Abstract
This paper looks into the interpretive and focus related properties of the raised and the in-place accusative marked definites and argues that object displacement is not optional in Turkish. It further claims, contrary to the prevailing analyses, that the trigger of displacement is neither a syntactic requirement nor a purely interpretational one. It maintains that a prosodically motivated rearrangement is required to ensure that there is no clash between the PF demand of neutral focus at the left edge of the VP and a potential LF demand of hosting an unaccented accusative definite which by triggering pragmatic presupposition necessitates a hearer-old and discourse-old information status. The paper further proposes that a set of verbs can trigger presupposition and carry sentential stress, thereby restrict the focus domain with the verb in Turkish.
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Notes
- 1.
Erguvanlı (1984) has been the first to observe that accusative in Turkish gives rise to specificity.
- 2.
A presupposition trigger is an item or construction that signals the existence of presupposition in an utterance. Though there is no consensus among researchers with respect to what serve as presupposition triggers, definite descriptions (Strawson 1950); factive verbs such as know, remember (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970); change of state verbs such as stop, begin (Karttunen 1974); among many others are considered as presupposition triggers.
- 3.
Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974, 2002) views pragmatic presupposition as a property of the speakers, not of sentences or lexical items. The following quotation from Stalnaker (1974: 200) elucidates the notion neatly: ‘A proposition P is a pragmatic presupposition of a speaker in a given context just in case the speaker assumes or believes that P, assumes or believes that his addressee assumes or believes that P, and assumes or believes that his addressee recognizes that he is making these assumptions or has these beliefs’.
- 4.
This example clearly illustrates that what we are talking about is not discourse-linking (d-linking) as there has been no mention of the entity in the prior discourse. It is, however, perfectly possible to evoke entities through conversational implicatures. In any conversation, the interlocutors accomodate presuppositions conveyed through conversational implicatures and we see how this is reflected through accentuation/deaccentuation of the entities in the focus domain.
- 5.
Drawing on the insightful observations made by Ginzburg (1996) and Roberts (1996, 2004, 2006), I proposed in Nakipoğlu (2009) that a Question Under Discussion (QUD) or a Topic Under Discussion (TUD) by encoding interlocutors’ assumptions and beliefs about the current discourse determine the discourse status of the definites.
- 6.
Although the literature on the issue is far from being clear on the distinct nature of OS and (Short) Scrambling, a detailed comparison of OS and scrambling can be found in Thráinsson (2001) where whether OS is A movement and scrambling is A’-movement is studied by taking into account whether i. movement is clause bounded, ii. it induces weak crossover violations, iii. it influences binding relations, iv. it has anything to do with case or whether the constituent moved licenses a parasitic gap or not. Apart from this study, Diesing (1997) also discusses the differences and shows that OS and scrambling differ from each other in many ways, some of which are listed below:
(i) Verb movement, that is, Holmberg’s Generalization is a precondition for OS while it is not for scrambling of a DP.
(ii) OS only involves the movement of DPs, whereas any constituent can dislocate in scrambling.
(iii) The object cannot move over the subject in OS languages while it can in scrambling languages.
As discussed in Collins and Thráinsson (1996), Icelandic, for instance, is an example of an Object Shift language since it is only the DPs that can displace. It also conforms to Holmberg’s Generalization, hence necessitating the object to move to the [Spec, vP] in order to get case checked. Yiddish, as discussed in Diesing (1997), on the other hand, is an example of a scrambling language, which does not have Verb Raising hence checking of the accusative case has to be carried out on independent grounds.
- 7.
In fact, according to Chomsky (1999, 2000) the operation Move is driven by morphological considerations, specifically, by an implicit pied-pi** requirement, in the sense that an uninterpretable feature in the structure must be checked for convergence. Thus when the spec of v has that feature, the verb has to move to v to form the complex verb [Vv] thereby the strong D feature of the v attracts the DP to move to the spec of v. In Chomsky (2000: 102), there is also a suggestion that there can be uninterpretable v EPP-features as well which with the configuration they establish can influence the interpretation.
- 8.
