Introduction

Introduction Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München / Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Albeit under various terminological guises, Romance linguistics has been interested in questions of focus–background structure since its inception. Starting out from a survey of some early observations about focus-related grammatical facets of Romance languages (Section 1) and of early theoretical concepts of information structure (Section 2), this introduction aims to provide a frame of orientation, signalling points of convergence and divergence between the different theoretical approaches to information structure and works of a more empirical nature. Thereafter, Section 3 will zoom in on basic concepts and issues dealing with the more recent theory of focus. In doing so, this section will seek to situate the included contributions briefly within the field of focus-related inquiry.

1.

Early observations about focus in Romance language scholarship

Some relevant remarks on focus can be found as early as in the Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen by Friedrich Diez, published from 1836 onwards, which was to lay the foundation for comparative investigations into the grammar of Romance languages and dialects. In particular, Diez mentions fronting of non-subject constituents and clefting as syntactic devices available for achieving emphasis (Nachdruck or Hervorhebung, Diez 1844: 288 and 424), moreover hinting at the possibility of foregrounding subjects in declarative clauses by means of subject-verb-inversion. Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, author of the second landmark nineteenth-century grammar of Romance languages, conceives constituent order as a “fight” (Kampf) between grammatical and “affective” factors (1899: 760–761). Among the latter group, Meyer-Lübke observes a tendency for the most “important” or most “noteworthy” element to occur in sentence-final position. In addition, Meyer-Lübke notes that whenever grammatical and affective principles of linearization enter into conflict, the choice between canonical and non-canonical ordering variants is regulated in language-particular ways. To our minds, Meyer-Lübke’s suggestions have a remarkably modern flavour, foreshadowing optimality-theoretic thinking about grammar as a specific ranking of competing constraints.

Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob

With the rise of national philological schools and traditions in Europe, approaches to focus-related alternations of sentence form become more variegated. In his monograph on Italian syntax, Fornaciari (1881) observes a tendency for “the most important” constituent to be positioned at the left or the right edge of the clause. According to Fornaciari, Italian enjoys the greatest syntactic flexibilities among all Romance languages. The author takes this to be an asset of Italian, for which he gives credit to the great literary figures of the past, as, in his opinion, their exemplarity contributed significantly to preserve the freedom in constituent ordering inherited from Latin. In France, by contrast, it is precisely the diachronic rigidification of subject–verb–object basic constituent order, and the decline of flexible sentence accents from Middle to early Modern French, which receive laudatory comments by linguists until way into the twentieth century (cf. Wartburg 1934: 221–222), thus perpetuating the view of a langue analogique, current in the rationalist metalinguistic reflexion of Enlightenment (cf. Bossong 2001; for an early reference to fixed word order in French cf. Ramus 1572: 182). At the same time, empirical investigations of the modern literary language demonstrate that quite a few rearrangement possibilities continue to be solidly attested, some of them obviously serving to single out and highlight subjects, objects or adjuncts of various semantic sorts (Blinkenberg 1928). Today’s thriving research into the grammar of informal spoken French and its specific information structuring devices (see the seminal work by Lambrecht 1994) has its precursors in works such as Bally’s (1909) Traité de stylistique française or Frei’s (1929) Grammaire des fautes. Frei describes a number of other non-standard constructions which achieve foregrounding, often with exclamative overtones, of individual constituents. In a similar vein, Bally offers interesting observations on dislocations and their capacity to modify what we would now call the focus–background partition of the utterance. Later, in his Linguistique générale et linguistique française (1932), Bally tried to apply his distinction between thème and propos, originally designed as a distinction between syntactic units of various hierarchic levels, for explaining the structure of sentences with left dislocated constituents. Moving on to Spanish, we find a remarkable tension in prescriptive judgements: On the one hand, to the extent that word order is treated at all in descriptive grammars, these continue to echo Correa’s (1625) claim that the most “natural” ordering of major constituents in this language is subject–verb–object. On the other hand, grammarians cannot avoid to acknowledge that deviations from this basic serialization are pervasive in both written and spoken varieties of Spanish. The considerable amount of variability in linear order is argued to be motivated by factors such as “smoothness, elegance or liveliness of expression” by the authoritative grammar of the Real Academia (“suavidad, elegancia, ó viveza de la expresión”, Real Academia Española 1771: 234), which arguably blocked out more impartial linguistic descriptions for quite a long time. Unsurprisingly, therefore, traditional grammars of Spanish and other scholarly Hispanicist works are often lacking informational structural reflections during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see the surveys in Neumann-Holzschuh 1993 and Casielles Suárez 2000). At best, one can find an occasional mentioning of “emphasis” as a determinant of constituent

