Table Of ContentPerspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context
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Volume 244
Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context
Studies in honor of Knud Lambrecht
Edited by Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers
Perspectives on
Linguistic Structure and Context
Studies in honor of Knud Lambrecht
Edited by
Stacey Katz Bourns
Harvard University
Lindsy L. Myers
University of Missouri, Kansas City
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context : Studies in honor of Knud Lambrecht /
Edited by Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 244)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Sentences. 2. Grammar, Comparative and
general--Syntax. 3. Functionalism (Linguistics) 4. Discourse analysis.
5. Pragmatics. I. Bourns, Stacey Katz, editor of compilation. II. Myers, Lindsy
L., editor of compilation. III. Lambrecht, Knud, honouree.
P291.L494 2014
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isbn 978 90 272 5649 2 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7059 7 (Eb)
© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.
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John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
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Table of contents
Introduction vii
Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers
Acknowledgements xv
Part I. Grammatical constructions 1
The information structure of ditransitives: Informing scope properties
and long-distance dependency constraints 3
Adele E. Goldberg
Non-promotional passives and unspecified subject constructions:
Navigating the typological Kuiper Belt 17
Catherine O’Connor and Joan Maling
On the relationship between sentence focus category, subject-verb order,
and genericity: A preliminary analysis of some Italian unaccusatives 39
Cinzia Russi
Frames and the interpretation of omitted arguments in English 57
Josef Ruppenhofer and Laura A. Michaelis
Interactive frames and grammatical constructions 87
Carl Blyth and Dale Koike
Topics at the left periphery in Russian 109
Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam
Part II. Topics in French grammar 131
Final compression in French as a phrasal phenomenon 133
Caroline Féry
Pourquoi in spoken French: Corpus-based function-form mapping 157
Lindsy L. Myers and Stéphanie Pellet
vi Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context
Processing constraints and information structure as moderating factors
on first- and second-language use of the causal conjunction parce que 183
Robert V. Reichle
Contrasting c’est-clefts and it-clefts in discourse 199
Stacey Katz Bourns
Left dislocation in French: Information structure
vs. (?) interactional linguistics 223
Betsy Kerr
Index 241
Introduction
Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers
Harvard University and University of Missouri-Kansas City
“What did you just say?” he would ask, pulling out his mini-notebook and pencil
from his pocket. “Don’t change anything. Say again exactly what you just said.”
Then he would jot down the utterance, put away the notebook, and smile sheep-
ishly. And so went many a dinner with our beloved dissertation advisor, Professor
Knud Lambrecht. Eager to make our point – but not to have our syntax analyzed –
we complied with a sigh. But even during the most frustrating of interrupted con-
versations, and despite our pleas for him to listen to what we were saying and not
how we were saying it, the interaction was always enjoyable and memorable, and
so was the meal, especially when he had prepared it. The feeling of being a part of
something bigger – the discovery of the interface between syntax and pragmat-
ics – was stimulating and exciting. We should also probably admit that in recent
years we have been guilty of the same Lambrechtian stunt, taking out a scrap
of paper and jotting down an interesting utterance, although maybe not with as
much aplomb.
Upon Knud’s retirement from the University of Texas at Austin and in honor
of his seventy-fifth birthday, we decided to put together this volume to celebrate his
rich contributions to the fields of French and general syntax and pragmatics. Highly
regarded by his former students, colleagues, and co-authors for his knowledge and
scholarly contributions, Knud is also a treasured mentor and friend. The contribu-
tors to this volume have all been inspired in some way by his work and collegiality,
whether they were fellow students in the graduate program at UC Berkeley, fac-
ulty and students at the University of Texas, or colleagues and collaborators from
around the world. Upon being invited, everyone immediately agreed to participate,
saying what a pleasure it would be to honor Knud. His brilliance, his gentleness, his
humility, his sense of humor, and his generosity are the backdrop to his immeasur-
able contributions to the field and to his colleagues. Knud has always been willing
to help, notably by providing thoughtful and honest feedback, replete with keen
insights, elaborate comments, and encouragement. The hallmarks of his own writ-
ing, including dedication to clarity, rigor, and insightful analysis, have benefited and
viii Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers
inspired us. His former students agree that there was nothing more satisfying than
finding the word “nice!” written by Knud in the margin of our papers.