Miyagawa (2003) offers an EPP-driven scrambling analysis for the movement of an object to [Spec, TP] for OSV order in Japanese. He, however, restricts himself with the object displacement in OSV order and does not extend this analysis to an account of object shift in Japanese.
- 9.
Movement before Spell-out, i.e. overt movement is a violation of the economy principle Procrastinate, which stipulates that movement should be suspended as long as possible, that is, it should be Last Resort. To remedy this problem in Icelandic, Collins and Thráinsson (1996) postulate a special requirement which has to do with the nominal features of AgroP. Essentially they claim that if the nominal features of AgroP are strong, object shift is obligatory, forcing the movement rule to operate early. If they are weak, however, no object shift is possible.
To make optional movement in Japanese consistent with the Last Resort principle, Bošković and Takahashi (1998), for example pursue an analysis in which θ-roles are deemed formal features that can drive movement. Under this view, scrambled elements are base-generated in their surface positions and undergo obligatory LF movement, particularly lowering to a position where they receive θ-roles.
For the optionality of object shift in Japanese, Swedish and Norwegian ditransitive clauses, Ura (2000) offers an analysis where the shift is induced by feature checking and optionality is assumed to be stemming from the weak features of the head which tolerates an unforced violation of Procrastinate. Specifically, what tolerates an unforced violation of Procrastinate in Swedish and Norwegian is the weak feature of the head that is relevant to the checking of IO, and that of the head relevant to the checking of DO in Japanese. Takano (1998), contra Ura (2000) argues for a non-feature driven analysis of object shift in Japanese based on the fact that Japanese lacks Verb-raising. In the syntactic analyses of object displacement, following Holmberg’s (1986) generalization, the checking of the accusative case is assumed to depend on the verb’s raising to T. This move further is argued to necessitate the movement of DP into [Spec, AgroP] in the Agr-based accounts and to the Spec of v in the Agr-less checking accounts. Under Takano’s analysis, lack of V-raising forces the accusative case to be interpreted as inherent case checked in-place in Japanese. The displaced accusative marked DP is treated as an instance of short scrambling to VP. In particular, the DP-PP surface order is argued to follow from a partial movement of the theme DP to the pre PP position. This displacement is partial in the sense that it takes place within VP and hence is analyzed as short scrambling to VP rather than movement to a position for case checking.
- 10.
Building on the observation in Nakipoğlu (2004) that an accusative marked object can function as a measuring scale when it is in the object position of (i) verbs of motion; (ii) incremental theme verbs and (iii) location verbs, hence be delimited, Üntak Tarhan (2006), to account for the syntactic position of the accusative marked objects proposes an AspP sandwiched between vP and VP in Turkish. She suggests that an ACC marked object can either be merged as the sister of the verb and then moved to [Spec, AspP] for case checking or it can be base generated in [Spec, AspP] and checks its case in situ. As only in the context of a set of verbs a delimited interpretation of the ACC marked object is possible, base generation of objects in [Spec, AspP] does not appear to be insightful.
- 11.
Karimi (2003) also observes that in Persian specific DPs can remain in-place inside the VP. Under a syntactic account this fact would suggest that case checking is carried out both overtly and covertly for the same language. This, however, as pointed out by Karimi also undermines the validity of the claim that displacement is triggered by case checking.
- 12.
An insightful discussion of what case means and how the Minimalist proposal that regards structural cases NOM and ACC as entities that figure in narrow syntax should be dispensed with, can be found in Hinzen (2013). Hinzen argues that structural case, ACC in particular, is not uninterpretable, rather it has rich informational content.
- 13.
The generative contention that syntactic computation is content-free and prosody-free, however, appears to be motivated on ad hoc grounds rather than being empirically driven. In the generative tradition syntax takes center stage, however, recent research on the architecture of grammar shows that syntactic organization in human language is not autonomous, rather it feeds directly into semantics, as discussed in Hinzen and Poeppel (2011), Hinzen (2013), Baggio et al. (2010), among others. Research on the interface phenomena suggests that all information, i.e. linguistic information coming from phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatic information such as knowledge about the context and the interlocutors, comes together in a ‘single unification space’ and is handled in parallel—not serially, so that the linguistic input can be mapped onto an event structure or discourse model directly.
