Focus

2000

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2000

Grammars cover only a small fraction of the grammaticalized functions and markers available in languages. Furthermore, for the few markers that are mentioned, not every meaning is described. The purpose of this article is to describe certain aspects of the meaning of some of these expressions: the adverb αντιθέτως, the prepositional phrase σε αντίθεση (με/προς) and the conjunction ενώ. Although this last one is mentioned in grammars, mostly in its temporal meaning and sometimes in its so-called ‘adversative’ sense, the first two are not. As I will try to prove, despite their many differences, all of them can mark parallel focus in Modern Greek. In this sense, they operate on the information structure of the sentence.

2011

Addressing the current debate on the mapping between focus marking and focus interpretation, the paper presents evidence suggesting that different types of focus correlate with different types of movement of DP-objects in Old English. The analysis of the contexts in which these movement operations occur reveals that if we assume a double base scenario allowing for both movement to the left and to the right of the IP, we obtain orders in which the objects firmly correlate with a particular information-structural property. While movement to the left takes place in those cases in which the referent of the object is in a contrastive relation to another entity in the context, rightward movement clearly relates to novelty in the discourse.

Georgios Giannakis (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Greek Language and Linguistics, 2014

Information structure, i.e., the grammatical component allowing speakers to shape their sentences according to the pragmatic context and their communicative goals, is a major aspect of Ancient Greek grammar, since it is the main factor of word-order variation in that language. The basic concepts of information structure (assertion and presupposition; indentifiability and activation; topic and focus) are explained and their relevance for Ancient Greek grammar (mainly word order) is dealt with.

"This paper investigates the semantics of Information focus and Contrastive focus in Italian. Throughout the literature, there have been some recent attempts to show that they both have the same semantic representation at LF. After arguing against these theories, I propose a semantic model for the interpretation of Information Focus and Contrastive Focus, according to which the latter is a subtype of the former, specified for exhaustivity. The model aims to bring together the theoretical advantages of both Rooth’s theory for the interpretation of focus and Horvath’s proposal about the intervention of an exhaustivity operator in the derivation of Hungarian Contrastive Foci. The purported differences between Italian and Hungarian are explained in terms of constraints on the type of objects which can enter in the domain of application of the exhaustivity operator."

Journal of Language Relationship, 2019

Journal of Pragmatics, 2008

This article deals with the position and the identification of Focus constituents in Latin, a 'free' constituent language known only through written texts. Three instances are analysed: entities that are newly introduced into the discourse, and obligatory arguments of the verbs ''to leave'' (proficiscor) and ''to send'' (mitto) in classical Latin prose (Caesar, Civil war and Sallust, The Iugurthine War) in order to observe whether constituents are positioned according to the principle of 'communicative dynamism' as described by Firbas (1992) and claimed for Latin by Panhuis (1982). Latin examples are compared with their translations into Czech, a modern 'free' constituent order Slavic language obeying the above-mentioned principle. The confrontation reveals several differences between Latin and Czech concerning not only the position of Focus constituents but also their anaphoric continuation and the position of anaphoric pronouns in the sentence.

2009

This paper investigates the realisation of focus in English and Greek. After providing a definition of focus and distinguishing between its two kinds, namely information and contrastive focus, I argue that, in both English and Greek, prosody accommodates information focus, while both syntax and prosody are responsible for contrastive focus. There is, however, an important difference in the syntactic device employed for the realisation of contrastive focus in each language. In Greek contrastive focus is realised via movement to [Spec, FocP], while English has to take recourse to it -clefts. An explanation is offered for this dissimilarity on the basis of the typological difference that exists between English and Greek.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016

This chapter deals with the prosodic and syntactic reflexes of information structure in Modern Greek. The relevant properties of this language are: (a) the word order is sensitive to information structure, such that topics and foci target positions in the left periphery and background information is right dislocated; (b) the intonational nucleus depends on the focus domain and is realized through pitch accents; and (b) definite complements must be doubled through co-referent clitic pronouns if they are not accented, which depends on information structure. This chapter introduces these phenomena and outlines their interaction for the expression of information structural notions.