Pragmatics of LF intervention effects: Japanese and Korean Wh-interrogatives  

Oleh:

Tomioka, Satoshi

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 39 no. 9 (Sep. 2007), page 1570-1590.
Topik: Logical form (LF); Intervention effects; Topic; Focus; Negative polarity items (NPIs); Scrambling; Post-focus reduction
Fulltext: Tomioka_Satoshi.pdf (306.88KB)

Isi artikel

This paper presents a pragmatic account for what have come to be known as logical form (LF) intervention effects, based on a wide range of data from Japanese and Korean. Despite their appearance, these effects are not due to structural constraints operative at LF but rather to a less-than-perfect realization of the information structure of interrogative sentences. The potential interveners, which seem to be a random collection of various expressions, are classified as Anti-Topic Items, since they cannot bear the topic marker -wa/(n)un. Although the non-Wh material in a Wh-question must belong to old information, the interveners fail to be interpreted as background material because of their Anti-Topicality when they precede Wh-phrases. The cancellation of the intervention effects with scrambling is derived from the prosodic phrasing that scrambling creates. Moving a Wh-element over an intervener places the intervener in the position of post-focus reduction—a prosodically reduced portion of the sentence.With post-focus reduction, the intervener becomes a part of old information. It will be shown that the proposed analysis not only accounts for core cases of intervention effects, but also makes correct predictions concerning the matrixsubordinate contrast in intervention effects and the special status of negative polarity items (NPIs).

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