From focus to syntax

From focus to syntax§

Caterina Donatia, Marina Nesporb,*aUniversita di Urbino, Italy

bFacolta di Lettere e Filosofia, Universita di Ferrara, Via Savonarola 27, Ferrara 44100, Italy

Received 9 October 2002; accepted 24 October 2002

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that the location of the focused constituent within a sentence, aswell as the definition of all the constituents that might be interpreted as focused, is predictable

on the basis of the syntax of a given language. The major (though not only) division acrosslanguages as to the distribution of focus is related to the degree of freedom that languagesallow for its location. The basic idea tested on basis of data taken from French, Italian,

Turkish and English, is that the more prominence may move around within an intonationalphrase, the more the language is characterized by rigid word order properties. Since infantsare sensitive to prosodic properties since birth, we argue that it is feasible that infants use the

location of intonational parameters in a preverbal stage.# 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Turkish; Focus; Word order; Intonational phrase prominence; Prosodic bootstrapping

1. Introduction

The main question we address in this paper concerns the possibility that infantsmay get some information about the syntax of the language they are exposed tothrough the phonological prominence that signals a focused constituent. We are

Lingua 113 (2003) 1119–1142

www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua

0024-3841/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/S0024-3841(03)00015-9

§ For discussions on different aspects of this paper, we thank Laura Bafile, Anne Christophe, Aslı

Goksel, Teresa Guasti, Rita Manzini, Jacques Mehler and Sumru Ozsoy. Many additional thanks to

Sumru whose help and hospitality during our visits in Istanbul were essential for the research reported

here. The paper has finally benefited from the comments of a Lingua anonymous reviewer, whom we

thank.

* Corresponding author.

E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Nespor).

especially interested in this issue from the point of view of the development of ahuman’s native language. The idea that prosody might cue syntax and thus help ababy in the initialization of the grammar of the language it is exposed to is not new.It is known as the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis and was first proposed inGleitman and Wanner (1982) (cf. also Gerken, 1994; Gerken et al., 1994; Morganand Demuth, 1996). Prosodic bootstrapping presents a considerable advantage overother bootstrapping hypotheses: that of being possible at a prelexical stage. In fact,when infants start combining words, at about 20 months, they appear not to makemistakes in the relative order of words (Bloom, 1970; Meisel, 1992; Clahsen andEisenbeiss, 1993). Even earlier, at the age of 17 months, they react differently towell- and ill-formed sentences (Hirsch-Pasek et al., 1987; Hirsch-Pasek and Golink-off, 1996). It may thus be assumed that the parameters governing word order mustbe set quite early in life. In particular, it would be a great advantage for the acqui-sition process if these syntactic parameters could be set long before 17 months, evenbefore the child has acquired the ability to segment a string into words or has anyknowledge about the meaning of words, i.e. at a prelexical stage.Prelexical bootstrapping, in fact, would help solving a paradox in the acquisition

of language pointed out by Mazuka (1996): to understand the word order of, say,heads and complements in the language of exposure, a baby must recognize headsand complements. But once it recognizes heads and complement, it already knowshow they are ordered. The baby, however, does not have this knowledge. We know,instead, that babies are sensitive to prosodic cues. Prosody may thus be a way out ofthe paradox. This is because if a parameter is set through prosody, neither identifi-cation of word class, nor the segmentation of a string into words is necessary.A proposal along the same line as the present one has been put forth in Nespor et

al. (1996), who argue that the prominence at the phonological phrase level mighthelp bootstrap the head-complement parameter, determining whether complementsfollow or precede their head. Experimental evidence appears to confirm thishypothesis, as we will see later (Christophe et al., 1997, 2002). As pointed out byMehler (p.c.), it would be strange if just one syntactic parameter would be setthrough prosody and all the other ones in different ways. It is to be expected,instead, that at least some other parameters might be set through signals containedin the message. Phonology, while not interpreting all syntactic information, in factprovides cues to more than just the head-complement parameter (for an overview ofthis problem, cf. Inkelas and Zec, 1990). In particular our ultimate goal in this paperis to understand whether the prominence that signals a focused constituent, i.e. themost prominent element of an intonational phrase (Hayes and Lahiri, 1991), maygive a cue to some syntactic parameters.Focus is, however, one of the most delicate issues in the study of grammar. The

semantic notion of focus appears to be related to phonology without having clearroots in syntax. It is this apparently direct relation between sound and meaning thatis problematic for the well-established T-model (Chomsky and Lasnik, 1977).According to the T-model, the two interpretive components—semantics andphonology—can only interpret what is generated by either of the two generativecomponents—morphology and syntax. A commonly proposed account of this

1120 C. Donati, M. Nespor / Lingua 113 (2003) 1119–1142

problem is the establishment of a feature [+F] that appears as a label in the syn-tactic tree (Rizzi, 1997; Zubizarreta, 1998, among others). The availability of elementslabelled [+F] is thus warranted to both interpretive components (also Selkirk, 1984;Kanerva, 1990).In this paper, we address the question of the relation between semantic focus and

phonological prominence, its most audible physical correlate, with the ultimate goalof understanding the bootstrapping issue stated above. In doing so, we attempt toeliminate the feature [+F] from the model of sentence grammar by proposing thatfocus is not at all a notion pertaining to sentence grammar, of which the T-model isa model, but to the grammar of discourse. Specifically, we will tentatively argue thatthe notion of focus is the by product of the output of the syntactic computation, i.e.a pair of a PF and an LF representation. Still, the location of the focused con-stituent within a sentence as well as the definition of all the constituents that mightbe interpreted as focused, it will be argued, is predictable on the basis of the syntaxof a given language. The major (though not only) division across languages as to thedistribution of focus is related to the degree of freedom that languages allow as forits location.The paper proceeds as follows: in Section 2, we first describe the phonological

