|
|
POSTPOSED ADDITATIVE PARTICLES AS MARKERS OF GIVENESS
Manfred Krifka Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin Tuesday, May 1, 12:00noon, MJH Rm 126 Many languages have postposed additive particles (PAPs) like too that occur after the constitutent they relate to and carry the main accent, as in ''Mary will come, too.'' This is in sharp contrast to restrictive or scalar particles like only and even, which do not occur in this configuration. In previous work I have argued that PAPs are the main focused items and require that their associate constituent is a contrastive topic. While this can explain some properties of PAPs in an elegant way, it is doubtful that their associate constituents indeed have to be contrastive topics. In this talk I will explore a quite different account: PAPs mark the predicative constituent they c-command to be contextually or situationally given. In this sense, they have a function similar to definite articles for referential constituents. It will be shown that this fits nicely into an explanation of default accent rules (that accent is realized on the argument), and it may also explain why PAPs are acquired much earlier than true focus particles. 
|