Garassino and Jacob (2018): Polarity focus and non-canonical syntax in Italian, French and Spanish #

This file formalizes [GJ18]'s account of clitic left dislocation and the sì che ~ sí que constructions as realizations of polarity focus. Polarity focus is focus whose background is the whole proposition and whose alternatives are the proposition and its negation, so a polarity-focus utterance is a congruent answer to a polar question under discussion (orbit_eq_alt_query). The chapter's corpus passages are read as discourse trees in the manner of [Bur03] and [Rob12]: a wh-question such as who has been sitting back? is pursued through the polar question for each candidate, each answered with a polarity-focus utterance, and a polar question about a hyperonymous proposition through the polar questions of its instances. Both strategies are complete: jointly resolving the subquestions resolves the question (agentStrategy_isComplete, scalarStrategy_isComplete), the former because the polar questions of a family are its partition question.

The rows are the chapter's examples with the lexical and syntactic means they use, the kind of antecedent, the dislocated constituent and, where the chapter says, whether the utterance stands to its antecedent in situational identity or analogy and whether it answers a subquestion. In situational identity a positive answer contradicts the negative proposition the context gives; in situational analogy it does not exclude its truth. Whether polarity focus reacts to a denial of the proposition is a separate criterion of the chapter, and the rows attest denials in both relations (rows_denies_identity_and_analogy). French si is limited to answering a preceding opposite turn: every attested si is a response of the kind [FB10] say it marks, [reverse, +] (rows_si_mem_reversePositive), while sì che and sí que are attested in responses outside it (rows_siChe_siQue_not_mem_reversePositive).

Implementation notes #

In the Direct Europarl corpus the chapter counts 6 Italian and 4 French polar left dislocations against none in Spanish, and 61 Spanish sí que against none in Italian, with 36 of the 61 carrying a left element (26 subjects, 2 objects, 8 adverbials); it draws the complementary distribution and Spanish's preference for a transparent assertive particle from these figures and offers no quantitative analysis, so the counts stay in prose.
The chapter endorses [MN18]'s view that dislocation is no structural means of polarity focus but makes the reading available in context.
An utterance with a preceding turn, a statement or a polar question, is a Discourse.Response to it (Antecedent.response), positive since it affirms; an inferred negation, an open question, a modal statement or no antecedent is no such turn.
The discourse trees are stated for finitely many worlds, which is what the substrate's strategy completeness needs to pass from lattice entailment to alternative entailment.

Garassino and Jacob (2018): Polarity focus and non-canonical syntax in Italian, French and Spanish #

Implementation notes #

References #

Polarity focus as a polar question under discussion #

Discourse strategies of polar subquestions #

The chapter's examples #