TY  - JOUR
AB  - This paper examines the impact of contrastive focus in Georgian syntax. In a semi naturalistic production study, we elicited spontaneous answers to questions which have shown that contexts involving contrastive focus induce placement of the focused constituent at the immediately preverbal position more frequently than other contexts. Based on this observation we investigate the properties of Georgian grammar which may account for the different impact of contrastive vs. non-contrastive contexts on word order. We first examine the involved syntactic structures and present evidence that preverbal focus is a result of movement to the specifier position of a functional projection whose head attracts the finite verb. We then address the question whether there is evidence for an association between contrast and movement to this position and we provide evidence that the correlation between context and order in the behavioral data does not result from a biunique form-function association of the kind ‘contrast-to-movement to the specifier position’, but from an asymmetry at a discourse level such that contexts involving contrast induce answers in which focused constituents occupy the stressed position in the clause more often than contexts that do not.
DA  - 2010
DO  - 10.1016/j.lingua.2008.10.012
KW  - verb attraction
KW  - movement
KW  - exhaustivity
KW  - focus
KW  - contrast
LA  - eng
IS  - 6
M2  - 1370
PY  - 2010
SN  - 0024-3841
SP  - 1370-1391
T2  - Lingua
TI  - Focus in Georgian and the expression of contrast
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-20950321
Y2  - 2024-11-24T00:24:48
ER  -