TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gussenhoven, Carlos
T1  - Notions and subnotions in information structure
N2  - Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings.
KW  - corrective focus
KW  - contrastive focus
KW  - informational focus
KW  - focus ambiguity
KW  - focus type
KW  - focus meaning
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19704
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Selkirk, Elisabeth
T1  - Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “Discourse-New”
N2  - New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given.
KW  - contrastive focus
KW  - givenness
KW  - second occurrence focus
KW  - F-marking
KW  - G-marking
KW  - prosody
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19670
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Contrastive focus
N2  - The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.
KW  - contrastive focus
KW  - emphasis
KW  - discourse expectability
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19688
ER  -