of these dialects. There is a constraint on intonational focalization limiting main intonational prominence to focalized words that bear a lexical or derived pitch accent, and more radically to words that constitute a separate intonational unit on their own, an Accentual Phrase (AP). A word forms an independent AP if it has a H*+L pitch accent and the word to its left ends an AP. 2. BACKGROUND It is well known that languages differ in the overt cues they use to make the hearer identify clearly the focalized constituent. On the one hand, there are languages which signal focalized elements intonationally, without overt syntactic or morphological cues. These are languages of the so-called English type, in which focalized elements receive main prosodic prominence in-situ, with no movement from their base position.1 Other Germanic languages such as Dutch and German also have this strategy of English for signaling narrow focus. However, in some cases these languages may also resort to syntactic movement operations to cue focus. When the verb is the focus of the sentence and a definite object is used, scrambling of the object may take place so that the verb is interpreted as narrow focus (Reinhart and Neeleman 1998). The verb receives main prosodic prominence by virtue of being in clause-final position.2 1 C. Lee et al. Topic and Focus: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation, 1–22. © 2007 Springer.

2

GORKA ELORDIETA

Some languages display two kinds of strategies for narrow focus manifestation: one in which words are assigned main prominence in their base-generated syntactic position (a strategy of the English-type), and another one in which syntactic displacement operations are produced such that these words or constituents end up occupying a syntactically specified position for narrow focus, by means of scrambling or fronting, or some other means. Unlike Dutch or German, the latter option is available for all constituents and is not subject to definiteness constraints, and perhaps most importantly, in these languages focalized words which are syntactically displaced are also assigned main prosodic prominence in the sentence (cf. Bolinger 1954, Ladd 1980, Culicover and Rochemont 1983, Vallduví 1990, Cinque 1993, Reinhart 1995, Selkirk 1995, Zubizarreta 1998, Frota 1998, among others). Spanish and Italian constitute examples of this type of languages. But in Spanish focalized words can also occur in non-in-situ positions, such as sentenceend position or also a fronted position, in both cases accompanied by main sentence stress (cf. Bolinger 1972, Contreras 1978, 1980, Uriagereka 1995, Zubizarreta 1998 among others, for discussion of the different options). Then, there are languages which signal focus morphologically, by the addition of a suffix, a prefix or some other overt marker that indicates focalization. This strategy can be combined with syntactic displacement, intonational marking, or a combination of both. In Wolof, for instance, a so-called ‘emphatic marker’ inserted before the verb indicates which constituent is being focalized, whether it is the subject, a complement, or the verb (cf. Rialland and Robert 2001). Narrow focus is also cued syntactically in Wolof, as focalized constituents have to appear in sentence-initial position.3 It is important to point out that in this language no intonational prominence or phrasing effects are manifested on the focalized element. English Creoles could be similar to Wolof in this respect, as focus is marked morphologically and also syntactically, by fronting the focalized constituent, and prosodic marking may be absent (cf. Bickerton 1993). In Japanese, morphological marking combines with prosodic marking to indicate focus: prosodic prominence and phrasing effects leave clear which constituent(s) have to be interpreted as narrow focus, and the focus particle -ga follows a focalized subject (cf. Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988, Haraguchi 1991, Kubozono 1993, among others). In other languages, focus is both syntactically and intonationally identified. That is, narrowly focalized elements not only receive main prosodic prominence and/or are accompanied by intonational phrasing boundaries, but they also occupy a syntactic position structurally defined for focalized expressions, be it Spec-CP, Spec-FocusP, the most embedded position in the sentence, the position immediately preceding the verb, or some other position. Hungarian, Turkish, Quechua, Basque and Hausa are examples of this type of language (cf. among others Horvath 1986, Kiss 1995, 1998 for Hungarian; Vogel and Kenesei 1987, 1990 for Turkish; Ortiz de Urbina 1989, 1999, Hualde et al. 1994, Elordieta 2001, Arregi 2001, Etxepare and Ortiz de Urbina 2003 for Basque; Inkelas and Leben 1990 for Hausa). The following paradigm from Basque illustrates this pattern in which focalized elements must appear immediately preceding the verb. Thus, examples (1e-g) are ill-formed

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

3

because they contain focalized constituents which are either postverbal or not immediately preverbal. Sentence (1a) represents a neutral declarative sentence, and 4 the rest are sentences with focalized constituents (capitalized): (1) a.

Jonek Mireni liburua eman dio John-erg Miren-dat book-abs give aux ‘John has given the book to Miren’

b.

Jonek liburua MIRENI eman dio John-erg book-abs MIREN-DAT give aux ‘John has given the book TO MIREN’

c.

Mireni liburua JONEK eman dio Miren-dat book-abs JOHN-ERG give aux ‘JOHN has given the book to Mary’

d.

Jonek Mireni LIBURUA eman dio John-erg Miren-dat BOOK-ABS give aux ‘John has given THE BOOK to Miren’

e.

*Jonek liburua eman dio MIRENI John-erg book-abs give aux MIREN-DAT

f.

*JONEK Mireni liburua eman dio JOHN-ERG Miren-dat book-abs give aux

g.

*Jonek Mireni eman dio LIBURUA John-erg Miren-dat give aux BOOK-ABS

These examples show that, although Basque is a language with flexible word order, there is a syntactic constraint in this language on the relative word order between focus constituents and the verb, namely that they must be left-adjacent to it (cf. the references mentioned in the previous paragraph for details on syntactic analyses that could explain this constraint).5 But apart from this syntactic restriction, in Basque the focalized expression receives main prominence in the sentence, that is, focus is cued both syntactically and intonationally. Serbo-Croatian offers a particularly rich case in focus marking possibilities (Godjevac 2000, Frota 2002). Like in English, prosodic phrasing and prominence with canonical word order serves to cue narrow focus. Another strategy to signal narrow focus is to produce a marked word order by scrambling operations, assigning at the same time prosodic phrasing and prominence cues to the constituent that is focalized (i.e., the Hungarian-Basque type). Finally, it is also possible to mark narrow focus by scrambling operations under a neutral intonation, leaving the focalized constituent in sentence-final position, so that it receives default sentence

4

GORKA ELORDIETA

stress (like in Dutch or German for verb focus). Thus, three different strategies or options are available in Serbo-Croatian to signal narrow focus. The different possibilities for signaling narrow focus discussed above might not constitute an exhaustive typology, although they might suffice for expository purposes. The table in (2) summarizes this typology of the different possibilities for signaling focus by means of syntax, morphology or prosody, or a combination of more than one of these strategies. A few representative languages are also included. Slots with a ‘?’ are those that to my knowledge do not have representatives. (2) Strategy for focus marking (a) Prosody alone (b) Morphology alone (c) Syntactic displacement alone (d) Prosody and morphology (e) Morphology and syntactic displacement (f) Prosody and syntactic displacement (g) Prosody, syntactic displacement and morphology

Sample languages - Only strategy: English, European Portuguese - One of the strategies: Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian ? - Only strategy: ? - One of the strategies: Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, German - Only strategy: Japanese - One of the strategies: ? - Only strategy: Wolof - One of the strategies: ? - Only strategy: Hungarian, Basque, Turkish - One of the strategies: Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Italian ?

Despite all these possibilities of marking focus, I will show that in pitchaccent dialects of Basque (i.e., Northern Bizkaian Basque, NBB) there are cases in which words which constitute the narrow focus of the utterance are not singled out by syntactic, morphological or intonational means. In these dialects, intonational highlighting of narrow focus is restricted to words which bear a lexical or derived accent, or for some speakers, to words that constitute Accentual Phrases (APs) by themselves. That is, not any independent word can bear intonational prominence even though it may be the pragmatic focus of the utterance. I discuss these cases in the following section. 3. SYNTACTIC AND PROSODIC CONSTRAINTS ON FOCUS IN NBB 3.1. Lexically and morphologically conditioned accentual classes in NBB In order to understand the syntactic and prosodic constraints on focus in NBB, it is necessary to provide an overview of the prosodic features of these dialects. NBB dialects are pitch accent varieties of the Bizkaian dialect of Basque, and are spoken in the northwestern Basque-speaking area, along the coast and in a band of around 15 kilometers inland from the coast. A noteworthy feature of these dialects is the

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

5

lexical distinction between unaccented and accented roots, stems and affixes, like in Japanese (cf. Poser 1984, Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988, Haraguchi 1991, Kubozono 1993 among others for details on Japanese tone and intonation structure). An accented root or affix is sufficient to render an accented word, which surfaces with prominence on a non-final syllable in all contexts. In most NBB varieties, the syllable preceding the leftmost accented morpheme surfaces with main prominence, as illustrated in (3) below for the Gernika variety (accented morphemes are indicated by an apostrophe). In a few varieties, it is always the penultimate syllable that is accented (as in the Lekeitio variety, cf. Hualde et al. 1994, Hualde 1997, 1999, Elordieta 1997, 1998): (3) a.

sagar -‘ata - ‘tik ĺ apple-plur.loc.-abl.

sa.gá.rra.ta.tik

‘from the apples’

b.

léku -‘ata - ra ĺ place-plur.loc.-all.

lé.ku.e.tara

‘to the places’

A combination of unaccented roots and affixes produces unaccented words (except in compounding, where even if the members are unaccented the compound word is accented). Unaccented words will only receive prosodic prominence if they occur immediately preceding the verb or are pronounced in isolation. In these cases, in most NBB varieties they display prominence on the final syllable, and in a few dialects they show penultimate prominence (e.g., Ondarroa and Markina, cf. Hualde 1997, 2000). This kind of prominence is called derived accent by Jun and Elordieta (1997), to distinguish it from the lexical accent of accented words. In all other contexts, unaccented words do not surface with any kind of prosodic prominence on any syllable. Thus, observe the behavior of the unaccented word laguna ‘the friend’ in (4), corresponding to the Lekeitio variety (henceforth Lekeitio Basque, LB). This word is composed of the unaccented root lagun ‘friend’ and the unaccented singular determiner –a. Prosodic prominence is indicated by an acute accent mark. The different word orders in (4a-d) are due to the flexible word order of Basque, constrained by topic and focus or theme-rheme structures. That is, (4a-d) differ in information structure (rheme constituents are underlined).

(4) a.

umiágas laguná etorri da child-com friend-abs come aux ‘The friend has come with the child’

b.

laguná etorri da umiágas friend-abs come aux child-com ‘The friend has come with the child’

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GORKA ELORDIETA

c.

laguna umiágas etorri da friend-abs child-com come aux ‘The friend has come with the child’

d.

umiágas etorri da laguna child-com come aux friend-abs ‘The friend has come with the child’

e.

*laguná umiágas etorri da

f.

*umiágas etorri da laguná

The unaccented/accented distinction is directly relevant for intonational phrasing in NBB. Prominence is realized as a H*+L pitch accent on the syllable that is phonologically associated with accent. As already mentioned above, accented words will always bear stress in any position in the sentence, whereas unaccented words only display a H*+L pitch accent if they are immediately left-adjacent to the verb, i.e., when they bear derived accent. The intonational pattern that arises is the following: the sentence starts with an initial low tone (%L), immediately followed by a rise phonetically associated with the second or third syllable of the first word. The pitch level is maintained until reaching a H*+L pitch accent, whether of an accented word or an unaccented word with derived accent. If after that H*+L pitch accent there is another word, the contour that is observed is one in which again there is an initial low tone on the first syllable of that word, the pitch level rising again on the second or third syllable of the following word, and the high tone level plateau being maintained on all syllables until another H*+L accent, corresponding to an accented word or an unaccented word preceding the verb, i.e., with derived accent. And if another word follows, the same pattern is observed. Thus, a cycle of low tone, rise, plateau and H*+L pitch accent is observed. The intonational units or constituents with this shape are identified by Elordieta (1997, 1998) as Accentual Phrases (APs). Jun and Elordieta (1997) and Elordieta (1998) show that APs consist of an initial %L boundary tone, a phrasal H tone (H-) on the second syllable,6 and a H*+L pitch accent. The phrasal H tone spreads phonologically onto all syllables between the second one and the one with the pitch accent. Schematically, the tonal structure of an AP is %L H- H*+L (cf. also Hualde et al. 2002).7 Figures 1-2 illustrate the general shape of APs in NBB, corresponding to (5a-b), respectively. Figure 1 is an example of a sentence containing three unaccented words before the verb; from an IP-initial %L there is a rise on the second syllable, reaching the peak on the third syllable, and the H tone continues until the H*+L pitch accent on the final syllable of the third word (i.e., the one immediately preceding the verb, with the derived accent). The pitch drops on the verb until the end of the utterance. In the figures in this article, the pitch accent is aligned with the right edge of the accented syllable. Fig. 2 contains two accented words, each of them with their corresponding H*+L pitch accent. Due to downstep, the second phrasal H- does not rise as much as the first one, and the second peak is smaller than the first one (cf. Elordieta 1997, 1998, Jun and Elordieta 1997 for details and more pitch tracks):

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

(5) a.

b.

AP{%L

HH*+L} | | | galdu dot alargunen nebien diruá widow-gen brother-gen money-abs lose aux ‘I have lost the widow’s brother’s money’

AP{%L

H*+L} AP{%L H-H*+L} | | | | | amúmen liburúak biar doras grandmother-gen books-abs need aux ‘I need grandmother’s books’

Figure 1. alargunen nebien diruá galdu dot

7

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GORKA ELORDIETA

Figure 2. amúmen liburúak biar doras

3.2. Intonational restrictions on the assignment of prominence to focalized words As explained in section 2 above and illustrated in (1), in NBB only words contained in an immediately preverbal syntactic constituent can be focalized. The focalized word does not have to immediately precede the verb, but it has to be contained in a syntactic constituent that is immediately preceding the verb. Thus, in the following examples, (6b) is grammatical, as well as (6a). (6c) is ungrammatical, however, as the syntactic constituent it is contained in is not immediately preverbal (syntactic constituents are separated by square brackets): (6)

a.

[maixuári] [lagúnen LIBURÚAK] emon dotzaras. teacher-dat friends-gen BOOKS-ABS give aux ‘I have given the friends’ BOOKS to the teacher’ (responding to stimuli such as: ‘Which of the friends’ things have you given to the teacher?’)

b.

[maixuári] [LAGÚNEN liburúak] emon dotzaras. teacher-dat FRIENDS-GEN book-abs give aux ‘I have given THE FRIENDS’ books to the teacher’ (responding to stimuli such as: ‘Whose books have you given to the teacher?’)

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

c.

9

*[MAIXUÁRI] [lagúnen liburúak] emon dotzaras. TEACHER-DAT friends-gen book-abs give aux ‘I have given the friends’ books TO THE TEACHER’ (erroneously responding to stimuli such as: ‘Who have you given the friends’ books to?’)

However, in cases of utterances where one of the words constitutes the narrow focus of the utterance, even if that word is contained in the immediately preverbal constituent, there is a further constraint it must obey in order to be intonationally singled out. In the variety of NBB I have investigated, LB, a focalized word can be the most prominent intonationally if it has a lexical pitch accent (i.e., if it is a lexically accented word) or if it has a derived accent (i.e., it is an unaccented word immediately preceding the verb). Let us illustrate this constraint with sentence (7) (repeated from (5b)), containing only one preverbal constituent with two accented words, amúmen ‘grandmother’s’ and liburúak ‘books’. The intonational structure corresponding to this constituent is thus the following: (7)

AP{%L

H*+L} AP{%L H-H*+L} | | | | | amúmen liburúak biar doras grandmother-gen books-abs need aux ‘I need grandmother’s books’

That is, in the immediately preverbal syntactic constituent there are two APs, each of them containing one accented word. Let us now describe the main patterns observed in contexts of narrow focus, that is, in cases in which the focalized word replaces the variable introduced by a wh-word in a previous question. The two words in (7) would become the narrow focus of an utterance if they formed part of a response to the questions in (8a,b), respectively: (8)

a.

Nóren liburúak biar dósus? whose books-abs need aux ‘Whose books do you need?’

b.

Sér biar dósu amuména? what need aux grandmother-gen ‘What do you need of grandmother’s?’

Since amúmen and liburúak have lexical H*+L pitch accents, they can be pronounced standing out as the most prominent words in the utterance. An interesting aspect worth mentioning is that in narrow focus cases in which the first word is focalized the pronunciation of such utterances is not usually distinguished from cases of broad focus. That is, the first word will not necessarily show a boosted pitch level and/or a following decreased pitch level. In the data I have analyzed from five female speakers of LB, only one speaker produced some utterances in which the

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first word was pronounced with a higher pitch followed by a lower level on the following word. This might be due to the fact that in broad focus cases the difference in pitch between the first peak and the following peaks is already quite big (cf. Fig. 2). However, when the second word is focalized, there are more instances in which the word is made more prominent intonationally and perceptually distinguishable from broad focus cases. The focalized word may present a higher pitch level (although the peak is still lower than the first peak, due to downstep), followed by a decreased pitch level. Quite often there may also be a displacement of the peak of the first word to the posttonic syllable. This strategy signals old information or topic status for that word.8 For sentence (9), which would be an answer to (8b), Figure 3 illustrates a case without peak delay at the end of the preceding word, and Figure 4 illustrates a case with peak displacement, indicated in the tone tier with a ‘>’ sign: (9)

amúmen LIBURÚAK biar doras. grandmother-gen BOOKS-ABS need aux ‘I need grandmother’s BOOKS’

A similar scenario would apply for a preverbal constituent containing two words, the first one accented and the second word unaccented. The accented word has a lexical H*+L accent, and the unaccented word receives a H*+L pitch accent by virtue of preceding the verb (i.e., it has a derived accent on its final syllable). The sentence in (10) is an example:

Figure 3. amúmen LIBURÚAK biar doras.

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

11

Figure 4. amúmen LIBURÚAK biar doras.

