There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. The former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (Halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. This study explores how relative importance is realized in English and Persian. It also investigates how advanced Persian learne...

there are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. the former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. this study explores how relative importance is realized in english and persian. it also investigates how advanced persian learne...

A proposal concerning the status of the semantic relation between the consequent clause of a conditional sentence and the conditional sentence itself is made: this relation corresponds to the dual of presupposition, in the technical sense. It holds not only for conditional declaratives but also for conditional questions, imperatives and exclamatives. Technically this is possible because conditi...

This paper presents an experimental study that provides evidence for the existence of two types of rising declaratives in English which differ systematically in their forms and their functions. The two are labelled assertive rising declaratives and inquisitive rising declaratives, respectively. Guided by the experimental results, the paper develops a semantic analysis of them. Having as backdro...

Urdu/Hindi has SOV default word order and an immediately preverbal default focus position [1, 2]. When focus is syntactically determined relative to the verb, verb focus is difficult to realize by position. We were therefore interested in the interplay between syntax and prosody with respect to verb focus in languages such as Urdu/Hindi and investigated the prosody associated with verb focus in...

This paper examines the hypothesis that embedded Verb Second (EV2), a classic main clause phenomenon, is licensed by assertion. Based on detailed examination of naturally occurring data from Swedish, I address two central questions in study EV2: interpretation V2-complements, and role matrix predicate licensing V2-complements. propose EV2-clauses best characterized terms statement they share co...

The contrast between imperatives and promissives brings out the issue well. These two types are functionally very similar: An imperative places a requirement on the addressee, while a promissive places a requirement on the speaker. Yet imperatives are apparently universal (and at least extremely common), while promissives are extremely rare. It does not seem easy to give a functional explanatio...

The current study examines the syntactic and prosodic characteristics of the maternal speech to two infants between six and ten months. Consistent with previous work, we find infant-directed speech to be characterized by generally short utterances, isolated words and phrases, and large numbers of questions, but longer utterances are also found. Prosodic information provides cues to grammatical ...