- Email: [email protected]
English focus constructions and the theory of grammar
262
Reviews
Stowell, Tim, 1983. Subjects across categories. The Linguistic Review 2, 285-312. Zagona, Ph.D.
Karen, 1982. Government and proper dissertation. University of Washington.
Zubizarreta,
Maria
dissertation.
Luisa,
government
1982. On the relationship
of verbal
projections.
of the lexicon to syntax.
Unpublished
Unpublished
Ph.D.
MIT.
Michael S. Rochemont and Peter W. Culicover. English Focus Constructions und the Theory of Grammar (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. vii + 210 pp. ~&30.00/$49.50. Reviewed by Andrea Moro, Piazza Vittoria 11, I-27100 Pavia, Italy. In spite borderline history of syntax has phenomena itself.
of its quite clear intuitive relevance from an operational point of view, the between syntax and semantics is a very receding notion. During the recent linguistics its shape has changed several times; in particular the area of invaded so many topics which were previously regarded as pure semantic that one can hardly see how to establish the core notion of semantics
Michael Rochemont and Peter Culicover have attempted to investigate an interesting area of natural languages which has so far failed to be treated within the framework of principles and parameters. As the title explicitly indicates, the main topic of this book concerns the so-called English Focus Constructions. Even from an intuitive point of view, this phenomenon appears to be a rather complex one; any reasonable theory of natural language must minimally notice that focus is the interface of at least two different modules: phonology, in that it is intonation which can perform the role of focusing and semantics, because the meaning of a sentence is very sharply affected by such a strategy. The interesting thesis that the authors of this book are defending here is that this interaction must undergo the same principles and parameters which govern syntactic phenomena. In this sense, focus constructions can be regarded as an extremely interesting, not to say paradigmatic, empirical phenomenon for those who are interested in understanding the very notion of semantics and its relationship with syntax. It might be of some relevance to notice that this phenomenon has often been treated with a sort of embarassment by many linguists and it has been frequently thrown away in the wastebasket of the so-called stylistic phenomena, an even more receding if not misleading notion. The first step that the authors take is that of clarifying the sense in which focus interacts with both semantics and phonology. These two issues are addressed in a very clear fashion. Let’s take first the semantics of focus constructions. An important proviso is stated: even if a good deal of modem linguistics has been that of analysing semantics from a truth-conditional perspective, it is clear that semantics cannot be
Reviews
263
exhaustively reduced to truth-conditional assignment: there are other aspects which can be reasonably considered as part of the semantic field. Take for example the following two sentences: (la) JOHN likes Mary. (I b) John likes MARY. ‘Although they are something different Also with respect anything but trivial: an entire constituent
truth-conditionally equivalent, each of these sentences implies concerning the point of information’ (p. 18). to the phonological aspect of focus construction the situation is in particular, it is not necessary that the intonational pitch affects in order to focus it. For example, in a sentence like:
(2) The man in the blue HAT likes Mary. ‘the single accent on “hat” in (6) [renumbered here as (2)] is sufficient to allow the entire subject phrase to act as a focus’ (p. 19). Moreover, the very fact that for an element to extend its focus on a constituent it must be on its right branch, is per se a first empirical datum supporting the thesis that focus construction, although manifested by means of intonation, is indeed sensitive to purely syntactic principles. After having set in a very clear way the entire theoretical framework which is minimally needed to understand the argument (chapter I, ‘Theoretical assumptions’), the authors explore three empirical areas in which the notion of focus is relevant, namely Extraposition from NP (chapter 2). Stylistic inversion (chapter 3) and NP Shift (chapter 4). We will skip a discussion of chapter 2 while we comment in some detail on chapter 3 and the closely related chapter 4, suggesting also some personal reflections. Of course, given all the methodological premises, the three sections are homogeneously treated under a unitary perspective, namely the intention to reduce those phenomena which interact with focus processes to instances of the simple rule move-u and restrict it by means of general principles such as ECP and Subjacency. Chapter 3 deals with the analysis of a well-known phenomenon which can be illustrated by referring to minimal pairs like the following: (4a) John walked into the room. (4b) Into the room walked John The core thesis defended in this chapter is to refute the analysis based on a transformation which displaces simultaneously the two XPs in a d-structure essentially identical to (4a), namely the NP John and the PP into the room, in order to yield an sstructure representation where the linear order is that of (4b). Formally, the following s-structure is in fact widely adopted for the type of sentence in (4b): (5) [PP, tj V ti NPj]
264
Reviews
