Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

58 Sections
We make use of a distinction between the core syntactic properties of a construction on the
one hand (with hard judgments of (un-)grammaticality) and the discourse-embedding of the
sentence on the other hand (with soft judgments bearing on the (in-)felicity of the sentence in
context).
French is reputed to be a language with a fixed word order, SVO, with two types of obligatory
inversion in direct questions. However, there also is a domain in which freedom seems to
reign; the position of the subject with respect to the verb is undetermined in embedded clauses
in subjunctive mood and in relative clauses, as shown in (1) and (2) respectively.
(1) a. Je veux que parte Paul (I want that leaves Paul)
b. Je veux que Paul parte (I want that Paul leaves)
(2) a. Le livre qu’a écrit Paul (The book that has written Paul)
b. Le livre que Paul a écrit (The book that Paul has written)
On the theoretical level the situation can be expanded to the statement “If the core syntax of a
language allows for choices, the actual reason for a speaker to prefer the one variant rather
over the other in a given situation is beyond syntax and typically reflects stylistic variation”.
In this paper we argue that this type of stylistic variation is largely dependent on discourse
functions which can be stated in terms of topic and focus. Our argumentation makes use of
questions/answer pairs among other things; a prominent one is given in (3).
(3) a. Que veux-tu que Paul fasse? √ 1b # 1a
b. Qui veux-tu qui parte? # 1b √ 1a
Our proposal is that topicality induces a preverbal position of the subject (SV if S = topic),
while focalisation induces a sentence-final position of the subject (VS if S = focus). The
proposal improves on the one in Kampers-Manhe et al (2004), and takes into account the
semantic data in Drijkoningen & Kampers-Manhe (ms.). Our more general point is that word
orders used to reflect the communicative progress of the discourse cannot overrule syntactic
impossibilities, such that French speakers are often forced to use SVO structures even if focus
is involved, as shown in (4).
(4) Qui viendra? *Viendra Paul / Paul viendra *VS (even if S=focus)
This entails for us that the interaction between word order and discourse is a matter of “proper
balance” rather than a discussion of the type “either/or”.
Drijkoningen, F., & Kampers-Manhe, B., (Ms. submitted), “On inversions and the
interpretation of subjects in French”; Kampers-Manhe et al. (2004), “Subject NP
inversion” In: F. Corblin & H. de Swart (eds) Handbook of French Semantics, CSLI
Publications, pp. 553-580.
Estonian clause patterns — from Finno-Ugric to SAE
Erelt, Mati / Metslang, Helle
University of Tartu / University of Helsinki / Tallinn University
mati.erelt@ut.ee
Estonian clauses can be divided into two basic patterns: unmarked basic clauses and marked
basic clauses, based on whether the clause-initial topic is the (nominative) subject. The
subject of the unmarked basic clause is the semantic actor and has the typical coding and
behavioural properties of the subject, among other things the ability to trigger verbal