Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing∗ Bern Samko [email protected] University of California, Santa Cruz 17 November 2014 SMircle, Stanford University

1 Introduction In verb-phrase preposing (VPP)1 , a verb and its arguments appear to the left of the subject: (1) LeBlanc, who acted in spots for products like Heinz Ketchup years before “Friends,” agreed. “We’re definitely concerned about overexposure and say no to a lot of things,” he said of the cast members. To limit problems with the Diet Coke campaign, he added, the cast and Warner Brothers had Coca-Cola agree “to run it only one month only on NBC. “And run it they did,” he said.2 Goal A compositional analysis of the syntax and semantics/pragmatics of VPP. • The analysis has three components: 1. Topicalization 2. Focus-marking 3. Intonation In this talk, I discuss each of these three components individually. • The hope is that they combine transparently to account for the observed properties of VPP. Thanks to Pranav Anand, Amy Rose Deal, Gisbert Fanselow, Donka Farkas, Line Mikkelsen, Maziar Toosarvandani, Luis Vicente, Malte Zimmermann, and audiences at Universit¨at Potsdam and the University of California, Santa Cruz for helpful discussion and advice. Any errors are my own. 1 The literature also refers to this construction as “VP topicalization” or “VP fronting”. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all examples are adapted from the New York Times portion of the English Gigaword corpus (Graff and Cieri, 2003). ∗

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Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing

Outline: • Basic syntactic facts about VPP • Property # 1: Topicality • Some basic pragmatic facts about VPP • Property # 2: Focus • More pragmatic facts about VPP • Property # 3: Intonation • Putting it all together

2 The phenomenon VPP is a type of of verb-phrase fronting. • A lexical verb and its objects (if any) appear at the left edge. • The subject appears in its canonical position in SpecTP. • A functional element is stranded sentence-finally. – This stranded element may be an auxiliary (2), a modal (3), or emphatic do (4). (2) Not since television’s minute-by-minute coverage of man’s first steps on the moon almost 28 years ago have people been able to follow a scientific odyssey so closely. And follow it they have. (3) “In the past year, I have traveled across this great country,” said Sen. John Ashcroft as he stood before the assemblage, “And what I hear about taxes over and over is this: It is time to spell ‘reform’ R-E-D-U-C-E.” And reduce it he would. (4) His father urged him to play. And play he did. The fronted verb appears in its base form.3 3

This is true even when it would appear in a past participial form in the uninverted word order, as in (2). See Sailor (2012); Harwood (to appear) for some discussion. (1) *? Not since television’s minute-by-minute coverage of man’s first steps on the moon almost 28 years ago have people been able to follow a scientific odyssey so closely. And followed it they have. Verb-phrase preposing of progressive participles is unattested in the corpus and is only marginally grammatical: (2) ?? Not since televisions’ minute-by-minute coverage of man’s first steps on the moon almost 28 years ago have people been able to follow a scientific odyssey so closely. And following it they are.

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2.1 Antecedence requirement (to be refined) In general, an overt linguistic antecedent for the preposed verb phrase is required. • Verb-phrase preposing is infelicitous out of the blue: (5)

# Guess what? Keep it together they did (the Reds, like the Tigers, won the World Series).

• It is also infelicitous in the absence of a suitable antecedent: (6)

# His father, a housepainter, was a silent figure who liked to take the young Kazin for walks. His mother was a stammerer, as was Kazin until he began writing. One day she brought home 12 volumes of John Ruskin. And use them he did.

Note that Ward’s (1990) affirmation of an explicitly evoked proposition is insufficient. • The sentence with preposing may negate an evoked proposition. (7) It would be their responsibility to produce, not simply oppose. And produce they could not. • The explicitly evoked material need not be a proposition. • A morphologically related noun is sufficient to serve as an antecedent.4 (8) That, he and Kovacs believe, set off an entirely new review under new rules, which took effect in August, that gave veto powers to the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and several intelligence agencies. And veto they did. Instead, something more-or-less corresponding to the preposed VP must appear in the discourse.