(10)

AP{%L

H*+L} AP{%L H-H*+L} | | | | | Amáien alabiá topa dot Amaia-gen daughter-abs find aux ‘I came across Amaia’s daughter’

If the first word were the narrow focus of the sentence, most commonly it would not receive more prominence than in broad focus cases. If the second word were the narrow focus, however, it would be made more prominent by presenting a higher pitch level than in broad focus cases, accompanied or not by peak delay in the first word (interestingly, when there is peak delay in the previous word a bigger pitch level on the focalized word is not necessary). An example with peak delay in the first word is illustrated below in Figure 5, corresponding to (11). As described above, however, this pattern is not obligatory, and it is also quite normal to find cases which are intonationally very similar to broad focus utterances.9 (11)

Amáien ALABIÁ topa dot. ‘I came across Amaia’s DAUGHTER’.

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GORKA ELORDIETA

Figure 5. Amáien ALABIÁ topa dot

However, in the case of preverbal constituents containing one or more unaccented words in nonfinal position (i.e., not immediately preceding the verb) the situation is different. An unaccented word will only get a derived accent if it is leftadjacent to the verb, and hence an unaccented word which is the narrow focus of an utterance but which is not in the position that grants a derived accent cannot be made more prominent intonationally. From a neutral sentence such as (12), the leftmost unaccented word, nebien ‘the brother’s’ would not receive main prominence even though it were the narrow focus of the sentence (as an answer to ‘Whose money have you lost?’, because it does not have a pitch accent, lexical or derived. A crucial aspect of this pattern in NBB is that focus does not insert accents that are not already there lexically or by virtue of a preverbal position. The first word is lexically unaccented, and even if it is focalized, it remains unaccented, that is, no accent is associated to it, as it is not left-adjacent to the verb and hence does not receive a derived accent. This impossibility does not depend on the accentual nature of the following word, as the same impossibility occurs with accented words following the unaccented word. Thus, in a sentence such as (13) it would not be possible to highlight the first word. The type of contours that surface in these instances is one in which the leftmost word has to be pronounced with the same pitch level as the following word, in the same AP. Figure 6 serves to illustrate such a contour, corresponding to narrow focalization of the word nebien in (12): (12)

AP{%L

HH*+L} | | | nebien diruá galdu dot brother-gen money-abs lose aux ‘I have lost the brother’s money’

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

(13)

13

AP{%L

HH*+L} | | | lagunen liburúa biar dot friend-gen book-abs need aux ‘I need the friend’s book’

Figure 6. nebien diruá galdu dot

As for the second word in sentences such as (12)-(13), we do not find a uniform pattern across speakers. However, such interspeaker variation reveals important facts about constraints on the intonational realization of main prominence in contexts of narrow focus. For two of the five speakers recorded, the second words in those cases would be able to receive main prominence if they were the narrow focus of the utterance, as in (14b), responding to a question such as (14a). An observed strategy in these cases is a continuation rise at the end of the preceding word, signaling old or known information. This rise cannot be due to an accent in the first word, so it must be due to H- (cf. Fig. 7). Another possibility is to have a sustained pitch at the end of the preceding word followed by a rise in pitch level on the focused word (other non-intonational features such as higher intensity may also be present). In both cases, a decrease in pitch level follows the focalized word. The same pattern is observed in cases in which the second word is lexically accented, as in (15): (14) a.

Ser galdu dósu nebiena? What lose aux brother-gen ‘What have you lost of the brother?’

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GORKA ELORDIETA

b.

nebien DIRUÁ galdu dot brother-gen MONEY-ABS lose aux ‘I have lost the brother’s MONEY’

(15) a.

Ser biar dosu lagunena? what need aux friend-gen ‘What do you need of the friend?’

b.

lagunen LIBURÚA biar dot friend-gen BOOK-ABS need aux ‘I need the friend’s BOOK’

Figure 7. nebien DIRUÁ galdu dot

Importantly, three of our five speakers did not produce utterances like (14b), or could not pronounce the second word in (15) with main intonational prominence. That is, they cannot highlight a word intonationally if it is preceded by an unaccented word. For these speakers, not only the leftmost word but also the second word cannot be prosodically highlighted. Regardless of which word is the corrective focus of the utterance, the whole AP (i.e., the two words) would have to be pronounced together. The explanation for this pattern is that these speakers have a stricter constraint on the intonational highlighting of focalized words. This constraint states that only words which constitute APs by themselves can be made intonationally prominent. In cases of two words with accent, such as the ones in (7)/ (10), each word constitutes its own AP, and can thus be singled out intonationally. But in cases in which the first word is unaccented, the second word does not constitute an AP by itself. Rather, it continues the AP that the first word started. As the intonational schemas in (12)-(13) show, the unaccented word starts an AP, with

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

15

the initial %L H- tone sequence, but since it does not have a pitch accent, the phrasal H- tone spreads onto the next word, until the H*+L accent (lexical or derived) of the following word ends the AP (cf. Jun and Elordieta 1997; Elordieta 1998). There is thus only one AP before the verb, containing the two words. Since neither word forms an independent AP, they cannot be made intonationally prominent on their own. The two words have to be pronounced in the same pitch level, in the same AP. The contour observed in these instances is similar to the one illustrated in Figure 6, which showed the impossibility of having the leftmost word as the most prominent word in the utterance. The important issue at work here is that no pitch accent is specially inserted to the first unaccented word, even if it is the narrow focus of the sentence from a pragmatic or information-structure point of view, as already mentioned above. Hence no AP boundary can be inserted at the right edge of the first word. That is, the lexical association of pitch accents is respected by focus in NBB. Thus, a mismatch between semantics and intonation arises in cases where a word which does not constitute an AP by itself is the corrective focus of an utterance. No intonational cues are used within the utterance containing the contrastively focalized word alone in order to convey the intended meaning. There is no way to single out the focalized word syntactically, as the word occurs with other words in the preverbal constituent. Disambiguation can only come from the preceding linguistic context. This mismatch situation between semantics and prosody does not arise in languages surrounding NBB (Spanish and French) or in Indo-European languages. And an insufficiency of syntax and/or morphology to mark focalized words is unattested in the languages for which there are descriptions of focus realization, a summary of which was provided in section 2. Thus, this property of NBB is interesting from a typological point of view as well. The patterns of realization of intonational highlighting change slightly when corrective focus is considered. Corrective focus refers to those instances in which the speaker corrects one of the words or syntactic phrases that her interlocutor has stated incorrectly. For instance: (16) a.

b.

Nóren alabia topa dosula? Alaznena? whose daughter-abs find aux Alazne-gen ‘Whose daughter did you come across? Alazne’s?’ Es, AMÁIEN alabiá topa dot. no AMAIA-GEN daughter-abs find aux ‘No, I came across AMAIA’s daughter.’

In (16b) above, the first accented word Amáien can be made more prominent, usually by having a boosted pitch level followed by a decreased pitch level in the rest of the material in the sentence. Thus, in corrective focus the first word is distinguishable from cases of broad focus, unlike in narrow non-corrective focus. The second word in (16b) would also be made more prominent, by means of a delayed peak in the preceding word, signaling the character of topic or old information of that word. This type of contour is illustrated in Figure 8, for a

16

GORKA ELORDIETA

sentence such Es, Amáien ALABIÁ topa dot ‘No, I came across Amaia’s DAUGHTER’. Another option is to have simply a higher pitch level on the focalized word, without a preceding peak displacement. Quite often, the focalized word is accompanied by higher intensity levels and longer duration.10 As already described above, the same options would be available for sentences in which the second word were lexically accented.

Figure 8. Es, Amáien ALABIÁ topa dot

But the interesting cases are those in which the first word is unaccented, forming an AP with the following word. As described above, in narrow noncorrective focus some speakers could not intonationally highlight either of the two words, due to a constraint that a word has to constitute an AP by itself in order to be the most prominent word in the utterance, rather than simply having a pitch accent. In corrective focus, however, these speakers can place main intonational prominence in a word even if it does not constitute an AP by itself. The sufficient condition is that the word has an accent, lexical or derived, like in narrow non-contrastive focus for the other speakers. Words bearing an accent and following an unaccented word may surface with main prominence, cued by a rise in pitch on the focalized word coming from a sustained pitch of the unaccented word, or by a rise at the end of the prefocal unaccented word. In both cases, usually the focalized word displays higher intensity and duration (cf. Elordieta and Hualde 2001, 2003). It is important to bear in mind, however, that this type of prosodic realization are scarce in the production of the most restrictive speakers, that is, those for whom a word has to constitute an AP by itself in order to stand out as the most prominent word.11 Figure 9 illustrates an F0 contour for a sentence such as (17b), in which the first option is realized, and Figure 10 illustrates the second possibility, with a rise at the end of the first word.

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

(17) a.

b.

Ser biar dosula lagunena? Kuadernúa? what need aux friend-gen notebook-abs ‘What do you need of the friend? His notebook?’ Es, lagunen LIBURÚA biar dot. ‘I need the friend’s BOOK’.

Figure 9. lagunen LIBURÚA biar dot

Figure 10. lagunen LIBURÚA biar dot

17

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GORKA ELORDIETA

We will finish our presentation of the intonational constraints on the prosodic realization of focus in NBB by summarizing in a table the focus realizations for all logically possible two-word combinations in a preverbal phrase. The left-hand column summarizes the patterns in narrow non-corrective focus, and the right-hand column those of corrective focus. When the two types of constraints for intonational highlighting (having an accent or being an independent AP) produce different outputs, they are distinguished as (a) and (b).12 Narrow (non-corrective) focus H*L H*L | | AP[Accented]–AP[Accented] – Verb

Corrective focus H*L H*L | | AP[Accented]–AP[Accented] – Verb

Each word can be highlighted

Each word can be highlighted (boosted pitch on focalized word more frequent than in non-corrective focus) H*L H*L | | AP[Accented]–AP[Unaccented] – Verb

H*L H*L | | AP[Accented]–AP[Unaccented] – Verb Each word can be highlighted H*L | AP[Unaccented–Accented] – Verb

Each word can be highlighted (boosted pitch on focalized word more frequent than in non-corrective focus) H*L | AP[Unaccented–Accented] – Verb

a. Neither word can be highlighted; they a. Neither word can be highlighted; they are uttered in the same AP are uttered in the same AP b. Only the word with an accent can be b. Only the word with an accent can be highlighted highlighted (more frequent than in noncorrective focus) H*L | [Unaccented–Unaccented] – Verb AP

H*L | [Unaccented–Unaccented] – Verb AP

a. Neither word can be highlighted; they a. Neither word can be highlighted; they are uttered in the same AP are uttered in the same AP b. Only the word with an accent can be b. Only the word with an accent can be highlighted highlighted (more frequent than in noncorrective focus)

CONSTRAINTS ON INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE

19

4. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION In this paper I have described the main constraints on the realization of prosodic prominence on focalized words in a pitch accent dialect of Basque. It has been shown that the minimum condition a word has to satisfy to receive main prosodic prominence if pragmatically focalized is that it has an accent, whether lexical or derived. However, in cases of narrow non-corrective focus some speakers reveal the existence of a more restrictive constraint, which demands that a word must constitute an AP by itself in order to surface with main prominence. In corrective focus the sufficient condition for the five speakers recorded is that a word has an accent. In either case, the interesting fact is that an unaccented word which does not have an accent cannot receive an accent even if it is pragmatically focalized. The context seems to prevent possible ambiguities between neutral and narrow focus readings of unaccented words without an accent. To my knowledge, these are crosslinguistically unattested constraints, and in this regard NBB is different even from a language like Tokyo Japanese, which also has a lexical distinction between accented and unaccented words, but which allows any unaccented word to be prosodically highlighted (cf. Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988). Dept. of Linguistics and Basque Studies,University of the Basque Country, VitoriaGasteiz, Spain NOTES *

Many thanks are due to Matthew Gordon and José Ignacio Hualde for comments on earlier versions of this article, as well as to Sónia Frota, Carlos Gussenhoven and Kiwa Ito for help with section 2. Of course, this article would not have been made possible without my native informants, to whom I am indebted immensely. This work was funded by research grants from the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government (PI-1998-127), the University of the Basque Country (UPV-HA8025/20 and 9/UPV 00033.130-13888/2001) and the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain (BFF2002-04238-C02-01/FEDER). 1 For the sake of expository purposes, we exclude cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences from the discussion, as we will compare this type of language with another type of language that marks focus constituents syntactically without clefting, by having focalized constituents occupy a certain syntactic position below in the text. Thus, we want to distinguish languages which have a structural position for focus from languages such as English that do not, although they may make use of cleft sentences to mark focus. 2 Scrambling is disfavored or does not apply with indefinite objects. In such cases, there is simply main prosodic prominence on the verb. 3 However, when an object is focalized and there is a nonpronominal subject, the focalized object has to follow the subject, which obligatorily appears thematized (i.e., topicalized, cf. Rialland and Robert 2001:897-898). 4 The following abbreviations will be used: abl = ablative, abs = absolutive, all = allative, aux = auxiliary, dat = dative, erg = ergative, gen = genitive, ines = inessive, loc = locative, pl = plural, sg = singular. 5 It is possible for focalized constituents to appear after the verb, but they are usually uttered as separate intermediate or intonational phrases. They are usually preceded by pauses, fillers such as e ‘err…/um…’, or final lengthening of the verb ending in a rising intonation. It appears that copulas can be followed by focalized constituents even without a pause (Hualde et al. 1994). In central and eastern dialects it is possible to have focalized elements postverbally without a pause (cf. Hidalgo 1994, Elordieta 2003), apart

20

GORKA ELORDIETA

from the usual preverbal position, but the speakers I have consulted cannot have postverbal focus as an answer to a wh-word. In that case preverbal focus is the only option. Perhaps only informational, noncontrastive focus (Kiss 1998) presented by the speaker in her own discourse can appear postverbally in these dialects, but more research is needed on this topic before making any generalizations. 6 Jun and Elordieta (1997) found that in APs up to four syllables long the peak of H- is reached on the second syllable, and in APs more than fours syllables long it was reached on the third syllable. This H- is not phonetically realized when the second syllable is associated to a pitch accent. 7 For some speakers, in sequences of four or more unaccented words certain dips in pitch can be observed between two unaccented words. Jun and Elordieta (1997) and Elordieta (1998) take these to be APboundaries, in the absence of H*+L pitch accents. However, the dips were difficult to perceive and were much smaller than regular drops after H*+L pitch accents (see relevant pitch tracks in the mentioned articles). Also, the factors conditioning these breaks were not very well established; desire for heaviness reduction and slower rate of speech were suggested as factors involved in the insertion of these breaks, but no systematic study was carried to prove these claims. Moreover, these facts were subject to speaker dependence; some speakers always produce plateaus in sequences of four or more unaccented words, without breaks. This issue deserves a more systematic study, which I plan to undertake in future research. 8 The delayed peaks at the end of prefocal words were already observed for some speakers of LB by Ito et al. (2003). However, their data involved cases of corrective focus, which we also discuss below. The patterns presented in this paper show that it is possible to find such delayed peaks in non-corrective narrow focus as well. Other strategies of main prominence that can be observed in these contexts and which are not intonational in nature are higher intensity and duration on the focalized word. 9 Indeed, the speakers of LB on which Elordieta (2003) based his findings did not produce utterances in which the second word was most prominent intonationally, and this lead to positing the absence of such a possibility. That conclusion must now be corrected to capture the facts presented in this article. 10 Although the results in Elordieta and Hualde (2001, 2003) showed that lengthening applied to words in corrective focus, it must be pointed out that in those utterances speakers were instructed to put special emphasis on those words. In other recordings in which speakers were not told to put emphasis on the correction, I have observed that lengthening did not occur significantly. It seems that a specific experiment (left for future research) is needed to clarify the role of lengthening as a cue to corrective focus. 11 Thus, highlighting words following an unaccented word without an accent is possible, but not frequent in LB. Its frequency is speaker dependent, but as stated in note 10, the possibility of finding such patterns has to be incorporated into the intonational grammar of LB, contra what was assumed in Elordieta (2003). 12 Interestingly, the two speakers that patterned differently from the other three speakers in contexts of narrow non-corrective contexts in being able to highlight a word following an unaccented word also patterned differently in other respects. For contexts in which the first unaccented word was correctively focalized, they produced contours in which this word was prosodically set apart, by having a higher pitch level followed by a fall in pitch for the following word, or by being pronounced with greater intensity and duration. However, such cases were few in number, compared to the majority of cases in which the unaccented word did not surface with main prominence, thus patterning with the other three speakers. At this point I consider it premature to conclude that highlighting the unaccented word in these contexts is a solid possibility in LB, and leave the issue open for further research based on data from more speakers and based on more tokens of each type of context.

REFERENCES Arregi, Karlos. “Focus and Word Order in Basque.” Manuscript, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. Bickerton, Derek. “Subject Focus Pronouns.” In Francis Byrne and Donald Winford (eds.), Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages, pp. 189-212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993. Bolinger, Dwight. “English Prosodic Stress and Spanish Sentence Order.” Hispania 37 (1954): 152-156.

