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Identificational Focus Versus Information Focus
Abstract
This article argues that identificational focus, which expresses exhaustive identification and occupies the specifier of a functional projection, must be distinguished in language description from information focus, which conveys new information and involves no syntactic reordering. The properties of the two types of focus are established on the basis of Hungarian and English material. It is argued that the cleft constituent is the realization of identificational focus in English. Only-phrases are analyzed as identificational foci carrying an evaluative presupposition. The feature specification of identificational focus is shown to be subject to parametric variation: the focus operators of various languages are specified for the positive value of either or both of the features [+exhaustive] and [+contrastive].
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Cited by
The Interpretability Hypothesis: evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition
Tsimpli, I. M., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007) · Second Language Research · doi:10.1177/0267658307076546 · Cited by 441
The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure
(2016) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.001.0001 · Cited by 423
Gundel, J. K., & Fretheim, T. (2006) · The Handbook of Pragmatics · doi:10.1002/9780470756959.ch8 · Cited by 314
Identifiability, improper priors and Gibbs sampling for generalized linear models
Gelfand, A. E., & Sahu, S. K. (1999) · Journal of the American Statistical Association · doi:10.1080/01621459.1999.10473840 · Cited by 242
Towards a typology of focus realization
Büring, D. (2009) · Information Structure · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199570959.003.0008 · Cited by 182
Metadata
- Authors
- Kiss, K. É.
- Venue
- Language
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1998-06
- Volume
- 74
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 245-273
- ISSN
- 0097-8507 (ISSN-L)
- 1535-0665
- OpenAlex
- W1999201450
- Cited by
- 1,609
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 111.40
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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