- 14.
In the so-called cartographic approach, information structural components, topic and focus are represented as formal features in the syntactic component of the grammar and feature annotated syntactic structures are interpreted at the levels of PF and LF (Rizzi 1997). Researchers, however, are divided over the issue of whether topic and focus are represented as syntactic features with interpretational reflexes in phonology and semantics or whether these notions must be understood as exclusively phonological features. Zubizarreta (1998), Szendrői (2001), Esteschick-Shir (2006) for example, propose that some movement operations are not feature driven and do not occur in the syntax, but are rather phonologically driven and occur in the phonological component. Schwarzschild (1999) and Büring (2006) suggest that there is direct correspondence between phonology and interpretation without recourse to syntax.
- 15.
With respect to how the ACC is assigned, we can either follow the more widely held idea that structural case is assigned to the NPs by the functional heads, hence an accusative marked DP in (7) is licensed case by the v as proposed in Chomsky (2000, 2001). As there are two NPs in (7), for example, one can also entertain the Dependent Case Assignment Theory (Marantz 1991; Bobaljik 2008; Baker 2015) where the case a DP has, depends on whether there are other case competitors in the local domain. Hence in this configurational case assignment approach, a DP that does not have a lexically governed case, is assigned the so-called dependent case i.e., the ‘accusative’ case. In (7) for instance, basın-a ‘press-DAT’ is assigned dative through the verb anlat- ‘tell’, hence what is left for the next DP, is accusative, hence darbe-yi ‘coup-ACC’.
- 16.
It is commonly held that the canonical position for neutral focus in Turkish is the immediately preverbal position (Erkü 1983; Erguvanlı 1984; Kural 1992; Kennelly 1997, among others). Contrary to this view, Göksel and Özsoy (2000, 2003) hold that there is a focus field rather than a focus position in Turkish and this field is assumed to cover the entire preverbal area including the verb. In their view, the reason that the immediately preverbal area is generally associated with a focus position has to do with the structural properties of the preverbal position, particularly that this position allows percolation of stress, hence allows a neutral focus reading.
- 17.
That the verbs bear stress due to being presupposition triggers, hence can restrict the focus domain is evident in the following examples as well. The accusative marked kanama ‘bleeding’ in (a) and isyan ‘riot’ in (b) are rendered deaccented, hence hearer-old and discourse-old as a result of the presupposition triggered by the verbs.
- 18.
Meinunger (2000: 78) points out that narrowly, i.e. contrastively focused definites in VP internal position are frequently encountered in German but that not all definite in-place DPs have narrow focus. He notes, for example, that definite DPs which are referential, not anaphoric; meaning DPs that are novel in the discourse and that can easily be perceived by the speaker and the hearer and DPs that appear as part of an idiom and those that have a generic reading can remain in-place without requiring contrastive focus.
- 19.
This exceptional status of NSR in the context of certain verbs appears to have gone mostly unnoticed in Turkish. An inquiry into this somewhat unexpected relation between nuclear accent and verbal presuppositions led me to the contrast that Bolinger (1972) had noticed in the sentences below.
Bolinger argues that the relevant notion that guides placement of NSR in (1b) on the verb emphasize but not on make in (1a) depends on the relative semantic weight and the (un)predictability of the predicate. The less predictable a verb is the more likely it is to bear stress. According to Bolinger the examples just suggest that the distribution of sentence accent is not determined by the syntactic structure but by semantics. Under the analysis proposed in this paper the contrast in (1) receives a straight-forward explanation. The verb emphasize in (1b) is a presupposition trigger accommodating the presupposition that a point has already been made. In (1a) no verbal presupposition is at issue, hence the object ‘a point’ is the focused entity.
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Nakipoğlu, M. (2019). Towards a Model of the Relation Between Prosodic Structure and Object Displacement in Turkish. In: Özsoy, A. (eds) Word Order in Turkish. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 97. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11385-8_8
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