Sophie Repp

Negation in gapping

1. Introduction 2. The Syntax of Clausal Negation: The Distributed Readings in Main Verb Gapping 3. The RIght Kind of Contrast: Narrow Scope Readings 4. Negation and the Speech Act 5. Finiteness in Gapping 6. Summary

Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and verum

This paper argues that there are operators with a common ground (CG) managing function that can influence the truth-conditional meaning of a sentence even though their meaning usually is taken not to be truth-conditional. It proposes that modal particles, as well as conversational epistemic operators?like the VERUM operator, and illocutionary negation expressed as the operator FALSUM, are CG-managing operators. The paper commences with a presentation on the basic set of data, where focus is on sentences with an epistemic modal verb, negation and the modal particle doch . It discusses the notion of CG and looks at the meaning and function of the FALSUM operator and the particles doch and ja . Then, it explains why the data presented pattern the way they do. A section extends the empirical base to modal particles not presented in the original data set and explains the observed effects. VERUM is analyzed and compared with FALSUM. Keywords:common ground (CG); doch ; FALSUM; illocutionary negation; ja ; modal particles; truth-conditional meaning; VERUM

Intonation influences processing and recall of left-dislocation sentences by indicating topic vs. focus status of dislocated referent

We tested the effects of two intonation contours on the processing and cued recall of German sentences with a left-dislocated subject vs. object: (i) a rising accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a rising-falling hat contour on the main clause; (ii) a falling accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a falling accent plus subsequent deaccentuation. The contours had differential effects depending on the grammatical function of the dislocated phrase (subject/object) and, for the recall, on the cue type for the recall (subject/object), in certain conditions overriding the subject-before-object preference normally found in processing. To account for the findings, we propose: (1) Contour (i) signals the topic status of the referent of the dislocated phrase. Contour (ii) signals that referents focus status. (2) Topics are referents that serve as an address in a structured discourse representation in working memory under which information about that referent is stored. (3) Subjects are default topics, whereas objects are not, so that topic-marking an object is motivated, which results in an object-before-subject preference for sentences with topical objects during processing. (4) Retrieval of information from an address incurs a lower processing load if the appropriate address is cued than if some other referent is cued.

Local and Global Implicatures in Wh-Question Disjunctions

It has been observed that wh-questions cannot be joined disjunctively, the suggested reasons being semantic or pragmatic deviance. We argue that wh-question disjunctions are semantically well-formed but are pragmatically deviant outside contexts that license polarity-sensitive (PS) items. In these contexts the pragmatic inadequacy disappears due to a pragmatically induced recalibration of the implicature triggered by or (as argued in [1]). We propose that the alternative-inducing property of or has as its syntactic correlate the feature [+σ] (cf. [2]), thus forcing the insertion of the operator O\(_{\mbox{\scriptsize{\sc alt}}}\), which is responsible for the computation of implicatures at different scope sites. Importantly, the licensing of the PS property of wh-question disjunctions cannot be reduced to the licensing of a lexical property of or but also depends on the semantics of the disjoined questions.