background within which our hypothesis concerning the prosodic bootstrapping ofsyntax is formulated, i.e. the theory of prosodic phonology and then proceed tointroduce the notion of prosodic bootstrapping. Section 3 is dedicated to a briefsummary of those infants’ perceptual abilities concerning language that are anecessary requirement for our hypothesis concerning bootstrapping to acquire someplausibility. In Section 4, we discuss main (but non-emphatic) prominence at thelevel of the intonational phrase in its relation with the notion of focus set, and inSection 5 we proceed to a proposal about the syntactic correlates of this prominence.In Section 6 we show that the syntactic parameter possibly settable through mainprominence within the intonational phrase cannot be a movement parameter. InSection 7 we put forth our proposal concerning the syntactic parameters which arefeasibly set on the basis of the location of exactly this prominence. Section 8 con-tains some concluding remarks.

2. Prosodic structure and prosodic bootstrapping

Prosodic events that signal phonological structure at the phrasal level, and thusindirectly provide cues to syntactic structure, most often apply at the edges ofphonological constituents (Selkirk, 1984; Nespor and Vogel, 1986). Not every edgeof syntactic constituents coincides with edges of phonological constituents, as wewill see below. The alignment between either the left or the right edge of syntacticand phonological constituents, however, is guaranteed. While in a few specific casesthe alignment between the constituents of the two hierarchies is universally defined(for example, parentheticals exhaustively constitute intonational phrases cross-linguistically), in general, alignment varies depending on specific syntactic propertiesof a given language (Selkirk, 1984; Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Inkelas and Zec, 1990).

C. Donati, M. Nespor / Lingua 113 (2003) 1119–1142 1121

In addition, while some prosodic events universally mark one edge of a certainlevel, thus presenting no crosslinguistic variation, others may mark either the left orthe right edge depending on specific characteristics of the language. For example,lengthening is universally characteristic of right edges of phrasal constituents of thephonological hierarchy. Though strengthening phenomena occasionally applyphrase initially, there is no phenomenon comparable to final lengthening thatlengthens the beginning of constituents. The location of main prominence, instead,varies crosslinguistically.Given that phonological and syntactic constituents do not necessarily coincide,

prosodic events signal syntactic properties only indirectly. Although phonologicalstructure is mapped from syntactic structure the resulting phonological units maydiffer from the original syntactic ones. The nonisomorphism between the two struc-tures is due to two factors: first, given the nonrecursive nature of the phonologicalarchitecture, the mapping rules produce a phonological hierarchy which is flatterthan the syntactic one (Selkirk, 1984; Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Hayes, 1989);1 sec-ond, they often yield units that are mismatched with respect to the units of syntax.Therefore, while prosodic events are sensitive to prosodic and thus indirectly to

syntactic structure, no syntactic constituent is unequivocally signaled by a specifictype of prosodic cue. In the case of phonological phrases in English for example,their right edge most often coincides with the right edge of a (non-functional) syn-tactic head, as exemplified in (1).

(1)
[All children]f [are buying]f [many small presents]f [for Christmas]f
This is however not always the case, as we will see below.The two phonological constituents relevant for the issues presented in this paper

are the phonological phrase (f) and the intonational phrase (I).2 The domain of thephonological phrase minimally includes the lexical head of a syntactic phrase, aswell as all the material on its nonrecursive side, plus other material subject tocrosslinguistic variation. In head-complement languages, the left edge of a syntacticphrase is aligned with the left edge of a phonological phrase. In these languages itthus contains, in addition to the lexical head, all the elements included in the maxi-mal projection from the head leftwards (i.e. specifiers, functional heads and leftadjuncts). In complement-head languages, it is the right edge of syntactic phraseswhich is aligned with the right edge of phonological phrases. The material includedin the phonological phrase in these languages thus spans from the head rightward(Nespor and Vogel, 1986).3 Evidence for constituency comes from all sorts of sandhirules applying within constituents, but not across them. Additional evidence comesfrom prominence, which systematically falls either on the right or on the left edge(Selkirk, 1980; 1984; Nespor and Vogel, 1986). In addition constituents of specific

1 A certain amount of recursivity is allowed in certain proposals concerning the prosodic hierarchy

(among others, Inkelas, 1989; Ito and Mester, 1992; Selkirk, 1996; Ladd, 1996).2 For the exact definitions of these two constituents assumed here cf. Nespor et al. (1996).3 Notice that there is an asymmetry between head-complement and complement-head languages: the

nonrecursive side is richer in the first than in the second type of languages.


levels are accompanied by final lengthening (among others, Nespor and Vogel, 1986;Frota, 2000; Cambier Langeveld, 2000). Examples are given in (2) for English (headinitial) and Turkish (head final), where the lexical head is in bold letters.

(2)
a. [for Bruce]f b. [Mehmet icin]f
Mehmet for
‘for Mehmet’
In both types of languages, the domain of the phonological phrase can restructurein specific cases to include additional material. As defined in Nespor and Vogel(1986), f can restructure, in many languages, to include the first nonbranchingcomplement (or modifier) on its recursive side.4 According to other definitions (e.g.Delais-Roussarie, 1995), the length of a constituent measured in number of syllablesmay also be a triggering factor in f restructuring. What is relevant for the presentdiscussion is that, after restructuring has applied as defined here, it is not the head ofthe syntactic phrase which occupies the edge of the phonological phrase. Theexamples in (3) illustrate the mechanism of restructuring in English and Turkish. Inboth cases, the edge of the phonological phrase where restructuring takes place isoccupied by the complement.