Introduction

order (Salvà 1830/1835: 117; Bello 1847/1988: II, 582), and passing remarks on focusing achieved by the fronting of constituents to initial position without clitic doubling (Cejador y Frauca 1905: 519, 523–524). For Portuguese, a historical grammar which includes some consideration of focus-related syntactic rearrangements is Dias (1918). Dias improves earlier descriptions in his chapter on “emphatic constructions” in that he not only mentions non-subject fronting, clefting and subject–verb inversion in this context, but also recognizes that not all instances of postverbal subjects in declarative sentences serve to highlight the subject constituent (pp. 324–329). More particularly, Dias’ discussion of the relationship between predicate type and informational distribution in verb–subject declaratives anticipates much recent work on presentative and thetic constructions.

2.

Early theories about information structure

The above remarks, which can only provide a very superficial glance of pre-structuralist observations about focus–background markings in Romance languages, suffice to show that a representative overview of these empirical insights would constitute a daunting task, since they are scattered in the grammatical literature as well as in philological commentaries and treatises on stylistics. Even so, it should have become clear that the ideas of the Prague School work on Functional Sentence Perspective fell on fertile soil in the field of Romance studies (to a greater extent than earlier proposals about the so-called “psychological subject”, cf. Paul [1880] 1975: 124; Gabelentz 1891: 378). Praguian theory, originally developed against the backdrop of salient grammatical contrasts between Czech and English, capitalizes on the communicative status of discourse referents and propositions and its impact upon sentence form (see Mathesius 1929; Firbas 1957, 1964; Daneš 1964). In its simplest version, Functional Sentence Perspective proposes a binary partition of sentence tokens into theme and rheme, notions adapted from Ammann (1928: 3) to designate constituents encoding ‘old’ and ‘new’ semantic content, respectively. Later refinements of the theory abandoned this dichotomous view of informational status in favour of a graded dimension of communicative dynamism, and explored the interrelatedness of information distribution with lexical content, context and intonation (Firbas 1971, 1992). In continental European linguistics, these Prague School concepts soon found their way into the study of sentential variants within Romance language scholarship (cf. Dubský 1960 for an early application to Spanish), and have inspired empirical scrutiny of the syntax–pragmatics interface for decades (cf. Raible 1971; Alisova 1972: 130–153; Contreras 1976; Blumenthal 1980: 158– 168; Bossong 1980 and passim; Wandruszka 1982; Combettes 1983; Reyes 1985; Stammerjohann (ed.) 1986; Rothenberg 1989, to mention but a few). In much subsequent literature, the theme–rheme organization has been related to what has standardly been referred to as the topic–comment structure, a terminology coined