3 Topicality The syntax of VPP involves movement: it is unbounded (9) and island-sensitive (10).5 4

The nouns that can serve as antecedents are generally either deverbal nouns or gerunds. The literature contains a number of proposals for the syntax of VPP, most of which are concerned with stranded material to the right of the auxiliary (Pesetsky, 1995; Lechner, 2003; Phillips, 2003; Landau, 2007). 5

(1) John intended to give candy to children in libraries on weekends, and a. . . . give candy to children in libraries on weekends he did. b. . . . give candy to children in libraries he did on weekends. c. . . . give candy to children he did in libraries on weekends.

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(Lechner, 2003, (4))

Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing (9) He means it’s pain that permeates everything, a pit where the sun seldom shines. But shine he believes it will, every once in a while. (10) “It is for me,” she squawks, sipping on her herb tea and willing her voice to cooperate. a. And cooperate it does, in a wide-ranging conversation that covers her show [. . . ]. b. * And cooperate we wonder if it will. c. * And cooperate I will hang up because it does not. The constituent that undergoes this movement is a vP: • It includes at least the lexical verb6 and the trace of the subject. • The subject moves out of this vP to its canonical position in SpecTP. • The entire preposed constituent corresponds to the discourse antecedent. The preposed vP, then, must move to a position above TP. • VPP can be embedded under bridge verbs, so this position is also below C. (11) American intelligence services were quietly saying he couldn’t survive without openheart surgery. But we now know that survive he did. • There are two options for the vP landing site. – The vP moves to a second SpecCP below C (Iatridou and Kroch, 1992). – The vP moves to a dedicated TopP position (Rizzi, 1997). I assume for concreteness that the vP moves to SpecTopP. • VPP cannot co-occur with a topicalized phrase: (12)

a. b. c.

And use the books he did. The books, he used. * And the books, use he did.

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• See Vicente (2007) for similar VP-movement in Spanish.

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The preposed phrase may also include progressive be:

(i)

If Darth Vader says that Han Solo was being frozen in carbonite, then. . . a. [being frozen in carbonite] he was. b. * [frozen in carbonite] he was being.

(Harwood, to appear, (56))

See Harwood (to appear) for arguments that progressive be is part of the smallest phase that includes the lexical verb and its arguments. 7 The sentence in (i) is also ungrammatical under the reading and intonation where the books is a (contrastive) topic: (i)

* Use, the books, he did.

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Bern Samko • The material in the fronted vP is given. – Givenness is often assumed to be a criterion for topicality (Gundel, 1988). The syntactic picture that emerges is as in (13): (13)

a. Run he did. b. TopP vPi Top

TP

tj . . . run DPj he

T did

ti

3.1 What kind of topicality? The definition of “topic” is not settled in the literature. • Further, most of the topicality literature concerns DP topics. • The preposed vP is familiar, but it is not an aboutness topic in the sense of Reinhart (1981). • Nor is it a contrastive topic. – It does not bear the characteristic B accent B¨uring (2003). • So can it really be considered a topic? VPP cannot be used in answers to polar questions (14) or in contradictions (15). (14) A: B: (15) A: B:

Did Bush show the American people that he had the right stuff for international and national leadership? # Show them he did. Most TV producers and newspaper editors didn’t play the story. # (No,) play it they did.

Nor can it be used to address the main point of the previous utterance: (16) The manager and coaches tried to keep that thing together. A: # (Yeah,) try they did. A′ : (And) keep it together they did.

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Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing VPP cannot be used to adress the most salient question under discussion (QUD; Roberts 1996). • Instead, it redirects the hearer’s attention to a less-salient but previously mentioned QUD. This means that VPP represents a strategy for topic shift to a previously mentioned topic. • I think this strategy has precedent in DP-topicalization with as for.8 • As for topicalization is also infelicitous in the above contexts: (17) A: B:

Could the Republicans produce? # As for the Republicans, they couldn’t produce.

(18) A:

The audience didn’t laugh when one character in the opera announced, “I admit my mistake if you’ll forgive me.” # (No,) as for the audience, they didn’t laugh.

