Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “Discourse-New”
- 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.
Author details: | Elisabeth Selkirk |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19670 |
Publication type: | Part of a Book |
Language: | English |
Publication year: | 2007 |
Publishing institution: | Universität Potsdam |
Release date: | 2008/07/25 |
Tag: | F-marking; G-marking; contrastive focus; givenness; prosody; second occurrence focus |
RVK - Regensburg classification: | ER 300 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
Collection(s): | Universität Potsdam / Schriftenreihen / Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632, ISSN 1866-4725 / ISIS (2007) 06 |
Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |
License (German): | Keine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz |
External remark: | erschienen in: The Notions of information structure / (eds.) Caroline Féry ... - Potsdam : Univ.-Verl., 2007. - 235 S. (Interdisciplinary studies on information structure ; 6) ISSN 1614-4708 ISBN 978-3-939469-88-9 URN: urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-15472 --> bestellen |