Abstract:

The talk deals with the semantic impact of different accents in the Hungarian equivalents of questions like What did you read YESTERDAY? and What did YOU read yesterday?. Many accounts of stress assignment treat this kind of nuclear stress as an instance of focus accent without further qualifications. The problem with this approach is that, if everything but the question word in constituent questions is presupposed, or at least backgrounded, as most analyses have it, then it is not entirely clear what meaning a focus accent on the non-question-word part of the question may have, given the notional incompatibility between prominence and presupposition/background. Lambrecht & Michaelis (1998) therefore propose that the nuclear stress in constituent questions is basically meaningless, assigned per default because of the non-accentability of wh-words in English, or, in marked cases, it serves as an activation accent, not a focus accent. Using data from Hungarian, a discourse configurational language in which question words are inherently accentable, the present talk attempts, contra Lambrecht & Michaelis, to preserve the insights of the focus-to-accent approach, without its disregard for the specific nature of constituent questions. Question words in Hungarian invariably function as foci, as the syntactic and prosodic evidence shows; semantically, they represent a specific type of focus, a kind of contextually bound variable. In the case of simple focus questions, it is only the question word that is accented. Hungarian constituent questions are thus subject to the same focus-to-accent rule as declarative sentences. In those cases which correspond to the English sentences given above, a second accent occurs. Prosodic and syntactic properties of these double accent questions closely resemble the properties of double accent declarative sentences. Since these declaratives express complex foci in the sense of Krifka (1992), an attempt is made to capitalize on this formal similarity and to postulate the same semantics for constituent questions with double accents: it is argued that the question word and the accented element form a complex focus with a list reading. The accent on the non-question-word part of constituent questions is thus interpreted as a focus accent, more precisely as an accent marking the second part of a complex focus.

References

Krifka, Manfred (1992), “A compositional semantics for multiple focus constructions.” In: J. Jacobs (ed.), Informationsstruktur und Grammatik. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag (LB, Sonderheft 4), 17-53.
Lambrecht, Knud & Laura A. Michaelis (1998), “Sentence accent in information questions: Default and projection.” In: Linguistics and Philosophy 21: 477-544.

11: 45 – 12:30 h
Ursula Drolc (Insitut für Afrikanistik, Köln)
Les coverbes en wolof

Abstract:

En Wolof se trouve une abondance fascinante des coverbes idéophoniques. Les coverbes idéophoniques sont situés en marge de la grammaire. Ils sont grammaticalement réduits et dépendents des autres verbes. Sémantiquement, ils confèrent des sens expressifs et imaginatifs. Ils se partagent en deux groupes. Le premier groupe de coverbes sert à intensifier les verbes qualificatifs, p.ex. nyuul kukk 'très noir', fees dëll 'très plein'. Le deuxième groupe de coverbes est construit avec l'auxiliaire ne 'dire'. Ils expriment des états et des changements d'états avec la manière, dans laquelle l'état se trouve ou dans laquelle l'action est faite comme p.ex. des mouvements brusques (ne pëll 'sortir en trombe'), des états immobile (ne jodd 'être raide comme un I'), des états d'esprit (ne ñogg 'être angoissé') etc. La communication va présenter ces coverbes, chercher leur étymologie et discuter leur particularités grammaticales.

12:30 – 13:00 h Pause

13:00 – 13:45 h
Anna Diagne (IfL - Phonetik, Köln)
Intonation patterns in Wolof persuasion discourse

Abstract:

Our purpose in this section is to identify the intonational patterns of structures that contribute to the communicative goal of persuasion. Looked at in isolation, no specific structure is persuasive by itself. However, the effect of persuasivity can be achieved by a deliberate linear ordering of particular structures by the speaker. The parts of the corpus that will be presented are monologues in meetings, in which the purpose of the speaker is either to educate his/her audience or to defend an opinion against others. The mismatches between intonational and syntactic structures show that the ultimate meaning of an utterance can not simply be derived from the addition of the different meanings of intonation or syntax but only at the level of discourse.