B:

(19) Thirty million people used MSNBC’s website on Tuesday to get news and exchange views about the election. A: As for CNN’s website, it registered very few hits. A′ : # As for those thirty million people, very few of them used CNN’s website. Interim conclusion VPP uses topicalization to signal a shift in topic.

3.2 The antecedence requirement revisited The antecedent QUD need not be explicitly mentioned. • It is sufficient for the antecedent to be inferable in the discourse (Prince, 1981).9 • That is, a pragmatically plausible antecedent may be accommodated. (20) This is muscadet country, and Sauvion is one of the best-known producers of that pale, invigorating wine. Within minutes after arriving at his estate here, the Chateau du Cleray, I was in a laboratory confronted by 25 examples of Sauvion wines, most of them muscadet. To someone who had been asleep in Paris a few hours earlier, it was a formidable sight. But taste them we did, reaffirming that muscadet at its best is still one of the most underestimated of the world’s fine wines. 8

The syntax of this construction is obviously different from the syntax of VPP. I do not mean to suggest that as for topicalization involves movement; it is, for example, not island-sensitive in the way that VPP is. 9 While it is difficult to determine what “inferable” means for a VP or a proposition, note that the more predictable the information conveyed by a VPP-sentence is, the easier it is to accommodate a suitable antecedent: (1) As he grieved for his friend, Blocker said he decided “something had to be done about it.” So Blocker spent about 16 hours on the streets asking question, trying to get information on the shooting of the 30-year-old replacement player. a. And help he did. b. # And hire a lawyer he did.

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4 (Verum) focus marking VPP has the properties characteristic of verum focus (H¨ohle, 1992). • Previous analyses come close to capturing this intuition (see Appendix A). • VPP has a distribution similar to that of canonical-order verum focus. • I implement this verum focus can be implemented in standard alternative semantics.

4.1 Comparison with other phenomena VPP can be used in the same contexts as the canonical instantiation of verum focus. • Verum focus is most often expressed by focus on the auxiliary verb. • The (b) examples below have auxiliary focus. • These are all pragmatically licensed.10 (21) Kenny Rogers had asked his fans to bring cans to his concerts to feed the hungry in the area. a. And bring cans they did. (ibid., (18)) b. And they did bring cans. (22) The Yale Club in midtown Manhattan, where Old Blues hang out after bellying up to the bar and ordering tumblers of Johnnie Walker Black with the rocks on the side, had but one Nathan Hale statue to lose. a. Lose it it did, sometime between midnight and 6:50 a.m. last Saturday. b. It DID lose it, sometime between midnight and 6:50 a.m. last Saturday. (23) If the scientists at Fermilab had not announced last week that they had found the top quark, then their next hope might have been a more powerful accelerator, like the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Geneva or the now forsaken Superconducting Supercollider. And if the top hadn’t been found at the energies produced by those machines, there was always the possibility that the top quark was so massive that no conceivable accelerator, not even one as big as the solar system, could find it. And that would have create some huge credibility problems, not to mention philosophical conundrums, for the whole enterprise. a. But find it they did. b. But they DID find it. Both constructions also require antecedents (Wilder, 2013).11 10

Note, though that the scalar interpretation we see with VPP is absent. See §5 below. This observation about auxiliary focus is apparently made by Richter (1993), though I do not have access to his manuscript. 11

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Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing

4.2 Implementing verum focus I assume an alternative semantic account of verum focus. • It involves syntactic [F ( OCUS )]-marking (Jackendoff, 1972; Selkirk, 1984). • The [F] feature is associated with polarity in the syntax. – I assume that polarity expressions are instantiations of Σ Laka (1990). • The focus semantic meaning of focused polarity is an alternative set (Rooth, 1985, 1992). – The relevant alternatives are expressions of positive and negative polarity. • The ∼ operator adjoins at a propositional level at LF. – It presupposes an antecedent that differs from the proposition only in polarity. (24)

a. And respond she did. b. {she did respond, she did not respond}

(25)

a. Run he did. TopP b. vPi Top

TP

tj . . . run ∼C

TP DPj he

T

ΣP Σ do [F]

ti

Therefore, [F]-marking is only indirectly related to the discourse context. • The focus accent is realized on the stranded auxiliary (Becker, 2006). Interim conclusion F-marking of the auxiliary reflects verum focus. • The analysis presupposes an antecedent for the VPP-sentence.

