Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Ben-Gurion University, will present her joint work with Björn Köhnlein, Ohio State University, on Why Danish doesn’t allow foci in preverbal position.

According to Fanselow 2016, Foci can be fronted for emphasis in a variety of (Germanic) V-2 languages (German, Swedish, Norwegian and Yiddish) but although Danish is very similar to these languages, it does not allow it. The examples in (1); (focus underlined) illustrate focus fronting and (2) shows its unacceptability in Danish 

(1) What has Derk spotted? 

a. Einen Habicht hat er entdeckt. German 

a harrier has he spotted 

What did the minister buy? 

b. En ny bil köpte han Swedish 

a new car bought he 

Focus fronting is, however, ruled out in Danish, and only the canonical, non-fronted position is available (2b): 

(2) What did the minister buy? 

a. *En ny bil købte han. Danish *Fronted focus 

A new car bought he 

b. Han købte en ny bil. Non-fronted focus 

He bought a new car. 

In our talk we argue that the reason for this difference is the fact that Danish prosody differs dramatically from that of the languages that do allow fronting: Danish marks all stressed syllables with equal prominence and hence lacks particular focal sentence accents (Grønnum 1980, 2022). We believe that phenomena of this type are best expressed in terms of an architecture that allows for interactions between word order, prosody and information structure. 

The answer in (3) is, however, a seeming counterexample to our claim that foci are blocked from preverbal position in Danish: 

(3) Q: Hvor meget koster æblerne? (How much do the apples cost?) 

A: 10 kroner for et kilo tror jeg. 

10 crowns for a kilo, think I. 

A’: *10 kroner for et kilo koster de. 

3A contrasts with 3A’ which is a case of focus fronting and predicted to be bad. 

We argue that what follows the answer, indeed a focus, is a VIP (verb initial parenthetical) (See e.g. Reis 1995 for a definition and discussion wrt German.) These are common in Danish and other languages as well. According to Reis VIPs are prosodically (and interpretationally) integrated into the host clause. This is also the case for the answer in 3A. The derivation takes the full answer to the question and linearizes the VIP in final position. Since the subject+verb replicate the same elements in the question, they are optionally elided as in all answers to wh-questions: 

(4) Æblerne koster 10 kroner for et kilo tror jeg. 

The occurrence of these “initial” foci is therefore not surprising. 

References: 

Fanselow, Gisbert. 2016. Syntactic and Prosodic Reflexes of Information Structure in Germanic. In The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, eds. Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara, 621-641: Oxford University Press. 

Grønnum, Nina. 1980. Neutral stress, emphatic stress, and sentence intonation in Advanced Standard Copenhagen Danish. Annual Report of the Institute of Phonetics University of Copenhagen 14:121-205. 

Grønnum, Nina. 2022. Modeling Danish Intonation. In Prosodic Theory and Practice, eds. Jonathan Barnes and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel: The MIT Press.