Unalternative Constraints Cross-Linguistically

Linguistic meaning is traditionally thought to relate to states of affairs in the world, or the mental representations thereof, an utterances literal meaning. Recent research in linguistics has expanded to include aspects of speech which primarily relate to the conversation itself, marking what speakers take to be mentioned previously, agreed upon already, quietly agreeable on, or controversial. One of these is prominence, conveying contrasts, or emphasizing an utterances relation to a previous one. In English-like languages, this is mainly accomplished by intonation (inflection) changing the sentences melody or the location of its main stress. This can have dramatic effects on meaning. A parent who replies to I am going to marry Kim by I thought youd marry that IDIOT (capital letters mark emphasis), may express approval and relief, while I THOUGHT youd marry that idiot spells trouble in the family. Among the worlds languages, stress is only one of many ways to convey grammatical emphasis. Other language achieve the same effect by reordering words, adding endings or particles, putting pauses, and so on. The project Unalternative Constraints Cross-Linguistically investigates these different strategies in English and other languages and develops a formalism which can capture their effects on interpretation. Its title partly references the (generally accepted) idea that emphasis points towards alternatives, seen against the non-emphasized background. Thus I thought youd marry that IDIOT relates to alternatives like I thought youd marry Kim, whereas I THOUGHT youd marry that idiot may relate to Now you are marrying that idiot. In different situations, e.g. answering You hoped I would marry that idiot, the same sentence more narrowly relates thought to its alternative hoped. Both versions have in common that there can be no alternatives to marry that idiot, only to I thought /thought. So perhaps it is more appropriate to characterize the effect of emphasis saying what, one way or another, cannot be an alternative than what all can; whence unalternative. Researchers in the project investigate the various means of emphasizing in languages as different as English, Czech, Hausa (a language spoken in and around Nigeria) and Chickasaw (an American-Indian language) in detail and, using tools from formal logic, information theory and ordinary language philosophy, work on describing the essential commonalities behind the variation in a precise and unambiguous manner, further contributing to linguistics Big Question: What makes language such a unique and essential tool for humans?

The result of this project has been a new framework for focus realization that can be used in the theoretical analysis of language. Data from non-European languages show that the way focus has been analyzed needs to be improved. Focus refers to the marking of new or important information in spoken language. Most European languages do this by accent: the most important information in the sentence is usually perceived as the loudest. In answers to questions, the focus is the part of the sentence that provides whatever was asked about. Thus, Who ate the beans? is answered by FRED ate the beans, with accent on Fred. However, many languages do not use accent to distinguish the focus in a sentence, but rather use words. For example, the following sentence in Buli (spoken in northern Ghana), W dè k mng, means He ate a mango. (w means he, dè means ate.) k corresponds to something English does with accent: He ate a MANGO, which indicates that the object of the sentence, mango, is the focus in that sentence. This is a possible answer to What did he eat?, but not to Who ate a mango?. All languages we know of allow something called focus ambiguities: Sometimes the same accent in English or the same focus marker in Buli can be used to answer several questions: He ate a MANGO can answer What did he eat? but also What did he do?. Likewise, W dè k mng can also be an answer to What did he do?In this project, we have collected such focus markers from 30 non-European languages and found restrictions on what they can mean. In some languages, like Buli, there is one word meaning just the object, or the verb and the object together, are the focus and one meaning just the verb is the focus. Other languages, like Gùrùntùm, have a word meaning just the object, or just the verb, or both the verb and the object are the focus. However, what we never found, and what we predict to be impossible, is a language where one word means either object or verb and object together are the focus and another word means just the object is the focus - a pattern where you can choose between two different words to express that the object is the focus.In order to put this prediction into our technical framework, the way theoretical linguistics has modelled focus realization based on Germanic languages, which use prosody to mark focus, cannot work for languages which mark focus with words, so we have proposed a new framework that can account for both the marking of focus by prosody and by words.