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5 Scalar emphasis Some VPP-sentences also convey a scalar inference (Ward, 1990). Scalar affirmation contains a predicate construable as a scale. • The subject is assigned a high value on that scale. (26) Led by police cars with flashing lights and trailed by other vehicles and more police, the seven cyclists were carefully watched for about the first three weeks of their journey [across the Soviet Union]. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans knew how to get rid of the police “shadows.” “They stopped when we hit the mud,” Jenkins said. And hit mud they did. And swamps. And paths so small they could barely be followed. (Ward 1990, (15)) I argue that this is not a distinct type of affirmation. • Rather, the it is a pragmatic property built on top of verum focus. • The availability of the scalar inference depends on the discourse context, not the predicate. • The same sentence may have it in one context (a) but not in another (b): (27)

a. “I like to stay active,” he says. “I keep moving. If you sit too much, time passes too slowly. I like to work.” So work he does, every day from 2 a.m. to 9 p.m. b. “I like to stay active,” he says. “I keep moving. If you sit too much, time passes too slowly. I like to work.” So work he does, every day from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

• The scales themselves are also contextually determined. – Possibilities include duration (28), extent (29), frequency (30), number of events (31), number of subjects (32), and general emphasis (33) (28) “This is good. I can lay down to talk.” And talk she does. When you’re the reigning queen of gospel, a 61-year-old dynamo who delivers the truth as song, you’ve got stories to tell. (29) But without a bottom, there’s nowhere to rise. And rise he did, from volunteer staff at the White House to trip coordinator in the travel office, to the president’s aide and assistant press secretary. Engskov’s job was to make sure the president was reading from the right script. (30) During a timeout, Sonics coach George Karl instructed his team to run at every opportunity—it was their only chance. And run they did. Before they were done running, they had pulled within two late in the half. Included in their 18-2 run was a stretch of more than five scoreless minutes for the Lakers, who combined cold shooting with poor ball movement. 9

Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing (31) Newsome knew it too, and so did Bryant, because he always said of Newsome, “He can catch a BB in the dark.” Let alone footballs. Catch them he did, in big games at Alabama and then in big ones in the National Football League. Newsome would play 13 Cleveland Browns seasons, catch more passes (662) than any other tight end in pro football history, play in 198 professional games and become a Browns team captain in a career that ended in 1990. At 6 feet 2 inches and 225 pounds, he helped reinvent the position by showing how tight ends could not only block but also catch the ball frequently and as a deep threat. (32) “That’s a pretty good stage on which to tap dance no matter what you are selling,” said Dick Smith, managing director and new issues specialist at Montgomery Securities, in San Francisco. And sell they did. So far this year, 541 companies sold stock to the public for the first time, second only to 1993 when 666 companies sold stock for the first time to rais $34 billion, according to Securities Data Corp. Among this year’s most stunning IPOs was that of Netscape. Sold to investors in August for 28 a share, it first traded at 71. (33) Still, for the session, the attitude was “Buy ’em,” as Alfred Goldman, a market strategist at A.G. Edwards Inc. in St. Louis, headlined a fax sent out yesterday. And buy they did. Of the Dow’s 30 component stocks, 29 gained Tuesday, led by Proctor & Gamble, up 4 a share, to 138; J.P. Morgan, up 4 5/16, to 111 13/16; Merck, up 3, to 95 11/16; and GE, up 3 to 66 3/16. The scales in (32) and (33) are counterexamples to Ward’s (1990) claim. • The predicate does not form a scale on which the subject ranks highly.

