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Specificational sentences and the influence of information structure on (anti-)connectivity effects1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2009

KAREN LAHOUSSE
KAREN LAHOUSSE*
Affiliation:
Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders & University of Leuven
*
Author's address: Department of Linguistics, University of Leuven, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, PO Box 3308, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper argues that the difference between connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in specificational copular sentences is heavily influenced by semantics and information structure. It shows that anti-connectivity effects with respect to binding disappear when the influence of information structure is neutralized, whereas anti-connectivity effects with respect to scope result from the semantics of specificational sentences. These data lead to the conclusion that anti-connectivity effects cannot be used as evidence against a syntax-based approach to specificational sentences and binding, that the analysis of specificational sentences should include both a syntactic and a semantic device, and that the syntactic analysis of specificational sentences should rely crucially on their information structure. I present and adopt Heycock & Kroch's (2002) analysis for specificational sentences, in which connectivity effects result from the assembling of ground and focus. The fact that connectivity effects are also exhibited by verb–object–subject word order in French and Spanish, which is marked for the ground-focus partition, is presented as an important piece of independent evidence in favor of this analysis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 139 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[1]

This paper has benefited from judgments by and discussion with Manuela Caniato, Carlo Cecchetto, Jenny Doetjes, Liliane Haegeman, Caroline Heycock, Vincent Homer, Stefania Marzo, Francisco Ordóñez, Johan Rooryck, Philippe Schlenker, Dieter Vermandere, María Anne Zribi-Hertz, Luisa Zubizarreta, as well as two anonymous referees for the Journal of Linguistics. All errors remain of course my own.

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