(3)
a. [She writes]f [poems]f![She writes poems]f b. [Ali]f [yemeg-i]f [pis% ir-di]f![Ali]f [yemegi pis% irdi]f
Ali food- acc cook-past
‘Ali cooked the food’
As for the prosodic events that mark the phonological phrase, lengthening appearsto signal its right edge both in head-complement and in complement-head languages.The location of prominence, instead, varies. In the first type of language, the main

prominence of the phonological phrase is on the rightmost word; in the second typeof language, it falls on the leftmost word within the phonological phrase. Weexclude from this cases of emphatic stress, where anything, even a morpheme, mayreceive emphasis (Nespor and Guasti, 2002), as we shall see below. As for which ofthe phonological phrases in an utterance is more prominent, this depends on dis-course related factors that will be discussed below.5

(4)
a. [My best friend]f [is getting married]f b. [Ben-im icin]f [yemeg-i pis% irdi]f
me for meal-acc. cook-past
‘(S/he) cooked the meal for me’
4 The level on which nonbranchingness is defined may vary from one language to another (Hayes,

1989).5 Throughout the text, underlining indicates stress, capital letters emphatic stress and italics (non-

contrastive) focus interpretation.


The domain of the immediately higher constituent of the phonological hierarchy,the intonational phrase, is more variable in nature. Besides parentheticals and otherclausal adjuncts which are always clearly signaled as they exhaustively form anindependent intonational phase, the domain of I is not straightforwardly definablein syntactic terms. Its syntactic correlate varies depending on the length of the sen-tence, as well as the rate of speech. A sentence, for example, may be mapped ontojust one I if it is relatively short and uttered at a relatively fast rate, while it is map-ped onto two or more Is otherwise. Unlike the domain of the phonological phrase,that of the intonational phrase does not appear to interpret any syntactic propertiesaccording to which languages vary. Examples of phrasing into intonational phrasesare given in (5) and (6) for English and Turkish, respectively. In both cases, thesentences contain a subject NP and a VP. While the (a) examples are mapped intotwo Is, the (b) examples, which are rather short, are mapped into just one I. It is theshortness of the sentences that triggers the formation of just one I, at least in normalor fast rates of speech.

(5)
a. [The people who work with me]I [travel every week for about six hours]I b. [John travels constantly]I
(6)
a. [Siz-i gotur-ecek s%ofor]I [ben-im askerlik arkadas-Im-dIr]I you bring-fut. driver my army friend-1sg.poss.-cop. ‘The driver who will bring you is an army friend of mine’
b.
[s%ofor arkadas-Im-dIr]I driver friend-1sg.poss.-cop. ‘‘The driver is a friend of mine’’
As for the prosodic events that mark this level, lengthening always appears tosignal its right edge, as it does in the phonological phrase domain.6 The location ofprominence within the intonational phrase signals some aspects of the informationalstructure of a sentence, as we will see in Section 4.Summing up so far, there are two distinct levels of prosodic structure, each sig-

nalling one specific aspect of syntactic structure. On both levels, prosodic cues dividenaturally into two classes: those which are subject to crosslinguistic variation, e.g.prominence location, and those which hold invariably, e.g. lengthening location.The question we address now concerns the possible use of prosodic cues in accessing

syntax on both levels of on line parsing and parameter setting. Given the mismatchbetween phonological and syntactic structure, no signal to phonological con-stituency (i.e. neither lengthening nor prominence) can per se lead to deduce thesyntactic structure of a sentence in on-line comprehension. As far as lengthening isconcerned, given its universal collocation at the right edge of phonological phrasal

6 While final lengthening appears to be a universal phenomenon in the case of intonational phrases, it

is not universal for phonological phrases, although widespread. For example, Frota (2000) has not found

phonological phrase final lengthening in European Portuguese and Cambier Langeveld (2000) has not

found it in Dutch.


constituents, it also does not provide any information that might possibly beexploited in the setting of parameters in acquisition.Unlike lengthening, however, the location of prominence may provide a cue to the

value of a number of syntactic parameters, since it is subject to crosslinguistic var-iation. The observation that some properties of the phonological shape of connectedspeech vary across languages, and that this variation systematically correlates withsyntactic parametrization, lies at the basis of the claim that some properties of syn-tax may be bootstrapped from prosodic cues (cf. Gleitman and Wanner, 1982;Morgan, 1986).Within all prosodic constituents, one element bears main prominence. As we said

above, prominence at the levels of phonological phrase and intonational phrase iscorrelated with different properties of the syntax of languages. At the phonologicalphrase level, it has been observed that prominence reflects the relative order of headsand complements (Nespor and Vogel, 1986). It has been proposed that this promi-nence might be used to bootstrap the Head Complement parameter, which definesthe surface relative order of complements with respect to the head of a phrase. As aconsequence, the relative order of main and subordinate clauses might also be set(Nespor, 1994; Nespor et al., 1996).The question we want to address below concerns the properties of syntax that can

possibly be signaled by prominence at the level of the intonational phrase (cf. alsoNespor, 2001). Before doing so, we will briefly review, in the next section, what isknown about the perception of the relevant properties of the signal by infants.

