Infrmation Structure

5 Aspectual Focus In the last chapter, we saw several instances in which lexical properties of verbs have an eff ect on f-structure: Manner-of-speaking verbs block focusing on the subordinate clause, and hence on extraction (Chapter , section .). Creation verbs allow focusing on the complement of the picture noun phrase and hence license extraction (Chapter , section .). The same eff ect was also seen with respect to extraposition (Chapter , section .). Finally, sentence completeness was seen to be aff ected by properties of the verb as well (Chapter , section .). In addition, the lexical properties themselves can be a ff ected by context: We saw that a meaning component can be backgrounded if its content is contextually prominent and that contrast and modification can force focus on a verb even though the verb itself does not require it. This chapter discusses these and similar phenomena and off ers a framework within which they can be analyzed. Section  briefl y outlines the lexical theory of atoms and introduces the notion of aspectual focus. Section  elucidates the lexical properties of manner-ofspeaking verbs predicting both the extraction facts and completeness facts. It goes on to distinguish the lexical properties of the di ff erent verb types which take picture NPs as their complements, again deriving their extraction and completeness properties. Then f-structure constraints on extraction in double object constructions are shown to follow from their lexical structure. The topic of section  is missing objects which form structures with characteristic information structure properties. Finally, section  accounts for the unusual stress patterns assigned to out-of-the-blue change-events pointed out in Chapter , section ..

5.1 The theory of atoms In Erteschik-Shir and Rapoport ; ; ; a; and in preparation, we off er a lexical analysis of verbs in terms of meaning components which we refer to as the theory of atoms (AT).1 There are three types of meaning comNote that in this theory, meaning components project syntactic structure deriving structures that are similar in many ways to the one in the work of Hale and Keyser (e.g., Hale and 1