5.1 The scalar reading is not part of the semantic meaning It is tempting to analyze the scalar inference as an implicature (Grice, 1975).12 • If the speaker wants to convey only verum focus, she could use the canonical word order. • Preposing the VP introduces additional complexity. – This signals to the hearer that the speaker intends to convey additional meaning. • The implicature is cancelable. – When it is canceled, the basic verum focus interpretation remains.

12

Ward (1990) also claims that scalar affirmation results from a Gricean implicature. For Ward, this is a quantity implicature that comes about when the speaker makes a “prima facie redundant” assertion.

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Bern Samko (34) [T]the president listened to Lott and his New Democrat budget team and decided to change course and work to keep the budget resolution free of all amendments. a. And work he did. When Lott called, the Hatch-Kennedy proposal had at least 52 votes, including 10 Republicans. By the time it was tabled, 55-45, two more Republicans and five more Democrats (out of 15 called by Clinton) had voted to shelve it. b. And work he did. But Clinton called only a handful of Democrats he knew would support him. The implicature is harder to cancel when the VPP-sentence’s propositional content is entailed. • Without the emphatic interpretation, the VPP-sentence would be redundant. (35) “This is why I came back,” he said. “This is why I put in all the work.” a. And work he does. [. . . ] He earned the right long ago to skip drills and get out of practices, and he never does. b. ?# And work he does, but as little as possible. He skips drills and gets out of practices.

6 Intonation Notice that the scalar interpretation is not a property of verum focus in general.13 • The scalar interpretation is unavailable in sentences with auxiliary focus. (36) “I know that about town meetings,” [Dole] said. “You don’t talk too long if you’re the candidate because people want to ask the questions.” a. They DID ask questions. b. Ask questions they did. Nor is it a property of preposing in general. • The scalar interpretation is entirely absent from DP preposing. But scalar emphasis is available when a main verb is repeated:

13

Surprisingly, an antecedent cannot be accommodated from the discourse context:

(1)

# The Rev. Peter Colapietro woke on Wednesday sniffling, sneezing, wheezing and unable to sing. But he DID rise, since there are no sick days for a priest at Christmas.

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Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing (37) When he works, he WORKS.14 • Here, too, the implicature is not obligatorily present: (38)

a. When the fascination with disaster sells magazines, it SELLS them. The October 1996 cover of Outside magazine featuring Jon Krakauer’s piece about deaths on Mt. Everest sold 150,000 copies on the newsstand, compared with an average of about 80,000. b. When the fascination with disaster sells magazines, it SELLS them. But often such long-hyped articles fall flat at the newsstand.

I hypothesize that the scalar interpretation is contributed by a particular intonational contour. • The evidence for this is subtle: (39) “I am starting at the bottom again,” he said. Bottom was seven years ago, when Engskov and a friend drove from Arkansas to the nation’s capital without money or jobs, and on the hunt for both. Bottom was being holed up in a $35-a-night-motel in a big, strange city and being “scared to death.” But without a bottom, there’s nowhere to rise. a. And RISE he did, from volunteer staff at the White House to trip coordinator in the travel office to the President’s aide and assistant press secretary. b. And rise he did, from volunteer staff at the White House to a paid job doing the same thing. c. # And RISE he did, from volunteer staff at the White House to a paid job doing the same thing. d. # And rise he did, from volunteer staff at the White House to trip coordinator in the travel office to the President’s aide and assistant press secretary. • The (a) and (c) examples have a LH*H% contour on rise. • The (b) and (d) examples have at most a H* pitch accent on rise. In the canonical order, the intonational contour can only be used to convey scalar emphasis. (40)

a. b. c. d.

And he ROSE—from volunteer staff at the White House to trip coordinator in the travel office to the President’s aide and assistant press secretary. And he rose from volunteer staff at the White House to a paid job doing the same thing. # And he ROSE—from volunteer staff at the White House to a paid job doing the same thing. And he rose from volunteer staff at the White House to trip coordinator in the travel office to the President’s aide and assistant press secretary.