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Bolinger, Dwight. “Accent is Predictable (If You’re a Mind-reader).” Language 48 (1972): 633-644. Cinque, Guglielmo. “A Null Theory of Phrase and Compound Stress.” Linguistic Inquiry 24 (1993): 239-297. Contreras, Heles. El Orden de Palabras en Español. Madrid: Cátedra, 1978. Contreras, Heles. “Sentential Stress, Word Order, and the Notion of Subject in Spanish.” In Linda Waugh and C.H. van Schooneveld (eds.), The Melody of Language, pp. 45-53. Baltimore: University Park Press, 1980. Culicover, Peter, and Michael Rochemont. “Stress and Focus in English.” Language 59 (1983): 123-165. Elordieta, Arantzazu. Verb Movement and Constituent Permutation in Basque. Utrecht: LOT, 2001. Elordieta, Gorka. “Accent, Tone and Intonation in Lekeitio Basque.” In Fernando Martínez-Gil and Alfonso Morales-Front (eds.), Issues in the Phonology and Morphology of the Iberian Languages, pp. 4-78. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997. Elordieta, Gorka. “Intonation in a Pitch-Accent Dialect of Basque.” International Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology 32 (1998): 511-569. Elordieta. Gorka. “Intonation.” In José I. Hualde and Jon Ortiz de Urbina (eds.), A Grammar of Basque, pp. 72-113. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Elordieta, Gorka, and José I. Hualde. “The Role of Duration as a Correlate of Accent in Lekeitio Basque.” In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2001 - Scandinavia, 105-108, 2001. Elordieta, Gorka, and José I. Hualde. “Tonal and Durational Correlates of Accent in Contexts of Downstep in Northern Bizkaian Basque.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 33 (2003): 195-209. Etxepare, Ricardo and Jon Ortiz de Urbina. “Focalization”. In José I. Hualde and Jon Ortiz de Urbina (eds.), A Grammar of Basque, pp. 459-515. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Frota, Sónia. Prosody and Focus in European Portuguese. University of Lisbon: Doctoral dissertation, 1998 [Published by Garland in 2000]. Frota, Sónia. Review of Intonation, Word Order and Focus Projection in Serbo-Croatian (Godjevac (2000). Glot International 6 (2002): 251-256. Godjevac, Svetlana. Intonation, Word Order and Focus Projection in Serbo-Croatian. Doctoral Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2000. Haraguchi, Shosuke. A Theory of Stress and Accent. Dordrecht: Foris, 1991. Hidalgo, Bittor. Hitz Ordenaren Estatistikak Euskaraz. Doctoral dissertation, University of the Basque Country, 1994. Horvath, Julia. Focus in the Theory of Grammar and the Syntax of Hungarian. Dordrecht: Foris, 1986. Hualde, José I. Euskararen Azentuerak. Bilbao: Servicio Editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco, 1997. Hualde, José I. “Basque Accentuation.” In Harry van der Hulst (ed.), Word Prosodic Systems in the Languages of Europe, pp. 947-993. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. Hualde, José I. “On System-Driven Sound Change: Accent Shift in Markina Basque.” Lingua 110 (2000): 99-129. Hualde, José I., Gorka Elordieta and Arantzazu Elordieta. The Basque Dialect of Lekeitio. Bilbao and San Sebastián: Servicio Editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco, 1994. Hualde, José I., Gorka Elordieta, Iñaki Gaminde and Rajka Smiljanic. “From Pitch-Accent to StressAccent in Basque.” In Carlos Gussenhoven and Natasha Warner (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology VII, pp. 557-584. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Inkelas, Sharon, and William Leben. “Where Phonology and Phonetics Intersect: The case of Hausa Intonation.” In John Kingston and Mary Beckman (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology I, pp. 17-34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Ito, Kiwako, Gorka Elordieta, and José I. Hualde. “Peak alignment and intonational change in Basque.” Proceedings of the 15 th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Barcelona. Spain, pp. 2929-2932. Barcelona, 2003. Jun, Sun-Ah, and Gorka Elordieta. “Intonational Structure of Lekeitio Basque.” In Antonis Botinis, Georgios Kouroupetroglou and George Carayiannis (eds., Intonation: Theory, Models and Applications, pp. 193-196. Proceedings of an ESCA Workshop. Athens, Greece, 1997. Kiss, Katalin É. “Introduction.” In Katalin É. Kiss (ed.), Discourse Configurational Languages, pp. 3-27. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

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Kiss, Katalin É. “Identificational Focus Versus Information Focus.” Language 74 (1998): 245-273. Kubozono, Haruo. The Organization of Japanese Prosody. Tokyo: Kurosio, 1993. Ladd, Robert D. The Structure of Intonational Meaning: Evidence from English. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1980. Ortiz de Urbina, Jon. Parameters in the Grammar of Basque. Dordrecht: Foris, 1989. Ortiz de Urbina, Jon. “Focus in Basque.” In Georges Rebuschi and Laurice Tuller (eds.), The Grammar of Focus, pp. 311-333. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pierrehumbert, Janet, and Mary Beckman. Japanese Tone Structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Poser, William. The Phonetics and Phonology of Tone and Intonation in Japanese. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT, 1984. Reinhart, Tanya. “Interface Strategies.” Manuscript, Utrecht University, 1995. Reinhart, Tanya, and Ad Neeleman. “Scrambling and the PF Interface.” In W. Gueder and Myriam Butt (eds.), Projecting from the Lexicon. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998. Rialland, Annie, and Stéphanie Robert. “The Intonational System of Wolof.” Linguistics 39 (2001): 893-939. Selkirk, Elisabeth. “Sentence Prosody: Intonation, Stress, and Phrasing.” In John Goldsmith (ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory, pp. 550-569. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Uriagereka, Juan. “An F Position in Western Romance.” In Katalin É. Kiss (ed.), Discourse Configurational Languages, pp. 153-175. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Vallduví, Enric. The Informational Component. University of Pennsylvania: Doctoral dissertation, 1990. Vogel, Irene, and István Kenesei. “The Interface between Phonology and Other Components of Grammar: The Case of Hungarian.” Phonology Yearbook 4 (1997): 243-263. Vogel, Irene, and István Kenesei. “Syntax and Semantics in Phonology.” In Sharon Inkelas and Draga Zec (eds.), The Phonology-Syntax Connection, pp. 365-378. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Zubizarreta, María Luisa. Prosody, Focus and Word Order. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.

ARDIS ESCHENBERG

POLISH NARROW FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS

1. INTRODUCTION1 Polish, a western Slavic language, is a so-called ‘free word order’ or ‘scrambling’ language. SVO ordering has been posited to be basic for Polish (Szober 1963), and a study by Klemensiewicz (1949) found the majority of isolated sentences to conform to this ordering. However, other constituent orders are still common. Variations in word order have often been explained in terms of information structure (Szwedek 1976; Willim 1989), as well as constituent length (Siewerska 1993). However, a single word order can occur with various types of information structure (Eschenberg 1999). In such cases, prosody may provide a way to distinguish between the differing information structure types. Analyses which rely on textual data or fail to consider prosody will be unable to account for cases where one word order is used for differing information structures. This paper explores Polish constructions involving focus on a single constituent, narrow focus constructions. Not only word order but also intonation, particularly sentence stress, is considered. First, declarative sentences are examined. Then, wh-questions are turned to. Word order alone cannot be used to account for narrow focus in Polish; prosody is crucial. Failure to consider prosody will be seen to cause confusion between construction types. Differences in word order will be shown to be motivated by different types of presupposition, as proposed by Dryer (1996). A more restricted definition of focus type offered by Kiss (1998) will be seen to apply in this situation.

2. FOCUS AND SYNTACTIC CONSTITUENTS: NARROW FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS 2.1. Theoretical Background Analyses of Polish focus structure consistently refer to the syntactic structure of clauses (Szober 1963, Szwedek 1976; Willim 1989, Siewerska 1993, Eschenberg 1999). Lambrecht (1994) bases his theory of information structure on the syntactic notions of predicate, argument and sentence, which also have semantic underpinnings. His concepts of predicate focus, argument focus and sentence focus ‘evoke both differences in syntactic focus domains such as VP, NP, PP, S, and 23 C. Lee et al. Topic and Focus: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation, 23–40. © 2007 Springer.

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ARDIS ESCHENBERG

differences in the focus portions of the pragmatically structured proposition, i.e. predicate, argument, and sentence (222).’ This captures the generalization that focus, a primarily pragmatic concept, tends to be associated with constituents which are syntactic in nature. In this theory, the syntactic domain which expresses the focus component of the pragmatically structured proposition is the focus domain of the proposition. Thus, for sentence focus constructions, the focus domain is the sentence, for predicate focus constructions it is the VP, and for argument focus constructions it is a NP or PP. Focus constructions must specify not only the focus domain, but also presupposition, assertion, and, most obviously, focus. The presupposition is the set of lexico-grammatically evoked propositions the speaker assumes the hearer knows, believes, or will take for granted at the time of the utterance (52). The assertion is the proposition expressed by a sentence which the hearer is expected to know or believe or take for granted as a result of hearing the sentence uttered (52). The focus of the assertion is the semantic component of a pragmatically structured proposition whereby the assertion differs from the presupposition (213). The following provides an example of these concepts used in an argument focus construction (from Lambrecht 1994: 228, 5.11’) Sentence: Presupposition: Assertion: Focus: Focus domain:

My CAR broke down. “speaker’s x broke down” “x = car” “car” NP

This paper explores argument focus, which has the communicative function of identifying a referent. Argument focus has also been called ‘narrow focus’ (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997) and occurs when one constituent is focal. The term narrow focus captures the fact that this constituent may be not only an actual argument (subject, object, indirect object), but also an oblique NP or PP or a nucleus (V). Narrow focus can be further divided into marked and unmarked narrow focus where unmarked narrow focus occurs when the focal constituent occurs in the unmarked focus position in the sentence for the given language. For example, the final position2 is the unmarked focus position for English. Thus, as English is SVO, objects, which occur finally, are unmarked for narrow focus. Similarly, Polish has a final focus position which is unmarked. The following section will examine narrow focus in Polish, beginning with marked narrow focus on the subject and continuing to unmarked narrow focus on the object. 2.2. Narrow Focus in Polish Narrow focus can be elicited through the use of a wh-question calling for an argument filler. When replying to a wh-question asking about a subject, narrow focus is placed on the subject in the reply sentence. In such a response where the subject is focal, two possible replies are felicitous:

POLISH NARROW FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS

(1) Q: A: a. b.

25

Kto Ğpiewaá? ‘Who sang?’ PIOTR Ğpiewa-á -Ø. Peter.NOM sing-PAST-3Msg ĝpiewaá PIOTR. ‘PETER sang.’

Both SV (1a) and VS (1b) ordered sentences are felicitous replies placing narrow focus on the subject.3 In each case, the subject is prosodically marked, receiving intonational prominence. Similarly, an answer containing (unmarked) narrow focus on an object can be ordered in two ways, where in each case the object is intonationally prominent. (2) Q: A: a. b.

Co kupi-á-eĞ? ‘What did you buy?’ SAMOCHÓD kupi-á-em. car.ACC buy-PAST-1Msg Kupi-á-em SAMOCHÓD. ‘I bought a car.’

In (2a) the object is sentence initial and prominent, and in (2b) the object is sentence final and prominent. Although the above example (2) did not involve an overt subject, a similar situation arises when an overt subject is present (3). (3) Q: A: a. b. c. d.

Kogo Jan kocha? ‘Who does Jan love?’ Jan kocha MARI-ĉ. John.NOM love.3sg.PRES Maria-ACC Jan MARI-ĉ kocha. # MARI-ĉ kocha Jan. ? MARI-ĉ Jan kocha. ‘John loves MARY.’

Again, the object can occur in its canonical position, sentence finally (a). It can also occur pre-verbally after the subject (b), but is less felicitous sentence initially (c,d). Note that in each of the above, while the word order changes, the pitch accent placed upon the focal constituent is similar. This can be seen in a pitch curve, such as in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. Comparison of pitch curves for (a) SVO and (b) SOV ordered sentences.

In Figure 1(a), the final focal object begins at 6.6 seconds as the pitch curve rises and continues until the end of the sentence. In (b) the medial focal object again begins on the ascent of the curve and continues through its peak and descent. The final constituent in each case is lengthened. Therefore, the curve associated with the final object is lengthened compared to the medial object's curve. However, the general shape and range in hertz associated with the focal object is similar for both the final and medial focal objects. Error correction paradigms provide another way to elicit narrow focus constructions, yielding similar results to wh-question elicitation (4). (4) Q: A: a. b. c. d.

Jan kocha KasiĊ. ‘Jan loves Kasha.’ Nie, Jan kocha MARI-ĉ. No, John. NOM love.3sg.PRES Maria- ACC Nie, Jan MARI-ĉ kocha. ?Nie, MARI-ĉ kocha Jan. # Nie, MARI-ĉ Jan kocha. ‘No, John loves MARY.’

The error correction paradigm in (4) provides the same grammaticality judgments and intonational contours as the similar wh-question paradigm in (3). This can be seen in a comparison of the plots of the pitch curves as well (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Pitch curves of (a) wh-question and (b) error correction paradigm responses: Jan kocha MARIĉ.

POLISH NARROW FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS

27

Thus, for both error corrections and replies to wh-questions, variable word orderings exist in Polish. Subjects can occur initially or finally, and objects can occur pre-verbally or finally. In all cases the focal argument receives prosodic prominence. 3. PREVIOUS ANALYSES Variability in Polish word order is not a newly discovered phenomenon. Indeed, as with many Slavic languages, Polish has been studied extensively by Prague School linguists, who call the principles underlying the flexibility in word order the “functional sentence perspective (FSP).” To describe how information is distributed in a sentence, that is to give the information structure of sentences, Mathesius (1929: 127) divides the parts of an utterance into “theme” and “rheme.” The theme is what “one is talking about, the topic,” and the rheme is “what one says about it, the comment” (Danes & 1970: 134). These have also been explained as a distinction between new information, rheme, and given information, theme. Using the latter interpretation, Szwedek (1976: 51) states that it is “not true that order of sentence elements in Polish is free or is a matter of style,” but that it is “strictly determined” and “reflects the organization of the utterance according to the new/given information distribution which, of course, is dependent on the context and situation.” Thus, for the above, both the focal object and focal subject are predicted to come last due to this organization. Szwedek notes that canonically ordered, insitu focus (SVO) is more colloquial or conversational for focal subjects than focus final placement (VOS). He does not discuss SOV constructions. Variation in word-ordering has also been studied by linguists from other schools of thought. Willim (1989: 38) notes that subjects are often introduced into discourse in final position. She calls these VOS ordered sentences ‘presentational.’ However, she does not note which argument in these presentational sentences is prosodically prominent, and, thus, it is difficult to apply her analysis to the above. In her analysis, OSV ordering with a prosodically prominent object is a case of ‘topicalization,’ where the object is focal and non-presupposed (122-3). Like Szwedek, she also does not discuss SOV constructions. Neither of these analyses completely accounts for all of the variation seen in (1-4). 4. EFFECTS OF PRESUPPOSITION 4.1. Theoretical background Although the alternative felicitous word orderings in the above examples could be strictly equivalent variations, this is not necessarily so. Just as the above Polish wh-questions can be replied to using two different constructions, English whquestions can also be felicitously answered by two different constructions. Dryer (1996) notes that both simple focus (SVO) sentences and cleft sentences can serve as answers to English wh-questions (5, adapted from Dryer 1996: 486). .

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(5) Q: A: a. b.

Who saw John? MARY saw John. It was MARY who

saw John.

Both the simple focus focus sentence (5a) and the cleft sentence (5b) felicitously answer the wh-question. The speaker of the wh-question believes that someone saw John and is asking who that person is. Lambrecht (1994: 283) notes that the speakers of wh-questions typically presuppose that there is an answer which fulfills the question. He states that one does not normally ask questions one does not expect answers to. However, the replies to the wh-question do not necessarily contain this presupposition. Dryer (1996: 188), following Rochemont (1986: 130), claims that cleft constructions necessarily contain this pragmatic presupposition but simple focus sentences do not. In the above, (5b) necessarily presupposes that someone saw John but (5a) does not. The following provides an overview of Dryer’s arguments as relevant to this paper. The presuppositional content of the replies becomes apparent in situations where the question does not contain such a pragmatic presupposition. Example (6), adapted from Dryer (1996: 510), provides an example of a question where the speaker does not assume that someone did in fact see John.

(6) Q: A: a. b.

Did anyone see John? MARY saw John. #It was MARY that saw John.

Note that only the simple focus sentence (6a) is a felicitous reply to the question when there is no presupposition that someone saw John. The cleft cannot be used as a felicitous reply (6b) because it inherently presupposes that someone did see John, and the question does not presuppose this. Although the questions in (5) and (6) differ for presupposition, both activate the proposition ‘someone saw John.’ In (5), the first speaker believes this proposition to be true; s/he presupposes it. In (6), the speaker does not have such a belief. Therefore, the presupposition cannot be part of the common ground between the two speakers. When the presupposition of the answer is negated in the reply, the cleft cannot occur (7). (7) Q: A: a. b.

Who saw John? NOBODY saw John. #It was NOBODY that

saw John.

The answer (7a) does not presuppose that someone saw John. In fact, it asserts just the opposite, that no one saw John. The cleft cannot felicitously assert this due to the fact that cleft contains a presupposition that someone saw John (Rochemont

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1986: 130, Dryer 1996: 188). Thus, while clefts inherently contain pragmatic presupposition, simple focus sentence answers do not. 4.2. Effects of presupposition in Polish Turning to Polish, all the paradigms presented so far elicit replies which may contain pragmatic presupposition. For the wh-question, one argument of the presupposed proposition is not known, but assumed to exist. For the error correction paradigm, the argument is incorrectly assumed and must be corrected. (8) provides an example in Polish of a question which does not contain such a pragmatic presupposition. (8) Q: A: a. b. c.

Czy ktoĞ Ğpiewaá? ‘Did anyone sing?’ PIOTR Ğpiewa-á-Ø. Peter.NOM sing-PAST-3Msg #ĝpiewaá PIOTR. ĝPIEWAà Piotr. ‘Peter sang.’