by Hockett (1958). In the English-speaking academia, it is principally through the work of scholars such as Bolinger or Halliday that information structure came to figure prominently on the research agenda of functionally oriented linguists (see Bolinger 1954, 1954/1955; Halliday 1967/1968). Undoubtedly, both Praguian and non-Praguian functionalist frameworks have informed a rich body of literature, which continues to be of great relevance for anybody interested in the formal encodings and interpretive consequences of focus. Having said this, we believe that most of the earlier works suffer from conflating into a single dimension (e.g. theme– rheme) aspects of information distribution that can, and should, be distinguished on both theoretical and empirical grounds. From very early on, even the followers of the Praguian terminology felt the need for further precision, insisting on the distinction between the textual dimension of the theme-rheme-dichotomy (“old” or “given” information vs. “new” information) and a sentence-internal dimension (captured in terms of “aboutness”: “what is said” vs. “about what something is said”, cf. e.g. Gülich & Raible 1972). In fact, even in the writings of some Prague School functionalists, one can find occasional side remarks suggesting such distinctions (cf. below). Chafe (1976), in his seminal article on “Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view”, establishes as many as six different levels of what he calls “information packaging”. However, from these, only two have been retained in most modern approaches to information structure. One reason is that Chafe’s starting point was not the sentence as a whole, but the informational status of noun phrases. Of course, there is a categorical difference between the informational status of a nominal or pronominal expression encoding a discourse referent – an entity of type e in Montagovian terms –, and the distribution of information within clausal and sentential units of discourse, i.e., expressions denoting propositions (of Montague’s type t). While it is well-known that the cognitive status of a discourse referent determines its encoding in systematic ways (Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski 1993), we follow Reinhart (1981) and Vallduví (1992: 16–21) in maintaining that such choices among alternative referring expressions do not fall within the purview of information packaging. The reason for this is straightforward: Unlike other carriers of information, including acoustic and visual paralinguistic signals, linguistically encoded information is inevitably processed and stored in a propositional format. This does not imply, of course, that speakers invariably need to utter a complete proposition in order to successfully convey a piece of information to their addressees. Nonetheless, hearers must be able to suitably integrate subpropositional input which is intended as informative into an open proposition. This open proposition, in turn, may be specified by a preceding explicit question, or it can be furnished by what von Stutterheim & Klein (2002) have called the quaestio, the implicit question which a stretch of discourse is designed to answer. More often than not, unfortunately, notions such as rheme have been applied indiscriminately to designate both linguistic expressions introducing ‘new’ referents and those parts of a sentence in which ‘new’ information is communicated.

Introduction

On the other hand, the given/new-distinction in itself needs to be differentiated: As pointed out most lucidly by Gundel (1988), at least two different notions of newness are at stake in much of the earlier literature on Functional Sentence Perspective. An occurrence of a referential expression at a given point in discourse can be assessed as new or old in discourse, given the preceding linguistic context, without consideration of the interlocutors’ discourse representation or knowledge base at the time of utterance. Evaluating a linguistic expression as conveying new information, by contrast, requires access to the addressee’s cognitive state. In other words, it is only addressee-newness that directly pertains to the linguistic transfer and management of information between communication partners, and thus to information structure narrowly defined. In the next section, we will move on to a more articulated conception of information structure, where focus–background becomes a dimension in its own right.

3.

Basic aspects of focus–background structure

Even when we choose to adopt a restrictive notion of information structure as applying only to propositional content, more than one dimension of packaging needs to be distinguished. As we said, even in Praguian functionalism it was acknowledged early on that grammatical signals of emphasis are organized in ways which cannot be reduced to the theme–rheme dimension (Sgall 1967: 208; see also Daneš 1984: 14). Notions such as emphasis, foregrounding, or center of information, have been associated with what is called focus following the lead of Halliday (1967/1968) and Chomsky (1971). The start for a systematic separation of different levels of information packaging was Chafe (1976). From the more recent attempts to give more analytic reconstructions of the dichotomies mentioned above, Féry & Krifka (2008) retain three principal distinctions: (1) ±givenness (defined as a feature indicating whether the entity denoted is present in the discursive common ground mutually shared by the interlocutors); (2) topic vs. comment (where topic is the address of the common ground where the information conveyed in the comment has to be stored) and (3) focus vs. background, where focus is defined in terms of alternatives. The idea that focus is the part of an utterance which makes a choice within a range of alternative semantic values that are of relevance to communication partners in the local context of discourse has been worked out in formal detail by Alternative Semantics (Rooth 1985, 1992), where the “ordinary meaning” of the focalized element contrasts with a set of alternatives (“alternative meaning”). Seen from such a perspective, the dimensions of topic–comment and focus–background are conceived of as being logically independent. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility of certain language-particular or cross-linguistic preferences and constraints in the alignment between the focus–background partition of sentences and the two other distinctions mentioned above. In any event, we maintain that such


