Contrastive Focus
نویسنده
چکیده
The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, 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 as involving the introduction and subsequent exclusion of alternatives. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discoursesemantic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected the focus content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark the focus constituent by means of special grammatical devices, thus giving rise to emphasis.
منابع مشابه
The role of selection in the comprehension of focus alternatives
Successful language comprehension often requires comprehenders to infer contrastive focus alternatives, but the mechanisms used to establish contrastive alternatives are still poorly understood. We propose that comprehenders establish contrastive alternatives by using selection mechanisms that distinguish contrastive from non-contrastive candidates. To examine this proposal, we investigated the...
متن کاملRecognition and Prediction for Implicit Contrastive Focus in Romanian
This paper is made up of two parts: the first part continues the theoretical investigations on Information Structure (IS), linguistic, and computational approaches suitable to provide solutions to the prosody prediction problem of Implicit Contrastive Focus (ICF) concept, introduced in our previous papers. ICF is meant to be the particular case but also the counterpart of the classical category...
متن کاملProsody of contrastive focus in estonian
The study contributes to the cross-linguistic discussion on the prosodic correlates and categorial status of contrastive focus. It brings in data from Estonian, a flexible word order language where the prosodic expression of Information Structure has been very little studied. The study compares narrow contrastive focus with narrow and broad information focus in semi-spontaneous production data,...
متن کاملProsodic (non-)realisation of broad, narrow and contrastive focus in Hungarian: a production and a perception study
In languages with variable focus positions, prominent elements tend to be emphasised by prosodic cues (e.g. English). If a language prefers a given prosodic pattern, i.e. sentence-final nuclear accents, like Spanish, the prosodic realisation of broad focus might not differ from that of narrow and contrastive focus. The relevance of prosodic focus marking was tested in Hungarian were focus typic...
متن کاملAn fMRI study of the perception of contrastive prosodic focus in French
This fMRI study deals with the perception of prosodic contrastive focus in French. Twenty-two right-handed French participants listened to two kinds of utterances: with contrastive prosodic focus (Focus) and without (Neutral). The task was to judge whether the utterances contained focus. The Focus vs. Neutral contrast revealed bilateral activation of the inferior frontal, superior and middle te...
متن کاملA Quantitative Study of Focus Shift in Marathi
We study the effect of focus shift on prosodic features for Marathi, a major Indian language. In our analysis, we consider different focus locations and different focus widths. We report observations of fundamental frequency, intensity, and syllabic durations of constituent words of the utterance. F0 is studied via the accent commands of the Fujisaki model. We contrast statements containing nar...
متن کامل