Volume 50, Issue 1

The form whose main function is to express indirect commands, called the third person Imperative, Jussive or Exhortative, when compared to the prototypical (second person) Imperative, shows semantic and formal similarities and distinctions at the same time. The study describes formal and functional patterns of Jussive and places this category within the typology of the related categories, such as Imperative and Optative, based on data from six East Caucasian languages (Archi, Agul, Akhvakh, Chechen, Icari and Kumyk). Five formal patterns of Jussive are attested in these languages, including a specialized form, constructions derived from want, from tell him to do and from make him do and the Optative. Jussive forms may express such meanings as third person command, indirect causation, permission, indifference towards the accomplishment of an action and an assumption. While the Jussive is crucially different from the second person Imperative in that it introduces a third participant, this article shows that it is the addressee, not a third person, who is the central participant of a Jussive situation from both formal and functional points of view.

The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the relation between information structure and discourse structure. It presents an account of the German conjunct adverb doch (doch CA ) that is based on the observation that the interaction between the two structures determines the semantic and pragmatic properties of this conjunct adverb. The account of doch CA presented thus defends a monosemic view on which the semantic and pragmatic properties of this particular use of the German discourse particle doch can be derived from the properties of the context in which the word occurs. I argue in particular that doch CA acquires its anaphoric and concessive properties due to the following interaction between discourse structure and information structure: (i) accent on doch CA evokes as a focus alternative the proposition expressed by the negated counterpart of the doch CA -host, and (ii) prosodically induced contrast together with a mechanism I tentatively call discourse-linking lead to establishing an implicational anaphoric link of the doch CA -host to the first conjunct in a doch CA -conjunction. The analysis of doch CA is argued to account for the relation between doch CA and other uses of the word, such as the conjunction doch and the adverbial middle-field doch. It also suggests an alternative account of cases of Roothean contrast (Rooth, Natural language semantics 1: 75116, 1992) involving implicit antecedents of contrastive focus alternatives, as well as a general model of the mechanics of the concessive interpretation of contrastive conjunctions such as aber and but.

In classical generative syntactic theory (the Principles and Parameters framework), French figures among the languages for which it has been argued that the basic way of ordering words does not reflect functional, pragmatic or discourse-informational properties such as topic and focus. In line with some more recent generative approaches that accept at least some interaction with these notions, we argue that this classical view is indeed partially incorrect because there are situations in which syntactic theory proposes word order optionality and therefore is in fact indeterminate. With respect to regular full nominal subjects, a syntactically free choice between a postverbal position and a preverbal one has been proposed for a certain array of embedded clauses. Out of these, we singled out relative clauses and subjunctive clauses for further scrutiny, i.e. cases like Le roman qu'a crit Paul / que Paul a crit (relatives) and Je veux que parte Paul / que Paul parte (subjunctives). In this paper we show that the position of the subject in these constructions should be determined by taking into account the functional/pragmatic notions of topic and focus. In particular, we demonstrate that the preverbal position calls for a Topic and the postverbal position for a Focus. However, as the array of constructions for which this position is defended, is in principle limited, we also express a view on the proper balance between the syntactic primitives and the functional ones; we suggest that topic/focus arrangement plays an important role when syntax is indeterminate.

This paper investigates Japanese-speaking children's (in)sensitivity to information strength when interpreting sentences containing the focus particle datte even. It examines whether or not their sensitivity is affected by the Question Under Discussion (QUD) and the Felicity Judgment (FJ) task based on the Processing Limitation Hypothesis (PLH; cf. Chierchia et al., The acquisition of disjunction: Evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicatures: 157168, Cascadilla Press, 2001, Semantic and pragmatic competence in children's and adults' comprehension of or , Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Because datte even is not a scalar term, it does not give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) by constituting a part of scales. Even evokes conventional implicatures. However, an even sentence in context in addition to the conventional implicatures evokes a special case of SI calculated from context-dependent scales, which is pragmatic inferences induced by evens conventional implicatures (i.e., the word's semantic/pragmatic import). The relevant scale (generally) concerns the NP element focused by even and a set of alternatives. Because sentences without even do not evoke any SI, I assume that the relevant implicatures are conventional in nature. Three experiments were done to examine whether Japanese-speaking children are really (in)capable of calculating conventional implicatures derived from datte sentences. It was found that (i) Children are insensitive to pragmatic anomalies of single infelicitous sentences (Experiments 1 and 2). This inability to detect pragmatic infelicity is consistent with findings about their ability to compute SIs. On the other hand, the adults showed sensitivity to conventional implicatures in all three experiments, which may be taken as evidence that the computation of implicatures derived from datte sentences differs from that of SIs. (ii) Unlike the results reported for SI in Zondervan (Effects of question under discussion and focus on scalar implicatures: 3952, 2007, Experiments on QUD and focus as a contextual constraint on scalar implicature calculation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), the wh -focus/QUD way of asking questions does not facilitate the children's performance with datte sentences (Experiment 2). (iii) The FJ task improved children's performance (Experiment 3), thus supporting the PLH, which was applied to SI computation (Chierchia et al., Semantic and pragmatic competence in children's and adults' comprehension of or , Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; cf. Reinhart, The processing cost of reference-set computation: Guess patterns in acquisition, Utrecht University, 1999, Interface strategies, MIT Press, 2006), and to the computation of implicatures involved in datte sentences. (iv) Children are unable to compute implicatures based on context-specific pragmatic scales derived from datte sentences, when a single underinformative statement is given. This partly contradicts previous findings on SI based on contextdependentpragmatic scales (Papafragou and Tantalou, Language Acquisition 12: 7182, 2004). The results indicate that children's insensitivity to the pragmatic infelicity of datte sentences stems from the processing load induced by building and maintaining alternative representations, as reported for SI computation.