Abstract
This chapter will give an overview and critical evaluation of selected work on constructions which involve focusing particles such as English only and even. These constructions have presented a challenge to linguistic theory for as long as the field of formal linguistics exists. The intricacies of these elements stem from the fact that they merge syntactic, semantic and phonological properties in such a way that all three components make almost equal contributions in accounting for the observed patterns. In the short history of formal linguistics, elements like only, even, also etc. have received attention mainly from a semantic point of view. Besides older generative work like Anderson’s (1972) and Fraser’s (1971) work on even, part of Jackendoff (1972) and Ross and Cooper (1979), much work was carried out in semantics and in the Montague Grammar tradition. I want to mention here Karttunen and Peters (1979). As for the description of English, influential developments came from Fauconnier, Karttunen and Peters and more recently from the dissertation of Mats Rooth (Rooth, 1985) to which we will turn in detail below. An excellent presentation of English data is given in Taglicht (1984). Some of Taglicht’s observations have direct influence on the theory of Logical Form. With respect to German, I want to mention the groundbreaking work by Hans Altmann, Altmann (1976; 1978) and, with a more theoretical orientation, Jacobs (1983) to which we will also turn in detail. Numerous articles have been published on individual particles of this type exploring mainly their semantic, pragmatic and communicative aspects. An in-depth analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of a single German particle is, for instance, given in Lerner and Zimmermann’s (1981) study of nur.1 Instead of giving a broad review of the work that has been done in the past, I will confine myself in this chapter to a review of Jacobs (1983) and Rooth (1985), as most of the descriptive as well as theoretical development is condensed in these two contributions.
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Notes
Lerner and Zimmermann were, however, not interested in the syntax of nur. For this reason, their work is not quite central for my present purposes.
For discussion see Bayer (1993) and Müller (1993: ch.7); for alternatives see Frey and Tappe (1992), Fanselow (1992) and Haider (1993).
See Bhatt (1990), Löbel (1990), and Olsen (1991).
Since it is normally assumed that main clauses are CPs in German, I use an IP embedded under C’.
See also Reuland and Kosmeijer (1988) and Bayer and Kornfilt (1990; 1994) for relevant discussion.
Notice that functional heads like D and C are virtually free morphemes that can bear phonetic prominence, engage in coordination etc., while I has none of these properties.
Roughly everything but it or German es.
C-command is to be understood in the sense of “first branching node up”.
See Klima (1964) and Rizzi (1990).
See Jacobs (1984).
I will always mark focus with capitals.
The Nuclear Stress Rule of English makes it hard to decide whether only focuses on the entire VP or on the rightmost DP, unless the DP receives extra heavy stress. To make the point clearer, one can look at examples such as
i) John will [only [introduce BILL to Mary]] where focus remains on Bill and cannot spread to VP. On the relation between the phonology of focusing and its correlates in syntax and semantics, see Bierwisch (1966), Höhle (1982), Culicover and Rochemont (1983), Selkirk (1984), Gussenhoven (1984), von Stechow and Ullmann (1986) and Rochemont (1986) among others.
Tancredi (1990) calls this the Principle of Lexical Association (PLA)
i) Principle of Lexical AssociationAn operator like only must be associated with a lexical constituent in its c-command domain The PLA rests on the observation that the trace seen in (iib) cannot serve as an associate of only:
ii) a. He only likes MARY
b. MARY, he only likes e
Notice, however, that the PLA cannot be at work universally. In German V2-clauses, for instance, it is possible that nur associates with the finite verb which has moved to the C-position:
iii) Martina TANZT vermutlich nur mit Hans-Dietrich Martina dances presumably only with Hans-Dietrich
Presumably Martina only DANCES with Hans-Dietrich (… but does not go to bed with him) There seems to be one serious exception to (18a). As has sometimes been observed, even but not only may escape the (surface) c-command requirement:
vi) JOHN would even/?*only understand Syntactic Structures
Of course, it is not unproblematic at all when we follow the usual GB-assumption that in German CP is extraposed in the sense of adjunction to IP. In this case, nur would cease to c-command CP. We will turn to this problem in detail in chapter 6.
It is sometimes claimed that a DP with an attached particle cannot appear in an English PP either; (see, for instance, Taglicht, 1984 ). The construction may be marked, but it should not be taken to be ungrammatical. (i) shows a real example (taken from Davison, 1988: 187) whose direct translation into
i) It has scope over only the matrix-clause element it binds… i) *Es hat über nur das Matrixsatz-Element Skopus, das es bindet… We will turn to this issue in more detail in chapters 2 and 3.
The judgements are my own. Speakers of German sometimes show a slight disagreement in their judgements. It is clear, however, that the b-sentences are far less acceptable than the a-examples.
In the present work I will not deal with these problems of coordination. See Bayer (1990a) for some discussion.
See König (1991: ch.5).
See König (1991: ch.4).
We will turn to necessary exceptions below.
See Montague (1974).
In briefly mentioning representations such as (45) as “GB-style”, v. Stechow (1991a) seems to assume that they can be properly interpreted. Rooth provides a footnote in which he refers to an idea by David Pesetsky’s suggesting that cases of multiple foci may be treated along the lines of multiple occurrences of Wh. In this case, however, it is assumed that one Wh-element is in a designated operator position (SpecCP) while those in situ adjoin to it in LF. The index of the syntactically moved element binds its variable in LF, but the index of the adjoined Wh-elements does not. Exactly this leads to the well-known ECP-explanation of superiority effects in English (see Chomsky, 1981). On this background it is unclear how two elements which are both moved in LF could undergo absorption. The first question would be what will absorb what; the second, why there are no superiority type asymmetries (including ungrammatical cases).
As the treatment of focus in generative syntax has shown, it is likewise not unproblematic to take it as a quasi-quantifier phrase that undergoes LF-movement. (See Rooth’s discussion of Chomsky, 1976).
Of course, one would like to know why QR should be confined to DPs. (54b) could be seen as a quantified VP which could equally be affected by QR. This would render the example ambiguous too. We will return to scope fixing effects later on and show why this undesirable possibility cannot arise.
According to Steve Berman and others it is, for example, possible to say (59a) in a context like I only invited ANN to the party because she is a LINGUIST, but I didn’t invite SUSAN because she is a SINGER. According to Regine Eckardt (p.c.) reason adverbials are hard to get because reasons can be too manifold to mentally invoke constrained enough alternatives.
These examples become grammatical when there is a possible parse that isolates the material that must undergo movement; at least for German there seems to be a parse in which the verb has moved out of a VP that may contain the subject:
i) Mehr Opert liebhaber schlugen vor, daß Domingo den “Tristan” in WIEN singen sollte, als Pavarotti den “Lohengrin” in Salzburg
Krifka (1992: 23) assumes a “one-to-one mapping between focus operators and foci” and takes cases of multiple foci as semantic correspondents of a list of more than one variable that can be bound by a lambda operator.
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Bayer, J. (1996). Selected Earlier Work on the Syntax and Semantics of Focusing Particles. In: Directionality and Logical Form. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1272-9_2
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