Interim conclusion The scalar interpretation comes from the intonational contour. • It is not an implicature, but rather an instance of a more general property. 14

Bold small caps are used to indicate that this verb receives an intonational emphasis that is stronger and longer than normal focus intonation and has more pitch variation. Further research is needed to determine whether this is a contrastive topic intonation, an emphasized focus intonation, or something else. See below for speculation.

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7 Conclusion VPP exhibits three independently attested properties that contribute to its interpretation: • Topicalization – This is a strategy for addressing a less salient QUD. – The result is a shift in topic. • Focus marking – Polarity is focus-marked, resulting in verum focus. – The focus accent is realized on the stranded auxiliary (Becker, 2006). • An optional intonational contour – This contributes the emphatic scalar component of the meaning of VPP. Several questions remain unanswered. – How does syntactic movement cause topic shift? – What is the relationship between vP movement and focus-marking. ∗ Why can’t the subject be focus-marked? – Do speakers actually distinguish the two intonational possibilities?

References Becker, Michael. 2006. Verum focus and T-toΣ movement in English. Paper presented at ECO5, March 2006. B¨uring, Daniel. 2003. On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26:511–545. Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of english. New York: Harper and Row. Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 2007. Information structure: The syntax-discourse interface. Number 3 in Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graff, David, and Christopher Cieri. 2003. English Gigaword. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Speech acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, volume 3 of Syntax and Semantics, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Gundel, Jeanette K. 1988. The role of topic and comment in linguistic theory. New York: Garland. Harwood, Will. to appear. Being progressive is just a phase: Celebrating the uniqueness of progressive aspect under a phase-based analysis. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory . ¨ H¨ohle, Tilman N. 1992. Uber Verum-Fokus im Deutschen. In Informationsstruktur und Grammatik, ed. Joachim Jacobs. Westdeutscher Verlag. Iatridou, Sabine, and Anthony Kroch. 1992. The licensing of CP-recursion and its relevance to the Germanic verb-second phenomenon. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 50:1–25. 13

Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing Jackendoff, R. S. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Laka, Itziar. 1990. Negation in syntax. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Landau, Idan. 2007. Constraints on partial VP-fronting. Syntax 10:127–164. Lechner, Winfried. 2003. Phrase structure paradoxes, movement and ellipsis. In The interfaces: Deriving and interpreting omitted structures, ed. Kerstin Schwabe and Susanne Winkler, 177– 203. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Leonetti, Manuel, and Victoria Escandell-Vidal. 2009. Fronting and verum focus in Spanish. In Focus and background in Romance languages, 155–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pesetsky, David. 1995. Zero syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press. Phillips, Colin. 2003. Linear order and constituency. Linguistic Inquiry 34:37–90. Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given/new information. In Radical pragmatics, ed. Peter Cole, 223–255. New York: Academic Press. Reinhart, Tanya. 1981. Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica 27:53–94. Richter, Frank. 1993. Settling the truth. Ms., University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of grammar: Handbook of generative syntax, ed. L. Haegeman, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Roberts, Craige. 1996. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In Papers in semantics, ed. J. H. Yoon and Andreas Kathol, number 49 in OSU Working Papers in Linguistics. Columbus: The Ohio State University. Rooth, Mats. 1985. Association with focus. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1:75–116. Sailor, Craig. 2012. Inflection at the interface. Ms., UCLA, March 2012. Schwarzschild, Roger. 1999. Givenness, AvoidF and other constraints on the placement of accent. Natural Language Semantics 7:141–177. Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 1984. Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Szendr˝oi, Kriszta. 2003. A stress-based approach to the syntax of Hungarian focus. The Linguistic Review 20:37–78. Vicente, Luis. 2007. The syntax of heads and phrases: A study of verb (phrase) fronting. Doctoral Dissertation, Universiteit Leiden. Ward, Gregory L. 1990. The discourse functions of VP preposing. Language 66:742–763. Wilder, Chris. 2013. English ‘emphatic do’. Lingua 128:142–171. Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa. 1998. Prosody, focus, and word order. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

