Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T10:38:44.818Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Expressive particle verbs and conditions on particle fronting1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2016

ANDREAS TROTZKE  and
EVA WITTENBERG
ANDREAS TROTZKE*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
EVA WITTENBERG*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
*
Author’s address: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 210 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305-4115, USAtrotzke@stanford.edu
Author’s address: Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0108, USAewittenberg@ucsd.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new distinction between expressive and non-expressive particle verbs in German. The basic observation for our proposal is that these two classes behave differently in the domain of particle fronting. In order to explain this difference, we will show that certain particle verbs are extreme degree expressions and that, therefore, a possible contrast across degrees makes fronting acceptable, even when the particle in isolation is non-contrastable. Our claims are supported by a rating study probing German native speakers’ intuitions about the likelihood of the occurrence of an utterance, without relying on acceptability judgments. We connect these new findings to other forms of non-information-structural fronting patterns that endow utterances with an emphatic flavor.

Keywords

contrastconventional implicaturesemphasisextreme expressionsinformation structureparticle verbs
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , 01 April 2017 , pp. 407 - 435
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1] This article has benefited from discussion with Farrell Ackerman, Josef Bayer, Silvio Cruschina, Werner Frey, Joachim Jacobs, and Stefano Quaglia. We thank three anonymous JL referees and Ewa Jaworska for their careful comments. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG grants BA 1178/9-1 and TR 1228/2-1) and from the DFG Excellence Initiative (University of Konstanz, project No. 610/14).