correlations, instead of being an apriori, still have to be established explicitly, partly on empirical grounds. In principle, nothing even prevents an expression which occurs in a sentence to be simultaneously marked as being part of both the topic and the focus domain, to mention but one controversial issue (see Aptekman, this volume, for further discussion). The theory of Alternative Semantics does not include an explicit theory of how the set of alternatives that is relevant in the local stretch of discourse can be computed from discursive and contextual givens. As far as we can see, formal linguists have generally refrained from tackling this issue. The tacit consensus seems to be that this task lies entirely outside the scope of grammar, and must be relegated to a more general theory of cognition. The contribution by Onea & von Heusinger (this volume) deals with this view. As this contribution endeavours to show, grammatical aspects (viz. the gender of a noun) do have a bearing for the computation of alternative focus values in certain non-standard varieties of Romanian. On the interpretive side, Chomsky (1971) and many of his followers have taken it for granted that the non-focus part of a sentence token – the background in the terminology used in this volume – lies outside the scope of assertion or other illocutionary operators and therefore contains information that is presupposed. However, the identification of background and presupposition does not seem to be maintainable when we adopt the classical notion of presupposition. In his monograph on word order in Spanish, Contreras (1976) gives the following example (1): (1) ¿Qué aprendiste hoy, Pedrito? Aprendí que dos y dos son cuatro. ‘What did you learn today, Pedrito? – I learnt that two and two is four.’ (Contreras 1976: 3) The subordinate clause in Pedrito’s answer is the focus part by virtue of providing the information solicited by the preceding question. At the same time, it is presupposed since it is subordinated under a factive predicate. At the very least, therefore, the presupposed part and the non-focus part of a sentence need not coincide in any case. Conversely, the focus domain need not be aligned with illocutionary scope (though see Beyssade et al. (forthc.) for a recent defense of the view that focus–background structure is reducible to illocutionary semantics). Nonetheless, the alleged close association between background and presupposition has recently been refined and reinstated by Geurts & van der Sandt (2004), who argue that each background portion of a sentence gives rise to an existential presupposition. Despite its initial attractions, this view has come under severe attack in a number of peer commentaries. These critics argue, for instance, that presuppositions generated by focus behave differently from standard cases of presupposition with respect to choice of antecedents (Büring 2004), as well as compositionality and projection (Kratzer 2004). In this volume, we will therefore remain neutral as to the triggering of presuppositions by non-focal parts of a sentence and stick to the more innocent notion of background as the complement notion of focus. Much work, of both generative and functionalist-typological

