Speaker: Paul Crowley (MIT) Time: Wednesday, March 9, 1-2pm Place: 32-D831 Title: A puzzle with contrastive polarity
Contrastive stress is commonly taken to indicate F-marking in the syntax, which is licensed under conditions that apply in the focus semantic domain (Rooth 1992, Schwartzchild 1999). This talk will be concerned with a puzzle relating to the licensing conditions on the contrastive stress appearing in expressions like (1), represented in CAPS.
(1) John didn’t read a singleNPI book that MARY DID read.
The sentence in (1) features two points of contrastive stress, on Mary and did. Stress on Mary expresses a contrast between the subjects of the matrix and relative clauses and stress on did indicates a contrast between the polarity of the two clause domains. Standard accounts of contrastive polarity assume that the accenting on did in the affirmative clause is associated with a covert affirmative head, which acts as the counterpart to the overt Neg (Chomsky 1955, 1957, Laka 1994). It will be shown that a parallel antecedent for the F-marked object containing the affirmative head in (1) can only be created by raising the object DP to scope above the negation at LF. However, the object DP cannot scope above the negation given that it contains an NPI which is only licensed within the scope of that negation.
It will be argued that the conflict in (1) must be resolved by assuming that contrastive polarity accenting does not indicate F-marking in the syntax and is licensed under different conditions than ‘normal’ contrastive accenting, e.g. contrastive subjects. Additional data will be offered as evidence for this. The rough beginnings of an analysis will be discussed, with many crucial details missing and many questions left unanswered. Lastly, contrastive polarity will be compared to another case of ‘abnormal’ contrastive accenting, contrastive voice, which raises independent questions. It will be suggested that these two types of accenting should be analyzed in a similar way.