References

Arnold, Jennifer E., Kaiser, Elsi, Kahn, Jason M. & Kim, Lucy K.. 2013. Information structure: Linguistic, cognitive, and processing approaches. WIREs Cognitive Science 4, 403–413.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Davidson, Doug & Bates, Douglas. 2008. Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 390–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, Dale J., Levy, Roger, Scheepers, Christoph & Tily, Harry J.. 2013. Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 68, 255–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Martin & Bolker, Ben. 2012. Ime4: Linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. Retrieved from http://cran.r-project.org/package=lme4 (R package version 0.999999-0).Google Scholar
Bergen, Leon, Goodman, Noah D. & Levy, Roger. 2012. That’s what she (could have) said: How alternative utterances affect language use. Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 120–125.Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina. 2015. Focus fronting and the syntax–semantics interface. In Ur Shlonsky(ed.), Beyond functional sequence, 60–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina, Bocci, Giuliano & Cruschina, Silvio. in press. Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures. Semantics & Pragmatics.Google Scholar
Caudal, Patrick & Nicolas, David. 2005. Types of degrees and types of event structures. In Maienborn, Claudia & Wöllstein, Angelika (eds.), Event arguments: Foundations and applications, 277–300. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio. 2012. Discourse-related features and functional projections. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruse, D. A. 1986. Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
d’Avis, Franz. 2013. Exklamativsatz. In Meibauer, Jörg, Steinbach, Markus & Altmann, Hans (eds.), Satztypen des Deutschen, 171–201. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole. 2015. Particle verbs in Germanic. In Müller, Peter O., Ohnheiser, Ingeborg, Olsen, Susan & Rainer, Franz (eds.), Word formation: An international handbook of the languages of Europe, 611–626. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeLancey, Scott. 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 1, 33–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
den Besten, Hans & Webelhuth, Gert. 1990. Stranding. In Grewendorf, Günther & Sternefeld, Wolfgang (eds.), Scrambling and barriers, 77–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanselow, Gisbert. 2002. Against remnant VP-movement. In Alexiadou, Artemis, Anagnostopoulou, Elena, Barbiers, Sjef & Gärtner, Hans-Martin (eds.), Dimensions of movement: From features to remnants, 91–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanselow, Gisbert. 2003. Surprising specifiers and cyclic spellout. Generative Linguistics in Poland 5, 29–46.Google Scholar
Farkas, Donka F. & Bruce, Kim B.. 2010. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27, 81–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Jerry A. 1972. Troubles about actions. In Davidson, Donald & Harman, Gilbert (eds.), Semantics of natural language, 48–69. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, Lyn, Dillon, Brian & Clifton, Charles. 2015. A note on interpreting damn expressives: Transferring the blame. Language and Cognition 7, 291–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frey, Werner. 2010. Ā-Movement and conventional implicatures: About the grammatical encoding of emphasis in German. Lingua 120, 1416–1435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Cole, Peter & Morgan, Jerry L. (eds.), Speech acts (Syntax and Semantics 3), 41–58. New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosz, Patrick G. 2012. On the grammar of optative constructions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. 1967. Notes on transitivity and theme in English: Part 2. Journal of Linguistics 3, 199–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heine, Antje, Jacobs, Joachim & Külpmann, Robert. 2010. Quer zu den Feldern: Zur Topologie von Partikelverben. Linguistische Berichte 221, 37–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunston, Susan & Thompson, Geoffrey. 2000. Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Joachim. 1991. Focus ambiguities. Journal of Semantics 8, 1–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Christopher & McNally, Louise. 2005. Scale structure, degree modification, and the semantics of gradable predicates. Language 81, 345–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 1994. The event argument and the semantics of voice. Ms. University of Massachusetts Amherst.Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 2012. Modals and conditionals: New and revised perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krifka, Manfred & Musan, Renate. 2012a. Information structure: Overview and linguistic issues. In Krifka & Musan (eds.), 1–44.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred & Musan, Renate (eds.). 2012b. The expression of information structure. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, Roger. 2008. Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106, 1126–1177.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lüdeling, Anke. 2001. On particle verbs and similar constructions in German. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Maas, Andrew L., Daly, Raymond E., Pham, Peter T., Huang, Dan, Ng, Andrew Y. & Potts, Christopher. 2011. Learning word vectors for sentiment analysis. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 142–150.Google Scholar
Maienborn, Claudia & Schäfer, Martin. 2011. Adverbs and adverbials. In von Heusinger, Klaus, Maienborn, Claudia & Portner, Paul (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 2, 1390–1420. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McIntyre, Andrew. 2001. German double particles as preverbs: Morphology and conceptual semantics. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar
Morzycki, Marcin. 2012. Adjectival extremeness: Degree modification and contextually restricted scales. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30, 576–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Gereon. 1998. Incomplete category fronting. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Gereon. 2004. Verb-second as vP-first. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 7, 179–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Stefan. 2002. Complex predicates: Verbal complexes, resultative constructions and particle verbs in German. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Myers, James. 2009. Syntactic judgment experiments. Language and Linguistics Compass 3, 406–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noonan, Máire. 2010. Á to zu. In Cinque, Guglielmo & Rizzi, Luigi (eds.), Mapping spatial PPs, 161–195. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, Carita. 2001. Adjectives and boundedness. Cognitive Linguistics 12, 47–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Portner, Paul & Rubinstein, Aynat. in press. Extreme and non-extreme deontic modals. In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2007a. Conventional implicatures: A distinguished class of meanings. In Ramchand, Gillian & Reiss, Charles (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, 475–501. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2007b. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33, 165–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2012. Conventional implicature and expressive content. In Maienborn, Claudia, von Heusinger, Klaus & Portner, Paul (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 3, 2516–2536. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Rett, Jessica. 2011. Exclamatives, degrees and speech acts. Linguistics and Philosophy 34, 411–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohde, Hannah & Kehler, Andrew. 2014. Grammatical and information-structural influences on pronoun production. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience 29, 912–927.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohde, Hannah, Levy, Roger & Kehler, Andrew. 2011. Anticipating explanations in relative clause processing. Cognition 118, 339–358.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schlenker, Philippe. 2007. Expressive presuppositions. Theoretical Linguistics 33, 237–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skopeteas, Stavros. 2012. The empirical investigation of information structure. In Krifka & Musan (eds.), 216–246.Google Scholar
Skopeteas, Stavros & Fanselow, Gisbert. 2011. Focus and the exclusion of alternatives: On the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference. Lingua 121, 1693–1706.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spector, Benjamin. 2005. Scalar implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean reasoning. In Aloni, Maria, Butler, Alastair & Dekker, Paul (eds.), Questions in dynamic semantics, 229–254. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Steube, Anita. 2001. Correction by contrastive focus. Theoretical Linguistics 27, 215–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stiebels, Barbara. 1996. Lexikalische Argumente und Adjunkte. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stiebels, Barbara & Wunderlich, Dieter. 1994. Morphology feeds syntax: The case of particle verbs. Linguistics 32, 913–968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trotzke, Andreas. 2015. Rethinking syntactocentrism: Architectural issues and case studies at the syntax–pragmatics interface. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trotzke, Andreas & Quaglia, Stefano. in press. Particle topicalization and German clause structure. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics.Google Scholar
Trotzke, Andreas, Quaglia, Stefano & Wittenberg, Eva. 2015. Topicalization in German particle verb constructions: The role of semantic transparency. Linguistische Berichte 244, 407–424.Google Scholar
Webelhuth, Gert & Ackerman, Farrell. 1999. A lexical-functional analysis of predicate topicalization in German. American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literature 1, 1–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2000. The structure(s) of particle verbs. Ms., McGill University.Google Scholar
Xiang, Ming & Kuperberg, Gina R.. 2015. Reversing expectations during discourse comprehension. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience 30, 648–672.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zanuttini, Raffaella & Portner, Paul. 2003. Exclamative clauses: At the syntax–semantics interface. Language 79, 39–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zeller, Jochen. 2001. Particle verbs and local domains. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zeller, Jochen. 2003. Moved preverbs in German: Displaced or misplaced?In Booij, Geert & van Kemenade, Ans (eds.), The yearbook of morphology, 179–212. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar