Looking back on three decades of research on focus markers, I will make a cautious attempt to give an overview over this rich set of relevant publications, trying to identify and distinguish general trends, important results, open questions, obvious gaps and errors. I will provide further evidence for the view that focus markers interact with the information structure of a sentence or text, i.e. with a structured proposition or text segment analyzed in terms of focus and scope by extending this analysis also to the relevant “discourse markers”. A comparative analysis of data from various languages reveals the most frequent parameters of variation in the identification of the focus and scope of a focus marker. Finally, I will show that cross-linguistic generalizations in the relevant domain are only possible if the comparison is restricted to a certain core group of markers.
Italian pur(e) seems to be quite peculiar among focus markers, since diachronically it displays the whole span of functions, from non-scalar exclusive to non-scalar additive. It is still an open question as to whether or not at some stage of its history pure enjoyed such an extended (nearly self-contradictory) polysemy synchronically too (while it is surely not the case for the contemporary language). The present investigation, based on the large corpus of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, casts some doubts on this possibility for Old Italian (approximately until the end of 14th century). Moreover, it surveys the very wide polysemy of pure beyond the functions of focus marker proper, and proposes several different evolutionary paths, among which some involve also non-focus marker uses as intermediate steps.
The present contribution aims to investigate the distribution of the Italian adverbs addiritura and perfino/persino using authentic linguistic data. Different structural, semantic and argumentative factors that are said to correlate with, or influence the distribution of these adverbs, shall be examined. The current scientific state of knowledge regarding the specificities of addirittura and perfino/persino shall be compared with data from Repubblica Corpus and C-Oral-Rom. Such comparison will show that the distribution of addirittura and perfino/persino is influenced by the syntactic function of the element in the focus, its semantics in the specific context (in particular the existence of focus alternatives), as well as the type of argumentative reinforcement marked by the adverb. Addirittura tends to refer to the predicate or the sentence as a whole. It is mainly used for direct argumentative reinforcement and may occur in non-additive contexts. In contrast, perfino/persino tends to create a local focus, is far less common in non-additive contexts and can be used for direct, as well as indirect argumentative reinforcement. These differences in use confirm the overall results of previous research and may be due to the diachronic evolution of the two adverbs.
The goal of this study is to determine whether prosody contributes to the discrimination of meaning in sentences with the French additive particle aussi (‘also’). Previous research has highlighted the frequent use of this particle in structurally ambiguous positions, especially in spoken data, while authors diverge on their views as to the possible contribution of prosody to their disambiguation. In order to verify the role of prosody, we have run an experimental study based on a reading task: 20 native speakers were recorded while reading a set of contextualized sentences with aussi placed in both structurally ambiguous and non-ambiguous positions. The results show the presence of different types of prosodic correlates associated with aussi, but also that they are not exploited in a systematic way.
This paper offers an experimental analysis of how additive discourse relations are processed in Spanish. The processing data were obtained from an eye-tracking reading experiment on utterances in which the focus operator incluso ‘even’ and the additive connective además ‘furthermore’ were either absent or present. Incluso acts fundamentally on the level of the information structure, whereas además is generally found in argumentative relations. Results show that, despite some differences during semantic and syntactic integration, the presence of a discourse marker affects principally high-level processing. These results seem to underpin theoretical studies that claim for a mainly procedural meaning of discourse markers.
Many languages have an overabundant set of additive focus adverbs (AFAs), whose differences are mostly investigated in semantic (e.g. scalarity) or syntactic (scope phenomena and restrictions for specific domains of association) terms. The present study adopts a discourse perspective on the issue, comparing two cross-linguistic, near-equivalent AFAs (Italian anche and French aussi) in original texts and their translations in the Europarl corpus. Specifically, this study describes the relation established between the constituent in the scope of the AFA and its alternatives, which can be either co-textually available or contextually inferable. Comparing the frequencies of anche and aussi in original texts and taking into account their translation equivalents confirms important differences between these adverbs. While aussi is more restricted to the syntagmatic function of linking co-textually available alternatives in adjacent sentences, anche appears in a wider array of uses, including cases in which the identification of alternatives requires more complex inferential steps, as they are distant or even implicit to the domain of association.
The English scalar additive operator even has a broad distribution, e.g. insofar as it is used in upward- as well as downward-entailing contexts. Other languages, such as German, use a variety of expressions to render the function(s) of even. The question arises what conditions and determines the use of the various operators of German. The present study addresses this question with respect to the particles selbst, sogar and auch as translation equivalents of even in upward-entailing contexts. On the basis of a sample of 300 translation pairs from the Europarl corpus, the influence of four syntactic and three pragmatic variables on the choice of an operator in German is investigated. The results show that the operators are mainly sensitive to two of the pragmatic variables, the presence or absence of overt focus alternatives in the clausal environment, and the size of the set of alternatives. From a syntatic point of view, a clear difference between selbst and sogar is shown, with selbst exhibiting a tendency to attach to higher levels of syntax than sogar. The quantitative findings are interpreted against the background of historical developments, the assumption being that synchronic distributions reflect diachronic developments (‘distributional intertia’).
German-speaking learners of Italian as L2 often misplace the additive focalizer anche (‘also, too’) in the sentence and therefore fail at conveying the intended meaning. The present study investigates mistakes through a multiple-choice task in which participants choose the word order that sounds the most correct among alternatives that only differ in the positioning of anche. Short dialogues force the interpretation towards either an object-, a predicate- or a subject scope. Data shows that learners master the use of additive focalizers in structures with scope on the subject, rather than in those with scope either on the predicate or on the object. Moreover, learners tend to transfer the position of additive focalizers in the sentence from their L1, independent of the scope to be realized.
Our study compares the expression of additive relations in oral native (French, Italian, Russian) and non-native discourse (French L2), elicited with the same visual stimulus. On the basis of a comparative analysis of native productions, we argue that, in additive contexts, Russian clearly shares the discourse perspective attested in the two Romance languages. Our French L2 data have shown that both Russian and Italian groups seem to proceed by looking for similarities with respect to their L1, but learners of a closer typological language (Italian L1) rely longer on structures that are formally (or functionally) similar and assume more similarities than there actually are, in comparison to learners of typologically unrelated language (Russian L1), thus confirming the psycho-typology effects.
The contribution examines the behaviour of additive particles in a specific language contact situation, namely the Ladin speaking area in Trentino-South Tyrol (Italy). Ladin is a minority language spoken by ca. 30,000 speakers, whose linguistic repertoires include also Italian (Fassa valley) and German (Badia and Gardena valleys). The analysis of a corpus of bilingual speech shows that, contrary to other types of particles (such as discourse markers), there is no borrowing of additive particles from Italian and German to Ladin. Nevertheless, the contact with these languages affects the position and scope of additive particles in the utterance, especially in Badia and Gardena Ladin.
Looking back on three decades of research on focus markers, I will make a cautious attempt to give an overview over this rich set of relevant publications, trying to identify and distinguish general trends, important results, open questions, obvious gaps and errors. I will provide further evidence for the view that focus markers interact with the information structure of a sentence or text, i.e. with a structured proposition or text segment analyzed in terms of focus and scope by extending this analysis also to the relevant “discourse markers”. A comparative analysis of data from various languages reveals the most frequent parameters of variation in the identification of the focus and scope of a focus marker. Finally, I will show that cross-linguistic generalizations in the relevant domain are only possible if the comparison is restricted to a certain core group of markers.
Italian pur(e) seems to be quite peculiar among focus markers, since diachronically it displays the whole span of functions, from non-scalar exclusive to non-scalar additive. It is still an open question as to whether or not at some stage of its history pure enjoyed such an extended (nearly self-contradictory) polysemy synchronically too (while it is surely not the case for the contemporary language). The present investigation, based on the large corpus of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, casts some doubts on this possibility for Old Italian (approximately until the end of 14th century). Moreover, it surveys the very wide polysemy of pure beyond the functions of focus marker proper, and proposes several different evolutionary paths, among which some involve also non-focus marker uses as intermediate steps.
The present contribution aims to investigate the distribution of the Italian adverbs addiritura and perfino/persino using authentic linguistic data. Different structural, semantic and argumentative factors that are said to correlate with, or influence the distribution of these adverbs, shall be examined. The current scientific state of knowledge regarding the specificities of addirittura and perfino/persino shall be compared with data from Repubblica Corpus and C-Oral-Rom. Such comparison will show that the distribution of addirittura and perfino/persino is influenced by the syntactic function of the element in the focus, its semantics in the specific context (in particular the existence of focus alternatives), as well as the type of argumentative reinforcement marked by the adverb. Addirittura tends to refer to the predicate or the sentence as a whole. It is mainly used for direct argumentative reinforcement and may occur in non-additive contexts. In contrast, perfino/persino tends to create a local focus, is far less common in non-additive contexts and can be used for direct, as well as indirect argumentative reinforcement. These differences in use confirm the overall results of previous research and may be due to the diachronic evolution of the two adverbs.
The goal of this study is to determine whether prosody contributes to the discrimination of meaning in sentences with the French additive particle aussi (‘also’). Previous research has highlighted the frequent use of this particle in structurally ambiguous positions, especially in spoken data, while authors diverge on their views as to the possible contribution of prosody to their disambiguation. In order to verify the role of prosody, we have run an experimental study based on a reading task: 20 native speakers were recorded while reading a set of contextualized sentences with aussi placed in both structurally ambiguous and non-ambiguous positions. The results show the presence of different types of prosodic correlates associated with aussi, but also that they are not exploited in a systematic way.
This paper offers an experimental analysis of how additive discourse relations are processed in Spanish. The processing data were obtained from an eye-tracking reading experiment on utterances in which the focus operator incluso ‘even’ and the additive connective además ‘furthermore’ were either absent or present. Incluso acts fundamentally on the level of the information structure, whereas además is generally found in argumentative relations. Results show that, despite some differences during semantic and syntactic integration, the presence of a discourse marker affects principally high-level processing. These results seem to underpin theoretical studies that claim for a mainly procedural meaning of discourse markers.
Many languages have an overabundant set of additive focus adverbs (AFAs), whose differences are mostly investigated in semantic (e.g. scalarity) or syntactic (scope phenomena and restrictions for specific domains of association) terms. The present study adopts a discourse perspective on the issue, comparing two cross-linguistic, near-equivalent AFAs (Italian anche and French aussi) in original texts and their translations in the Europarl corpus. Specifically, this study describes the relation established between the constituent in the scope of the AFA and its alternatives, which can be either co-textually available or contextually inferable. Comparing the frequencies of anche and aussi in original texts and taking into account their translation equivalents confirms important differences between these adverbs. While aussi is more restricted to the syntagmatic function of linking co-textually available alternatives in adjacent sentences, anche appears in a wider array of uses, including cases in which the identification of alternatives requires more complex inferential steps, as they are distant or even implicit to the domain of association.
The English scalar additive operator even has a broad distribution, e.g. insofar as it is used in upward- as well as downward-entailing contexts. Other languages, such as German, use a variety of expressions to render the function(s) of even. The question arises what conditions and determines the use of the various operators of German. The present study addresses this question with respect to the particles selbst, sogar and auch as translation equivalents of even in upward-entailing contexts. On the basis of a sample of 300 translation pairs from the Europarl corpus, the influence of four syntactic and three pragmatic variables on the choice of an operator in German is investigated. The results show that the operators are mainly sensitive to two of the pragmatic variables, the presence or absence of overt focus alternatives in the clausal environment, and the size of the set of alternatives. From a syntatic point of view, a clear difference between selbst and sogar is shown, with selbst exhibiting a tendency to attach to higher levels of syntax than sogar. The quantitative findings are interpreted against the background of historical developments, the assumption being that synchronic distributions reflect diachronic developments (‘distributional intertia’).
German-speaking learners of Italian as L2 often misplace the additive focalizer anche (‘also, too’) in the sentence and therefore fail at conveying the intended meaning. The present study investigates mistakes through a multiple-choice task in which participants choose the word order that sounds the most correct among alternatives that only differ in the positioning of anche. Short dialogues force the interpretation towards either an object-, a predicate- or a subject scope. Data shows that learners master the use of additive focalizers in structures with scope on the subject, rather than in those with scope either on the predicate or on the object. Moreover, learners tend to transfer the position of additive focalizers in the sentence from their L1, independent of the scope to be realized.
Our study compares the expression of additive relations in oral native (French, Italian, Russian) and non-native discourse (French L2), elicited with the same visual stimulus. On the basis of a comparative analysis of native productions, we argue that, in additive contexts, Russian clearly shares the discourse perspective attested in the two Romance languages. Our French L2 data have shown that both Russian and Italian groups seem to proceed by looking for similarities with respect to their L1, but learners of a closer typological language (Italian L1) rely longer on structures that are formally (or functionally) similar and assume more similarities than there actually are, in comparison to learners of typologically unrelated language (Russian L1), thus confirming the psycho-typology effects.
The contribution examines the behaviour of additive particles in a specific language contact situation, namely the Ladin speaking area in Trentino-South Tyrol (Italy). Ladin is a minority language spoken by ca. 30,000 speakers, whose linguistic repertoires include also Italian (Fassa valley) and German (Badia and Gardena valleys). The analysis of a corpus of bilingual speech shows that, contrary to other types of particles (such as discourse markers), there is no borrowing of additive particles from Italian and German to Ladin. Nevertheless, the contact with these languages affects the position and scope of additive particles in the utterance, especially in Badia and Gardena Ladin.