Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns Editor Associate Editor Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker University of Augsburg University of Zurich Founding Editors Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation, Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp Editorial Board Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of Miriam A. Locher Foreign Studies John C. Heritage University of California at Los Universität Basel Sandra A. Thompson Angeles Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of California at University of Athens Santa Barbara Susan C. Herring Indiana University Srikant Sarangi Teun A. van Dijk Cardiff University Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Masako K. Hiraga Barcelona St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Marina Sbisà University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu The University of Queensland Volume 244 Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context Studies in honor of Knud Lambrecht Edited by Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context Studies in honor of Knud Lambrecht Edited by Stacey Katz Bourns Harvard University Lindsy L. Myers University of Missouri, Kansas City John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context : Studies in honor of Knud Lambrecht / Edited by Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 244) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Sentences. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax. 3. Functionalism (Linguistics) 4. Discourse analysis. 5.  Pragmatics. I. Bourns, Stacey Katz, editor of compilation. II. Myers, Lindsy L., editor of compilation. III. Lambrecht, Knud, honouree. P291.L494 2014 415--dc23 2013048250 isbn 978 90 272 5649 2 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 7059 7 (Eb) © 2014 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Table of contents Introduction vii Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers Acknowledgements xv Part I. Grammatical constructions 1 The information structure of ditransitives: Informing scope properties and long-distance dependency constraints 3 Adele E. Goldberg Non-promotional passives and unspecified subject constructions: Navigating the typological Kuiper Belt 17 Catherine O’Connor and Joan Maling On the relationship between sentence focus category, subject-verb order, and genericity: A preliminary analysis of some Italian unaccusatives 39 Cinzia Russi Frames and the interpretation of omitted arguments in English 57 Josef Ruppenhofer and Laura A. Michaelis Interactive frames and grammatical constructions 87 Carl Blyth and Dale Koike Topics at the left periphery in Russian 109 Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam Part II. Topics in French grammar 131 Final compression in French as a phrasal phenomenon 133 Caroline Féry Pourquoi in spoken French: Corpus-based function-form mapping 157 Lindsy L. Myers and Stéphanie Pellet vi Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context Processing constraints and information structure as moderating factors on first- and second-language use of the causal conjunction parce que 183 Robert V. Reichle Contrasting c’est-clefts and it-clefts in discourse 199 Stacey Katz Bourns Left dislocation in French: Information structure vs. (?) interactional linguistics 223 Betsy Kerr Index 241 Introduction Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers Harvard University and University of Missouri-Kansas City “What did you just say?” he would ask, pulling out his mini-notebook and pencil from his pocket. “Don’t change anything. Say again exactly what you just said.” Then he would jot down the utterance, put away the notebook, and smile sheep- ishly. And so went many a dinner with our beloved dissertation advisor, Professor Knud Lambrecht. Eager to make our point – but not to have our syntax analyzed – we complied with a sigh. But even during the most frustrating of interrupted con- versations, and despite our pleas for him to listen to what we were saying and not how we were saying it, the interaction was always enjoyable and memorable, and so was the meal, especially when he had prepared it. The feeling of being a part of something bigger – the discovery of the interface between syntax and pragmat- ics – was stimulating and exciting. We should also probably admit that in recent years we have been guilty of the same Lambrechtian stunt, taking out a scrap of paper and jotting down an interesting utterance, although maybe not with as much aplomb. Upon Knud’s retirement from the University of Texas at Austin and in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday, we decided to put together this volume to celebrate his rich contributions to the fields of French and general syntax and pragmatics. Highly regarded by his former students, colleagues, and co-authors for his knowledge and scholarly contributions, Knud is also a treasured mentor and friend. The contribu- tors to this volume have all been inspired in some way by his work and collegiality, whether they were fellow students in the graduate program at UC Berkeley, fac- ulty and students at the University of Texas, or colleagues and collaborators from around the world. Upon being invited, everyone immediately agreed to participate, saying what a pleasure it would be to honor Knud. His brilliance, his gentleness, his humility, his sense of humor, and his generosity are the backdrop to his immeasur- able contributions to the field and to his colleagues. Knud has always been willing to help, notably by providing thoughtful and honest feedback, replete with keen insights, elaborate comments, and encouragement. The hallmarks of his own writ- ing, including dedication to clarity, rigor, and insightful analysis, have benefited and viii Stacey Katz Bourns and Lindsy L. Myers inspired us. His former students agree that there was nothing more satisfying than finding the word “nice!” written by Knud in the margin of our papers. Knud has long framed his central research question as: why are there so many ways to say the same thing in any given language? In his view, the variant forms reflect language