Similar to (6), the question in (8) does not contain the presupposition that someone actually sang. The speaker of the question has activated the proposition ‘someone sang,’ but does not necessarily believe it to be true. The SV ordered sentence with focus on the subject is felicitous (8a). It contains but does not presuppose the proposition that someone sang. However, VS ordering is not grammatical if prosodic prominence is placed on the subject (8b). Behaving analogously to an English cleft construction, the VS construction presupposes that someone sang and cannot felicitously answer a question which does not contain such a presupposition. To use the VS construction would entail that the presupposition is part of the common ground between speakers, but the question shows that it is not. The VS ordering is felicitous if the sentential stress is perceived to be on the verb (8c). This, however, is not a case of narrow focus on the just the subject, but rather the entire sentence is in focus. Indeed, in a spectrogram, the pitch curve actually shows stress on both the verb and the subject in such a construction. While (8a) places narrow focus on Jan, (8c) places focus on the entire proposition. Both necessarily assert that someone sang as the question does not presuppose this. However, one focuses on the actor, entailing the event, and the other focuses on the entire event. Narrow focus on subjects can occur with either sentence initial or sentence final subjects (1). However, sentence final subjects contain pragmatic presupposition which their sentence initially placed counterparts do not (8). Focal objects have also been seen to occur both initially and finally (2). The following explores the effects of presupposition on object word order (9).

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(9) Q: A: a. b.

Czy Jan kocha kogoĞ? ‘Does John love anyone?’ Jan kocha MARI-ĉ. John.NOM love.PRES.3sg Mary-ACC #Jan MARI-ĉ kocha. ‘Jan loves MARY.’

In example (9), the reply to a question with object focus but no pragmatic presupposition felicitously occurs only with canonical ordering (SVO), as in (9a). SOV ordering, similar to a cleft construction in English cannot felicitously answer the question. Thus, it can be seen that non-canonical word orderings with prosodic prominence on an argument entail pragmatic presupposition. Canonically ordered SVO sentences with prosodic prominence on an argument do not entail such a presupposition. Without pragmatic presupposition, focus must occur in-situ, that is, the word ordering must be SVO. In all constructions, the focal constituent receives prosodic prominence. Examples such as (8) and (9) necessarily lead to a revision of Lambrecht’s formulations of assertion, presupposition and focus. Presupposition is not simply the set of lexico-grammatically evoked propositions the speaker assumes the hearer knows, believes, or will take for granted at the time of the utterance (Lambrecht 1994: 52). Rather, it is only the set of propositions that the speaker assumes the hearer believes at the time of the utterance. His definition of assertion as the proposition expressed by a sentence which the hearer is expected to know or believe or take for granted as a result of hearing the sentence uttered still holds true (52). However, the focus can no longer be defined as the semantic component of a pragmatically structured proposition whereby the assertion differs from the presupposition (213). Both (8a) and (8c) assert that someone sang and that Jan is the person who sang. Neither contain a presupposition about the beliefs of the hearer. However, the focus in these two constructions is not the same. In (8a), the focus is the argument ‘Jan’ and in (8c) it is the entire sentence. Focus is determined not by subtracting presupposition from assertion but rather by prosody. 5. IDENTIFICATIONAL AND INFORMATIONAL FOCUS 5.1. The phenomenon Somewhat similar to Dryer (1996), Kiss (1998) also distinguishes between two types of focus, ‘identificational focus’ and ‘informational focus,’ using presupposition. Identificational focus conveys the exhaustive subset of a set of contextually or situationally given elements for which the predicate phrase holds. Informational focus conveys new, non-presupposed information (245-6). Informational focus is not associated with movement, and, although all sentences contain information focus, not all contain identificational focus (246).

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31

Using tests developed by Szabolcsi (1981) and Farkas (p.c. to Kiss 1998), Kiss demonstrates that identificational focus expresses exhaustive identification in Hungarian pre-verbal focus constructions and in English cleft sentences. One test involves a pair of sentences where the first contains two coordinated objects and the second contains only one of the two objects. If the second sentence involves exhaustive identification, it cannot be a logical entailment of the first. That is, if the second sentence expresses exhaustive identification, it contradicts the first. The following provides such a test in Polish using both canonical and non-canonical word order. (10) A.

B:

(11) A:

B:

Jan kupi-á-Ø CHLEB i MASàO. Jan.NOM buy-PAST-3Msg bread.ACC and butter.ACC ‘Jan bought BREAD and BUTTER.’ On kupi-á-Ø MASàO. he buy-PAST-3Msg butter.ACC ‘He bought BUTTER.’ Jan CHLEB i MASàO kupi-á-Ø. Jan.NOM bread.ACC and butter.ACC buy-PAST-3Msg ‘It was BREAD and BUTTER Jan bought.’ On MASàO kupi-á-Ø. He butter.ACC buy-PAST-3Msg ‘It was BUTTER he bought.’

While (10B) is a logical consequence of (10A), (11B) is not a logical consequence of (11A). (11B) contradicts (11A) as (11B) asserts an exhaustive set which is not equal to the exhaustive set of (11A). Thus, SOV sentences in Polish are instances of identificational focus and SVO sentences are instances of informational focus. Kiss’s prediction that informational focus is not associated with movement (or noncanonical word ordering) is thus upheld. Kiss also shows that the identificational focus position in Hungarian is not available for certain types of constituents, such as ‘also’ phrases, ‘even’ phrases and the existential quantifiers ‘somebody/something’ (251). This also proves true for pre-verbal focal objects in Polish (12). (12) a.

b.

c.

.

#Jan TEĩ SWETR kupi-á-Ø. Jan.NOM also sweater.ACC buy-PAST-3Msg *‘It was ALSO A SWEATER Jan bought.’ #Jan NAWET SWETR kupi-á-Ø. Jan.NOM even sweater.ACC buy-PAST-3Msg *‘It was EVEN A SWEATER Jan bought.’ #Jan COĝ kupi-á-Ø. Jan.NOM something.ACC buy-PAST-3Msg *‘It was SOMETHING Jan bought.’

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The preverbal focal object placement is not felicitous for ‘also’ phrases (12a), ‘even’ phrases (12b) and an existential quantifier (12c). All of these constructions are possible for final objects (13). (13) a.

b.

c.

Jan kupi-á-Ø TEĩ SWETR. Jan.NOM buy-PAST-3Msg also sweater.ACC ‘4Jan bought ALSO A SWEATER.’ Jan kupi-á-Ø NAWET SWETR . Jan.NOM buy-PAST-3Msg even sweater.ACC ‘Jan bought EVEN A SWEATER.’ Jan kupi-á-Ø COĝ. Jan.NOM buy-PAST-3Msg something.ACC ‘Jan bought SOMETHING.’

Whereas focal objects placed non-canonically were not felicitous for such phrases, focal objects in-situ (clause final) are felicitous for ‘also’ phrases (13a), ‘even’ phrases (13b), and an existential quantifier (13c). Thus, the identificational focus constructions are not felicitous, but the informational focus constructions, which are not associated with movement, are felicitous in these examples. In the analyses in sections 2 and 4, both focal subjects and objects were found to behave in similar ways based on in-situ versus non-canonical word ordering and focus. Although Kiss does not explore subjects, a thorough investigation of the Polish phenomena presented thus far requires such an examination. The following presents sentences similar to (12, 13) involving focal subjects rather than focal objects. (14) a. a’. b. b’. c. c’.

MARIA TEĩ Ğpiewa-á-a. Maria.NOM also sing-PAST-3Fsg ĝpiewaáa TEĩ MARIA. ‘MARIA ALSO sang.’ NAWET JAN Ğpiewa-á-Ø. even Jan.NOM sing-PAST-3Msg ĝpiewaá NAWET JAN. ‘EVEN JAN sang.’ #KTOĝ Ğpiewa-á-Ø. someone.NOM sing-PAST-3Msg ĝpiewaá KTOĝ. ‘SOMEONE sang.’

‘Also’ phrases (14a, 14a’) and ‘even’ phrases (14b, 14b’) are felicitous for focal subjects regardless of whether the subject is placed initially or finally. Although in such constructions focal objects could only occur in the canonical position of informational focus (13), focal subjects can occur in canonical or non-canonical positions. However, focal existential quantifiers are not felicitous in initial position (14c) but are felicitous in final position (14c’).

POLISH NARROW FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS

33

Although the felicity judgements of (14c, 14c’) seem very odd considering the results seen earlier, Kiss notes that existential quantifiers cannot function as either identificational or informational focus. Thus, (14c’) must be a different type of construction; it cannot be an identificationally focused final subject as in (1b). Indeed, it is a presentative with a pitch accent on the introduced element ktoĞ. This is an example of the VOS ordered sentences Willim (1989: 38) refers to. These constructions introduce a new element rather than providing the contrastive reading (section 3) of identificational focus due to exhaustive identification. Here, rather than exhaustive identification, a constituent is introduced. Similarly, the non-canonically ordered subjects in (14a’) and (b’) are not examples of identificational focus, but rather presentatives. In the earlier examples (1, 2, 3, 4) informational focus and identificational focus constituents have similar pitch accents but different word orderings. This is confirmed by both native speaker judgment and spectrographic analysis (figure 1). However, speakers do not judge the SV ordered and VS ordered sentences in (14) to have the same pitch accents. Whereas speakers state that in (14a) and (14b) the strongest pitch accent is on the adverb (and a lesser pitch accent occurs on the noun4), they consistently judge (14a’) and (14b’) to place the strongest pitch accent on the noun (and a lesser pitch accent on the adverb). Spectrographic analysis confirms speaker judgments of prosodic prominence (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Pitch curves of (14a) and (14a’), ‘also’ phrases with prosodically prominent subjects.

In Figure 3, the highest points in the pitch curve differ for (a) and (b). In (a), the highest point is over ‘also,’ but in (b) it is over ‘Maria.’ This confirms native speaker judgements. Identificational focus with a subject noun phrase results in prosodic prominence on the adverb in ‘also’ and ‘even’ phrases. Speakers also judge the strongest pitch accent to be on the adverb in such constructions when the object is focal (13).

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That (14a’) and (14b’) are not identificational focus is further supported by the fact that their pitch curves differ from clear examples of subject identicational focus (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Comparison of pitch curves for a final focal subject (a) and presentational final subject (b).

Whereas Maria begins when the pitch curve is already mid-ascent (4.5 sec.) in the focal subject construction (a), it begins on the lowest point of the pitch curve (7.96 sec.) in the presentative construction. That is, a local minimum occurs in the pitch curve well before the subject in (a) but coincides with the subject in (b). The fact that the pitch curves are not identical is due to the fact that the VS sentences in (14) are not instances of identificational focus, but rather are presentational constructions. Thus, careful analysis of prosody can distinguish between sentence final identificational focus subjects and sentence final presentational subjects. Thus, in Kiss’ analysis, SVO and SVO sentences are examples of informational focus, while SOV and VOS sentences are instances of identificational focus. Additionally, VOS sentences can occur as sentences involving introduction of a constituent. 5.2. Identificational focus versus focus with pragmatic presupposition Although both Dryer’s and Kiss’ analyses are able to distinguish between the variations found in section 2, they are not necessarily identical. Both concur that informational focus (simple focus in Dryer’s terms) conveys non-presupposed information. However, whereas Dryer explicitly states that clefts contain pragmatic presupposition that involves belief and not simply activation, Kiss states that identificational focus may convey contextually or environmentally given elements. Crucially for these constructions, Dryer examines the non-focus portion of the sentence, while Kiss considers the focal portion. That is, Dryer concentrates on what is presupposed by the sentence while Kiss considers what is asserted. While Dryer

POLISH NARROW FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS

35

notes that a cleft necessarily presupposes a proposition, Kiss notes that identificational focus asserts all the variables that fulfil this proposition. For example, for the sentence ‘it is Jan that sang,’ Dryer’s analysis shows that this construction presupposes the proposition that someone sang. Kiss’ analysis shows that Jan is the only person who sang. Thus, their insights are complimentary. Together, they yield a larger picture of this construction, giving both its presupposition and assertion. However, identificational focus does not always lead to an exhaustive set of variables cross-linguistically. In languages such as Finnish, Kiss notes that identificational focus may or may not be exhaustive (1998: 271). Thus, ultimately, a [+exhaustive] feature must be noted to truly account for the phenomenon of identificational focus (or focus with presupposition) in Polish. 6. RELATED PHENOMENON 6.1. Clitic pronouns Further evidence supporting a distinction between identificational and informational focus can be found in the Polish pronoun system. Polish object (accusative case) pronouns have two forms for the second person singular. These are the long form ciebie and the short form ciĊ. Ciebie is used to give emphasis, to point out that it is only you of all the possible people. This coincides with Kiss' identificational focus, where the one person from a group is being pointed out. (15) a.

b.

c. d.

Ewa kocha ciĊ. Ewa.NOM loves you.ACC ‘Ewa loves you.’ Ewa (TYLKO) CIEBIE kocha. Ewa.NOM only you.ACC loves ‘Ewa loves (ONLY) YOU.’ #Ewa ciĊ kocha. #Ewa kocha (TYLKO) CIEBIE.

Accordingly, use of ciebie coincides with the structure and intonation used for identificational focus. It is placed in non-canonical position, pre-verbally, and given prosodic stress (15b). It is less felicitous in the canonical (final) object position reserved for informational focus (15d). Conversely, the non-presupposed ciĊ occurs most felicitously in canonical object position (15a) and less felicitously pre-verbally (15c). This phenomenon further supports the above analysis of identificational versus informational focus in Polish.

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6.2. Wh-questions In the literature, wh-questions are often assumed to be a type of narrow focus with properties similar to non-wh focus. For example, Kiss (1998: 249) states that for Hungarian, a wh-phrase other than ‘why’ is ‘always placed in the preverbal identificational focus position…’ However, she notes that wh-questions can be answered by identificational or informational focus. This leads to an ambiguity as to whether wh-question words are a type of identificational focus or not. Polish, however, provides clear evidence that wh-focus is not the same as identificational focus in a declarative (16). (16) a.

b. c.

KTO umar-á-Ø? who.NOM die-PAST-3Msg ‘Who died?’ *Umar-á-Ø KTO? UMAR-à-Ø kto? ‘Did anyone die?’

In (16a), the felicitous wh-question, the subject is both initial and focal. This is similar to the informational focus position of a subject (14a,b). It is unlike identificational focus subjects, which have been seen to occur finally (8). In (16b) the focal subject is final and the resulting sentence is ungrammatical. Example (16c) shows that a ‘wh’ subject can occur finally, but only when it is not prosodically prominent, or focal. In such a case, it also does not receive a wh-reading. Unlike in Hungarian, Polish focal wh-subjects are clearly not in the identificational focus position. The fact that (16c) does not have a wh-reading can be seen by looking at its felicitous answers: (17) Q: A: A’: A”: A’”: A””:

UMAR-à-Ø kto? MARIA umar-á-a. Maria.NOM die-PAST-3Fsg UMAR-à-A Maria. #Umar-á-a MARIA.

‘Maria died.’ ?MARIA. ‘Mary.’ Nie. ‘No.’

Only answers which do not presuppose that someone did indeed die are felicitous, such as (A) with canonical order and prosodic prominence on the subject (informational focus). (A”), an example of identificational focus, has the pragmatic presupposition that someone died and is not grammatical. The answer ‘no’ (A””) is a felicitous reply here but would not be for the wh-question ‘who sang?’ This

POLISH NARROW FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS

37

paradigm proves different from an actual wh-question, such as (1), and, rather, is similar to a question involving an indefinite pronoun (8). This focal whquestion/ non-focal indefinite pronoun patterning can also be seen in Siouan languages such as Omaha and Lakhota where words which function as wh-words when focal act as indefinites when non-focal. Just as focal wh-subjects occur initially (16), focal wh-objects also occur initially (18): (18) a. b. c.

CO Jan kupi-á-Ø? What.ACC Jan.NOM buy-PAST-3Msg *Jan kupi-á- Ø CO? ‘What did you buy?’ KUPI-à-Eĝ co? buy-PAST-2Msg what.ACC ‘Did you buy anything?’

Similar to wh-subjects, wh-objects must occur initially and be prosodically accented to receive a wh-reading (18a). Wh-objects in final position, which is the canonical, informational focus position for non-wh-objects, cannot receive prosodic prominence or a wh-word reading (18b). The wh-object word can occur finally but in this case it is not prosodically prominent and functions as an indefinite and not a wh-word (18c). Again, it can be seen that the grammatical wh-word placement is not equivalent to the identificational focus position. Identificational focus objects are placed pre-verbally but after the subject, SOV, as in (11). Here, the wh-word is before the subject, WHSV, (18a). Thus, it can be seen that wh-focus differs from non-wh-focus. It requires initial position in the sentence, regardless of what type of argument the wh-word is. Prosody importantly distinguishes grammatical and ungrammatical final placement of a wh-word. Even grammatical sentence-final occurrence of a wh-word does not yield a wh-reading and does not have prosodic prominence (focus) on the wh-word. 7. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION Word order and prosody intertwine to create different focus constructions in Polish. An analysis based on only one or the other fails, as both are integral to Polish focus. For narrow focus constructions, when word order differs, focal constituents can have similar pitch accents (1, 2, Figure 1). In other constructions, the same word order may involve differing prosody based on focus type (14). Failing to consider prosody as well as word order results in an inability to draw relevant conclusions about the word order felicitousness (8, 11, 14). Also, it has been seen that narrow focus in Polish involves a finer distinction than provided by a theory such as Lambrecht (1994), which is based on syntactic constituenthood and semantic role. Under Lambrecht's theory, different word orderings seem interchangeable (1,2). However, these differing word orderings function in distinct ways (8, 9). In order to distinguish between constructions which .

