The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

The position of the sentential stress falls on the main word stress. Main word stress falls
on the initial syllable of a prosodic word. In general, odd-numbered syllables are stressed,
giving rise to trochaic rhythm. For an overview of word stress in Czech see van der Hulst
1999, p. 818ff.
Ladd 1996 argues that Czech is a language that does not use pitch accent at all and that
has very rigid phonology. This is significant in light of the hypothesis that syntax must
adjust to phonology because phonology is not a ‘plastic’ component of the grammar (cf.
Vallduví 1990). 25 This picture is, however, too simplistic. Czech has other prosodic means
than assigning nuclear stress to the last prosodic word. For example, contrastively focused
words may be prosodically prominent in situ. Also certain lexical items, for instance whwords,
are independently prosodicaly prominent. But it is true that Czech prosody is more
rigid than the prosody of, for example, English. Thus, we cannot exclude in advance the
possibility that syntax accommodates prosodic requirements.
The important question with respect to givenness is whether there is a direct relation
between being given and deaccenting. We have already seen in the previous section that
the semantic licensing conditions on givenness are stronger than the licensing conditions
on deaccenting in English, but there is still a possibility that for an element to be given in
Czech, the element must be deaccented. Thus, the question is whether or not G-movement
may be characterized as prosodically driven movement.
To be able to answer this question, let’s first identify another type of prosody driven
movement in Czech. Such movement is found with inherently stress-less items, for instance
něco ‘something’. As we can see in (136), ‘something’ cannot be the last prosodic
word. The reason is that in this position it would bear the main sentential stress. Crucially,
destressing ‘something’ in situ is not possible.
(136) a. *Chtěla bych jíst něco.
wanted would eat.Inf something
b. Chtěla bych něco jíst .
wanted would something eat
‘I would like to eat something.’
As we can see in the example in (137), the movement observed in (136) is not independent
syntactic movement. If we modify the sentence in (136) with a VP adverbial which
surfaces as the last prosodic word, ‘something’ does not need to move anymore. In fact, it
cannot move. The reason is that now it is the adverbial that bears the main sentential stress.
‘Something’ is not affected by the sentential prominence.
(137) a. Chtěla bych jíst něco u Nováků.
wanted would eat.Inf something at Novak’s
b. *Chtěla bych něco jíst u Nováků.
wanted would something eat at Novak’s
25 Czech is supposed to pattern in this respect with languages like Italian and Hungarian.
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