Introduction

origin, has been spent on sorting out different types of focus, mainly based on different kinds of semantic and pragmatic inferences. While Dik et al. (1980) introduce a sixway typology of focus functions in order to account for the differential acceptability of alternative focus-marking strategies in different contexts, the most widely accepted proposals distinguish only between two principal subtypes of focus, known as identificational and information focus, respectively (É. Kiss 1998; see also Rochemont 1986; Campos & Zampini 1990). Whereas the latter type acts as a default, identificational focus is the special case, involving reorderings and licensing additional inferences. Perhaps the most important subcase of identificational focus is contrastive focus (see Isac 2003 for the distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive identificational foci and their grammatical relevance in Romanian). The occurrence of contrastive focus has been associated with systematic deviations from neutral sentence accent position and realization, designated syntactic positions and movement types as well as specific quantificational interpretations. In cases of contrastive focus, an inference is triggered that there is at least one salient alternative which could not be substituted for the contrastively focused part of the sentence salva veritate. A sentence such as PETER I met, with contrastive focus on the object, strongly invites the inferences that Peter was the only person whom the speaker met (exhaustivity) and that there is at least one salient alternative to Peter in the local context of discourse whom the speaker could have been expected to meet, but in fact did not. Much of what can be found under headings such as “emphatic constructions” in traditional Romance descriptive grammars in fact contains similar insights into these constructions. In particular, focus fronting appears to be restricted to contrastive foci in the majority of Romance language varieties, and is perceptible in a subtype of verb-second declaratives as early as in Classical Latin (Devine & Stephens 2006: 172–179). At the same time, evidence from Romance languages has also been adduced to argue that the distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive foci is less clear-cut than has been taken for granted in much syntactic work (cf. Brunetti 2004, this volume; and Samek-Lodovici 2006, this volume, all on focus in Italian). An alternative line of thought surmises that contrast is not directly related to either focus–background or topic–comment structures (Molnár 2002, 2006; Neeleman et al. 2007). Such a view has no problem in acknowledging the observation that topic constituents may establish salient contrast relations without exhibiting properties of typical focus elements. Several of the contributions to this volume explore the semantic and pragmatic inferences which focus may generate, such as exhaustivity, contrast or unexpectedness (Brunetti, this volume; Dufter, this volume; Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal, this volume; Onea & von Heusinger, this volume). Information structure, as a relation of the utterance to the Common Ground, is often considered as a pragmatic feature of a sentence, independent from the truth value-semantic, propositional structure of the utterance. However, it has been recognized since Jackendoff (1972) that at least some occurrences of focus have quantificational impact. The clearest cases are the so-called focus particles such as only or also (König 1991). These operators take the focus domain as their scope, in such a way that different focus domains result in different quantificational, and, thus, in


different truth conditions. Now, as Rooth (1985) shows, focus particles may be associated with different focus domains even within the same linear order of elements in a sentence, giving rise to truth-conditional differences in interpretation. In such cases, it is typically prosodic cues that prevent ambiguities. In a cross-linguistic perspective, these focus particles also exhibit interesting differences with respect to their positional variability and association potential. To the best of our knowledge, such language-specific properties of focus particles have received comparatively little attention beyond Germanic languages. A notable exception is the case study presented in Leray (this volume), who studies the acquisition of focus particles in children growing up bilingually in German and French. In contrast to earlier research on this topic, Leray argues that both languages provide essentially the same adjunction possibilities. This being so, differences in syntactic complexity cannot be held responsible for the fact that the bilingual children under study consistently preferred the German ordering pattern over the alternative pattern in French even in their French linguistic productions. As Leray’s discussion makes clear, these findings have theoretical implications well beyond the field of language acquisition. More generally, differences in prosodic and syntactic flexibility, both across and within the Germanic and Romance language families, have immediate repercussions for focus marking strategies and are a promising point of departure for typological comparison (see e.g. the contributions in Schwabe & Winkler (eds) 2007; especially Abraham 2007 and Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007 and references cited there). In contrast to the semantic and/or pragmatic definition to which we adhered in the previous paragraph, Chomsky (1971: 200) specified the focus part of a sentence as a “phrase containing the intonation centre” and offered arguments in favour of analysing focus–background partitions on the syntactic surface rather than at the level of deep structure. This combination of prosodic and syntactic criteria leaves us with an important problem of underspecification: in prototypical cases at least, focus accents may only target single syllables, whereas the syntactic domain of focus can be considerably larger and even comprise the entire sentential unit. One may thus expect at best an inclusiveness constraint such that the prosodic exponent of focus must be contained inside the expression that is to be interpreted as focus. This underspecified relationship between focus accent position and the actual domain of focus has been discussed in terms of focus projection rules (see Contreras 1976 for an early account of Spanish). Subsequently, however, the interrelationship of focus accent position and potential focus domains has become a major object of controversy (see Winkler & Göbbel 2002 for an excellent summary). These complications notwithstanding, accent-based definitions of focus can still be found in more recent literature (see Rooth 1996), and prosodic manifestations of focus have even been considered the most basic marking device from a universalist perspective (Roberts 1998; though see Costa & Figueiredo Silva 2006 for a dissenting view). Nonetheless, other scholars have warned against identifying focus as a language-independent informational category with any specific prosodic exponent (Krifka 2006). We will only mention three observations from Romance varieties to illustrate the type of complications lurking behind the as-

