Keywords
focus
contrast
focus particles
clefts
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the description and analysis of the expression and interpretation of focus and contrast in Catalan Sign Language (LSC) from a pragmatic perspective. The main claim of the thesis defends that contrast is an independent category within the field of Information Structure, functioning at the same level as the focus or the topic of a sentence. This claim is supported by empirical data from LSC (elicited data and corpus data), which show how the notion of contrast is expressed through a specific marking that functions orthogonally to the marking of focus and topic. Three types of contrast have been described and analyzed: parallel contrast, selective contrast and corrective contrast. All these contrast types are built compositionally since they share a basic combination of non-manual markers to express the most basic meaning: semantic parallelism, but they also may have additional prosodic markers that trigger more complex meanings, such as exhaustivity and counter-expectation. Moreover, this dissertation presents a first description and a preliminary pragmatic analysis of three types of focus particles (additive, additive-scalar, and restrictive) and two types of clefts (clefts and pseudoclefts) in LSC.
References
Barberà, G. (2015). The meaning of space in Sign Language: Reference, specificity and structure in Catalan Sign Language. De Gruyter Mouton e Ishara Press [Versión revisada y actualizada de la tesis de 2012, Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra]. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614518815
Branchini, C. (2014). On relativization and clefting: An analysis of Italian Sign Language. De Gruyter Mouton e Ishara Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501500008
Büring, D. (2012). Focus and intonation. En Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language (pp. 103–115). Routledge.
Büring, D. y Križ, M. (2013). It’s that, and that’s it! Exhaustivity and homogeneity presuppositions in clefts (and definites). Semantics and Pragmatics, 6(6), 1–29. http://doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.6
Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view. En C. N. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 27-55). Academic Press.
Féry, C. (2008). Information Structure Notions and the Fallacy of Invariant Correlates. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 55(3-4), 361-379. https://doi.org/10.1556/aling.55.2008.3-4.10
Gundel, J. (1974). The role of topic and comment in linguistic theory. University of Texas.
Herrmann, A. (2013). Modal and Focus Particles in Sign Languages: A crosslinguistic study. De Gruyter Mouton. http://doi.org/10.1515/9781614511816
Hockett, C. F. (1958). A Course in Modern Linguistics. Macmillan.
Horn, L. R. (1981). Exhaustiveness and the semantics of clefts. North East Linguistic Society, 11, 125-142.
Kimmelman, V. (2019). Information Structure in Sign Languages: Evidence from Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510045
Kimmelman, V. y Vink, L. (2017). Question-answer pairs in Sign Language of the Netherlands. Sign Language Studies, 17(4), 417-449.
Kimmelman, V. y Pfau, R. (2016). Information Structure in Sign Languages. En C. Féry y S. Ishihara (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure (pp. 814-834). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.001
Kiss, K. É. (1998). Identificational focus versus information focus. Language, 74, 245–273. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.1998.0211
Lambrecht, K. (2001). A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics, 39(3), 463–516.
Lillo-Martin, D. y Quadros, R. (2008). Focus Constructions in American Sign Language and Língua de Sinais Brasileira. En J. Quer (Ed.), Signs of the Time: Selected papers from TISLR 8 (pp. 161-176). Signum.
Molnár, V. (2009). On different kinds of contrast. En V. Molnár y S. Winkler (Eds.), The Architecture of Focus (pp. 197-234). De Gruyter Mouton.
Morales-López, E., Reigosa-Varela, C. y Bobillo-García, N. (2012). Word order and informative functions (topic and focus) in Spanish Signed Language utterances. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 474-489.
Mosella, M. (2012). Les construccions relatives en llengua de signes catalana (LSC) [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Navarrete-González, A. (2019). The notion of focus and its relation to contrast in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Sensos-e, 6(1), 18-40. https://doi.org/10.34630/sensos-e.v6i1.2565
Navarrete-González, A. (2020). Pragmatics: 4. Information Structure. En J. Quer y G. Barberà (Eds.), A Grammar of Catalan Sign Language (LSC). SIGN-HUB Sign Language Grammar Series. http://thesignhub.eu
Navarrete-González, A. (2021a). The expression of contrast in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 6(1), 29. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1102
Navarrete-González, A. (2021b). L'estructura informativa en llengua de signes catalana (LSC). Revista d’Estudis Catalans / Zeitschrift für Katalanistik, 34, 111-142.
Navarrete-González, A. (2023). Focus and contrast in Catalan Sign Language (LSC): Form and interpretation. Sign Language & Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.00074.nav
Navarrete-González, A. y Zorzi, G. (2019). The role of contrast in coordination and subordination in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). En Seminario del Basque Research Group of Theoretical Linguistics (HiTT). Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea UPV/EHU.
Nunes, J. y Quadros, R. (2008). Phonetically Realized Traces in American Sign Language and Brazilian Sign Language. En J. Quer (Ed.), Signs of the Time: Selected papers from TISLR 8 (pp. 177-190). Signum.
Pfau, R. y Quer, J. (2010). Nonmanuals: their grammatical and prosodic roles. En D. Brentari (Ed.), Sign Languages (pp. 381-402). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511712203.018
Reinhart, T. (1981). Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica, 27(1), 53-94.
Repp, S. (2016). Contrast: Dissecting an Elusive Information- Structural Notion and its Role in Grammar. En C. Féry y S. Ishihara (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.006
Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics: An International Journal of Semantics and Its Interfaces in Grammar, 1(1), 75–116. http://doi.org/10.1007/BF02342617
Schlenker, P., Aristodemo, V., Ducasse, L., Lamberton, J. y Santoro, M. (2016). The Unity of Focus: Evidence from Sign Language (ASL and LSF). Linguistic Inquiry, 47(2), 363-381.
Umbach, C. (2004). On the notion of contrast in information structure and discourse structure. Journal of Semantics, 21(2), 155-175. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/21.2.155
Vallduví, E. (2016). Information structure. En M. Aloni y P. Dekker (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of formal semantics (pp. 728–755). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139236157.024
Vallduví, E. y Engdahl, E. (1996). The linguistic realization of information packaging. Linguistics, 34, 459-519.
Vallduví, E. y Vilkuna, M. (1998). On rheme and kontrast. The Limits of Syntax, 79-108.
Wilbur, R. (1997). A prosodic/pragmatic explanation for word order variation in ASL with typological implications. En M. H. Verspoor, K. D. Lee y E. Sweetser (Eds.), Lexical and Syntactical Constructions and the Constructions of Meaning, (pp. 89-104). John Benjamins.
Wilbur, R. (2012). Information Structure. En R. Pfau, M. Steinbach y B. Woll (Eds.), Sign Language: An International Handbook (pp. 462–489). De Gruyter Mouton.
Wilbur, R. y Patschke, C.G. (1998). Body leans and the marking of contrast in American Sign Language. Journal of Pragmatics, 30(3), 275–303. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00003-4
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alexandra Navarrete-González