3. The perception of language in infants

The advantage of setting some syntactic parameters through prosody is that inorder for the task to be accomplished, it is not necessary for the infant to be able toparse the speech stream into words. It is not even necessary to understand themeaning of words. However we know that neither parsing nor learning meanings ofwords are trivial (Gleitman, 1990; Mehler and Christophe, 1994; Christophe et al.,1997).In order for our hypothesis concerning prosodic bootstrapping to become plau-

sible there must be evidence that infants a) set the relevant syntactic parameters inan early stage of language development and, b) are sensitive to the relevant prosodiccues.As for the period in which infants appear to have set word order parameters,

experimental evidence shows that at least some properties related to word order areacquired quite early, possibly at the prelexical stage. Comprehension studies haveshown that 2-year-olds exploit word order to infer the agent and the patient ofreversible sentences such as ‘Can John kiss Sarah?’ (Roberts, 1983). In addition,Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1996) have shown that 17-month olds look longer at avideo showing a scene corresponding to the correct meaning of reversible sentencesof the type of ‘Cookie Monster is tickling Big Bird’, than at a video corresponding tothe wrong meaning of the same sentences. These results account for the fact that


when children of about twenty months start combining words, they do not deviatefrom the word order of the target grammar (Bloom, 1970; Brown, 1973; Pinker,1994; Slobin and Bever, 1982). But if at 17 months of age, language comprehensionrelies on knowledge concerning word order, the relevant syntactic parameters musthave been set before then.As for the infants’ sensitivity to prosodic cues, they should be sensitive both to the

edges (at least to one of the edges) and to the main prominence of intonationalphrases for our hypothesis to work. Experimental evidence suggests that infants aresensitive to intonational phrase boundaries before 1 year of age (Gerken et al., 1994;Gout et al., in preparation). In addition, Christophe (1993) shows that six-month-olds are sensitive to phonological phrase boundaries. We can thus assume that by sixmonths they are sensitive also to the boundaries of higher constituents, since therichness of prosodic cues increases with the size of the constituent.As for prominence, it has been shown that very young infants discriminate

between two words that differ only in the location of stress either on the first or onthe second syllable (Jusczyk and Thompson, 1978; Sansavini et al., 1997). It has alsobeen shown that infants 6–12 weeks old discriminate resynthesized French sentencesfrom similar Turkish sentences. In the resynthesis, all sentences were pronounced bythe same voice (which recorded the diphones), so that they all contained the sameDutch phonemes. All vowels were mapped to schwa, and consonants were mapped bymanner of articulation (stops to /p/, fricatives to /s/, nasals to /m/, liquids to /l/ andglides to /j/). Since French and Turkish have a similar syllabic structure and word stressin both languages falls on the last syllable (in the majority of cases, and in any case in allthe words that were used), the only difference was the prominence at the phonologicalphrase level. Examples of two of the sentences used are given in (7) and (8) (Christopheet al., 2002). The underlined words are stressed at the level of the phonological phrase.

(7)
French a. [Le grand orang-outang] [etait enerve] b. [leplem pelemepem] [epe pemelse]
(8)
Turkish a. [Yeni kitabımı] [almak istiyor] b. [Jeme pepepeme] [elmep espejel]
If infants are sensitive to phonological phrase prominence, we may assume thatthey are sensitive also to stronger prominences, such as those of the intonationalphrase. As we will see below, all the infant has to hear is whether I main prominenceis final, initial, or somewhere else.

4. Prominence at the intonational phrase level

At the intonational phrase level, main prominence gives a cue for the informa-tional structure of a sentence by signaling the constituent(s) that are to be interpreted


as focused. In other words, prominence at this level determines the focus set of anygiven sentence, that is, the set of constituents which can be interpreted as new infor-mation in specific discourse contexts (Reinhart, 1995; Neeleman and Reinhart, 1998).The focus set is universally defined on the basis of two types of information: a) the

location of main prominence, and b) the geometry of the syntactic tree. The wordthat bears the main prominence of the intonational phrase is obligatorily a member ofthe focus set. More precisely, the constituent bearing main prominence is aligned withthe minimal constituent to be interpreted as focused. Other members of the focus setare determined on the basis of syntactic structure, as informally defined in (9).7

(9)
Focus set The focus set of a sentence includes: a) the word bearing the main prominence b) all the constituents of the connected subtree containing the word bearingmain prominence.8
Given a tree like (10), where Yo is the word bearing the main prominence, theclauses in (a) and (b) of the definition above establish that the focus set of (10) willcontain all the nodes in bold letters.

(10)

epresents the typical configura
The abstract tree in (10) r tion of prominence and focus in head complement languages.
7 For a first formulation of this generalization cf. Nespor and Guasti (2002).8 Where the notion of connected subtree is defined in terms of g-projection, as originally proposed in

Kayne (1984).

Y is a g-projection of X iff:

a. Y is a projection of X or of a g-projection of X; or

b. Y immediately dominates W and Z, where Z is a g-projection of X, and W and Z are in a

canonical government configuration.

Where W and Z are in a canonical government configuration iff V governs NP to its right in the languageand W precedes Z; or V governs NP to its left in the language and Z precedes W.