The authors notice that sentences like the one in (4b) can be fruitfully related to another similar phenomenon that is the so-called there-insertion construct. This phenomenon has been studied very extensively within the generative framework: among the se.Jeral analyses of such a construct, the authors report two major ones; in particular they mention Stowell (1981) and Safir (1985) whose analyses are given here respectively as (6a) and (6b):
(64 Lp t, I IvpVP Np,ll (6b) LIP[IP6 1 VP1NPiI Rochemont and Culicover notice that, although some sort of extension of either Stowell’s or Safir’s analyses would reduce the complexity of a very improbable rule like (5) there are still several empirical problems to solve before arriving at a satisfactory formula explaining (4b). In particular, they suggest that rightward movement of the subject as in (6) can hardly be maintained, given that when we add a ‘secondary’ predicate to the sentence, the linear order is the following: (7a) ‘into the room walked nude John (7b) into the room walked John nude The link between these facts and the main topic of the book is given by the fact that sentence (7a) is grammatical only if John nude is focused (p. 77). Their own proposal is based on ‘three major components: VP topicalisation, V to I, and inversion containing V, each of which may be independently motivated for English’ (p. 79). The interaction of these three independent phenomena would offer the explanation for the stylistic inversion. To follow their reasoning we can just consider the following simple sentence:
(8) Lp hp L into the room1L L walked1IIpJohn ti tdll The authors themselves recognise that this analysis is not completely unproblematic but they consider it a better approximation to the empirical data than current alternatives. We will not discuss the details of their reasoning (see pp. 8694) here; in any case, we can at least single out two major considerations which led to (8) both interestingly related to just one structural opposition, namely IP-adjunction. Notice first that the key fact is that it is postponed to an adjoined position. The question then is twofold: first, why is the VP moved to an adjoined position and not to, say, spec-CP? Second, is a representation where a head, walked, is adjoined to a maximal projection a good one? The answers to these questions are of a different nature: the first is of theory-internal character, namely if VP were in spec-CP then an ECP violation would be expected, given the version of such a principle that the authors adopt. More explicitly, the reason why VP is adjoined to IP must necessarily be traced back to other phenomena and to the necessity of maintaining the
Reviews
265
theory consistent, rather than to empirical reasons which are directly implied within this cluster of facts. The second one, on the contrary, is intended to be an empirical one: ‘Vata and other languages do exhibit unbounded movement of V to A-bar positions’ (see p. 91 and references cited there). Although we are not in a position to criticise this approach to the phenomenon here, it should be noticed that the main idea implied by this analysis, namely that the subject is not rightward moved, could be preserved by adopting the analysis offered by Hoekstra and Mulder (1989) with a minor cost in terms of theoretical assumptions. In their terms, there is no need to stipulate IP-adjunctions given that the pre-verbal predicate is rather moved to spec-IP. Moreover, Hoekstra and Mulder themselves suggest that the relation between this kind of locative preposing, by using their terminology, and there-insertion is in fact a true one provided that one adopts the proposal made in Moro (1990) that preverbal there is itself a predicate: also in this theory spec-IP is independently considered as landing site for a predicative constituent. even if only for a subset of the NP class. The central relevance of the issue concerning there is implicitly emphasised by the fact that the authors essentially dedicate an entire chapter to it, namely chapter 4. The problem is the following: why is there obligatory in cases of stylistic inversion while it is banned with NP-shift phenomena? That is to say, why is it ungrammatical in (9a) and obligatory in (9b) (p. 117) given that in both cases the authors assume that the NP at the right of the sentence has been moved to that position leaving an anaphoric trace? (9a) *John bought there for his mother a picture that he liked. (9b) ‘Walked into the room a man with long blonde hair. The core of this chapter is precisely section 2, where the authors present a critical survey of the history of the accounts of there-insertion. We will not present the lines of this section, which are indeed very clear and synthetic; we can just limit ourselves to saying that if one adopts the idea that there is a predicate rather than an expletive, the theory seems to be significantly simplified. Chapter 5 is the conclusive one. The results of the main program as proposed in the Introduction is eventually checked: namely, the class of stylistic rules (grouped in three sub-classes), extraposition, stylistic inversion, and NP shift), has been eliminated from the syntax and is framed within the general cluster of principles that govern all other instances of syntactic constructions. The conclusive step is twofold: on the one hand, the authors want to explore the theoretical consequences that this account has on the general theory; on the other, they address two much more ambitious questions, namely the two following ones (p. 148): (1 Oa) Why are these constructions (lob) Why do these constructions that phrase?
