Colloquium
Context in grammar: a frequent visitor or a regular inhabitant?

Organizers: Gisbert Fanselow, Mira Grubic, Anja Kleemann-Krämer, Frank Kügler, Radek Simik, Luis Vicente, Sabine Zerbian, and Malte Zimmermann.

It is uncontroversial that extra-grammatical context (linguistic and non-linguistic) influences the form and meaning of sentences. The sentence Everybody is asleep will have a different form (intonation, word order, etc.) depending on what question precedes it (Who is asleep? vs. What is everybody doing?) and different truth-conditions depending on who is included in the domain of quantification of everybody (e.g. people in the house vs. people in the village). What is subject to ongoing controversy is how (and if at all) contextual and more generally extra-grammatical information should be represented in the grammar. Searching for answers to this question is of great importance to our understanding of all the major grammatical modules - syntax, semantics, and phonology, their mutual interfaces, as well as their interfaces to the "peripheral" systems, in particular pragmatics and phonetics. The question is also intimately related to the traditional but still vital issue of grammatical modularity.

The pool of theories and proposals offering partial answers to this general question is rich. Concerning the pragmatics-grammar relationship, there is a well-established hypothesis that contextual information can (or even must) be directly encoded in the syntax, giving rise to contextual syntactic categories and features, such as focus, topic, contrast (Brody 1990, Rizzi 1997, Aboh 1998, a.o.), speaker, hearer (e.g. Speas and Tenny 2003), etc. These narrow syntactic approaches have recently come under attack, esp. within the study of information structure. The competing hypothesis is that context relates to syntax much less directly, particularly via its interface representations (Fanselow 2006, Horvath 2010, Fanselow and Lenertova 2011, a.o.). The theories that have been developed within this research program rely both on a context-PF relation (Zubizarreta 1998, Szendroi 2001, Samek-Lodovici 2005) and a context-LF relation (Herburger 2000, Kucerova 2007, Neeleman & van de Koot 2008, a.o.). The other side of the spectrum is occupied by theories according to which the impact of context on the grammar of sentences is minimal (e.g. von Fintel 1994) or virtually non-existent (Recanati 2002), positions which are particularly influential in the study of quantifier domain restrictions.

An analogous controversy is present in theorizing about the phonetics-grammar relationship. There, the question is to what extent extra-grammatical (i.e. phonetic) properties affect the grammatical (i.e. phonological) system. Some strands in phonology (e.g. Bermudez-Otero 2007), but also theories of the phonology-phonetics interface (Kingston 2007 provides a survey) maintain a strict modular division along the classical generative architecture of grammar. Optimality theoretic approaches typically draw no strict border between grammar and phonetics, freely interspersing phonetic and phonological constraints in the same constraint hierarchy, or even preferring constraints that only refer to extra-grammatical information (Hayes et al. 2004).

Below is a list of relevant subquestions:

• General questions
• What exactly constitutes modularity? To which extent is the computation in a module independent from the computation in another module? To which extent are the principles and mechanics of computation module-specific? To which extent are the properties of the various modules of the mental grammar specific for language? Are there cognitive principles that are shared by language and other cognitive systems?
• How does intermodular communication work? How often and in which ways do the peripheral systems access (the outcome of) the grammatical computation? Provided that grammatical computation and interface access (spell-out/transfer) proceeds in cycles, how much information from the peripheral systems becomes "visible" to the grammatical computation at the onset of a new cycle?
• What are the limits to the nature of grammatical categories and operations? If contextual categories like "focus" exist, do they have the same general properties as less controversial categories like "verb"? To which extent, if any, can grammatical operations (e.g. movement, assimilation) be influenced or even driven by extra-grammatical properties?


• Questions about pragmatics-grammar interface
• What is the relation between different types of contextual information, e.g. information about previous discourse (information structure) vs. information about conversation background (indexicality, domain restrictions)? Do they have the same or a different status in the grammar?
• Does the (non-)existence of syntactic categories like "focus" entail the (non-)existence of syntactic categories like "speaker" and vice versa?
• Are there parallels between the impact of context on grammar and the impact of other pragmatic factors, such as conversational implicatures, attitudes of conversation participants, emotions?
• Do "secondary" layers of meaning (alternative, projective, expressive) belong to grammar? If yes, how does their grammar relate to the "primary" one? Are multidimensional models of syntax well-suited for this purpose?


• Questions about phonetics-grammar interface
• Is there a modular division between phonology and phonetics? What are the arguments in favour or disfavour of such a division?
• In case there is a modular division, how does intermodular communication work?
• In case there is no modular division, what exactly remains phonological (i.e. non-phonetic) in phonology? And is the non-division between phonetics and phonology due to a principled rejection of modularity, or just to a different delineation of linguistically relevant computational systems?
• What exactly, if any (cf. substance-free approaches), are the real-world categories that appear in phonological vocabulary? How are these participants in phonological computation (labial, occlusion etc.) defined and selected among the real-world candidates?

References

Aboh, E. 1998. Focus constructions and the focus criterion in Gungbe. Linguistique Africaine 20, 5-50.

Bermudez-Otero, R. 2007. Morphological structure and phonological domains in Spanish denominal derivation. In F. Martinez-Gil and S. Colina (eds.), Optimality-theoretic studies in Spanish phonology, 278-311. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Brody, M. 1990. Some remarks on the focus field in Hungarian. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 2, 201-225.

Fanselow, G. 2006. On pure syntax (uncontaminated by information structure). In P. Brandt and E. Fuss (eds.), Form, structure, and grammar, 137-157. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

Fanselow, G. and D. Lenertova. 2011. Left peripheral focus: Mismatches between syntax and information structure. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29, 169-209.

von Fintel, K. 1994. Restrictions on quantifier domains. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Hayes, B., R. Kirchner, and D. Steriade (eds.) 2004. Phonetically-Based Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Herburger, E. 2000. What counts: Focus and quantification. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Horvath, J. 2010. Discourse features, syntactic displacement, and the status of contrast. Lingua 120, 1346-1369.

Kingston, J. 2007. The phonetics-phonology interface. In P. de Lacy (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, 435-456. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kucerova, I. 2007. The syntax of givenness. PhD dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Neeleman, A. & H. van de Koot. 2008. Dutch scrambling and the nature of discourse templates. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 11, 137-189.

Recanati, F. 2002. Unarticulated constituents. Linguistics and Philosophy 25, 299-345.

Rizzi, L. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In L. Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar: A handbook of generative syntax, 281-337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Samek-Lodovici, V. 2005. Prosody-syntax interaction in the expression of focus. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23, 687-755.

Speas, M. & C. Tenny. 2003. Configurational properties of point of view roles. In A. M. DiSciullo (ed.), Asymmetry in grammar, Vol. 1: Syntax and semantics, 315-344. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Szendroi, K. 2001. Focus and the syntax-phonology interface. PhD dissertation, University College London.

Zubizarreta, M. L. 1998. Prosody, focus, and word order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.