Focus on Basque movements

This thesis can be summarized in the following two objectives: (i) to develop a new version of the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) which overcomes certain problems found with previous versions, and (ii) to explain the so-called preverbal focus position in Basque in terms of the new NSR and prosodic principles imposed on focused phrases. With respect to the NSR, I argue that certain generalizations about stress above the word level can be reduced to two basic syntactic properties of phrases: headedness and branchingness. The proposal is based on certain crucial insights found in previous work on the topic (Chomsky, Halle, and Lukoff 1956, Chomsky and Halle 1968, Liberman and Prince 1977, Halle and Vergnaud 1987, Cinque 1993, Zubizarreta 1998). The work reported in this thesis puts these insights together, resulting in a new version of the NSR, within the formalism of the metrical grid, which makes explicit reference to syntactic structure. With respect to the preverbal focus position in Basque, I argue, contra much previous work on the topic, that it is not a syntactically defined position. Rather, it is to be explained in terms of certain prosodic conditions imposed on focused phrases. More specifically, focused phrases need to have primary stress in the sentence.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Arregui-Urbina, Karlos, 1971-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Pesetsky.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8159
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8159

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8159