syntactically restricted in the way they are? require that a specific phrase be focused and why
The answers to these two major questions are considered to be of the same nature: the underlying idea is that if the kind of constructs that have been studied in this book are in fact instances of the basic rule move-a, then Universal Grammar is to provide an answer to both questions. These constructs are restricted because the structure that they display blocks further applications of move-a. This explains the first question. The second one is considered as essentially dealing with the same issue: it is because of their particular structure, derived by an instance of the general rule move-a, that they require an element to be focused. Although the problem is very clearly addressed in this section the mechanism accounting for this link between focusing and the structure of the sentence is quite complicated: the Focus Principle, to use the author’s terminology (p. 156) is essentially based on two distinct facts. A certain element is a structural focus iff (i) it is canonically governed by a lexical head and it is not case-marked or theta-marked; (ii) it is not a predicate that is related to the lexical head which governs it. Now, if one can easily agree with the authors in the way they address the problem, it is very hard to see their Focus Principle as a definitive formulation of the principle accounting for this phenomenon. In particular it might be observed that the kind of relations that enter into this principle are very unstable from a theoretical point of view. To take just one single element, it is very hard to see how the notion of lexical head can play a role in the explanation, given that there seems to be no agreement about such a notion. However, the mere fact that an entire class of sentences has been traced back to the arena of syntax is indeed more than a welcome result. It is perhaps interesting to notice that also within the alternative framework which considers there as a raised predicate the same issue has been addressed. In this case, it seems to me that the results obtained in the two frameworks could be fruitfully compared: in particular, in both cases an explanation for the so-called Dejniteness Eflect is considered to be provided. The main difference is that while here the explanation for this fact is given by means of the representation at s-structure, within the other the predictive results are reached at the level of Logical Form. Whether or not the two different approaches are actually different, or even incompatible, is too complex a matter to be discussed here.
References Hoekstra, T. and R. Mulder, 1990. Unvergatives as copular verbs. Linguistic Review 71, I-81. Moro. A., 1990. There as a raised predicate. Talk given at XIII GLOW Conference, Cambridge, England. Safir, K., 1985. Syntactic chains. Cambridge: Cambridge University Stowell, T., 1981. Origin of phrase structure. Ph.D. dissertation. Technology.
Press. Massachusetts
Institute
of
Reviews
Stowell, Tim, 1983. Subjects across categories. The Linguistic Review 2, 285-312. Zagona, Ph.D.
Karen, 1982. Government and proper dissertation. University of Washington.
Zubizarreta,
Maria
dissertation.
Luisa,
government
1982. On the relationship
of verbal
projections.
of the lexicon to syntax.
Unpublished
Unpublished
Ph.D.
MIT.
Michael S. Rochemont and Peter W. Culicover. English Focus Constructions und the Theory of Grammar (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. vii + 210 pp. ~&30.00/$49.50. Reviewed by Andrea Moro, Piazza Vittoria 11, I-27100 Pavia, Italy. In spite borderline history of syntax has phenomena itself.
of its quite clear intuitive relevance from an operational point of view, the between syntax and semantics is a very receding notion. During the recent linguistics its shape has changed several times; in particular the area of invaded so many topics which were previously regarded as pure semantic that one can hardly see how to establish the core notion of semantics
Michael Rochemont and Peter Culicover have attempted to investigate an interesting area of natural languages which has so far failed to be treated within the framework of principles and parameters. As the title explicitly indicates, the main topic of this book concerns the so-called English Focus Constructions. Even from an intuitive point of view, this phenomenon appears to be a rather complex one; any reasonable theory of natural language must minimally notice that focus is the interface of at least two different modules: phonology, in that it is intonation which can perform the role of focusing and semantics, because the meaning of a sentence is very sharply affected by such a strategy. The interesting thesis that the authors of this book are defending here is that this interaction must undergo the same principles and parameters which govern syntactic phenomena. In this sense, focus constructions can be regarded as an extremely interesting, not to say paradigmatic, empirical phenomenon for those who are interested in understanding the very notion of semantics and its relationship with syntax. It might be of some relevance to notice that this phenomenon has often been treated with a sort of embarassment by many linguists and it has been frequently thrown away in the wastebasket of the so-called stylistic phenomena, an even more receding if not misleading notion. The first step that the authors take is that of clarifying the sense in which focus interacts with both semantics and phonology. These two issues are addressed in a very clear fashion. Let’s take first the semantics of focus constructions. An important proviso is stated: even if a good deal of modem linguistics has been that of analysing semantics from a truth-conditional perspective, it is clear that semantics cannot be
