Anti-pied-piping

The semantics of focus particles requires that they take their associating focus in their scope — a conclusion reinforced by the findings of my dissertation. And yet, there are apparent exceptions to this generalization. A particularly challenging class of such exceptions is where the focus particle is contained within its logical focus associate, a configuration which Kenyon Branan and I call anti-pied-piping. We have identified instances of anti-pied-piping in over 50 different languages from over 30 different genera, and show that anti-pied-piping affects both focus particle placement and focus movement and cannot be the result of a purely post-syntactic operation. We propose a theory of focus particles as late adjoined during cyclic Spell-Out — and focus movement parasitic on particle placement, as in Cable’s “Q-particle” theory — which unifies anti-pied-piping with better-studied pied-piping behavior.

• Branan and Erlewine, 2023. “Anti-pied-piping.”  
  Language 99:3, pages 603–653. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2023.a907013

“As low as possible” placement

I have studied the structural placement of focus particles, in particular exhaustive focus particles in Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese. I observe that in languages that allow sentential focus particles at different attachment heights on the clausal spine, there is a generalization that a focus particle must be as low as possible while c-commanding its associate, within a given phase. Jacobs (1983) and Büring & Hartmann (2001) describe the distribution of German focus adverbs in similar terms, but its cross-linguistic generality has not been explored and the nature of this “as low as possible” description has not been adequately studied. The sensitivity of this behavior to phase boundaries forms a new argument for the theory of phase-based, cyclic structure-building.

• 2022. “Mandarin exhaustive focus shì and the syntax of discourse congruence.”  
  Particles in German, English, and beyond, pages 323–354. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.224.12erl
• 2017. “Vietnamese focus particles and derivation by phase.”  
  Journal of East Asian Linguistics 26:4, pages 325–349. DOI: 10.1007/s10831-017-9156-y
• 2015. “In defense of Closeness: focus-sensitive adverb placement in Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese.”  
  Manuscript, McGill University.
• 2015. “Minimality and focus-sensitive adverb placement.”  
  Proceedings of NELS 45, volume 1, pages 193–202.

My student Keng Ji Chow and I have also investigated restrictions on the placement of exh, a covert exhaustive focus operator hypothesized to underly the introduction of scalar implicatures (SI). Based on the interaction of SI with the presuppositions of also and again, we argue that, for some SI triggers, exh must be as low as possible while taking its trigger in its scope. Our work thus shows that covert exh exhibits syntactic parallels with overt sentential focus particles in German, Mandarin, and Vietnamese, as described above.

• Chow and Erlewine, 2022. “Restrictions on the position of exh.”  
  Proceedings of SALT 32, pages 522–542. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v1i0.5403

The attachment of adverbial particles

In some languages, the syntax of the language conspires to obscure the precise syntactic position of adverbial “particles,” such as sentential focus particles or some temporal expressions (e.g. still, already). In such cases, I consider the semantic contribution of these particles (specifically, their scope-taking behavior) as evidence for their syntax. Examples include my work on sentence-final particles in Chinese languages and their cognates in Singlish as well as on Tagalog second-position clitics.

• To appear. “Sentence-final particles at the vP phase edge.”  
  Proceedings of the 25th North American Conference of Chinese Linguistics (NACCL 25).
• Hsieh and Erlewine, 2025. “Tagalog clitics.”  
  Draft handbook chapter.
• Hsieh and Erlewine, 2024. “Determining the scope of Tagalog clitic adverbs.”  
  Presented at LSA 100.
• 2023. “A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already.”  
  Discourse Particles in Asian Languages, volume 2: Southeast Asia, pages 91–120. DOI: 10.4324/9781351057752-5
• Hsieh and Erlewine, 2023. “On the scope and position of Tagalog clitic adverbs.”  
  Handbook of the 24th meeting of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences, pages 109–112.
• 2017. “Low sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese and the Final-over-Final Constraint.”  
  Journal of East Asian Linguistics 26:1, pages 37–75. DOI: 10.1007/s10831-016-9150-9
• 2016. “The locus of Mandarin sentence-final particles and the Final-over-Final Constraint.”  
  Invited talk at the Workshop on Word Order of Heads, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• 2010. “Sentence-final only and the interpretation of focus in Mandarin Chinese.”  
  The Proceedings of the 22nd North American Conference of Chinese Linguistics (NACCL 22) and the 18th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL 18), pages 18–35.