Abstract for Arsalan Kahnemuyipour's talk

Escaping sentential stress
Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (Syracuse University)
October 18, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

This talk addresses the phenomenon of sentential stress (also called nuclear stress, Chomsky & Halle 1968), how it is assigned and its interaction with information structure. I will briefly discuss and argue against previous analyses of the phenomenon (including phonological ones such as Halle and Vergnaud 1987, and syntactic ones such as Cinque 1993 and Zubizarreta 1998) and will then propose a purely syntactic account of sentential stress based on the notion of phases and multiple spell-out (Chomsky 2000, 2001). I will show that this proposal accounts for some unexplained facts in SOV and SVO languages as well as some new data mainly from Persian. The analysis crucially depends on the assignment of stress to 'surface- syntactic structure, where an element avoids sentential stress by virtue of syntactic movement out of a position of stress. This property is used to explore a possible explanation for the stress behavior of specific/nonspecific objects, wh-phrases and negation.