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differ in word order but not prosodically prominent constituent (for example, 1a and 1b), Dryer’s notion of presupposition proves valuable (8, 9). Kiss’ definition of identificational focus proves equally applicable (10,11). In both cases, a stipulation that the construction provides exhaustive identification needs to be integrated. In addition to refining the concept of narrow focus to include presupposition, Kiss’ analysis additionally provides that movement is not associated with informational focus. Supporting this, in Polish informational focus occurs in-situ (10, 14), while identificational focus is associated with non-canonical position (11, 13). Use of Polish clitics versus full pronouns provides additional evidence for the distinction between informational and identificational focus (15). However, Kiss’ observation that wh-words in Hungarian tend to occur in the identificational focus position does not hold for Polish. A different type of focus, wh-word focus behaves differently than focus in declaratives. Wh-word focus in wh-questions entails placing the wh-word in initial position and giving it prosodic prominence. This is true regardless of the argument type of the wh-word. Again, accounting for prosody proved crucial in that a non-prosodically prominent wh-word can occur sentence finally. However, in this case, an indefinite and not a wh-reading is attained. Thus, Polish, as a flexible word order language, provides an ideal testing ground for theories of focus. Just examining prosodic accent on single constituents leads to evidence for identificational focus, informational focus, wh-question focus, and presentatives. Word order and/or prosody can distinguish each; there are no overlaps where two constructions are homophonous and only distinguishable through context. Positing a focus position applicable regardless of semanticosyntactic roles proves valid for wh-words, but not for other forms of narrow focus. The position of constituents involved in presentatives, informational focus and identificational focus is best explained as in-situ versus non-canonical position, rather than as fixed positions. Table 1 provides a summary of the word orders and prosody involved for the constructions examined in this paper.

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39

Table 1. Different focus constructions in Polish and their syntactico-prosodic realization

Focus Type: Narrow focus on subject, informational focus Narrow focus on subject, Identificational focus

Polish manifestation: SV(O)

Presentative subject construction

V(O)S, pitch curve minimum at the beginning of S SVO

Narrow focus on object, informational focus

V(O)S, pitch curve minimum before the beginning of S

Narrow focus on object, Identificational focus

SOV

wh-question focus

WH(S)V(O)

Ardis Eschenberg University at Buffalo Nebraska Indian Community College 8. NOTES 1 I would like to thank Janina Aniszewska, Jolanta àapat, Maágorzata àapat, Czesáaw Prokopczyk, and Piotr Szewczyk, and for their patience, teaching and insight into the Polish language. Any mistakes here are the responsibility of the author, but all the truth obtained is due to the kindness of these consultants. I would also like to thank Daniel Büring for his insightful comments. 2 Final position in the core, not the clause, where the core consists of the predicate and its arguments. 3 Bold underline represents prosodically accented constituent. Small caps are used to indicate sentence stress in sample sentences. 4 The stronger pitch accent is indicated by bold small caps, while the lesser is in small caps.

9. REFERENCES Daneš, FrantiĞek. “One instance of Prague school methodology: functional analysis of utterance and text.” In Paul L. Garvin (ed.), Method and Theory in Linguistics. Paris: Mouton & Co, 1970. Dryer, Matthew. “Focus, pragmatic presupposition, and activated propositions.” Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996): 475-523. Eschenberg, Ardis. Focus in Polish. M.A. thesis. University at Buffalo, 1999. Kiss, Katalin. “Identificational versus information focus.” Language 74.2 (June 1998): 245-273. Klemensiewicz, Zbigniew. Lokalizacja podmiotu i orzeczenia w zdaniach izolowanych. Biuletyn PTJ 9 (1949): 8-19. Lambrecht, Knud. Information Structure and Sentence Form: a theory of topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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40

ARDIS ESCHENBERG

Mathesius, Vilem. Functional linguistics. In M. Mayenova, ed., O spojnosci tekstu, pp. 121-42. Warsaw: 1987. Siewierska, Anna. “Syntactic weight vs. information structure and word order variation in Polish.” Journal of Linguistics 29.2 (1993): 233-266. Szabolcsi, Anna. “The semantics of topic-focus articulation.” In Jan Groenendijk, Theo Janssen, and Martin Stokhof (eds.), Formal methods in the study of language, pp. 513-41. Amsterdam: Matematisch Centrum, 1981. Szober, Stanislaw. Gramatyka jĊzyka polskiego. Warsaw: PWN, 1963. Szwedek, Aleksander. Word Order, Sentence Stress and Reference in English and Polish. Edmunton: Linguistic Research, Inc, 1976. Van Valin, Robert and Randy LaPolla. 1997. Syntax: Structure, meaning and function. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Willim, Ewa. On word order: a government binding study of English and Polish. Krakow: Uniwersytet Jagellonski, 1989.

DAVID GIL

INTONATION AND THEMATIC ROLES IN RIAU INDONESIAN*

1. INTRODUCTION What kinds of meanings may be expressed by intonation? There is general agreement that intonation may convey emotions, and, related to this, speakers’ attitudes towards the propositional content of utterances. It is also well-known that certain intonation contours may be associated with specific speech acts such as questions. Moreover, as reflected by the title of this volume, intonation may encode various pragmatic functions such as topic and focus. Another, rather more indirect way in which intonation may express meanings is via its relationship to syntactic structure. In general, intonation contours parse an utterance into intonation groups, which correspond closely, albeit not always perfectly, to syntactic constituents. However, in many cases, a given string of words may be associated with two or more different constituent structures, each of which in turn is associated with a different meaning. In such cases, the different syntactic structures and corresponding meanings may be reflected by different intonation groups. Nevertheless, the range of meanings expressible by intonation is highly constrained. For example, no language has intonation contours which, when applied to any sentence, add meanings such as past tense, ‘in the rain’, or ‘because John came to the party’. Thus, a major goal of any theory of intonation must be to determine the set of meanings potentially encodable by intonation in one or more human languages. This paper contributes to the above goal through the examination of one specific semantic domain, namely thematic roles: actor, undergoer, goal and the like. Most commonly, thematic roles are encoded with various morphosyntactic features, typically some combination of word order, case marking and verbal agreement. One might wonder whether there are any languages in which thematic roles can also be expressed by means of intonation. This paper addresses the question through an empirical examination of intonation and thematic roles in one particular language, namely the Riau dialect of Indonesian. The results of the study are negative: no evidence is found that might point towards any correlation between intonation and thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. This, in turn, is suggested to lend greater cogency

41 C. Lee et al. Topic and Focus: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation, 41–68. © 2007 Springer.

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to the question whether in fact it is possible in any language for thematic roles to be encoded by intonation. 2. THE STATE OF THE ART What is known with regard to the relationship between intonation and thematic roles? At present, I am not familiar with a single study in the linguistic literature showing the existence of a language in which intonation can be used to encode thematic roles. An email query on the LINGTYP Discussion List (22 March 2001) seeking references to such studies produced no clear cases. However, the email query did reveal the presence of a common belief that languages in which intonation may distinguish between thematic roles “ought to” exist; some potential examples that were suggested include Hebrew, Persian, Russian and Italian. In Hebrew, for example, if a number of morphosyntactic variables are set right, it is possible to construct sentences exhibiting actor-undergoer ambiguities, such as the following: (1)

Kelev radaf yeled chase:PST:3:SG:M child:M dog:M (i) ‘A dog chased a boy’ (ii) ‘A boy chased a dog’

Speakers of Hebrew occasionally claim that the two meanings can be distinguished by intonation. But when asked how, they do not provide systematic answers. In general, the most readily available interpretation is that in which the actor precedes the undergoer, as in (1/i) above. In order to obtain the less readily available interpretation, that in (1/ii), speakers of Hebrew sometimes offer a distinctive intonation contour, involving greater pitch variation and greater duration for certain syllables. However, when questioned, they will generally concede that even with the distinctive intonation contour, the sentence can also be understood as in (1/i); and then they will often admit that even with an ordinary intonation contour, the sentence can also be understood as in (1/ii). Similar facts are reported also for Persian and other Middle-Eastern languages by Stilo (1984, personal communication). As suggested by the above, there would seem to be a rather striking mismatch between the widespread conviction that intonation can be used to differentiate between thematic roles, and the absence of any detailed empirical studies testing the veracity of such claims. To the best of my knowledge, then, this paper represents the first attempt to subject the possible relationship between intonation and thematic roles to systematic empirical investigation. 3. RIAU INDONESIAN Riau Indonesian is the variety of Indonesian spoken in informal situations by the inhabitants of Riau province in east-central Sumatra. Riau Indonesian is quite

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different from Standard Indonesian, familiar to many general linguists from a substantial descriptive and theoretical literature.1 One of the most salient characteristics of Riau Indonesian is the absence of obligatory morphosyntactic coding for a wide range of categories which play a central role in the grammars of many other languages. In particular, there is no obligatory morphosyntactic device for distinguishing thematic roles: word order is flexible, and there is no case-marking or morphological agreement. Thus, in a simple clause, a given expression denoting a participant in an activity could bear any thematic role whatsoever with respect to that activity: it could be the actor or the undergoer, or it could stand in any other semantic relationship that makes sense in the given context. Indeed, it is only context that enables the hearer of such utterances to interpret them in appropriate ways. Below are some examples of Riau Indonesian sentences illustrating thematic role indeterminacy. These examples, and all the Riau Indonesian examples that follow in this paper, are from a corpus of naturalistic texts. As abstract sentences, each of the following examples is indeterminate with respect to thematic roles; however, as actual utterances, each is associated with a specific interpretation, as indicated in the translation. Since the interpretation of the utterance is heavily context-dependent, the context is also indicated, right above the translation, within square brackets.2 (2a)

Beli aku laser, ‘kan laser Q buy1:SG [Contemplating a shopping trip] ‘I’ll buy a laser, right’

(b)

Beli nasi goreng aku buyrice fry 1:SG [Group of people decide they want to pay cards; somebody tells speaker to go out and buy some; speaker objects on the grounds that it’s somebody else’s turn to go out] ‘I bought the fried rice’

(3a)

Saya pakai kaca mata, Vid use glass eye FAM|David 1:SG [Speaker putting on a new pair of glasses] ‘I’m wearing my glasses, David’

(b)

Honda pakai abang Elly motorcycle use elder.brother Elly [Interlocutor tells speaker to go and buy food; speaker doesn’t budge; interlocutor asks speaker why he isn’t going; speaker explains] ‘Elly’s using the motorcycle’

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(4a)

Si

Pai aku usir Pai 1:SG send.away [Complaining about his younger brother Pai, who won’t have anything to do with him] ‘Pai sent me away’ PERS

(b)

Abang elder.brother

dia 3

sendiri one-AG-stand

dia 3

usir send.away [Complaining about his younger brother Pai, who won’t have anything to do with him] ‘His very own brother he sent away’ In each of the above examples, a word denoting an activity is in boldface, and its two associated participants are in italics. In (2) the activity word occurs before its two participants, in (3) it occurs between them, and in (4) it occurs after them both. Within each of the three sentence pairs, the activity word is the same; however, the actor precedes the undergoer in the first sentence while following it in the second sentence. Thus, in (2a) actor aku ‘I’ precedes undergoer laser ‘laser’ while in (2b) actor aku ‘I’ follows undergoer nasi goreng ‘fried rice’; in (3a) actor saya ‘I’ precedes undergoer kaca mata ‘glasses’ while in (3b) actor abang Elly ‘Elly’ follows undergoer Honda ‘motorcycle’; and in (4a) actor si Pai ‘Pai’ precedes undergoer aku ‘I’ while in (4b) actor dia ‘he’ follows undergoer abang dia sendiri ‘his very own brother’. Thus, each of the three sentence pairs constitutes a near minimal pair illustrating the indeterminacy of thematic role assignment. Together, sentences (2) - (4) show that in a basic sentence consisting of activity, actor and undergoer, these three items may occur in any of the six possible orders. Similar facts obtain also with respect to other thematic roles. Examples such as the above occur frequently in the corpus; other similar examples are cited in Gil (1994:181, 1999:191-193, 2002b:246-249). Thus, sentences such as these point towards the conclusion that in Riau Indonesian, grammar does not provide any obligatory grammatical means for distinguishing between thematic roles.3 Given the kind of indeterminacy present in examples such as the above, it is only natural to wonder whether intonation might play a role in differentiating between various interpretations. In fact, practically every time I have presented examples such as the above in lectures, somebody in the audience has asked whether it isn’t perhaps the case that different interpretations involving different assignments of thematic roles might be distinguishable by means of different intonation contours. However, the answer to this question is a simple, straightforward ‘no’: intonation does not and cannot differentiate between different assignments of thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. Thus, for example, in sentences such as those in (2) - (4), there are no systematic differences between the intonation contours of the (a) sentences, in

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45

which the actor precedes the undergoer, and the (b) sentences, in which the actor follows the undergoer. Here the matter should rest, but unfortunately it does not always do so. Rather, many scholars continue to hold steadfast to the belief that intonation must distinguish thematic roles in Riau Indonesian, and in other varieties of Malay/ Indonesian. (Some of the possible reasons behind the persistence of this belief are discussed in Gil 2003). However, not a single one of these scholars, when challenged, has been able to formulate an explicit description of exactly how intonation can be used to distinguish thematic roles, and to the best of my knowledge, no such account appears anywhere in the linguistic literature on Malay/ Indonesian. The closest to an explicit proposal that I have come across is perhaps the following. (The claim is stated in my own words, and constitutes my interpretation of one or two suggestions made by colleagues in informal discussions.) In general, in Riau Indonesian, there is a significant tendency for undergoers to follow activities, as in (2) and (3a) above. Accordingly, when undergoers precede activities, as in (3b) and (4), this unusual word order is signalled by a pause occurring right after the undergoer. Within a generative framework involving movement, this generalization might be restated as follows: when a undergoer is fronted to a higher position in the clause, a pause occurs between it and the clause from which it was extracted. This “pause proposal” at least constitutes an explicit hypothesis which can be examined in face of the facts. But as shown in Section 6 below, it is clearly false.4 4. TWO HYPOTHESES So what needs to done in order to finally put such claims to rest? Three methods suggest themselves. First, one might use elicitation, and ask native speakers for their judgements of sentences exhibiting various possible pairings of intonation contours and thematic roles. Secondly, one might construct experiments, which would present native speakers with various tasks requiring them to make use of intonational cues in order to distinguish thematic roles. Thirdly, one might study naturalistic corpora, and search for possible correlations between intonation contours and thematic roles. While each of these three methods is in principle equally valid, this study chooses to make use of the third method, involving naturalistic corpora. The reasons for this choice are entirely practical. On the one hand, elicitation and experiments are particularly problematical in the study of Riau Indonesian. As a regional colloquial language variety, Riau Indonesian stands in a basilect-to-acrolect relationship with Standard Indonesian. Put a speaker of Riau Indonesian in what is perceived to be a learnèd setting such as an elicitation session or a controlled experiment, and he or she is likely to switch to Standard Indonesian, no matter how clearly and repeatedly the investigator has asked the speaker to use “ordinary language”, that is to say, Riau Indonesian. On the other hand, in Riau Indonesian an extensive naturalistic corpus is available, containing recordings of speech from many different speakers in a variety of settings, including narrative and

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conversational. Accordingly, the present study makes use of the third method, examining a naturalistic corpus for possible correlations between intonation contours and thematic roles. Two specific hypotheses are examined: (5a)

Hypothesis A (existential): For each sentence, there exists at least one intonation contour which renders the sentence undifferentiated with respect to thematic roles.

(b)

Hypothesis B (universal): For each sentence, every available intonation contour renders the sentence undifferentiated with respect to thematic roles.

Both of the above hypotheses negate the claim that intonation distinguishes between thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. However, the second hypothesis is stronger than the first: one can envisage a state of affairs in which the first hypothesis holds but the second one fails, but not vice versa. As we shall see in Section 6 below, the naturalistic corpus provides overwhelming support for the weaker Hypothesis A, and substantial support for the stronger Hypothesis B. Accordingly, the results of this study lead to the conclusion that intonation does not differentiate thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. 5. BASIC SUPRASEGMENTAL PATTERNS To be in a position to examine the Riau Indonesian naturalistic corpus for possible correlations between intonation contours and thematic roles, it is first necessary to describe the basic suprasegmental patterns and establish an inventory of the major intonation contours available in the language. 5.1. Word Structure In Riau Indonesian, as in most other languages, intonation contours interact with word structure; hence, before going any further, it is first necessary to develop a clear picture of word structure in Riau Indonesian. Riau Indonesian is a strongly isolating language, with no inflectional morphology, little derivational morphology and little compounding. However, unlike the stereotypical isolating languages of mainland Southeast Asia, the typical or canonical word in Riau Indonesian is bisyllabic.