Introduction

sumption of a straightforward focus–accent correspondence: To begin with, Modern French stands out from the rest of the Romance languages in indicating primarily the boundaries of focus domains instead of accenting what has been analysed as the domain’s prosodic head (Féry 2001). In spoken French at least, focusing and backgrounding strategies are therefore closely associated with operations such as phrasing or ‘dephrasing’ of sentential subparts. The more general lesson to draw from this is that languages may choose at least between head-marking and edge-marking strategies in their prosodic signals of focus–background structure. But even in varieties of Romance languages that do have focus accents, focus–background structures may not only be constrained by accent position, but also by accent type. While the position of pitch accents signalling verb phrase focus and postverbal object focus is the same, D’Imperio (2002) argues that their phonological makeup may differ in southern forms of Italian such as the Napolitan pronunciation of the standard language: In the first case, we find a rising accent pattern, whereas object focus is invariably indicated by falling pitch. A third objection comes from Madrid Spanish: As shown by Face (2001), different focus domains (and possibly functions) are not only marked by categorically different melodic events, but also by non-discrete phonetic cues such as pitch range. In any event, grammarians’ received conceptions about focus accents may well turn out to be overly simplistic when confronted with the intriguing complexities of Romance prosodic systems. To account for phonological and semantic consequences of focus, Jackendoff (1972), elaborating upon Chomsky’s (1971) remarks, introduces a focus feature [F] into phrase structural descriptions. Perhaps the most important argument in favour of a syntactic representation of focus comes from so-called weak crossover effects, which have been taken as evidence for an operator–variable representation of focus at the level of Logical Form (Chomsky 1976), and inspired analyses in terms of covert movement (but see Costa 2000 for a critique, based on data from European Portuguese). In some languages, focus appears to be closely associated to some designated structural position in the sentence. On the basis of Hungarian data, Brody (1990) introduces focus as a functional category into syntax. For foci that occur in the left sentence periphery, Rizzi (1997) proposes a detailed projectional skeleton which includes a non-recursive focus projection FocP. This so-called cartographic account has inspired a great deal of reactions. A number of modifications have been proposed (Benincà 2001; Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007), while others have denied the viability of the cartographic approach altogether, proposing less choosy landing sites for movement into the left periphery (Zubizarreta 1998; Neeleman et al. 2007, see also the state-of-the-art overview in Szendrői 2006). The contributions by Brunetti (this volume) and Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal (this volume) offer empirical investigations into the information structural consequences of moving constituents into the left periphery in Italian and Spanish. Brunetti argues that sentences headed by fronted focus constituents typically present information that runs counter to the shared beliefs of interlocutors. In a similar vein, Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal make a strong case for the existence of a third subtype beside focus and topic fronting in Spanish. This third type involves fronting

