TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
A1  - Onea, Edgar
T1  - Focus marking and focus interpretation
JF  - LINGUA
N2  - The languages of the world exhibit a range of formal phenomena (e.g. accenting, syntactic reordering and morphological marking) that are commonly linked to the information-structural notion of focus. Crucially, there does not seem to be a one-to-one mapping between particular formal features (focus marking devices) and focus, neither from a cross-linguistic perspective, nor within individual languages. This raises the question of what is actually being expressed if we say that a constituent is focused in a particular language, and whether, or to what extent, the same semantic or pragmatic content is formally expressed by focus-marking across languages. This special issue addresses the question of focus and its grammatical realization from a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives. In this introductory article we elaborate on this question by making an explicit proposal about what we take to be the correct way of thinking about the information-structural category of focus and its formal realization. In the first part, we introduce a unified semantico-pragmatic perspective on focus in terms of alternatives and possible worlds. In the second part, we present a cursory cross-linguistic overview of focus marking strategies as found in the languages of the world. Finally, in the third part, we discuss the connection between the notion of focus, different pragmatic uses of focus and different focus marking strategies employed in the grammars of natural languages. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
KW  - Focus
KW  - Alternatives
KW  - Contrast
KW  - Information structure
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.002
SN  - 0024-3841
VL  - 121
IS  - 11
SP  - 1651
EP  - 1670
PB  - ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
CY  - AMSTERDAM
ER  -