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The bisyllabic nature of the Riau Indonesian word raises the issue of word stress. As observed by Tadmor (1999, 2000), word stress in Malay and Indonesian presents a thorny problem, with different scholars often providing conflicting descriptions. Thus, for example, van Ophuijsen (1915) claims that stress is on the final syllable, Amran (1984:60) maintains that it is on the penultimate, while Kähler (1956:37) asserts that it is either on the final syllable (if the penultimate is a schwa) or on the penultimate (in all other cases). One possible source for these discrepancies might be that different scholars are unwittingly describing different regional and/or social varieties of Malay / Indonesian. Thus, Tadmor (1999, 2000) shows a tendency for word stress in Malay / Indonesian to progress from final, in the western parts of the archipelago, towards penultimate, in the eastern regions, reflecting a similar progression in the local languages, which often constitute substrates for the regional varieties of Malay/ Indonesian. Another possible source for these inconsistencies could well be that Malay/ Indonesian has no word stress. In such a case, the patterns that are being described may be present in the investigator’s ear but not in the language itself, as is suggested by Goedemans and van Zanten (to appear). Alternatively, the patterns described may be phonetically real, but pertaining not to word stress but rather to intonational prominence, as is in fact suggested in the continuation of this section. Indeed, for Riau Indonesian, I am not familiar with any positive evidence supporting the existence of a privileged syllable which could be characterized as the locus of word stress. In this sense, then, Riau Indonesian may be appropriately characterized as lacking word stress. Nevertheless, while Riau Indonesian words lack a privileged syllable, there is strong evidence for the presence of a privileged bisyllabic unit, which may be referred to as the core foot. As represented in (6) below, the core foot (F) consists of two syllables (S), each of which consists in turn of an onset (O) plus a rhyme (R): The Core Foot: F

(6)

S

ke

di

S

O

R

O

R

m

a

k

an

m

i

p

i

t

ing

b

e

l

i

c

at

‘eat’ ‘noodles’ ‘crab’ kan

‘buy’ ‘paint’

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48

Most words, such as makan ‘eat’, are bisyllabic and thus coextensive with most or all of the core foot. A few shorter monosyllabic words, such as mi ‘noodles’, occupy only the second syllable of the foot, while a small number of longer words, such as kepiting ‘crab’, occupy the entirety of the core foot plus additional space preceding it. Clitics, when present, invariably occur outside of the core foot, either after it, for example the end-point marker -kan in belikan ‘buy’, or before it, for example the undergoer marker di- in dicat ‘paint’. The core foot is thus what underlies the basic bisyllabic nature of Riau Indonesian words. However, the existence of the core foot is also supported by a number of additional independent phenomena. One such phenomenon involves patterns of reduction in fast connected speech. Typically, as shown in (7) below, material belonging to the core foot is retained, while preceding material may undergo partial or complete deletion: Reduction in Fast Connected Speech: F

(7)

S

S

O

R

O

R

p

s

a

w

at

→

[psawat] ~ [sawat] ‘airplane’

tang

k

e

r

ang

→

[taNkeraN] ~[NkeraN] ~ [keraN] ‘[place name]’

Whereas the above phenomenon involves the contraction of overly long words, a number of others involve the expansion of words that are too short to fill the core foot. One such phenomenon pertains to the personal marker si, which marks expressions as constituting names of people:

INTONATION AND THEMATIC ROLES IN RIAU INDONESIAN

49

The Personal Marker “si” in Non-Vocative Expressions: F

(8)

S

S

O

R

O

R

t

o

p

an

→

[sitopan]~[stopan]~[topan] ‘[name]’

s

i

p

an

→

[sipan], *[span], *[pan] ‘[name]’

si

Before bisyllabic names, such as Topan, the personal marker si is optional, and, when present, it may undergo reduction of the kind exemplified in (7); this is shown in the first line underneath the tree diagram in (8) above. However, names also possess a monosyllabic familiar form derived by truncation; for example Pan from Topan.5 Often, this form is used vocatively; however, it is also used in non-vocative functions, in which case the use of the personal marker si is obligatory; this is shown in the second line in (8). Thus, one of the functions of the personal marker si is to expand the monosyllabic familiar form of the name to fill the core foot. A similar phenomenon involves words with what might be characterized as a defective penultimate rhyme. For this purpose it is necessary to acknowledge the existence of two subdialects of Riau Indonesian, which may be referred to as the schwa dialect and the schwaless dialect respectively. In the former dialect, the schwa ´ is part of the phonemic inventory, though even in this dialect, it never occurs in the final syllable. Of interest here however is the second, or schwaless dialect, in which there is no phonemic schwa. Consider the way in which a word containing a schwa in the schwa dialect, [b ´sar] ‘big’, is realized in the schwaless dialect: Spreading and Epenthesis: F

(9)

S O

b

S R

O

s

R

ar

→ [bs`ar] ~ [b´sar] ~ [besar] ‘big’

As shown above, realizations of the word in question involve a syllabic [ s` ´] (as evidenced by the ways in which native speakers parse the sequence into syllables), a

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phonetic schwa [´], or a full mid-high front vowel [e] (phonetically identical to the mid-high front vowel phoneme). This range of possibilities can be most appropriately accounted for by positing a segmental melody bsar occupying the core foot as per (9) above, with an empty penultimate rhyme position which is subsequently filled either by backward spreading of the sibilant s or by epenthesis of a schwa or full vowel. Thus, these phonological processes, spreading and epenthesis, beef up an impoverished segmental melody, thereby enabling the word to extend across the entire core foot. An analogous though somewhat less systematic phenomenon involves loan words which, in the source language, are monosyllabic: Expansion of Monosyllabic Loan Words: F

(10)

S O

S R

O

R

o g

o

l

om

< Dutch oom ‘uncle’

op

< English golf

As suggested by the above examples, such monosyllabic words are often expanded to form bisyllabic words in Riau Indonesian, though the strategies by which such expansion is achieved are idiosyncratic and unpredictable. However, a particular subclass of such cases, in the schwaless subdialect, make use of the same processes of spreading and epenthesis that apply, as in (9) above, to native words: (11)

Expansion of Monosyllabic Loan Words through Spreading and Epenthesis: F

S

S

O

R

O

R

s

(n)

tr

um

m

ek

s

→ [strum] ~ [s´trum] ~ [setrum] ~ [s n`trum] ~ [s´trum] ~ [sentrum] < Dutch stroom ‘electric current’ → [sm`ek] ~ [s´mek] ~ [semek] < English smack

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51

In the first example, the borrowing of Dutch stroom involves the optional introduction of a nasal stop n, followed by various combinations of spreading and epenthesis. In the second example, the borrowing of English smack involves either the spreading of the nasal stop m or epenthesis. In general, evidence from borrowing may be open to alternative interpretations, since the path from source to target language could potentially involve any number of intermediate way stations, with the word in question actually entering Riau Indonesian from another variety of Indonesian, already in bisyllabic form. However, in at least one case, smek < smack, it may be safely surmised that the word entered Riau Indonesian directly from English. This is because the borrowing was actually observed to take place, in the late 1990’s, via television, immediately following the introduction into US professional wrestling (hugely popular throughout Indonesia) of the brand name Smack Down. Accordingly, this latter example provides clear-cut evidence for the relevance of the core foot as a factor governing the incorporation of loan words into Riau Indonesian. The final phenomenon supporting the core foot comes from the Warasa ludling, a secret language in which the sequence war- is inserted at the beginning of each word.6 In (12) below the results are shown of applying the ludling to the words represented in (6) above: Warasa Ludling: F

(12)

S

wa

S

O

R

O

R

r

a

k

an

makan → warakan ‘eat’ wa

m

r

i

mi → waremi ‘noodles’ wa

r

i

t

ing

kepiting → wariting ‘crab’ wa

r

e

l

i

belikan → warelikan ‘buy’ wa

r

c

dicat → warecat ‘paint’

at

kan

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52

As shown in (12) above, the sequence war- is inserted into a position that is defined structurally, with reference to the core foot: r occupies the first onset of the core foot with wa immediately preceding it. The effect of adding war- to a word thus depends crucially on the size of the original word. For most words, which are bisyllabic, adding war- involves deletion of the first consonant, if the word begins with a consonant, for example makan → warakan. However, for monosyllabic words, adding war- involves not deletion but rather the further insertion of an epenthetic vowel, for example mi → waremi. Conversely, for polysyllabic words, adding war- involves the deletion not just of the first consonant of the penultimate syllable, but of any and all preceding material, for example kepiting → wariting. For stems combined with an enclitic, the ludling ignores the enclitic and treats the stem as though it constituted the entire word, for example belikan → warelikan. In contrast, for stems combined with a proclitic, adding war- involves the deletion of the proclitic, and treats the remainder of the word as though the clitic were absent; for example dicat → warecat, with the further insertion of an epenthetic vowel. Thus, as shown in (12) above, the application of the Warasa ludling relies crucially on the core foot, thereby providing yet additional evidence for its central role in the structure of the Riau Indonesian word. Thus, a number of independent phenomena support the existence of a core foot underlying the structure of the word in Riau Indonesian. Although, as noted in the beginning of this section, Riau Indonesian has no privileged syllable which could be characterized as the locus of word stress, the core foot does constitute a privileged unit, albeit of a larger size. As such, Riau Indonesian may be characterized as being endowed with a somewhat more abstract variety of word stress, whose locus is not the syllable, as in most typical instances of stress, but rather the bisyllabic core foot. As we shall see in Section 5.3 below, the characterization of the core foot as bearing word stress may account also for properties of focus intonation. 5.2. Intonation Groups and Final Prominence As in most other languages, intonation contours form intonation groups with a hierarchical tree structure, in which smaller units group together to form larger ones, which in turn group together to form even larger ones, and so forth; see, for example, Nespor and Vogel (1986). Such intonational groupings often coincide to a certain degree with syntactic groupings. Because of this, intonation can sometimes help to disambiguate between different readings associated with different syntactic constituencies underlying the same sequence of words. Consider the following example: (13)

Tengok tikus aku look mouse 1:SG [Speaker learning to play a game of laptop billiards in which it is rather difficult to control the position of the simulated player with the

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53

track pad, and the player often ends up under the table; the first time this happened, I jokingly asked him whether he was looking at the mice; when this happened once again, speaker joked] ‘I’m looking at the mice’ In order to facilitate the intended interpretation, the above sentence was associated with an intonation contour which effected the grouping [Tengok tikus] aku. However, in a different context, a different intonation contour could have been used to effect a different grouping, Tengok [tikus aku], which would have a quite different meaning, ‘Looking at my mice’. It should be acknowledged, however, that the above sentence may also be uttered with intonation contours that do not reflect any internal constituent structure and hence do not disambiguate between the two potentially available meanings. Perhaps the most noticeable characteristic of intonation groups is final prominence. Within each intonation group, the final syllable is accented, thereby providing a salient marker of intonation phrase boundaries. Thus, for example, in (13) above, the grouping [Tengok tikus] aku was affected by accent on the final syllable of the intonation group, namely kus. As in many other languages, accent is realized by a combination of phonetic features including greater pitch variation, greater intensity and greater duration. However, compared to some other languages, the contribution of greater duration would appear to be relatively larger. Examples (14) and (15) illustrate the phenomenon of phrase-final lengthening, with durations indicated in milliseconds: 370 (14)

Banyak se mut many ant [Eating newly bought fruit] ‘Lots of ants’

760 (15)

700

1230

Aku main seo rang play one-person 1:SG [Speaker squabbling over who gets to play on laptop computer] ‘I’m playing by myself’

Each of the above examples represents a single intonation group. As indicated by the figures, in each example the final syllable is almost twice as long as all of the preceding syllables combined. The prolongation of the final syllable of the intonation group is not always quite as dramatic as in the above examples. However,

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the above examples are quite typical of the way in which final lengthening may be exaggerated in order to increase the affective expressiveness of the utterance. For the unwary investigator, one of the consequences of final prominence in intonation groups is that it gives rise to the illusion of final word stress. For example, in a situation involving elicitation, where the researcher asks what the word for such-and-such is, the speaker typically responds with a one-word utterance bearing the final-prominent intonation contour. This sounds like final word stress; however, it is important to keep in mind that the suprasegmental pattern is not a property of the word, but rather of the entire utterance, which just happens to consist of a single word. Mistaken analyses of final-prominent intonation contours as word stress are apparently responsible for the probably erroneous characterization of many related Malayic language varieties of Sumatra as possessing final lexical stress, for example Nurzuir et al (1985:32-33) for Jambi, Umar et al (1986:28) for Muko-Muko, and Suwarni et al (1989:80) for Lintang. 5.3. Focus Intonation Final-prominent intonation groups provide the backdrop for an additional layer of intonational organization, that of focus intonation. Within each intonation group, a single word, which may occur in any position within the group (initial, medial or final), may optionally be assigned focus intonation. Focus intonation provides an expression for the semantic focus operator, though many of the details remain to be worked out. (The term “focus” is thus used here in the sense that is current in general semantic theory, not in the rather peculiar sense that has gained acceptance among Austronesianists, where it refers to what is known elsewhere as verbal voice.) Focus intonation is realized through a bundle of phonetic properties associated with the core foot of the word in focus, as shown below: (16)

Focus Intonation: F

S

ke

di

S

O

R

O

R

M

A

K

AN

M

I

P

I

T

ING

B

E

L

I

C

AT

‘eat’ ‘noodles’ ‘crab’

kan

‘buy ’ ‘paint’

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Example (16) above illustrates the domain of focus intonation for the words previously illustrated in (6) and (12); in this and subsequent examples, the domain of focus intonation is indicated with upper case letters. As shown in (16), the domain of focus intonation coincides precisely with the core foot, as supported by the various phenomena discussed in Section 5.1 above. The phonetic realizations of focus intonation are distributed unevenly over the two syllables of the core foot. The most salient feature of focus intonation involves the lengthening of the rhyme of the first syllable of the core foot, and sometimes also the onset of the second syllable. (In some varieties of Riau Indonesian, the onset of the second syllable may be lengthened if and only if it is other than an oral stop, while for other varieties, more influenced by a Minangkabau substrate, the onset of the second syllable may be lengthened no matter what its contents are.) This lengthening is generally associated with a level pitch contour. At the same time, focus intonation is also reflected by pitch prominence and secondary lengthening on the rhyme of the second syllable of the core foot. Some examples of focus intonation are given in (16) and (17) below, with durations again indicated in milliseconds: 780 (17)

380

350

PAY…AH budak i ni DEM-DEM:PROX bad child [Bantering with friends] ‘This kid’s really bad’

330 (18)

270

750

1030

Rekam LA GI record again [Seeing me turn the laptop computer recorder on] ‘Recording again’

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Each of the above examples consists of a single intonation group. In (17), focus intonation falls on the first word, payah. In this example, focus intonation is reflected primarily by the length of the first syllable plus second onset, pay, totalling 780 msec. The second rhyme, ah, is also relatively long, and in addition bears salient pitch prominence. The remainder of the intonation group follows the usual pattern of final prominence, with three short syllables followed by a final much longer one, ni. In (18), focus intonation falls on the second word, lagi. Here, once more, focus intonation is reflected by the length of the first syllable, la, totalling 750 msec., but in this case the second syllable gi is even longer, showing the combined effect of secondary lengthening due to focus plus the regular final prominence of the intonation group.7 This particular constellation of features, involving lengthening of a penultimate syllable followed by some kind of pitch accent on the final syllable, is not peculiar to Riau Indonesian. In the Jakarta dialect of Indonesian, focus intonation occurs more frequently than in Riau Indonesian, and its phonetic realization is more pronounced; so much so that when speakers from Riau attempt to imitate a Jakarta accent, one of the things that they do is exaggerate the frequency and the phonetic properties of focus intonation. Outside of Mala y /Indonesian, penultimate lengthening coupled with some kind of final accentuation has been reported, among others, for the Formosan language Amis (Edmundson, Huang and Pahalaan 2001), for various Micronesian languages (Rehg 1993), and for the Polynesian language Marquesan (Margaret Mutu, personal communication), thereby suggesting that the feature may be of considerable antiquity within the Austronesian language family. Just as final prominence in intonation groups sometimes creates the illusion of final word stress, so focus intonation and concomitant penultimate lengthening may occasionally give rise to an unwarranted impression of penultimate word stress, at least in those cases where penultimate lengthening is more salient to the investigator’s ear than final pitch accent. For example, such a misanalysis is what underlies some descriptions of Minangkabau, for example Zarbaliev (1987:23) and Adelaar (1992:12), as having penultimate word stress, even though in reality the suprasegmental patterns of Minangkabau are largely identical to those of Riau Indonesian. In some other dialects, such as Jakarta Indonesian, focus intonation and penultimate lengthening are often used in place of the final-prominent intonation contour in the context discussed earlier, where, in response to being asked what the word for such-and-such is, the speaker responds with a one-word utterance. This use of focus intonation thus contributes further to a characterization of Malay / Indonesian as having penultimate word stress. However, in actual fact, focus intonation and the way in which duration and pitch prominence split across the two syllables of the core foot provide additional support for the claim that in Riau Indonesian, as in many other related varieties, word stress is present not at the domain of the syllable but rather at the level of the entire foot, with respect to which it occurs in fixed position, falling invariably on the core foot.