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of a constituent which is neither a good candidate for focus or topic status but signals verum focus, i.e. focus on the polarity, or the truth value, of the entire sentence (Höhle 1982, 1992). The analysis of Samek-Lodovici (this volume) for focus constituents that appear to be fronted in Italian treads a different path: According to this author, such sentences do not result from the leftward movement of focus constituents, but rather from a rightward backgrounding displacement of non-focal material (see Vallduví 1991 and Longobardi 2000 for similar analyses of apparent focus fronting in Catalan and Italian, respectively). The importance of such analyses lies in the fact that they shed new light on the relation between focus and its prosodic and syntactic manifestations. In fact, research into focus has repeatedly provoked theoretical controversies about the organization of grammar as a whole. As we have noted above, focus has been treated as an annotation to phrase structures in earlier generative syntax, as a feature which in turn feeds into the phonological and semantic components. More recently, however, the general viability of such a conception of grammar has been questioned, since there are arguments for assuming that at least some kinds of syntactic movement in Romance languages are driven by prosodic properties rather than the other way round (Zubizarreta 1998). Given this, the design of grammatical theory must allow for bidirectionality in the syntax–phonology interface. In more radical departures from earlier generative T-model conceptions of grammar, the assumption that the mapping of phonology and semantics is mediated by syntax has been abandoned altogether. We will mention but two pieces of evidence for such a view that have been adduced from Romance languages: For Spanish, it has been argued that the position of subject constituents is determined by intonational constraints rather than by inherent grammatical or lexical properties, probably more so than in other Romance languages (Büring & Gutiérrez-Bravo 2001; Gutiérrez-Bravo 2005; though see Fant 1984 for a different view). In a similar vein, Romanian has been argued to obey to some kind of default rule for the placement of nuclear accent (Göbbel 2003). Since deaccenting is not generally permitted in Romanian, scrambling within the verb phrase may help to ensure the intended focus–background partition by placing a constituent in a deaccentuated position, thus acting as a functional counterpart to deaccenting in flexible intonation languages. One has to bear in mind that, syntactic focus movement options notwithstanding, the Romance languages have been classified as permitting only “weak word order flexibility” in the typological literature (Sornicola 2006: 403). In any event, Romance languages turn out to differ considerably in their division of labour between in situ focus marked by prosody alone and displacements into and away from designated syntactic, and possibly prosodic, focus positions. A second rearrangement option that has been related to focus marking (respectively to foregrounding) in Romance since Diez (1844) is subject–verb inversion (see Belletti 2001; Lahousse 2005, for recent theoretical implementations of this idea). Postverbal subject position was quite frequent in medieval stages of Romance, which show an inclination towards verb-second orderings in declaratives (most notably perhaps in Galloromance). The possibility of postverbal lexical subjects as a focalizing strategy has been retained to different degrees in the individual language histories. As

Introduction

already noted in Section 1, Modern French imposes by far the most severe restrictions on postverbal subjects in declarative clauses, but even here there is one clearly distinguishable subtype of verb–subject inversion which unambiguously achieves focus on the postverbal lexical subject expression (Lahousse 2005, 2006). For linguists interested in the diachrony of information packaging, French constitutes a particularly interesting field of syntactic inquiry, since the change from the Old French flexible verb-second syntax towards a more rigid subject–verb–object basic order is inevitably concomitant with changes in focus marking strategies. The syntax of Middle French, a period which roughly encompasses the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, has sometimes been dismissed as merely reflecting a rather unorderly state of transition, with great variation even within texts of similar provenance and genre. The contribution by Muller (this volume) scrutinizes two texts from this period and identifies a number of determinants for subject position. Most importantly, the choice between preverbal and postverbal placement of lexical subjects is not only constrained by information status and the focus–background partition, but fulfils additional textual functions in terms of organizing narrative structure. The diachrony of major constituent ordering is also at issue in the contribution by Rinke (this volume). Rinke compares subject positions in Old Portuguese texts from the thirteenth century to Modern European Portuguese and finds that in both stages, postverbal lexical subjects have to be analysed as being part of the information focus domain. At the same time, Rinke argues that Old Portuguese texts do not warrant an analysis along the lines put forth for Germanic verb-second languages. Her conclusion is that the postverbal placement of subjects is motivated by essentially the same factors in the medieval period than in contemporary European Portuguese. While Rinke’s contribution thus indicates areas of diachronic stability in the focus marking strategies of Portuguese, Kato & Ribeiro (this volume) set out to pinpoint and motivate areas of change within the same language. Their contribution is devoted to cleft sentences, another classic topic in the literature on syntactic focus marking devices. In European languages, clefts have been demonstrated to show a skewed distribution, such that their frequency of occurrence declines from west to east (Miller 2006). Syntactically, clefts have been considered a showcase of constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar (see Lambrecht 2004, on French), or at least as disposing of some special focus feature in the cleft copula (Camacho 2001, on Spanish). Modern Portuguese, both in its European and in its Brazilian varieties, appears to be particularly fond of clefting. Couched in formal syntactic terms, Kato & Ribeiro’s analysis identifies several grammatical changes affecting the cleft types from Old to Modern Portuguese, viz. the appearance of an additional focus position in the low IP area and, in Brazilian Portuguese, variable copula deletion and complementizer deletion. Kato and Ribeiro connect these changes to the information packaging capacities of the different cleft types. Another contribution on clefts is Dufter (this volume). Drawing on data from a multilingual parallel corpus, Dufter examines the translational equivalents of English it-clefts in German and in four Romance languages – French, Italian, Spanish, and European Portuguese. Results show considerable

