TY - JOUR
T1 - Focus assignment in English specificational and predicative clauses
T2 - Intonation as a cue to information structure?
AU - Van Praet, Wout
N1 - Funding Information:
The research for this article was made possible by the doctoral research grant awarded by the F.R.S.-FNRS. I thank everyone who offered comments and feedback to the presentation of this material at the Second Round Table on Communicative Dynamism (Université de Namur). I am particularly grateful to the two anonymous referees for their usual comments on earlier versions of this article. Many thanks also go out to Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte, Gerard O’Grady, Eirian Davies, and Ditte Kimps for discussion of issues central to this article. Needless to say, I am the only one responsible for remaining errors of thought.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique?FNRS [25083327]. The research for this article was made possible by the doctoral research grant awarded by the F.R.S.-FNRS. I thank everyone who offered comments and feedback to the presentation of this material at the Second Round Table on Communicative Dynamism (Universit? de Namur). I am particularly grateful to the two anonymous referees for their usual comments on earlier versions of this article. Many thanks also go out to Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte, Gerard O?Grady, Eirian Davies, and Ditte Kimps for discussion of issues central to this article. Needless to say, I am the only one responsible for remaining errors of thought.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/7/3
Y1 - 2019/7/3
N2 - Studies of types of copular clauses assume that specificational and predicative clauses can be contrasted by their different information foci, as reflected in patterns of intonational prominence. This paper investigates that assumption by looking at the prosodic realisation of 600 specificational clauses with variable noun phrase (NP) subjects and 600 predicative clauses with predicative NP complements. A study of the utterances’ tonality, tonicity, relative pitch and intensity reveals that the two copular types cannot readily be contrasted by a mere background-focus dichotomy. While predicative clauses evince the expected prominence pattern with the focus on the description, specificational clauses give salience to their two arguments. Therefore, I propose that the real difference between specificational and predicative clauses most frequently concerns the foregrounding or backgrounding of the semantically more general NP, i.e., the variable and what I propose to call the ‘describee’, respectively. This I explain in terms of the different communicative dynamism of the variable vs. describee and of the specificational and predicative clause types in general.
AB - Studies of types of copular clauses assume that specificational and predicative clauses can be contrasted by their different information foci, as reflected in patterns of intonational prominence. This paper investigates that assumption by looking at the prosodic realisation of 600 specificational clauses with variable noun phrase (NP) subjects and 600 predicative clauses with predicative NP complements. A study of the utterances’ tonality, tonicity, relative pitch and intensity reveals that the two copular types cannot readily be contrasted by a mere background-focus dichotomy. While predicative clauses evince the expected prominence pattern with the focus on the description, specificational clauses give salience to their two arguments. Therefore, I propose that the real difference between specificational and predicative clauses most frequently concerns the foregrounding or backgrounding of the semantically more general NP, i.e., the variable and what I propose to call the ‘describee’, respectively. This I explain in terms of the different communicative dynamism of the variable vs. describee and of the specificational and predicative clause types in general.
KW - English
KW - communicative dynamism
KW - information structure
KW - prosody
KW - specification/predication
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85070508345&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/03740463.2019.1641318
DO - 10.1080/03740463.2019.1641318
M3 - Article
SN - 0374-0463
VL - 51
SP - 222
EP - 241
JO - Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
JF - Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
IS - 2
ER -