Reviews
263
exhaustively reduced to truth-conditional assignment: there are other aspects which can be reasonably considered as part of the semantic field. Take for example the following two sentences: (la) JOHN likes Mary. (I b) John likes MARY. ‘Although they are something different Also with respect anything but trivial: an entire constituent
truth-conditionally equivalent, each of these sentences implies concerning the point of information’ (p. 18). to the phonological aspect of focus construction the situation is in particular, it is not necessary that the intonational pitch affects in order to focus it. For example, in a sentence like:
(2) The man in the blue HAT likes Mary. ‘the single accent on “hat” in (6) [renumbered here as (2)] is sufficient to allow the entire subject phrase to act as a focus’ (p. 19). Moreover, the very fact that for an element to extend its focus on a constituent it must be on its right branch, is per se a first empirical datum supporting the thesis that focus construction, although manifested by means of intonation, is indeed sensitive to purely syntactic principles. After having set in a very clear way the entire theoretical framework which is minimally needed to understand the argument (chapter I, ‘Theoretical assumptions’), the authors explore three empirical areas in which the notion of focus is relevant, namely Extraposition from NP (chapter 2). Stylistic inversion (chapter 3) and NP Shift (chapter 4). We will skip a discussion of chapter 2 while we comment in some detail on chapter 3 and the closely related chapter 4, suggesting also some personal reflections. Of course, given all the methodological premises, the three sections are homogeneously treated under a unitary perspective, namely the intention to reduce those phenomena which interact with focus processes to instances of the simple rule move-u and restrict it by means of general principles such as ECP and Subjacency. Chapter 3 deals with the analysis of a well-known phenomenon which can be illustrated by referring to minimal pairs like the following: (4a) John walked into the room. (4b) Into the room walked John The core thesis defended in this chapter is to refute the analysis based on a transformation which displaces simultaneously the two XPs in a d-structure essentially identical to (4a), namely the NP John and the PP into the room, in order to yield an sstructure representation where the linear order is that of (4b). Formally, the following s-structure is in fact widely adopted for the type of sentence in (4b): (5) [PP, tj V ti NPj]
264
Reviews
The authors notice that sentences like the one in (4b) can be fruitfully related to another similar phenomenon that is the so-called there-insertion construct. This phenomenon has been studied very extensively within the generative framework: among the se.Jeral analyses of such a construct, the authors report two major ones; in particular they mention Stowell (1981) and Safir (1985) whose analyses are given here respectively as (6a) and (6b):
(64 Lp t, I IvpVP Np,ll (6b) LIP[IP6 1 VP1NPiI Rochemont and Culicover notice that, although some sort of extension of either Stowell’s or Safir’s analyses would reduce the complexity of a very improbable rule like (5) there are still several empirical problems to solve before arriving at a satisfactory formula explaining (4b). In particular, they suggest that rightward movement of the subject as in (6) can hardly be maintained, given that when we add a ‘secondary’ predicate to the sentence, the linear order is the following: (7a) ‘into the room walked nude John (7b) into the room walked John nude The link between these facts and the main topic of the book is given by the fact that sentence (7a) is grammatical only if John nude is focused (p. 77). Their own proposal is based on ‘three major components: VP topicalisation, V to I, and inversion containing V, each of which may be independently motivated for English’ (p. 79). The interaction of these three independent phenomena would offer the explanation for the stylistic inversion. To follow their reasoning we can just consider the following simple sentence:
(8) Lp hp L into the room1L L walked1IIpJohn ti tdll The authors themselves recognise that this analysis is not completely unproblematic but they consider it a better approximation to the empirical data than current alternatives. We will not discuss the details of their reasoning (see pp. 8694) here; in any case, we can at least single out two major considerations which led to (8) both interestingly related to just one structural opposition, namely IP-adjunction. Notice first that the key fact is that it is postponed to an adjoined position. The question then is twofold: first, why is the VP moved to an adjoined position and not to, say, spec-CP? Second, is a representation where a head, walked, is adjoined to a maximal projection a good one? The answers to these questions are of a different nature: the first is of theory-internal character, namely if VP were in spec-CP then an ECP violation would be expected, given the version of such a principle that the authors adopt. More explicitly, the reason why VP is adjoined to IP must necessarily be traced back to other phenomena and to the necessity of maintaining the
Reviews
265
