Jorunn Hetland

Structures of Focus and Grammatical Relations

The seven articles of this volume take up crucial aspects of information structure and grammatical form. Special attention is paid to the definition of topic, focus and contrast, to the language specific devices for expressing different types of these information structural notions, and to the typological characterisation of languages as to discourse configurationality. The investigation of grammatical relations includes the interplay between syntactic functions, morphological case and thematic structure, and the study of the functional and formal complexity of passive in Germanic languages.

Accent and the notion of contrast: A cross-linguistic approach

This paper focuses on the notion of contrast: how contrast has been defined in the literature, how contrast is realised in natural language, how contrast is related to pitch accent. One pitch accent seems to have an inherent ability to express contrast: the fall-rise. The fall-rise accent plays a key role in the discussions of contrastive topics – and partly foci – in languages as different as English, German, Hungarian and Korean. In the present paper, I show that – whereas all pitch-accents can be used to signal contrast, depending on the relevant context – the fall-rise may induce contrast also in cases where there is no sign in the context that contrast is intended. The fall-rise itself seems to create an illusion of a given closed set to which the accented constituent belongs. This, in turn, induces an implicit reference to alternatives, and thereby contrast, within the given set.

Verbprojektionen im Vorfeld — Ansatz zu einem deutsch-norwegischen Vergleich

Ausgangspunkt fur meine Uberlegungen ist das Faktum, das zwischen den beiden germanischen Sprachen Deutsch und Norwegisch bestimmte Unterschiede bestehen bezuglich der moglichen Vorfeldstellung infiniter Verbprojektionen.