Contrastive focus
- 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.
Author details: | Malte ZimmermannORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19688 |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Publication year: | 2007 |
Publishing institution: | Universität Potsdam |
Release date: | 2008/07/25 |
Tag: | contrastive focus; discourse expectability; emphasis |
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 1614-4708ISBN 978-3-939469-88-9 URN: urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-15472 --> bestellen |