Michael Wagner of McGill University will be presenting a talk on “Syntactic Alternative Projection” in our departmental colloquium series, Friday April 26th at 3:30 in ILC S11. All are welcome! An abstract follows

Abstract. Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and play a crucial role in explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, and but also constrain scalar implicature, focus association, and related phenomena. This talk presents evidence that prosodic focus in fact relies on a syntactic mechanism of alternative generation. Focused constituents introduce a set of alternative expressions, which then ‘project’ in a pointwise way in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions. Syntactic alternative projection sheds new light on a number of oddball phenomena, such as focus below the word level, metalinguistic uses of focus, expletive insertion within words, and echo questions (building the pioneering work on these phenomena by Arstein (2002)). The analysis also raises new questions, however, about the architecture of grammar, since it relies on a syntax in which structural pieces are inserted early, before they are infused with syntactic features and meaning.