A Previous analyses of VPP A few authors analyze VPP (explicitly or implicitly) as something like verum focus. • Ward (1990): The relationship to the antecedent determines the discourse function of VPP. 14

Bern Samko – The antecedent must correspond to the VPP-sentence’s proposition as either: Independent proposition affirmation Affirmation of an explicitly evoked proposition that is neither semantically entailed nor presupposed in the prior discourse (41) At the end of the term I took my first schools; it was necessary to pass, if I was to stay at Oxford, and pass I did, after a week in which I forbade Sebastian by rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black coffee and charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. (Ward, 1990, (1)) Concessive affirmation Affirmation of a proposition in the context of some countervailing consideration conceded in the prior discourse • The proposition may be entailed or presupposed in the discourse (42). • But this entailment/presupposition relation is not necessary (43) (42) While he and his mother had often talked about writing her story, he went on, ‘the mundane things we do with our lives’ had prevented them. It was ironic, he continued, that he eventually learned more from his mother’s papers and tapes than he had directly from her. But learn her story he did, and the article is not only her story, about what she and other Jews endured, it is also his story, about the fragile process by which memory is kept alive. (Ward, 1990, (3b)) (43) Waiting in long lines can be infuriating. Waiting in long lines to pay someone else money seems unconscionable. Waiting in long lines to pay someone else more money than they seem to be entitled to is lunacy. But wait in line they did Monday in Chicago and the Cook County suburbs, partaking in the semi-annual ritual of settling up property taxes by the 6 p.m. deadline. (ibid., (3a)) Leonetti and Escandell-Vidal (2009) analyze a similar construction in Spanish: (44) Dije que terminar´ıa el libro, y el libro he terminado. say.PST.1 SG that finish.COND .1 SG the book and the book have.PRS .1 SG finished ‘I said that I would finish the book, and finish the book I did.’ • The fronted VP cannot be interpreted as a topic or as a contrastive focus. – The intonational and grammatical properties exclude these possibilities. • Focus falls on polarity because there is no informational partition. – This does not result in a thetic interpretation (Erteschik-Shir, 2007). – Instead, the propositional content is treated as background. • The proposition is strongly affirmed because the opposite proposition is rejected. • They suggest that their analysis can be extended to VPP. 15

Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing

B Against prosodic and pragmatic accounts of verum focus The movement schematized in (13) causes the auxiliary/modal in T to be sentence-final. • This movement is reminiscent of prosodically driven movement in other languages. – See Zubizarreta (1998) for Romance and Szendr˝oi (2003) for Hungarian. • Nuclear accent is rightmost in in English (Chomsky and Halle, 1968). • In VPP, this accent coincides with the focus assigned to the auxiliary/modal. • But English does not have a rigidly designated focus position. • In general, the nuclear accent shifts to coincide with the focus. The pragmatic approach is based on givenness of the preposed VP. • No [F] feature is associated with a particular syntactic position. • Verum focus arises where all lexical material is mentioned. – i.e., where the proposition expressed by the preposed VP is given. The focus accent on the stranded auxiliary is a last resort. • It prevents any of the given material from bearing a focus accent (Schwarzschild, 1999). But two problems arise from deriving verum focus from givenness of the preposed VP. • Not all the lexical material in the preposed VP is necessarily given. – An antecedent can be accommodated. (45) How much is a life worth? Merely posing the question offends most people. But answer it they must and answer it they do, says Kip Viscusi, an economist at Duke University. • The preposed material does not behave intonationally as though it were given. – This is true even when an identical discourse antecedent exists. – It seems to bear a rising/B accent (Jackendoff, 1972). – This accent is indicative of contrastive topic (B¨uring, 2003).15 (46) The panel, about evenly divided between supporters and critics, was assigned the task of clarifying the pros and cons of privatization, not choosing sides. And CLARIFY it did. Therefore, verum focus is a semantic property of VPP, not a pragmatic one. 15

I leave opeen the question of what this contrastive topic might contrast with. One possibility is that the alternatives are other possible verbs; this possibility is perhaps more evident in examples like (45).

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