Talk by Marta Wierzba, Wednesday 6th 4-6 PM
The next talk in the phonology colloquium will be by Marta Wierzba (Potsdam University) - Abstract below:
06.11.19 Marta Wierzba:
"Focus projection: extending the empirical data base"
Room: IG 4.301
Everybody is welcome!
In this talk, I present two experiments on focus projection in German.
In transitive sentences, prosodic prominence on the object is compatible
with interpreting a larger unit (VP, IP) as focused. Such a broad-focus
interpretation is usually assumed to be less available when the subject
or the verb is the most prominent element. In experiment 1, I use a new
experimental paradigm to test whether this prosodic asymmetry carries
over to sentences with wh-movement. In experiment 2, I investigate
whether projection is also possible for a different
information-structural category, namely contrastive topics (CTs), and to
what extent CT projection follows the same pattern as focus projection....