Implications

To distort Putnam’s (1975) famous quip: Focus just ain’t in the syntax.10 _{It is a phono-} logical property, and I hold that its distribution is largely determined by strategic rules of choice which minimize the risk of miscommunicating in the presence of noise, while still holding to basic economy principles (e.g. minimize overall prominence). Under this con- ception, Focus placement is a byproduct of basic communicative considerations, and as such we should expect direct analogs to it in non-linguistic communication systems. I dare not speculate as to whether this prediction is borne out generally, but a piece of anecdotal evidence might be useful as a suggestion of what such analogs can look like. Consider the map in Fig.56, taken from the cartography textbookMaking Maps(Krygier and Wood, 2011, p.144). This map is presented as an instance of one of the British Cartographic Society’s “five principles of cartographic design”, the principle they call “Hierarchy with Harmony”. The main point is to draw the user’s attention to the important information on the map and de-emphasize (but not exclude altogether) the less important information. In Fig.56 the states on the map in which significant events occurred are shaded darker and labeled, while the other states, largely irrelevant for the purposes of the map, are lightly colored and less prominent, with no labels. One could imagine the same map but with only the relevant states included, with irrelevant states like Oregon not appearing on the map at all. The presence of all 48 contiguous states serves to situate the user geographically— the relevant states are easier to identify when part of a geographic whole, as opposed to being disembodied outlines floating on a white background. Even so, the relevant states are labeled, i.e. the cartographercouldhave communicated all relevant information with- out including all 48 contiguous states. This instantiates the kind of basic communicative principle suggested above, which could be summarized as follows: “include enough infor- mation to make the intended meaning obvious, but don’t emphasize information which is not crucial to understanding.”

10_{The original quote is, “‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!” Putnam is arguing about what it means to}

mean something, concluding that meaning is external to the human mind, since the ‘meaning’ of an utterance can depend on facts which are unknown to the users of that utterance.

This kind of communicative principle is quite different from the grammatical principles of the “principles and parameters” approach to language acquisition. The typical generative conception of acquisition is that grammatical parameters are part of an innate structured hy- pothesis space, i.e. they determine a set of possible grammars, and that these parameters are “set” from experience. That is to say, certain grammatical constructions “come online” at a certain point during acquisition once enough experience has been gained to set the right parameters.11 _{Applied to the analysis developed in Chapters 3 and 4, this means that}

Givenness-marking should be learned as part of a domain-specific process of setting gram- matical parameters, just like the placement of tensed verbs or the formation of questions, etc. The developmental trajectory of one’s ability to de-accent Given XPs should be inde- pendent from the developmental trajectory of more general principles of communication. In fact, there need not be any correlation between the patterns exhibited during syntactic ac- quisition and the patterns exhibited during the acquisition of Focus. And to the extent that we can test a child’s general communicative abilities apart from her grammatical abilities, we expect the trajectory of Focus acquisition to correlate only with the general abilities.12

It is far beyond the scope of this work to further probe the two implications discussed here—that Focus should have analogs in non-linguistic communication, and that the acqui- sition of Focus by a child should therefore not be expected to follow a trajectory similar to that of the acquisition of strictly linguistic parameters. But there is another implication of the arguments made thus far that will be at least partially tested in Chapter 6. This is an implication suggested by previous work on information structure (Kucerova, 2007; Selkirk, 2007; Kratzer and Selkirk, 2009): any IS category which is not marked in narrow syntax cannot directly motivate movement. Therefore, Focus should not directly motivate move- ment. This is not to say that certain movement constructions cannot be correlated with certain Focus structures for indirect reasons. But it would be problematic for the current conception of IS if one could find examples of syntactic movement in a language being

11_{See (Yang, 2002) for a fully formalized model of this.}

12_{A note for future research: experimental studies in various languages (see Gussenhoven, 1983; Braun,}

2006; Clopper and Tonhauser, 2013) have shown that there are phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence, e.g. f0 slope and changes in syllable duration, which are reliably found in speech production, but which are often imperceptible by hearers in certain experimental tasks. This asymmetry poses a challenge for language acquisition: if some of the acoustic correlates of accent are imperceptible, how do people learn to produce them? Perhaps they are not learned at all, i.e. they could be byproducts of innate or mechanical phonetic processes. But if the child goes through an early phase in which these correlates are not found, it implies a stage where the child “learns” the phonetics of prominence without any perceptible evidence in the linguistic input data. If such a phenomenon were found, it could be explained if the acoustic correlates in question are the result of applying domain-general principles of communication and prominence to language production.

100% correlated with Focus of the exact nature discussed in this work. I leave the dis- cussion of this rather strong prediction for Chapter 6. For now I briefly foreshadow the conclusion of that chapter: a number of purported cases of Focus-driven movement do not have the same semantic/pragmatic effect as Focus as it is discussed in this work. Rather, many movement constructions are indirectly correlated with Focus in virtue of having in- dependent semantic or phonological motivations which partially overlap with the function Focus.

Having argued for a particular place for Focus in the language faculty, a place which is quite different from that of Givenness, I now turn to the heart of the analysis of this phenomenon: a game-theoretic model of Focus placement.