In complement head languages, instead, the focus projection includes all the nodesin bold letters in (11) below, where Yo is the word bearing the main prominence.9

(11)

e nodes that dominate it, also t
In addition to Yo and all th he sister of Y�, i.e. XP, is included in the focus set, since the connected subtree containing Y� includes also itscomplement. These two abstract cases are illustrated in (12) and (13) below, with anEnglish sentence and a Turkish sentence, respectively.
(12)

9 We are here representing complement-head languages with the traditional structure, assuming a con-

figurational parameter to be responsible for word order variation. This choice is due to reasons of simplicity

of presentation, rather than to deep theoretical arguments. The fact that the focus set of a sentence with

rightmost main prominence includes the same constituents both in head complement and in complement

head languages may be an argument in favor of Kayne’s (1994) universal structure across languages.


(13)

xample in (13) illustrates, complementossibility of a mismatch between stress

Notice that, as the e head languages arecharacterized by the p location and focus
location that never holds in head complement languages. The definition in (9) pre-dicts that the word bearing main prominence, which is always the strong element ofthe rightmost phonological phrase (the verb okudu in the above example), may notcorrespond to the minimal constituent included in the focus set. This latter may, infact, also be the most embedded one, i.e. the direct object yeni kitabını in (13). Thismismatch may be the reason for the controversy that focus in complement headlanguages has given rise to (see Ergunvanlı, 1979, but see also note 9).10
Returning to our main concern, the point is that the location of the main promi-nence of the intonational phrase is not sensitive to the head complement parameter:in both head complement and complement-head languages, and indeed universally,main prominence falls on the last phonological phrase of I.11 With this prosodic

10 It should be recalled that nonbranching complements may restructure to form a phonological phrase

together with the verb. In this case, stress and focus coincide.11 Contra Cinque (1993), we claim that the location of main prominence within the intonational phrase

is not subject to a parametrization related to the head complement parameter. This claim concerning main

prominence at the I-level in complement head languages goes back to Hayes and Lahiri (1991). See also

Truckenbrodt (1994). We have tested its validity for Turkish on a set of 40 sentences pronounced by seven

readers with a neutral intonation in the absence of any context (out of the blue) and have found that main

prominence falls on the last phonological phrase of I.


contour, the sentence may be interpreted with different foci depending on the con-text, as predicted by the fact that it has the largest possible focus set.From the point of view of the infant, this means that final main prominence within I

does not give him any information about variable properties of the syntax of the lan-guage he is exposed to. In spite of the universal character of final main prominence in I,there are specific discourse contexts for which the appropriate prosodic contour exhi-bits a clear crosslinguistic variation. In fact, only some languages allow main promi-nence to fall on a word other than the rightmost, and this under specific discourseconditions. When the context requires new information to correspond to an elementnot belonging to the focus set, some languages but not others, place the main promi-nence on that element. This option is illustrated on the basis of English in (14) and thecorresponding structures in (15) and (16).

(14)
a. I sent a present to Julia b. Julia arrived
(15)


(16)


his crosslinguistic variation and its po
We will now explore t ssible syntactic correlates. Recall that the final aim we pursue in this paper is that of finding outwhether at the level of the intonational phrase, prosody may provide a reliable cueto syntax, thus allowing the possibility that the infant might exploit it to set somesyntactic parameters. Before proceeding to investigate the syntactic correlates ofdifferent locations of main prominence in I, it is necessary to distinguish mainprominence in the sense intended above, from emphatic prominence. The lattercorresponds in all languages to a contrastive focus interpretation, and it may fall inany position.The two types of prominence (emphatic and nonemphatic) and their correspond-
ing focus interpretations differ in a number of ways, phonetically, phonologicallyand pragmatically (cf. Nespor and Guasti, 2002).12 It appears to be the case, in fact,that the phonetic correlates of the two types of prominence are audibly differentacross languages.13 Phonologically, the two structures differ in two respects. First,while neutral prominence is associated with the focus set as defined above emphatic

12 This contrasts with Frascarelli (2000), who claims that in Italian contrastive and non contrastive

focus may present in many cases similar phonologies. A similar claim is made in Frota (2000) for Eur-

opean Portuguese.13 This claim has been tested for Italian, Turkish, French, Greek and English on the basis of twenty

sentences per language. Half of the sentences contained a biargumental verb selecting a direct object; the

other half contained a biargumental verb requiring an indirect object. The sentences were read by a native

speaker in an out of the blue context, i.e. with the intonation typical of sentences conveying new infor-

mation (cf. above). The subjects were given the sentences one by one and were asked to choose which of

two questions would define the context appropriate for the given sentence. An example of the two alter-

native ‘‘Focus defining’’ questions and the corresponding sentence is given in (i) and (ii) respectively

(i)
a. What did Mary eat?
b. Did Mary eat a banana?

(ii)
Mary ate an apple.
As can be seen in (i), while the first question may provide a context for a sentence where the object is the

minimal constituent in the focus set, the second question provides a context for a sentence with contrastive

focus on the object. The subjects excluded the second question either in all or in the overwhelming

majority of the cases.

prominence can fall on an element as small as a morpheme, but not on anyconstituent larger than the word. In (17) and (18) the different domains of neutraland contrastive focus, respectively, are illustrated. As shown in these examples,while new information can have a domain as small as a word and as large as thesentence, contrastive focus can have a domain as small as a morpheme and as largeas a word.

(17)
a. John just bought a blackbird b. John just bought a blackbird c. John just bought a blackbird d. *John just bought a blackbird
(18)
a. I always thought John was ANTIcommunist b. I always thought John was WELSH c. *I always thought John was a YOUNG JOURNALIST14
Second, and most relevant for our proposal, emphatic prominence, unlike neutralprominence, triggers the insertion of an intonational phrase boundary at its right edge.