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6. INTONATION AND THEMATIC ROLES The description of the basic intonational patterns of Riau Indonesian presented in the preceding section makes it possible for us now to address the main concern of this paper, namely, the purported correlation between intonation and thematic roles. In order to do this, we shall examine the distribution, in the naturalistic corpus, of four basic intonation contours, associated with declarative statements and imperatives.8 These four contours make reference to intonation groups, as recognizable by the feature of final prominence, and to pauses, which may separate successive intonation groups. (19)

Four Basic Intonation Contours:

(a)

Intonation Contour A: Two intonation groups separated by pause, no focus

(b)

Intonation Contour B: Single intonation group with no pause, no focus

(c)

Intonation Contour C: Single intonation group with no pause, initial focus

(d)

Intonation Contour D: Single intonation group with no pause, final focus

The above four contours span much of the variety that is in evidence in the intonational patterns of Riau Indonesian, though of course they do not exhaust it. For declarative statements and imperatives, additional intonation contours may involve more complex configurations containing two or more intonation groups, focus, and pauses; however, as complexity increases, these intonation contours become less and less frequent. Alternatively, other intonation contours of a qualitatively different nature include those associated with certain specific sentencefinal particles, and also with other kinds of speech acts such as polar and information questions, and direct quotation. Nevertheless, the above four basic intonation contours suffice to give the proponents of a correlation between intonation and thematic roles a good run for their money: if such a correlation did exist, it is most likely that it would involve at least one of the above four contours. The four basic intonation contours are examined with respect to a set of basic sentence patterns defined in terms of an activity in construction with a single associated participant. The participant in question may either precede or follow the activity, and it may be associated with the thematic roles of either actor or undergoer. Resulting from these two binary choices are the following four basic sentence patterns:

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(20)

Four Basic Sentence Patterns:

(a)

Actor precedes activity

(b)

Undergoer precedes activity

(c)

Actor follows activity

(d)

Undergoer follows activity

Again, the above four basic sentence patterns do not exhaust the inventory of sentence patterns in Riau Indonesian. However, it is reasonable to suppose that if intonation did distinguish thematic roles, its effect would be observable with respect to at least some of the above basic sentence patterns. The four basic intonation contours in (19) and the four basic sentence patterns in (20) may be combined to yield sixteen potentially possible pairings of intonation contours and sentence patterns. These sixteen pairings are represented in the sixteen cells of Table 1. (In Table 1, letters a, p and v stand for actor, undergoer and activity respectively, upper case letters denote focus intonation, while ø represents a pause between intonation groups.) Table 1:

Intonation Contours and Sentence Patterns

Participant precedes activity Actor

Undergoer

Participant follows activity Actor ↔

↔ Intonation Contour A: Pause, no focus

aØv (21a)

Intonation Contour B: No pause, no focus

av (23a)

Intonation Contour C: No pause, initial focus

Av (25a)

Intonation Contour D: No pause, final focus

aV (27a)

Undergoer

pØv (21b)

vØa (22a)

pv (23b)

va (24a)

Pv (25b)

Va (26a)

pV (27b)

vA (28a)

vØp (22b) ↔

↔

vp (24b) ↔

↔

Vp (26b) ↔

↔

vP (28b)

Table 1 provides a classificatory scheme for utterances in the naturalistic corpus. If intonation does distinguish thematic roles, then one would expect to find an unequal

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distribution of utterances across the table, with, crucially, some empty cells, reflecting impossible pairings of intonation contours and sentence patterns. Conversely, if intonation does not differentiate thematic roles, then one would expect to find utterances exemplifying all of the potential pairings of intonation contours and thematic roles, with no empty cells in the table. The facts are quite clear. Even a cursory examination of a small subset of the naturalistic corpus turns up examples of all sixteen potential pairings of intonation contours and sentence patterns: there are no empty cells in the table. Thus, there is no correlation between the intonation contours defined in (19) and the sentence patterns represented in (20): intonation does not differentiate thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. In examples (21)-(28) below, each of the sixteen pairings of intonation contours and sentence patterns is illustrated with an utterance from the naturalistic corpus; for easy cross-referencing, the number of each example is shown in the appropriate cell in the table. As in examples (2)-(4) previously, the activity word is in boldface, while the relevant associated participant is in italics. (In some of the examples, the pairing of intonation contour and sentence pattern extends over just part of a larger utterance; in such cases, the remaining parts of the utterance are enclosed in parentheses. Breaks between intonation groups, either within the relevant part of the utterance or outside of it, are represented with commas.) (21a)

Kepala head

desa itu, (Intonation contour A) village DEM-DEM:DIST

pindah move

rumah house

papan board

itu DEM-DEM:DIST

[From narrative about peeping tom] ‘The village head moved into that wooden house’ (b)

( Vid, ) FAM|David

hilangkan disappear-EP

dah

Vid

PFCT

FAM|David

ini, DEM-DEM:PROX

lupa forget

[Playing billiards on laptop computer; speaker asking me to help him get rid of the lines on the screen which show where the balls will go] ‘David, I’ve forgotten how to get rid of these, David’

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(22a)

(Sangkut be.caught.on

situ

‘kan,

LOC-DEM-DEM:PROX

Q

selamat safe

dia,) 3

tidur, sleep

dia, 3

(anak child

si

Yung Yung

tadi

ini)

PERS

PST:PROX

DEM-DEM:PROX

[From narrative about village boy and sparrowhawk; boy has fallen off a bridge into a mangrove tree] ‘He was caught there, he was safe, he fell asleep, the boy Yung’ (b)

Jumpa, meet

satu one

jauh far

Q

asap, (nampak asap dari smoke see smoke from

‘kan )

[From narrative about village boy and sparrowhawk; boy is wandering through forest] ‘He noticed a plume of smoke, he saw smoke from afar, right’ (23a)

masuk (Intonation contour B) Bola putih ball white enter [Playing billiards on laptop computer] ‘The white ball’s gone in’

(b)

Rokoknya buang throw cigarette-ASSOC [Cleaning a room with friends] ‘Throw the cigarette stubs away’

(24a)

Kawin dia, (David) marry 3 David [From narrative about boy who grows up, gets married, and learns the facts of life] ‘Then he got married, David’

(b)

Tutup pintu oy EXCL close door [Speaker wants to prevent other people from coming in to the room] ‘Hey, close the door’

INTONATION AND THEMATIC ROLES IN RIAU INDONESIAN

(25a)

Bola PUTIH masuk (Intonation contour C) white enter ball [Playing billiards on laptop computer] ‘The white ball’s gone in’

(b)

INI

61

pencet ha, (ini pencet) press DEIC DEM-DEM:PROX press [Playing billiards on laptop computer; speaker showing friend which key to press] ‘Press this one, press this one’ DEM-DEM:PROX

(26a)

MASUK bola putih enter ball white [Playing billiards on laptop computer] ‘The white ball’s gone in’

(b)

TUKUL dio ha, (macam mano, DEIC kind what hammer 3 [From narrative about peeping tom] ‘She hammered him, it hurt’

(27a)

(E,) EXCL

bola ball

putih white

sakit die) hurt 3

MASUK enter

(Intonation contour D) [Playing billiards on laptop computer] ‘The white ball’s gone in’ (b)

Catur chess

tak NEG

PANDAI know.how

itu, DEM-DEM:DIST

(Vid) FAM|David

[Discussing what game to play next on laptop computer; someone suggests chess; speaker reacts] ‘I don’t know how to play chess, David’

DAVID GIL

62

(28a)

Rekam DIE record 3 [Speaker discovers I’ve been recording] ‘He’s recording’

(b)

“Aku 1:SG

nak want

TANGAN hand

dikau”, (katanya, 2 say-ASSOC

dia bilang) 3 say [From horror story about ungrateful son who tries to rob his mother’s tomb; at the end of the story, the mother’s ghost tries to snatch her son’s hand] ‘“I want your hand” she said’ Each of the above eight numbered examples presents a near minimal pair, as close a contrast as one is likely to find in a naturalistic corpus. Within each pair, the intonation contours are the same, the relative orders of activity and participant are the same, but the thematic role of the participant is different: whereas in the first, or (a) example, the participant is an actor, in the second, or (b) example, it is a undergoer. Thus, each of these minimal pairs shows that for a particular intonation contour and a particular sentence pattern, the intonation contour in question fails to differentiate between thematic roles, allowing a certain participant to be understood either as an actor, in the first member of the pair, or as an undergoer, in the second. For example, (21) shows that Intonation Contour A does not differentiate between actors and undergoers when these occur in a position preceding an activity. Similarly, (23) shows that Intonation Contour B does not distinguish between actors and undergoers when these come before an activity. Thus, examples (21) and (23) refute the “pause proposal”, discussed in Section 3 above, which suggests that when a undergoer precedes an activity, it must be followed by a pause. Such, indeed, is the case in (21b); however, in (23b), a undergoer also precedes an activity and here, contrary to the pause proposal, there is no pause (and there are many more examples like this in the corpus). Moreover, in (21a) there is a pause, even though here it is an actor rather than an undergoer that precedes the activity. Thus, examples such as these show that when the participant in question occurs before the activity, the presence or absence of a pause plays no role whatsoever in distinguishing actors from undergoers. In conjunction, then, examples (21) - (28), and many others like them in the corpus, show quite clearly that intonation plays no role in the differentiation of thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. To the extent that the four basic sentence patterns in (20) are representative of the variety of sentence patterns in the language, the above examples provide overwhelming support for Hypothesis A, as formulated in (5a), suggesting that for each sentence there is at least one intonation contour which

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63

renders that sentence undifferentiated with respect to thematic roles. Moreover, to the extent that the four basic intonation contours in (19) encompass the major patterns of intonation that are available in the language, the above examples provide substantial support for the stronger Hypothesis B, as formulated in (5b), asserting that for each sentence, every intonation contour renders that sentence undifferentiated with respect to thematic roles. In view of examples such as these, it is hard to see how anybody can continue to maintain an uncritical position to the effect that intonation can function to distinguish thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, it could, admittedly, still turn out to be the case, contrary to everything suggested in this paper, that intonation somehow does differentiate thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. For example, there could exist some additional intonation contours, not considered in this paper, which do differentiate thematic roles: such intonation contours would provide a counterexample to Hypothesis B, though not contradict the weaker Hypothesis A. More far-reachingly, it could conceivably be the case that each of the four would-be basic intonation contours defined in this paper actually lumps together two or more distinct intonation contours which do differentiate thematic roles: if this were true, then counterevidence would be provided even for the weaker Hypothesis A. Thus, the claims made in this paper constitute explicit hypotheses for which it is easy to imagine hypothetical counterevidence. Nevertheless, the results of this paper suggest that such counterevidence is indeed no more than strictly hypothetical. Accordingly, if anybody still wishes to claim that intonation can differentiate thematic roles in Riau Indonesian, then the burden of the proof now rests solidly on their shoulders: they must produce the data, and specify exactly which intonation contours distinguish which thematic roles. (To assist in such a challenge, I would be happy to share the naturalistic corpus, including the sound files, with anybody wishing to examine them for scientific purposes.) In the meantime, in the absence of such counterarguments, the only position that can reasonably be maintained is that intonation does not and cannot differentiate thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. 7. CONCLUSION The results of this paper underscore the need for linguistic descriptions to avoid Eurocentric assumptions with regard to the expressive power of languages. Just because thematic roles are central to the grammatical organization of many familiar languages does not mean that they are of equal importance in all of the world’s languages. Riau Indonesian shows how a language can manage just fine, fulfilling a wide range of communicative functions, without any obligatory grammatical means for distinguishing between thematic roles: word order, case marking, agreement, or intonation. More specifically, the absence of any relationship between intonation and thematic roles in Riau Indonesian provides reinforcement for previous descriptions of the language which have argued that it is lacking in many of the categories that are considered to be central to the grammatical organization of most other languages.

DAVID GIL

64

The reader may have noted that no mention was made at any point in this paper of parts of speech (such as noun and verb), syntactic categories (such as noun phrase and verb phrase), or grammatical relations (such as subject, direct object, indirect object, and so forth). Indeed, in Gil (1994, 1999, 2000, 2001a,b, 2002b, 2005) it is argued that such categories are absent in Riau Indonesian. As statements of non-existence, such claims can be readily refuted, by showing how a single grammatical generalization makes reference to the category in question. Conversely, such claims can be supported only in gradual incremental fashion, through the examination, one after the other, of a wider and wider range of phenomena, each of which can in turn be accounted for without reference to the categories in question. In the case at hand, the absence of any correlation between intonation and thematic roles adds further to the plausibility of the claim that Riau Indonesian does not possess any categories whose definitions make reference to thematic roles, such as grammatical relations, or whose prototypical characteristics involve thematic roles in any way, such as parts of speech and syntactic categories. How would the grammar of Riau Indonesian work in the absence of so many commonplace grammatical categories? Following are syntactic and semantic representations for a typical Riau Indonesian sentence, example (2a) above, ‘I’ll buy a laser’. (For ease of exposition, the final particle ’kan in (2a) is ignored.) (29)

syntactic representation:

semantic representation:

S

S

S

S

beli

aku

laser

BUY

1:SG

LASER

A (BUY, 1:SG, LASER)

As argued in Gil (1994, 2000, 2001a, b, 2005), Riau Indonesian syntax contains a single open syntactic category, S(entence). As shown above, beli, aku and laser are all Ss, as is the construction as a whole; from a formal point of view, beli aku laser is thus a coordination of three Ss. The semantics of Riau Indonesian centers around the association operator, represented above with the letter A. In its monadic, or one-place guise, the association operator provides a semantic representation for markers of association, possession, and genitive case in many languages. For example, in English, in an expression such as John’s, the possessive ’ s is interpreted as the association operator A, applying to the denotation JOHN, yielding the formula A (JOHN), which can be read as ‘entity associated with John’, where the detailed nature of the association is left unspecified by the grammar and is instead determined by context. However, in a typical Riau Indonesian sentence, the

INTONATION AND THEMATIC ROLES IN RIAU INDONESIAN

65

association operator applies polyadically, to a sequence of items, and without any overt morphosyntactic realization. For example, in (29) above, it applies to the three meaning components of the sentence, yielding the formula A (BUY, 1:SG, LASER), which may be read as ‘entity associated with buying, speaker and laser’, where, again, the precise nature of the association is left unspecified, to be determined by context. Accordingly, the sentence Beli aku laser is endowed with a single unitary semantic representation which is indeterminate with respect to a variety of categories such as number, definiteness, tense, aspect and thematic roles. In the right context, it could thus mean anything from ‘I’ll buy a laser’, as in fact it did in (2a), to ‘Somebody bought me the laser’, ‘Somebody’s buying something from me with some lasers’, and so forth. Thus, as suggested in (29) above, the basic sentence structure of Riau Indonesian is extremely impoverished, making no reference to thematic roles. It is thus hardly surprising that intonation, too, fails to differentiate thematic roles in Riau Indonesian. But what of most other languages, with more elaborate clause structure, in which thematic roles play a central part? Prima facie, there might perhaps be more reason to expect intonation to correlate with thematic roles in at least some such languages. Imagine, for example, a language like Hebrew, with flexible word order, and in which, for basic transitive clauses, there is evidence for hierarchical syntactic structure of the kind commonly represented in terms of a VP containing the verb and the object to the exclusion of the subject. Now imagine that in such a language, intonational grouping were to reflect the VP constituent in sentences such as Hebrew (1) in the same way that it reflects other kinds of constituency in Riau Indonesian (13) and in many other examples in most or all languages. In such a language, then, intonation would distinguish between thematic roles, albeit not directly, but rather through the mediation of syntactic constituency, in accordance with the alternative scenario suggested in the introduction. However, as noted in Section 2, there are no clear documented cases of languages in which intonation works in this way. Can we thus conclude that intonation is in principle incapable of encoding thematic roles in human language? At present, this is perhaps most appropriately viewed as a conjecture still in need of serious further investigation, so that it may either be refuted by means of one or more counterexamples, or else recognized as a linguistic universal, a substantive constraint on what constitutes a possible human language. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology 8. NOTES *

I would like to thank all my colleagues who asked whether intonation differentiates thematic roles in Riau Indonesian, and/or insisted and perhaps still insist that it does, for providing me with the impetus to write this paper. In particular, I am indebted to Peter Cole, Gabriella Hermon and Uri Tadmor for numerous discussions on the issues dealt with in this paper, and to Matt Gordon for constructive comments on an earlier draft. I am especially grateful to the many speakers of Riau Indonesian who

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provided the naturalistic data on which this paper is based: Arief, Benny, Danzha Selpas, Desrul, Ellyanto, Dwiarpianto, Fuad, Jumbro, Junaidi, Muchlis, Pai, Per, Riki, Rudy Chandra, Septianbudiwibowo, Wira, Zainudin. Versions of this paper were presented at the Fifth International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics, Leipzig, Germany, 17 June 2001; at Topic and Focus: A Workshop on Intonation and Meaning, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 21 July 2001; and at the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, 26 April 2002; I would like to thank participants at all three events for their helpful comments and suggestions. 1 In addition to Riau Indonesian, some of the data cited in this paper show evidence for interference from Siak Malay, the dialect of Malay spoken in the lower part of the Siak river basin, in Riau province. Riau Indonesian and Siak Malay share a considerable degree of mutual intelligibility; in fact, in some cases it is difficult to determine whether a given utterance is in one dialect or the other. Although this paper focuses on Riau Indonesian, all of its main points are equally germane also for Siak Malay. 2 The interlinear glosses in this paper make use of the following abbreviations: AG ‘agent’; ASSOC ‘associative’; DEIC ‘deictic’; DEM ‘demonstrative’; DIST ‘distal’; DISTR ‘distributive’; EP ‘end point’; EXCL ‘exclamation’; FAM ‘familiar’; M ‘masculine’; NEG ‘negative’; PERS ‘personal’; PFCT ‘perfect’; PROX ‘proximal’; PST ‘past’; Q ‘question’; SG ‘singular’; 1 ‘first person’; 3 ‘third person. 3 Readers familiar with Malay / Indonesian may be wondering about the well-known “voice markers” and whether they might perhaps be involved in the differentiation of thematic roles. In Riau Indonesian, the relevant forms di- and N- are indeed present; however, their use is optional, and, crucially, they do not help to differentiate thematic roles: sentences with di- or N- (or even both) remain indeterminate with respect to thematic roles (see Gil 1999, 2002b for examples and detailed discussion). Perhaps the most productive means for differentiating thematic roles in Riau Indonesian is provided by the form sama, which can mark participants in any thematic role except that of absolutive, thereby discriminating between roles such as, for example, actor and undergoer, by overtly marking the former. However, even this form is optional; moreover, it is only very weakly grammaticalized, and is actually more appropriately considered as an ordinary “content” word with a very broad and abstract meaning centered around the notion of togetherness (see Gil 2004, for examples and argumentation). 4 Another proposal occasionally mentioned in discussions of intonation and clause structure in Malay / Indonesian is that of Chung (1978), pertaining to a language variety that she refers to as “informal Indonesian”, but which is actually closer to Standard Indonesian than to any of the regional colloquial varieties (including those of Jakarta and Bandung, from where her speakers hailed). Chung is concerned with a particular sentence pattern of the form AVP (Agent - Activity - Patient), where the V is devoid of any morphological voice marking. For a subset of such sentences, those in which the A is a pronoun or a proper noun, she maintains that two distinct intonation contours are available, which she calls “normal declarative” and “subject shifting”. She then claims that these two intonation contours correspond to two different syntactic analyses of the sentence in question, as “active” and “passive” respectively. In the latter case, her suggestion involves the following derivation. First, an active sentence with AVP order undergoes passivization (of the variety known in Indonesian studies as the pasif semu, or “second passive”), resulting in a structure of the form PAV, where the P assumes some subjecthood properties, and the A is cliticized to the V. Next, the P undergoes subject shifting, a process which moves subjects to the end of the sentence, in this case restoring the original AVP order. Although it may seem as though we’re back where we started, Chung asserts that such sentences are passive, and cites as evidence the purported “subject shifting” intonation contour associated with such constructions. Whether or not the facts are as described, and whether or not the analysis provided is the most appropriate one to account for such facts, Chung’s proposal does not involve any suggestion to the effect that intonation may differentiate thematic roles, since both intonation contours are associated with the same assignment of thematic roles. Indeed, this could hardly be otherwise, since, in the variety of Indonesian described by Chung, there is no thematic role indeterminacy of the kind illustrated in (2) - (4), and in particular no sentences of the form PVA such as in (3b). 5 In general, in the derivation of such monosyllabic forms, the lighter of the two syllables is omitted, while the heavier one is retained – w here the weight of the respective syllables is defined in terms of the number of segments they contain and their position on the sonority hierarchy, greater sonority

INTONATION AND THEMATIC ROLES IN RIAU INDONESIAN

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corresponding to lesser weight. Thus, in the above example, pan is heavier than to by dint of the additional coda segment n; hence the familiar form of Topan is Pan, not To. 6 The name of the ludling, Warasa is derived by application of the ludling in question to the Malay / Indonesian word bahasa ‘language’. This and other Riau Indonesian ludlings are described in detail in Gil (2002a). 7 Occasionally, focus intonation occurs in a variant form, which might appropriately be referred to as super-focus. Phonetically, super-focus has all the special features of ordinary focus, plus an additional one, lip rounding on the lengthened penultimate syllable. Semantically, super-focus adds emphasis and affective force; one common usage of super-focus is with scalar adjectives, where it lends itself to translation into English with an accented intensifier such as “very”. 8 As far as I can tell, there are no systematic differences between the intonation contours of declarative statements and imperatives. In fact, there would seem to be no grammatical differences whatsoever distinguishing between sentences used to perform these two particular speech acts.

