Re: Italian Particles

At 05:26 PM 4/21/2000 -0700, Sally Caves wrote:
>But I wonder if the front of the
>sentence is always the most natural site of emphasis.  Why can't it
>be the last thing heard?    Rain I like as for me.
>
>...[snip]...
>
>I am not summarily opposed to the front as a point of emphasis.  What
>I'm saying is that the formal T. sentence, with no emphasis, is OSV;
>variations of that require a pleonastic pronoun to keep the sentence
>OSV:
>
>                The door I closed.  Me, the door *I* closed.
>
>Since it is so natural for others to hear emphasis in the first word
>mentioned, T. has to do something extra to emphasize the object,
>obviously.    So it resorts, as usual, to pleonasm:  The door it I
>closed.
>There is a subtle emphasis at beginning and end of every sentence in T.,
>which suggests that it's the end of the sentence that carries the
>weight,
>and T puts the verb in that place of honor.
>
>Except, sigh, that with a rule of this sort, T. would have to say "I
>closed
>the DOOR" if it wanted a focus on door.  The Teonim are very reluctant
>to
>put the object last.  I don't know why.  It's very complicated.  Places
>for
>emphasis in Teonaht are first, last, but never middle.
>
>...[snip]...
>
>The door Sarah closed.
>This
>puts emphasis subtly on "closed" and on "door."  If Sarah is to be
>emphasized,
>then it's:  Sarah the door she closed.   Think:  TA DA tadada TA DA.
Here, I think, is the crux of the matter.  You talk about "emphasis", but
there's more than one kind of emphasis.  At a minimum, there's topical
emphasis vs. focal emphasis.  (And finer distinctions within those, like
contrastive vs. non-contrastive, and (to use Matt's terminology)
discourse-level topics vs. sentence-level topics.  But let's ignore those
for the moment.)  As a native English speaker, I find it perfectly natural
for there to be two points of emphasis in a sentence, one at the beginning
and one at the end.  But my tendency is to interpret the initial emphasis
as topical and the final emphasis as focal.  Furthermore, my tendency is to
put only weak emphasis on the topic (unless it's a contrastive topic), but
strong emphasis on the focus.

Are you making this kind of distinction in Teonaht?  And if so, which is
which?  (Initial topic and final focus, or vice versa?  Or neither?)

Another problem is that, in general, the verb is probably the _least_
likely constituent to be either topicalized or focused.  Thus, I think the
tendency in verb-final languages is not to have the kind of sentence-final
stress that English has, but rather to stress the constituent immediately
_before_ the verb and back off on the verb itself.

- Tim