(19)
[I want a dog for my birthday]I
(20)
[I want a DOG]I [for my birthday]I
Notice that this difference is observable only in the subset of languages whichexhibit I main prominence on a constituent other than the rightmost, English amongthem.Finally, the two prominences are used in different pragmatic situations: emphatic

prominence in contexts of correction (contrastive focus) and neutral prominence toconvey new information (focus tout court).In the rest of this paper we will not consider emphatic prominence and its inter-

pretation as contrastive focus. Children are often exposed to utterances that containcontrastive focus. Motherese, in fact, is rich in emphatic prominence and forms asignificant part of child directed speech, and infants even prefer it to regular speech(Fernald, 1985; Kemler Nelson et al., 1989). Contrastive focus is, however, notrelevant for our hypothesis, since it is always final in the intonational phrase, and weknow that infants hear I boundaries. Since, as we said above, all languages have Ifinal prominence, hearing this pattern would not be misleading. We are proposingthat the non emphatic speech of the type the baby is exposed to all the time (inspeech directed to others) is essential to make the bootstrapping hypothesis plau-sible. It is, in fact, only in nonemphatic speech that I internal prominence variescrosslinguistically, in that only in some languages, it may occur in a position differ-ent from the final one.

14 Contrastive focus on two words, as in (18c), is acceptable only if they belong to two different into-

national phrases.


5. Syntactic correlates of prominence location in I

The crosslinguistic variation concerning the possible location of main prominencein the intonational phrase introduced above correlates with no variation at theinformational level. In every language, the most prominent constituent correspondsto the element that defines the focus set.‘‘Displaced prominence’’, in fact, appears to correspond to a specific focusing

strategy. When a constituent not belonging to the focus set, as defined by rightmostmain prominence, is to be focused, the strategy chosen by a number of languagesconsists in assigning to the sentence a new focus set by displacing the prominence.This strategy is illustrated once again on the basis of English in (21) and (22).

(21)
context: the relevant shared information is that Julia sent a letter to somebody appropriate sentence: Julia sent a letter to Bruce
(22)
context: the relevant shared information is that Julia sent something to Bruce appropriate sentence: Julia sent a letter to Bruce
Notice that given the definition of focus set given provided in (9) above, the focusset of (22) includes just one member: the most prominent word in (22), letter, beingon a left branch, is not on a connected subtree with any constituent other than itsmaximal projection.Recall that the focusing strategy just illustrated characterizes only a subset of lan-

guages. The languages that opt for this strategy are those in which an alternativestrategy is not available.15 The alternative strategy consists in locating the constituentto be focused within the focus projection. This may mean two things according to thetype of language. In a head-complement language like Italian, the constituent to befocused has to be located with its right edge aligned with the rightmost edge of theintonational phrase. This option is illustrated on the basis of Italian in (23) and (24).

(23)
context: the relevant shared information is that Julia sent a letter to somebody appropriate sentence: Julia ha spedito una lettera a Bruce
Julia has sent a letter to Bruce
‘Julia sent a letter to Bruce’
(24)
context: the relevant shared information is that Julia sent something to Bruce appropriate sentence: Julia ha spedito a Bruce una lettera
Julia has sent to Bruce a letter

In complement-head languages, however, given that the focus projection includesthe constituent c-commanded by the most prominent word [see definition (9), and its

15 For the opposite view cf. Zubizarreta (1998), where it is claimed that the ‘displaced prominence’ strategy

is the unmarked case. The ‘displaced constituent’ strategy is seen as the result of a prosodically triggered

movement. Notice however that this proposal has the undesirable result of having a syntax constrained by

phonology (Guasti and Nespor, 1999; Nespor and Guasti, 2002). See the next section for a critical discussion

of a movement characterization of the parameter involved in the choice of these two strategies.


illustration], the immediate preverbal (i.e. prefinal) position is available for the con-stituent to be focused.

(25) context: the relevant shared information is that Ali wrote a small letter tosomebody

appropriate sentence:
Ali kısa mektubu guzel kıza yazdı Ali short letter-acc beautiful girl-dat wrote ‘Ali wrote a short letter to the beautiful girl’
(26) context: the relevant shared information is that Ali wrote something to thebeautiful girl

appropriate sentence:
Ali guzel kıza kısa mektubu yazdı Ali beautiful girl-dat short letter-acc wrote
Both Italian and Turkish, languages in which the ‘‘displaced prominence’’ strategy isnot an option,16 share the property of being systematically discourse-ambiguous: giventhe definition in (9) of the focus set, the sentence in (25), for example, is also appro-priate in (at least) the following contexts: a) the relevant shared information is that Aliwrote something to somebody (VP); b) the relevant shared information is that Alidid something (vP); c) no relevant shared information. The same holds for its Italianequivalent (23).The question we want to address now concerns the syntactic properties that correlate

with the two groups of languages. As is well known in the syntactic literature fromGreenberg onwards, languages sharply differ as to surface word order (Greenberg,1966). On a very low descriptive level, languages can be classified into two large groups:languages—call them ‘rigid word order languages’ (RWO)—with a fixed word orderand languages with a freer word order—call them ‘free word order languages’ (FWO).Among RWO languages are, in addition to English, also German, Dutch and Chinese.Among FWO languages are, in addition to Turkish, also Italian, Greek and Japanese.Interestingly, this classification overlaps with the two groups characterized by the

different focus strategies introduced above: FWO languages choose the ‘displacedconstituent’ strategy while RWO languages opt for the ‘displaced prominence’strategy. This suggests that prominence at the level of I may indeed provide a cue toa major syntactic division among languages.

