Alternating constructions on the semantics-pragmatics interface : theticity and sentence-focus in Dutch and Italian

This PhD dissertation is focused on the study of the several thetic and sentence-focus constructions that can be found in Dutch and Italian. Thetic and sentence-focus constructions are characterized on the level of their information structure by the fact that they commonly do not have a topic constituent and that both the subject and the predicate constituent that make up the construction are in focus. This dissertation pursues two lines of investigation in the study of the thetic and sentence-focus constructions in the two languages. The first line of investigation (Part I) is centered on determining the semantic, i.e. grammatically encoded, and/or the pragmatic, i.e. inferred or implicated, nature of the relationship between the constructions and the functional categories ‘theticity’ and ‘sentence-focus’. The second line of investigation (Part II) is centered on investigating the factors that drive the alternation between the various constructions that are available in Dutch and Italian. Part I starts off with a meta-linguistic comparison of three theoretical frameworks that have developed elaborate accounts of the semantics-pragmatics interface, viz. Relevance Theory, Neo-Gricean Pragmatics and Integral Linguistics. Based on the comparison of the three frameworks, it is concluded that for linguistic purposes the model of Integral Linguistics is both conceptually coherent and methodologically adequate. Following Integral Linguistics, the dissertation adopts ‘defeasibility’ or ‘cancelability’ as the central criterion to distinguish semantics from pragmatics and applies this distinction in the study of the semantics and pragmatics of the Dutch and Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions. On the basis of corpus research (SoNaR corpus for Dutch, LIP corpus for Italian), it is demonstrated that none of the Dutch and Italian constructions that have hitherto been identified as thetic or sentence-focus constructions are semantically dedicated to expressing these two functions. In fact, all constructions turn out to be highly multifunctional, exhibiting uses such as indicating topic constituent-comment structure, argument-focus construal and predicate-focus construal. It is therefore concluded that both with regard to Dutch and Italian theticity and sentence-focus belong to the level of (default) pragmatics, rather than to the level of structurally encoded semantics. Part II delves into the alternation between the various constructions. For Dutch it is demonstrated by means of an experimental data-elicitation task that referential givenness plays a key role in determining speakers’ choices for one rather than the other Dutch construction. For Italian it is shown by means of a 100-split task that the number of constituents in the sentence influences speakers’ preferences for one rather than the other Italian construction. The dissertation then turns to discussing the concept of ‘allostructions’, which provides a novel way of analyzing alternating constructions within the Construction Grammar framework. It is shown that while an allostructional analysis can be applied to several pairs of alternating constructions, it should not be applied in the analysis of the thetic and sentence-focus alternation. Part II is rounded off by a discussion of a number of epistemological challenges that are inherently connected to the study of alternating constructions while presenting a number of possible solutions to address these challenges.