Knud has long framed his central research question as: why are there so many
ways to say the same thing in any given language? In his view, the variant forms
reflect language users’ conventionalized solutions to the problem of fitting sen-
tence structures to communicative contexts. Knud’s seminal book, Information
Structure and Sentence Form (1994), changed the way that linguists look at the
interaction of syntax, discourse, and prosody by examining it through the lens
of grammatical construction theory. Key to his approach is the simple obser-
vation that the formal features of an utterance (e.g., phrasal stress, word order,
morphology) encode what propositional content is to be taken as new (or focal),
what propositional content is to be taken for granted, and what entities are to be
treated as predictable participants of the predication. According to this model,
focus marking is neither iconic nor governed by general algorithms; it is instead
mediated by a set of constructions that instantiate a universal inventory of focus
articulations. These focus articulations provide touchstones for the cross-linguistic
analysis of information-structure distinctions (Lambrecht 2000b), but the man-
ner of expression of each focus articulation in each language is presumed to be
as idiosyncratic as the constructional inventory of that language. In other words,
according to Knud, speakers leverage existing structures of the language to make
needed distinctions among focus articulations. It is thus unsurprising that Knud
draws frequently in his work upon analogies to evolutionary biology, as in the
landmark 2001 Linguistics paper (Lambrecht 2001a), in which he provides a typo-
logical framework for the analysis of cleft sentences. The paper begins with an epi-
gram from Steven Jay Gould, who himself quotes Darwin in noting the many traits
of organisms that are imperfectly designed, “jerry-rigged” adaptive responses.
Knud has been prolific, publishing two books and over thirty articles and book
chapters, many of which investigate, in broad terms, syntax, semantics, and prag-
matics, and their interface. These works frequently analyze French and English
but also incorporate Greek, Latin, German, Italian, and Spanish. Knud’s research
inspires and engages his readership through the clarity of his prose style, the con-
ceptual coherence and rigor of his analyses, and the remarkable language facts
that he retrieves from his overstocked storehouse of linguistic observations – from
simple patterns that theorists have never noticed before (as in his analyses of voca-
tives [1996] and the French comme N construction [1995]) to intimidatingly dif-
ficult patterns that his work renders intuitively simple (as in his analyses of English
‘incredulity responses’ [1990] and English question accentuation [Lambrecht and
Michaelis 1998]).
As a former student of Professor Charles Fillmore in the Department of
Linguistics at UC Berkeley, Knud adopted an approach to form and meaning
analysis based on Construction Grammar (Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor 1988).
Introduction ix
As Knud explains, the Construction Grammar framework allows researchers to
analyze constructions “as form-function pairings whose structural and seman-
tic properties cannot, or not entirely, be accounted for in terms of other proper-
ties of the grammar of a language or of universal grammar and which therefore
require independent explanation” (Lambrecht 2001a: 466). Knud’s contributions
to Construction Grammar are vital and include among other work his (1996)
Language paper, co-written with Laura Michaelis, “Toward a Construction-Based
Model of Language Function: The Case of Nominal Extraposition,” one of the
first works on Construction Grammar to appear in a major journal. The paper is
still widely cited as a strong early demonstration of the need for constructional
type hierarchies or “inheritance networks.” Knud’s work has also influenced allied
function-oriented theories of syntax, in particular Role and Reference Grammar,
which integrated Lambrechtian focus articulations into its formal descriptive
architecture (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997).
In this tribute to Knud, we examine the intersection of syntax, discourse, prag-
matics, and semantics. The contributors represent a diverse group of scholars whose
research reflects various languages, frameworks, and areas of research, as well as
varying degrees of overlap or agreement with his legacy. The volume offers new the-
oretical and applied insights (Polinsky and Potsdam, Ruppenhofer and Michaelis)
at the juncture of linguistic structure and context, all of which connect to Knud’s
interests. In addition, it re-examines the heuristic value of information structure
(Goldberg, Kerr) and Construction Grammar (Blyth and Koike) with theoretical
reflections (O’Connor and Maling) and analysis, as well as concrete applications
(Katz Bourns, Féry, Reichle). It also offers novel perspectives on pragmatics, seman-
tics, and syntax (Russi) to analyze discourse-based phenomena (Myers and Pellet).
The first section of the volume considers issues of grammar, especially involv-
ing grammatical constructions, which are often at the heart of Knud’s research
(Lambrecht 1988, 2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2004; Lambrecht and Polinsky 1998). The
volume begins with a chapter by Adele E. Goldberg in which she asks how infor-
mation structure, especially the concept of topicality, explains the distribution of
ditransitive constructions. She argues that information structure is “perhaps the
most important factor in understanding syntax” (p. 3). While Goldberg’s interpre-
tation implicitly embraces the tenets of Construction Grammar, Carl Blyth and
Dale Koike assert that the interpretation of grammatical constructions benefits
from consideration of the communicative context beyond Lambrecht’s (1994)
pragmatic/syntactic level. They propose instead that accounts of constructional
meaning should include interactive frames and the notion of textual genre in order
to contextualize pragmatic meaning fully.
The last four chapters of this section analyze particular constructions, many
of which Knud also examined: left dislocation (1994 and 2001b), unaccusatives
(1994), null complements (Lambrecht and Lemoine 2005) and passives. Taking an