users’ conventionalized solutions to the problem of fitting sen- tence structures to communicative contexts. Knud’s seminal book, Information Structure and Sentence Form (1994), changed the way that linguists look at the interaction of syntax, discourse, and prosody by examining it through the lens of grammatical construction theory. Key to his approach is the simple obser- vation that the formal features of an utterance (e.g., phrasal stress, word order, morphology) encode what propositional content is to be taken as new (or focal), what propositional content is to be taken for granted, and what entities are to be treated as predictable participants of the predication. According to this model, focus marking is neither iconic nor governed by general algorithms; it is instead mediated by a set of constructions that instantiate a universal inventory of focus articulations. These focus articulations provide touchstones for the cross-linguistic analysis of information-structure distinctions (Lambrecht 2000b), but the man- ner of expression of each focus articulation in each language is presumed to be as idiosyncratic as the constructional inventory of that language. In other words, according to Knud, speakers leverage existing structures of the language to make needed distinctions among focus articulations. It is thus unsurprising that Knud draws frequently in his work upon analogies to evolutionary biology, as in the landmark 2001 Linguistics paper (Lambrecht 2001a), in which he provides a typo- logical framework for the analysis of cleft sentences. The paper begins with an epi- gram from Steven Jay Gould, who himself quotes Darwin in noting the many traits of organisms that are imperfectly designed, “jerry-rigged” adaptive responses. Knud has been prolific, publishing two books and over thirty articles and book chapters, many of which investigate, in broad terms, syntax, semantics, and prag- matics, and their interface. These works frequently analyze French and English but also incorporate Greek, Latin, German, Italian, and Spanish. Knud’s research inspires and engages his readership through the clarity of his prose style, the con- ceptual coherence and rigor of his analyses, and the remarkable language facts that he retrieves from his overstocked storehouse of linguistic observations – from simple patterns that theorists have never noticed before (as in his analyses of voca- tives [1996] and the French comme N construction [1995]) to intimidatingly dif- ficult patterns that his work renders intuitively simple (as in his analyses of English ‘incredulity responses’ [1990] and English question accentuation [Lambrecht and Michaelis 1998]).  As a former student of Professor Charles Fillmore in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, Knud adopted an approach to form and meaning analysis based on Construction Grammar (Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor 1988). Introduction ix As Knud explains, the Construction Grammar framework allows researchers to analyze constructions “as form-function pairings whose structural and seman- tic properties cannot, or not entirely, be accounted for in terms of other proper- ties of the grammar of a language or of universal grammar and which therefore require independent explanation” (Lambrecht 2001a: 466). Knud’s contributions to Construction Grammar are vital and include among other work his (1996) Language paper, co-written with Laura Michaelis, “Toward a Construction-Based Model of Language Function: The Case of Nominal Extraposition,” one of the first works on Construction Grammar to appear in a major journal. The paper is still widely cited as a strong early demonstration of the need for constructional type hierarchies or “inheritance networks.” Knud’s work has also influenced allied function-oriented theories of syntax, in particular Role and Reference Grammar, which integrated Lambrechtian focus articulations into its formal descriptive architecture (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997). In this tribute to Knud, we examine the intersection of syntax, discourse, prag- matics, and semantics. The contributors represent a diverse group of scholars whose research reflects various languages, frameworks, and areas of research, as well as varying degrees of overlap or agreement with his legacy. The volume offers new the- oretical and applied insights (Polinsky and Potsdam, Ruppenhofer and Michaelis) at the juncture of linguistic structure and context, all of which connect to Knud’s interests. In addition, it re-examines the heuristic value of information structure (Goldberg, Kerr) and Construction Grammar (Blyth and Koike) with theoretical reflections (O’Connor and Maling) and analysis, as well as concrete applications (Katz Bourns, Féry, Reichle). It also offers novel perspectives on pragmatics, seman- tics, and syntax (Russi) to analyze discourse-based phenomena (Myers and Pellet). The first section of the volume considers issues of grammar, especially involv- ing grammatical constructions, which are often at the heart of Knud’s research (Lambrecht 1988, 2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2004; Lambrecht and Polinsky 1998). The volume begins with a chapter by Adele E. Goldberg in which she asks how infor- mation structure, especially the concept of topicality, explains the distribution of ditransitive constructions. She argues that information structure is “perhaps the most important factor in understanding syntax” (p. 3). While Goldberg’s interpre- tation implicitly embraces the tenets of Construction Grammar, Carl Blyth and Dale Koike assert that the interpretation of grammatical constructions benefits from consideration of the communicative context beyond Lambrecht’s (1994) pragmatic/syntactic level. They propose instead that accounts of constructional meaning should include interactive frames and the notion of textual genre in order to contextualize pragmatic meaning fully. The last four chapters of this section analyze particular constructions, many of which Knud also examined: left dislocation (1994 and 2001b), unaccusatives (1994), null complements (Lambrecht and Lemoine 2005) and passives. Taking an