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differences in clefting propensity, which are argued to be due, at least partially, to differences in other parts of the grammar that affect information packaging strategies. Except for clefts, complex sentences continue to be a somewhat neglected topic of research into information structure. The contribution by Aptekman (this volume) is a case study of conditionals in French. After refining Haiman’s (1978) argument for the topic status of the protasis, Aptekman takes stock of the large gamut of pragmatic types available in those conditional sentences where the most prototypical element si ‘if ’ acts as subordinator. In particular, the author argues that the topic status of the si-clause does not necessarily prevent this clause from being targeted by focus as well, particularly in cases where the protasis follows the apodosis. In conclusion, the ten contributions gathered in this volume document that research into focus–background structure in Romance language scholarship is vibrant. First, progress has been achieved in the tradition of Romance descriptive grammars: Several of the grammars on the market today dedicate separate sections to overviews of focus-marking devices (see, for French Riegel, Pellat & Rioul 1994: 425–433; Wilmet 1998: 463–464; for Italian Salvi & Fanelli 2004: 303–306; for Spanish Zubizarreta 1999; for Catalan Vallduví 2002; for Portuguese Mira Mateus et al. 1984: 344–359; Travaglia 1999; for Galician Álvarez & Xove 2002: 76–80 and for Romanian, Gorăscu 2005). Second, and perhaps more importantly, a wealth of empirical data is now available, and has been the object of research, from present-day standard languages as well as from dialects and other non-standard varieties, from older periods as well as from first and second language acquisition. These data still hold surprises for linguists interested in the interpretive consequences of focus (Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal, this volume; Onea & Heusinger, this volume) and for those who seek to understand how sentential focus–background structure engages into the organization of text and discourse (Aptekman, this volume; Muller, this volume), including the various developmental stages in language acquisition (Leray, this volume). Cleft constructions, arguably a privileged means for explicitly coding the focus–background partition, continue to be the object of a good deal of syntactic and semanto-pragmatic investigation (Dufter, this volume; Kato & Ribeiro, this volume). Focus-driven departures from canonical subject–verb–object orderings likewise attract a considerable deal of syntactic attention (Brunetti, this volume; Rinke, this volume), and more recently, there is a growing awareness that some surface orderings traditionally considered to result from focus movement can more satisfactorily be re-analyzed as involving a syntactic operation of backgrounding (Samek-Lodovici, this volume). In sum, then, this volume is an invitation to pursue in studying focus in Romance languages, improving upon existing descriptive accounts in a theoretically informed way, and improving the general theory of focus by drawing upon an exceptionally rich and varied set of linguistic data.

Introduction

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