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Title:
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Grammatical Effects of Topic and Focus Information
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Author:
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Jung-Min Jo
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2004
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Morphology
Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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English
Korean
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Director(s):
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James Yoon
Cedric Boeckx
Peter Lasersohn
Elabbas Benmamoun
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Abstract:
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This dissertation examines how topic and focus information are realized within a sentence and how they affect sentence forms, i.e. what morpho-syntactic processes are involved in deriving constructions associated with topic and focus in Korean, in comparison with certain constructions in English. Under the assumption that topic and focus feature assignments are an integral part of syntactic computation, I show that the topic feature is morphologically realized in-situ or by syntactic movement, which is, in essence, driven by morpho-syntactic requirements, whereas the focus feature is realized by a pitch accent in-situ with no syntactic movement involved, consequently arguing against the existence of focus movement in Korean.
Patterns of both nominal and predicate topics are examined and, in particular, the morpho-syntactic patterns of the predicate topic constructions are scrutinized, not only because the latter constructions are less often studied than nominal topics, but also because they raise theoretically and empirically challenging questions, and the examination of both nominal and predicate topics is a necessary step to take for any substantive claim about the grammatical effect of topic information in general. Specifically the topic encoder is uniformly identified as the particle –nun for both nominal and predicate topics. Predicate topic constructions, so-called Ha- and R-constructions, are examined to identify a variety of morpho-syntactic properties and provide a systematic account of those properties. I claim that the two constructions are one and the
same construction as far as the syntax and semantics are concerned, but that they arise as a result of morphophonological variation at PF/Morphological Component. That is, the Ha- and R-constructions and their variations arise as a result of the phrasal movement targeting a different domain in the narrow syntax and an optional deletion process in the lower copy in PF. The complex process involved with the predicate topic,w which is different from the nominal topic, is in essence attributed to the morpho-syntactic properties of verbal morphology and the topic particle.
As for focus information, I show that pitch accent is held accountable for focus interpretation, with the apparent syntactic movement playing no significant role as far as focus interpretation is concerned. Sentential stress patterns and their implications for focus interpretation are examined. In particular, this dissertation examines whether scrambling (i.e., an instance of syntactic movement) has anything to do with focus, as is claimed by some researchers. While I show that nuclear stress falls on the most deeply embedded XP in the base position whether the sentence is scrambled or not, Saito's (1989) early observation is maintained that scrambling is an optional syntactic operation with no semantic effect as far as focus interpretation is concerned. As for the question of syntactic focus movement, constructions which are often claimed to be involved with focus movement, so-called 'sluicing' and cleft constructions, are examined only to refute the existence of syntactic focus movement. Also word order variations in copular constructions are examined to see how topic and focus information are relevant in restricting sentence word order. While the word order of the pre-copular nominals is relatively free, I conclude that the
predicate nominal fronting is allowed only when it is construed with a topic or topic-like interpretation, confirming the cross-linguistic observation made by Partee (1998).
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