6. A parameter not settable through I main prominence

On both empirical and theoretical grounds, we can start by excluding thatmain prominence in I may give a cue to any parameter related to movement.17

16 Contra Goksel and Ozsoy (2000) who argue instead that Turkish is a ‘‘displaced prominence’’ lan-

guage. Notice however that their notion of focus is different from ours in that they do not explicitly set

apart neutral focus and contrastive focus.17 Cf. Reinhart (1995) and Neeleman and Reinhart (1998) for similar arguments against a movement

analysis of focus constituents.


It is first of all a fact that in both groups of languages, many allow (A’) movementwith clear effects on focus structure. The clearest example of such a movement is wh-movement in questions, which is observable in languages belonging to both groups,as shown in (27) and (28) for English and Italian, respectively.

(27)
What do you think that Julia has bought?
(28)
Cosa credi che Julia abbia comprato? What think-2s that Julia has bought ‘What do you think that Julia has bought’
It is clear that wh-movement has effects on the focus structure of a sentence: thewh-element always corresponds to the minimal focus constituent (Rizzi, 1997).Other examples of movement constructions related to focus in both groups of lan-guages include cleft sentences and pseudoclefts, as illustrated in (29) and (30).

(29)
It is a lot of chocolate that Julia bought.
(30)
E’ un sacco di cioccolato che Giulia ha comprato.
Second, both groups of languages include those in which wh-movement is neverovert, without this being correlated to a preference for a specific focus strategy.Turkish, a ‘‘displaced constituent’’ strategy language, displays no overt wh-move-ment; the same is known to be true in Chinese, which is a ‘‘displaced prominence’’language.At a theoretical level, the parameters involved in the major division we are con-

sidering cannot be movement parameters for reasons of economy. Movement isstandardly assumed to be a costly ‘last resort’ operation, to be triggered by thenecessity to check some formal feature (Chomsky, 1995). The ‘displaced constituent’strategy, however, is the preferred option. Since it is reasonable to assume that thepreferred option is not the most costly, this is another argument against a parameterinvolving movement. Another problem on the theoretical side has to do withoptionality: to assume focus movement, one needs to acknowledge it to be optional,since it yields no difference in grammaticality or (strictly semantic) interpretation. Acostly operation, however, cannot be optional (Chomsky, 1995).An apparent solution to these theoretical problems is provided by those who claim

that there is a focus feature in the computational system, which triggers, whenselected in the numeration, an obligatory and economic movement operation inorder to be checked (Rizzi, 1997; Zubizarreta, 1998). There are, however, manyreasons to consider this hypothesis problematic once it is translated from a purelydescriptive or taxonomic device into a real analytic tool. The first problem isempirical and concerns the facts about A’-movement illustrated above. That is, itmay be assumed that one wants to account for both types of movement (A’-move-ment and the proposed focus-triggered movement) in terms of a focus feature. Still,it is necessary to keep them dissociated for independent empirical reasons (as we


saw, languages which display the first do not necessarily allow for the second, andvice-versa). Therefore one would have to posit two different focus features in syntax:an undesirable consequence, both for obvious theoretical reasons and given that thefocus interpretation is the same in both cases.The second main problem is purely theoretical and has to do with the status of the

alleged focus feature. As is well known, according to the feature-checking approachto movement developed in Chomsky (Chomsky, 1995, 1998, 1999) the features to bechecked in syntax are those that are uninterpretable, and would make the derivationcrash if left undeleted. These very features are, moreover, defined as ‘formal’ features, orelse as ‘morphological’ features. It is hard to see how a purely pragmatic property, likethe informational organization of the sentence, which defines its appropriateness in agiven context, can be reduced to an uninterpretable, formal, or morphological feature.It is also true that focus is uninterpretable both at LF and at PF, in that it is nei-

ther a (truth value) semantic notion nor a phonological notion. But it is just as truethat focus is indeed interpretable and interpreted at the discourse level, which excludesit from being a formal feature. Our view is that focus is not a syntactic feature at all,but rather a by-product of the two outputs of the syntactic computation, a pair of anLF and of a PF representation. Only at this level does focus come into play, and it isdefined, as we have seen, both on structural information and on phonological infor-mation. This approach to focus will be further developed in future research.

7. Parameters settable through I main prominence

Having excluded a movement characterization of the parameter involved in focusstrategies, we are left with one simple alternative, which we may call the free mergeparameter. In some languages, call them free word order (FWO), for some reasonsto be defined, syntax is such that it allows arguments to be merged in more than oneposition. In other words, as far as syntax is concerned (i.e. general phrase structureprinciples and features configurations), merging an XP in a position a or in a posi-tion b simply makes no difference: the only difference concerns informational struc-ture, namely focus. If, say, the position a is included in the focus set determined by theprominence and the syntactic structure of the sentence, then the constituent XPmerged in that position carries new information; if it is not included in the focus set ofthe sentence, XP cannot be focused, and b may be freely chosen as an alternativeposition according to discourse requirements, i.e. if the context requires XP to be infocus.18

In some other languages, call them rigid word order (RWO), syntax requires everyargument to occupy one and only one position, not allowing for any variation.For illustration, consider subject position in Italian (but the same holds for

Spanish, Catalan and Greek, among other languages). As is well known, the subjectof a tensed clause can be both preverbal and postverbal in this language, as in theexample in (31).