9. REFERENCES Adelaar, K. Alexander. Proto-Malayic: The Reconstruction of Its Phonology and Parts of Its Lexicon and Morphology, Pacific Linguistics Series C – 119. Canberra: The Australian National University, 1992. Amran Halim. Intonasi dalam Hubungannya dengan Sintaksis Bahasa Indonesia, Seri ILDEP di bawah Redaksi W.A.L. Stokhof. Jakarta: Penerbit Djambatan, 1984. Chung, Sandra. “Stem Sentences in Indonesian.” In S.A. Wurm and L. Carrington (eds.), Second International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, Fascicle 1, Western Austronesian, Pacific Linguistics Series C - No. 61, pp. 335-365. Canberra: Australian National University, 1978. Edmundson, Jerold A., Tung-Chiou Huang and Akiyo Pahalaan. “Phonological Strengthening in Hsiukuluan Amis of Taiwan”, Paper presented at the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand, 17 May 2001. Gil, David. “The Structure of Riau Indonesian.” Nordic Journal of Linguistics 17 (1994): 179-200. Gil, David. “Riau Indonesian as a Pivotless Language.” In E.V. Raxilina and Y.G. Testelec (eds.), Tipologija i Teorija Jazyka, Ot Opisanija k Objasneniju, K 60-Letiju Aleksandra Evgen’evicha Kibrika (Typology and Linguistic Theory, From Description to Explanation, For the 60th Birthday of Aleksandr E. Kibrik), pp. 187-211. Moscow: Jazyki Russkoj Kul’tury, 1999. Gil, David. “Syntactic Categories, Cross-Linguistic Variation and Universal Grammar.” In P. M. Vogel and B. Comrie (eds.), Approaches to the Typology of Word Classes, Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, pp. 173-216. New York: Mouton, 2000. Gil, David. “Creoles, Complexity and Riau Indonesian.” Linguistic Typology 5 (2001a): 325-371. Gil, David. “Escaping Eurocentrism: Fieldwork as a Process of Unlearning.” In P. Newman and M. Ratliff (eds.), Linguistic Fieldwork, pp. 102-132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001b. Gil, David. “Ludlings in Malayic Languages: An Introduction.” In Bambang Kaswanti Purwo (ed.), PELBBA 15, Pertemuan Linguistik (Pusat Kajian) Bahasa dan Budaya Atma Jaya: Kelima Belas, Jakarta: Unika Atma Jaya, 2002a. Gil, David. “The Prefixes di- and N- in Malay / Indonesian Dialects.” In F. Wouk and M. Ross (eds.), The History and Typology of Western Austronesian Voice Systems, pp. 241-283. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2002b. Gil, David. “Intonation Does Not Differentiate Thematic Roles in Riau Indonesian.” In A. Riehl and T. Savella (eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA9), Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics 19 (2003): 64-78. Gil, David. “Riau Indonesian sama, Explorations in Macrofunctionality.” In M. Haspelmath (ed.), Coordinating Constructions (Typological Studies in Language 58), pp. 371-424. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2004. Gil, David. “Word Order Without Syntactic Categories: How Riau Indonesian Does It.” In A. Carnie, H. Harley and S.A. Dooley (eds)., Verb First: On the Syntax of Verb-Initial Languages, pp. 243-263. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2005.

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Goedemans, Rob and Ellen van Zanten. “Stress and Accent in Indonesian.” In D. Gil (ed.), Studies in Malay and Indonesian Linguistics. London: Curzon Press, to appear. Kähler, Hans. Grammatik der Bahasa Indonesia. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1956. Nespor, Marina and Irene Vogel. Prosodic Phonology. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986. Nurzuir Husin, Zailoet, M. Atar Semi, Isma Nasrul Karim, Desmawati Radjab and Djurip. Struktur Bahasa Melayu Jambi. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, 1985. Rehg, Kenneth L. “Proto-Micronesian Prosody.” In J.A. Edmondson and K.J. Gregerson (eds.), Tonality in Austronesian Languages, pp. 25-46. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication No. 24. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993. Stilo, Don. “Alternative Devices for Object Marking in Middle Eastern SOV Languages”, Paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association of North America, San Francisco, CA, USA, 29 November - 1 December 1984. Suwarni Nursato, Sutari Harifin, Zainin Wahab, Nangsari Ahmad and Homsen Nanung. Fonologi dan Morfologi Bahasa Lintang. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, 1989. Tadmor, Uri. “Can Word Accent Be Reconstructed in Malay?”, Paper presented at Third International Symposium on Malay / Indonesian Linguistics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 24 August 1999. Tadmor, Uri. “Rekonstruksi Aksen Kata Bahasa Melayu.” In Yassir Nasanius and Bambang Kaswanti Purwo (eds.), PELBBA 13, Pertemuan Linguistik (Pusat Kajian) Bahasa dan Budaya Atma Jaya: Ketiga Belas, Pusat Kajian Bahasa dan Budaya, pp. 153-167. Jakarta: Unika Atma Jaya, 2000. Umar Manan, Zainuddin Amir, Nasroel Malano, Anas Syafei and Agustar Surin. Struktur Bahasa MukoMuko. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, 1986. Van Ophuijsen, Ch. A. Maleische Spraakkunst. Leiden: van Doesburgh, 1915. Zarbaliev, X.M. Jazyk Minangkabau. Moscow: Nauka, 1987.

MATTHEW GORDON

THE INTONATIONAL REALIZATION OF CONTRASTIVE FOCUS IN CHICKASAW

1. INTRODUCTION While the realization of focus in languages which express focus either syntactically or prosodically or through a combination of both prosody and syntax has been studied relatively extensively, e.g. English (Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986), Korean (Cho 1990, Jun 1993), Chichewa (Kanerva 1990), Bengali (Hayes and Lahiri 1991, Lahiri and Fitzpatrick-Cole 1999), Shanghai Chinese (Selkirk and Shen 1990), Hungarian (Horvath 1986, Kiss 1998), Hausa (Inkelas and Leben 1990), there is very little work on languages which mark focus morphologically through affixes or particles attached to or adjacent to focused elements. Of particular interest is the question of whether languages with morphological marking of focus also utilize prosodic cues to signal focus, much as languages with special word orders associated with focus may redundantly use prosody to cue focus. In their study of Wolof, a language which marks focus morphologically, Rialland and Robert (2001) claim that Wolof does not use intonation to signal focus redundantly. Beyond this study of Wolof, however, there is little phonetic literature dealing with the prosodic manifestation of focus in languages with morphological expression of focus. It is thus unclear to what extent languages that mark focus morphologically tend to also employ prosodic cues to focus.1 This study attempts to broaden our understanding of the phonetics of focus by examining prosodic cues to focus in Chickasaw, a language like Wolof with morphological marking of focus. A number of potential pitch and duration cues to contrastive focus are examined to determine whether Chickasaw redundantly use both prosody and morphology to mark focus. 2. BACKGROUND ON CHICKASAW Chickasaw is a Western Muskogean language spoken by no more than a few hundred predominantly elderly speakers in south-central Oklahoma. Chickasaw has been the subject of extensive work by Pamela Munro and colleagues. Munro (2005) provides a grammatical overview of Chickasaw and includes an analyzed text of a traditional Chickasaw story. Munro and Willmond (1994) is a dictionary that also contains a thorough description of Chickasaw grammar. Gordon et al. (2000) provides a quantitative phonetic description of Chickasaw and Gordon (1999, 2005)

69 C. Lee et al. Topic and Focus: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation, 69–82. © 2007 Springer.

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are descriptions of various aspects of the intonational system, including boundary tones, prosodic phrasing, and pitch accents. 2.1. Intonation Chickasaw utterances may be divided into a hierarchically ordered set of prosodic constituents (Gordon 1999, 2005). The largest clearly defined intonational unit is the Intonation Phrase, which is marked by a f0 excursion at its right edge, typically a f0 rise in statements and a f0 fall in questions. An Intonation Phrase consists of one or more Accentual Phrases which are canonically associated with a [LHHL] tone sequence when there is sufficient material in the phrase. The L tone is aligned with the left edge of the Accentual Phrase, and the first H tone occurs early in the Accentual Phrase, typically falling on or near the second sonorant mora, with considerable gradience in its alignment. The final two tones usually associate with the final syllable, yielding a f0 fall on the final syllable. Stressed final syllables, those containing a coda consonant or a long vowel (see Gordon 2002 on stress in Chickasaw) may not realize the final low tone, however. A short Accentual Phrase, one with fewer than three sonorant moras, may also not realize all the tones of a canonical AP, with deletion of the initial or final L being the typical strategy for truncating the AP. An AP with three sonorant moras is usually sufficient to realize all tones though a two syllable AP with three sonorant moras may not realize all its tones. Schematic examples of the realization of tones in an AP appear in (1). (1)

a. Monomoraic 1st Syllable

L

H

H L

[ µ µµ ! ]AP n a S oÚ b a… t

b. Bimoraic first syllable c. Short AP

L H

H L

H

L

[ µµ ! ! ! ]AP [ µ µ ]AP n am bi laÚma/ fala

Chickasaw strongly tends to align Accentual Phrase boundaries with word boundaries; thus, it is most common for a single word to constitute an entire Accentual Phrase. It is possible, however, for two relatively short words, i.e. words of one or two syllables, to group together into a single Accentual Phrase. 2.2. Focus Chickasaw has at least two types of focus markers (Munro and Willmond 1994) which are suffixed to focused nouns and differ according to whether the focused element is a syntactic subject or an object. The first focus suffix, -ho…t when attached to subjects and –ho when affixed to objects, is termed a “focus/inferential case ending” by Munro and Willmond (1994:liv) and will not be discussed further in this paper. The focus of this paper is the contrastive focus

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suffix, which is realized as -akot with subjects and as -ako)… with objects (Munro and Willmond:liii). Although the precise semantic conditions that give rise to the contrastive focus are not completely understood, one of its primary functions is to attract narrow focus to the noun which it modifies. There is no comparable suffix affixed to verbs to signal narrow focus on the verb. Sentences exemplifying the contrastive focus suffixes and their counterparts lacking contrastive focus marking appear in (2). (2)

hat…ak-at koni(a)) pisa. Man-subj skunk sees The man sees the skunk. hat…ak-akot koni(a)) pisa. Man-cont.subj. skunk sees THE MAN sees the skunk. hat…ak-at koni-ako)… pisa. Man-subj skunk-cont.obj. sees The man sees THE SKUNK.

As the sentences in (2) indicate, non-focused subjects are marked with the suffix – at, while non-focused objects may either have no overt suffix or be marked with the suffix – a)…. The unmarked word order in Chickasaw is SOV, though other orders are possible under certain as yet not well-understood semantic conditions, including focus, which may be associated with fronting of the focused element. For example, sentence (2c) could appear with a fronted object, i.e. koniako)… hat…akat pisa ‘The man sees THE SKUNK’. 3. PRESENT STUDY 3.1. Methodology The present study examines the prosodic realization of sentences involving contrastive focus on subjects and verbs. Data were collected during elicitation sessions with individual speakers. Subjects were presented with English sentences containing a subject, object, and verb and instructed to give the Chickasaw equivalent. Focus was elicited by offering English translations emphasizing the focused element. Three different focus conditions were elicited: one involving broad focus, i.e. no special focus on any particular element, one with narrow focus on the subject and one with narrow focus on the object. Subjects repeated each sentence between three and five times. The corpus used in the experiment appears in Table 1.

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Table 1. Corpus recorded for the focus experiment

NO FOCUS Speakers 1-4 hat…akat naSo…bai pisa hat…akat ampaska pisa hat…akat wa…ka/ pisa hat…akat hopa…ji/ pisa Speaker 5 na…hol…a…t naSo…ba pisa…tok na…hol…a…t ampaska pisa…tok na…hol…a…t wa…ka/ pisa…tok na…hol…a…t hopa…ji/ pisa…tok

The man sees the wolf. The man sees my bread. The man sees the cow. The man sees the fortune teller. The white man saw the wolf. The white man saw my bread. The white man saw the cow. The white man saw the fortune teller.

SUBJECT FOCUS na…hol…a…kot a)…nampaka)…li/ pisa…tok na…hol…a…kot minko/ pisa(…tok) na…hol…a…kot ofo)…lo pisa…tok

THE WHITE MAN saw my flower. THE WHITE MAN sees(saw) the chief. THE WHITE MAN saw the owl.

OBJECT FOCUS na…hol…a…t minka…ko)… pisa…tok na…hol…a…t amofo)…la…ko)… pisa…tok na…hol…a…t sat…iba…piSiako)… pisa…tok

The white man saw THE CHIEF. The white man saw MY OWL. The white man saw MY BROTHER.

Data was collected and analysed for a total of five female speakers. Four of the speakers were recorded in Oklahoma in 1996 while the remaining speaker was recorded in Los Angeles in 2002. Subjects were recorded on DAT tape while wearing a high quality noise cancelling microphone on their heads. Data were then transferred onto computer using Scicon MacQuirer at a sampling rate of 22.5 kHz. Two measurements that could potentially distinguish different focus conditions prosodically were made using the MacQuirer software. First, the average fundamental frequency for each of the three words comprising each sentence was calculated to determine whether focused words are produced with heightened pitch relative to postfocus elements, a common prosodic realization of focus crosslinguistically. Second, the duration of the pause between the subject and object and between the object and verb was measured to ascertain the degree of juncture

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between different words under different focus conditions. Prosodic boundaries between words in postfocus position in other languages are commonly eliminated, reducing the level of temporal disjuncture between elements in postfocus position. 4. RESULTS 4.1. Fundamental Frequency A two factor (focus condition and syntactic category) analysis of variance pooling together results from all speakers failed to indicate a significant effect of either focus condition or syntactic category on f0 values: for syntactic category (subject, object, verb), F(2, 349) = 1.706, p = .1831; for focus condition (no focus, subject focus, object focus), F(2, 349) = .664, p = .5153. There was, however, a significant interaction between focus condition and syntactic category: F(4, 349) = 3.280, p = .0117. This interaction was attributed primarily to an overall raising of f0 for subjects in sentences involving any type of focus, either subject or object focus. This effect was only observed for certain speakers but not others. Another effect contributing to the interaction between focus and syntactic category was a lowering of f0 on verbs in sentences with a narrow focused noun. Again this effect was speaker dependent, however. Given the considerable interspeaker variation in the expression of focus, it is thus instructive to consider results for individual speakers. Average f0 results for individual speakers are given in Table 2. Speaker 1 displayed a significant raising of f0 for subjects in sentences with either narrow focus on the subject or object. Unpaired t-tests for this speaker revealed a significant difference between f0 values for subjects in broad focus sentences and subjects in sentences with either narrow focus on the subject, t(2,13) = 2.824, p = .0144, or narrow focus on the object, t(2,14) = 3.146, p = .0072. F0 values did not differ reliably between subjects in sentences with subject focus and those with object focus. Nor was there any significant difference in f0 values for objects or verbs under the three focus conditions. Results for speaker 2 were similar to those for speaker 1: f0 values for subjects were higher in sentences involving narrow focus than those with broad focus. This difference was only a trend, however, and did not quite reach statistical significance in unpaired t-tests: broad focus vs. narrow subject focus, t(2, 20) = 1.899, p = .0721 ; broad focus vs. narrow object focus, t(2, 9) = 1.963, p = .0662. F0 values for objects and verbs did not differ significantly under different focus conditions. Speaker 3 also displayed an overall raising of f0 in subjects in sentences with narrow focus either on the subject or the verb: broad focus vs. narrow subject focus, t(2, 25) = 4.588, p