theory consistent, rather than to empirical reasons which are directly implied within this cluster of facts. The second one, on the contrary, is intended to be an empirical one: ‘Vata and other languages do exhibit unbounded movement of V to A-bar positions’ (see p. 91 and references cited there). Although we are not in a position to criticise this approach to the phenomenon here, it should be noticed that the main idea implied by this analysis, namely that the subject is not rightward moved, could be preserved by adopting the analysis offered by Hoekstra and Mulder (1989) with a minor cost in terms of theoretical assumptions. In their terms, there is no need to stipulate IP-adjunctions given that the pre-verbal predicate is rather moved to spec-IP. Moreover, Hoekstra and Mulder themselves suggest that the relation between this kind of locative preposing, by using their terminology, and there-insertion is in fact a true one provided that one adopts the proposal made in Moro (1990) that preverbal there is itself a predicate: also in this theory spec-IP is independently considered as landing site for a predicative constituent. even if only for a subset of the NP class. The central relevance of the issue concerning there is implicitly emphasised by the fact that the authors essentially dedicate an entire chapter to it, namely chapter 4. The problem is the following: why is there obligatory in cases of stylistic inversion while it is banned with NP-shift phenomena? That is to say, why is it ungrammatical in (9a) and obligatory in (9b) (p. 117) given that in both cases the authors assume that the NP at the right of the sentence has been moved to that position leaving an anaphoric trace? (9a) *John bought there for his mother a picture that he liked. (9b) ‘Walked into the room a man with long blonde hair. The core of this chapter is precisely section 2, where the authors present a critical survey of the history of the accounts of there-insertion. We will not present the lines of this section, which are indeed very clear and synthetic; we can just limit ourselves to saying that if one adopts the idea that there is a predicate rather than an expletive, the theory seems to be significantly simplified. Chapter 5 is the conclusive one. The results of the main program as proposed in the Introduction is eventually checked: namely, the class of stylistic rules (grouped in three sub-classes), extraposition, stylistic inversion, and NP shift), has been eliminated from the syntax and is framed within the general cluster of principles that govern all other instances of syntactic constructions. The conclusive step is twofold: on the one hand, the authors want to explore the theoretical consequences that this account has on the general theory; on the other, they address two much more ambitious questions, namely the two following ones (p. 148): (1 Oa) Why are these constructions (lob) Why do these constructions that phrase?
syntactically restricted in the way they are? require that a specific phrase be focused and why
The answers to these two major questions are considered to be of the same nature: the underlying idea is that if the kind of constructs that have been studied in this book are in fact instances of the basic rule move-a, then Universal Grammar is to provide an answer to both questions. These constructs are restricted because the structure that they display blocks further applications of move-a. This explains the first question. The second one is considered as essentially dealing with the same issue: it is because of their particular structure, derived by an instance of the general rule move-a, that they require an element to be focused. Although the problem is very clearly addressed in this section the mechanism accounting for this link between focusing and the structure of the sentence is quite complicated: the Focus Principle, to use the author’s terminology (p. 156) is essentially based on two distinct facts. A certain element is a structural focus iff (i) it is canonically governed by a lexical head and it is not case-marked or theta-marked; (ii) it is not a predicate that is related to the lexical head which governs it. Now, if one can easily agree with the authors in the way they address the problem, it is very hard to see their Focus Principle as a definitive formulation of the principle accounting for this phenomenon. In particular it might be observed that the kind of relations that enter into this principle are very unstable from a theoretical point of view. To take just one single element, it is very hard to see how the notion of lexical head can play a role in the explanation, given that there seems to be no agreement about such a notion. However, the mere fact that an entire class of sentences has been traced back to the arena of syntax is indeed more than a welcome result. It is perhaps interesting to notice that also within the alternative framework which considers there as a raised predicate the same issue has been addressed. In this case, it seems to me that the results obtained in the two frameworks could be fruitfully compared: in particular, in both cases an explanation for the so-called Dejniteness Eflect is considered to be provided. The main difference is that while here the explanation for this fact is given by means of the representation at s-structure, within the other the predictive results are reached at the level of Logical Form. Whether or not the two different approaches are actually different, or even incompatible, is too complex a matter to be discussed here.
References Hoekstra, T. and R. Mulder, 1990. Unvergatives as copular verbs. Linguistic Review 71, I-81. Moro. A., 1990. There as a raised predicate. Talk given at XIII GLOW Conference, Cambridge, England. Safir, K., 1985. Syntactic chains. Cambridge: Cambridge University Stowell, T., 1981. Origin of phrase structure. Ph.D. dissertation. Technology.
Press. Massachusetts
Institute
of