Noah Constant
University of Massachusetts, Amherst constant@linguist.umass.edu
This article gives evidence for two claims about contrastive topic (CT) across languages. First, as recent work suggests, a unified pragmatic account of CT is possible, covering both “lone CT” (Ward & Hirschberg’s “rise-fall-rise”) as well as CT+F contours, given in (1) and (2) respectively (Wagner 2008, Oshima 2008, Constant 2009). Second, following Steedman (2000), CT meaning can be realized entirely at the boundary of the intonational phrase. Specifically, I show that Mandarin CT constructions have the particle ne in the position of the English boundary tone L-H%. I follow Chao (1968) in factoring out aspectual uses of ne, but show that both “evaluative” sentence final ne (Li 2006) and “thematic” ne (Wu 2006), given in (3) and (4), can convey CT, corresponding to lone CT and CT+F meanings respectively. In contrast, Japanese and Korean CT markers wa and (n)un, are known to occur on the focused phrase, like the English pitch accents L*+H or (L+)H* (Heycock 2007, Lee 2006).
To compare CT realization across languages, it’s important to be precise about what counts as a CT meaning. I show that use conditions on Mandarin ne fit with Büring’s (2003) theory that CT marks a response to a question which is part of a larger discourse strategy, delimited by the CT value of the response.
Furthermore, ne displays a characteristic feature of CT in resisting “alternative- dispelling” focuses (Constant 2009). These properties are illustrated in elicited examples (4) and (5). In these examples, the constituent focused by CT is not marked in any special way other than the pitch expansion and accentual lengthening associated with Mandarin focused material generally (Xu 1999, Chen 2002).
CT particles like ne open up new possibilities for exploring CT meaning and distribution. Of 527,794 Mandarin product reviews on amazon.cn, 3–4% contain the particle ne. Corpus examples like (6) reveal that ne is frequently used in questions, which is surprising given the claim in Büring 2003 that CT in questions is impossible. Since English CT is found across a range of speech acts including imperatives like (7), and CT is attested in questions for Czech (Sturgeon 2006), Japanese and Korean (Tomioka 2008), and Mandarin, I argue that English in fact possesses CT questions, but they are not distinguished prosodically from other question types. Since questions are already specified for a boundary tone, the homophony of CT and non-CT questions is evidence for Steedman’s (2000) proposal that English CT meaning resides with the boundary tone.
Although the core pragmatics of CT is shared across language-specific realizations, there are a few minor variations in meaning that are worth mention.
First, I observe variation in the ability to use CT on specific types of non- sentential answers to yes-no questions. While CT never marks a resolving answer like (8a), “maybe” answers can be CT marked in English (8b) and Mandarin, but cannot be wa-marked in Japanese. Furthermore, both Japanese and Mandarin resist “rhetorically non-resolving” uses of CT as in (8c).
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Another important point of variation concerns the ability to use CT marking on the answer to a strategy-final subquestion. While English lone CT resists issue- resolving uses (Constant 2009), CT+F configurations like the one in (2) are possible as resolving answers. In Mandarin, however, examples like (9) show that even lone CT may be used strategy-finally. This constitutes additional evidence that the collapse of lone CT and CT+F is justified.
The differences in CT distribution across languages suggest the need for a typology of CT meanings. Differences withstanding, I have provided evidence that the basic pragmatic effect of CT is the same regardless of phonological realization in terms of prosody or particle. This finding highlights the potential for using discourse particles as a window into intonational meaning.
Examples
References
Büring, Daniel (2003). “On D-Trees, Beans, and B-Accents”, Linguistics & Philosophy 26:5.
Chao, Yuen Ren (1968). A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chen, Yiya (2002). “Accentual lengthening of monosyllabic-constituents in Beijing Mandarin”, In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002.
Constant, Noah (2009). “English Rise-Fall-Rise: A study in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Intonation”.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst (ms.)
<http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jhmYTI5M/>
Heycock, Caroline (2007). “Japanese -wa, -ga, and Information Structure”, in S. Miyagawa and M. Saito (eds.) Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, Oxford University Press.
Lee, Chungmin (2006). “Contrastive (Predicate) Topic, Intonation, and Scalar Meanings”, in Lee, Gordon and Büring (eds.) Topic and Focus: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation, Springer.
Li, Boya (2006). Chinese Final Particles and the Syntax of the Periphery. PhD dissertation, University of Leiden.
Oshima, David Y. (2008). “Morphological vs. phonological contrastive topic marking”, in Rodney L. Edwards, Patrick J. Midtlying, Colin L. Sprague, and Kjerti G. Stensrud (eds.) Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society 41.
Steedman, Mark (2000). “Information Structure and the Syntax-Phonology Interface”, Linguistic Inquiry 31.
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Sturgeon, Anne (2006). The Syntax and Pragmatics of Contrastive Topic in Czech. PhD dissertation, UC Santa Cruz.
Tomioka, Satoshi (2008). “Contrastive Topics Operate on Speech Acts”, to appear in Féry, C. and M. Zimmermann (eds.) Information Structure from Different Perspectives, OUP.
Wagner, Michael (2008). “A Compositional Analysis of Contrastive Topics”, in Proceedings of NELS 38.
Wu, Guo (2006). ‘The “thematic question” — on “non-interrogative constituent + particle ne” questions’. In Yǔyánxué Lùncóng (Linguistic Forum) Vol. 32. Beijing Commercial Press.
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