18 Cf. Neeleman and Reinhart (1998), Manzini and Savoia (in prep.), Jelinek (1984), among others.


(31) a. E’ arrivato Mario.
Is arrived Mario
b.
Mario e arrivato. Mario is arrived ‘Mario arrived’
The only difference between (31a) and (31b) is informational: the postverbal sub-ject is focused, while the preverbal subject is in a topic position (cf. Barbosa, 1995;Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou, 1998; Belletti, 2001).19 This focus difference ispredicted by the focus set definition given in (9) above: the postverbal position cor-responds to the rightmost constituent in I, which defines the focus set; the preverbalposition does not belong to the focus set, being a left branch node (i.e. not in acanonical government configuration, cf. note 8 above).The next question concerns the status of the ‘free positions’ that arguments

occupy in these languages. First of all, they cannot be thematic positions, since ifthey were so, one would be compelled to conclude that arrive has two different the-matic structures in (a) and (b): one in which it has an external argument, and one inwhich it has an internal one. More generally the position occupied by the subject inthe two sentences in (31) cannot be a feature-related position of any kind, for thesame reasons discussed in the preceding paragraph; as soon as a constituent is mergedin a feature-related position, it enters into feature checking relations, becoming visibleto syntax. However, we just started from the assumption that syntax in Italian-typelanguages does not care about order differences like the ones in (31).This amounts to conclude that the subject in (31) is merged in a position which, being

neither thematic, nor inflectional nor feature related, can only be adjoined, as in (32).

(32)

19 See Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (1998) for a detailed discussion reviewing a number of argu-

ments in favour of preverbal subject being in a topic position in these languages. Notice however that

crucially this topic position does not belong to a separate intonational phrase.


We shall assume that this proves true for all FWO languages, and for all argu-ments in these languages.As the structure in (32) clearly shows, however, something is missing from the

picture drawn so far. What about the thematic and inflectional positions, and theirrelative features? How come the selection of the verb arrivare in the above exampleis satisfied? How come the Extended Projection Principle is not violated? Here iswhere the core of the free merge parameter is set: free merge languages are thoselanguages where these obligatory, syntactically interpreted, positions are filled bysome extra-element that RWO languages do not possess. This element appears tocoincide with pro in Italian, which is a null subject and null object language. Thecomplete structure for (31) will then be as in (33).

(33)

uages like Italian possess a morpheme-likntactic positions connected with argumen

In
ment, which fills the sy ts and does all the
other words, lang e pronominal ele-

feature checking job: lexical arguments, such as the ‘‘subject’’ in (33) are thereforeboth optional and freely mergeable where required by discourse conditions. How-ever, if we consider some more languages of the free-merge group, we may concludethat the relevant parameter does not necessarily coincide with the traditional pro-drop parameter, in that many languages do exhibit the properties illustrated abovewith Italian without allowing for the null pronominal situation illustrated in (33). Inthese languages the pronominal, clitic-like element filling the argumental positions isobligatorily lexically realized, as shown in (34) through an example in Florentine.

(34)
a. La Maria l’e arrivata the Maria cl. is arrived
b.
L’ e arrivata la Maria cl. is arrived the Maria ‘Maria arrived’

Again in (34), just like in (31), the only difference between (a) and (b) concernstheir focus set: as predicted by the definition in (9), the subject belongs to the focusset in (b) but not in (a).As for the other type of languages, the ones we have labelled RWO, consider the

English example in (35).

(35)
a. Mary arrived. b. Mary arrived. c. *Arrived Mary.
English does not possess the pronominal morpheme, in neither lexical nor nullform, to be merged in the thematic position of arguments for satisfying selectionalrequirements, and in the inflectional positions for checking the relevant features.The only possibility is thus to merge the NP argument in thematic position andcheck all syntactic features through successive cyclic movement of the NP argumentitself, as illustrated through the rather traditional representation in (36).

(36)

the subject of (36) into the focus set is
The only way to insert , therefore, to use the ‘displaced prominence’ strategy and thus to shift the main prominence on its head,as shown in (35b).Returning now to the main concern of this paper, namely that of investigating
whether main prominence in the intonational phrase may provide a cue for somesyntactic parameter, a full fledged answer is now beginning to emerge. Main pro-minence in I provides direct access to a crosslinguistic variation, namely to whethera given language uses one or the other of the two focus strategies, ‘displaced pro-minence’ or ‘displaced constituent’. The selected focus strategy is, in turn, forced bya proper syntactic parameter, traditionally defined as pro-drop parameter, but thatshould, in fact, be reanalyzed as a parameter concerning the availability of specificmorpheme-like elements. These conclusions suggest that this parameter may be seton the basis of purely prosodic evidence, and hence may be prosodically boot-strapped at a prelexical stage.


8. Conclusions

In this paper, we have offered a proposal about the possibility that some syntacticparameters relating to the configurational properties of language may be set ininfancy through prosody. More specifically, we propose that the location of mainprominence within the intonational phrase gives information about the relativefreedom of constituents to appear in different positions in the sentence. The basicidea is that the more prominence may move around within an intonational phrase,the more the language is characterized by rigid word order properties. The mainadvantage of this proposal, as of prosodic bootstrapping in general, is that therelevant parameters could be set without the need to segment a string into words,quite early in life. Thus the prediction is that when infants start combining words,they will neither produce postverbal subjects in a language that allows initial pro-minence in the intonational phrase, nor dislocated prominence in a language withfree word order.

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