LingLunch : Lena Borise

Lena Borise (Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)
Two types of preverbal foci: a unified prosodic account

The preference or requirement for immediately preverbal focus placement, common especially in verb-final languages, has been shown to result from different syntactic configurations cross-linguistically. Some immediately preverbal foci are raised to a dedicated projection, accompanied by verb movement (e.g., in Hungarian; Bródy 1990; É. Kiss 1998), while other ones remain in situ, with any material intervening between the focus and the verb undergoing displacement (e.g., in Turkish; Şener 2010). We offer a unified account of the two types of preverbal foci, raised and in-situ ones, based on their prosodic requirements. Specifically, we show that both types of foci require alignment with an edge of a prosodic constituent, but differ in its directionality (right- or left-alignment). Our analysis rests on bringing together two independent existing proposals, Focus-as-Alignment (Féry 2013) and flexible Intonational Phrase (ɩ)-mapping (Hamlaoui & Szendrői 2015). We show that this approach makes correct predictions for a number of unrelated Eurasian languages and discuss some further implications of this approach.