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Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “discourse-new”
Open accessAbstract
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 discourse-given constituents (Féry-Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discourse-new 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.
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Citations
Cited by
The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure
(2016) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.001.0001 · Cited by 423
Contrastive focus vs. discourse-new: Evidence from phonetic prominence in English
Katz, J., & Selkirk, E. (2011) · Language · doi:10.1353/lan.2011.0076 · Cited by 326
Self-citationTowards a typology of focus realization
Büring, D. (2009) · Information Structure · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199570959.003.0008 · Cited by 182
Metadata
- Authors
- Selkirk, E.
- Venue
- Acta Linguistica Hungarica
- Publisher
- Akademiai Kiado Zrt.
- Published
- 2008-12
- Volume
- 55
- Issue
- 3-4
- Pages
- 331-346
- ISSN
- 1216-8076 (ISSN-L)
- 1588-2624
- OpenAlex
- W2022026578
- Cited by
- 239
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 123.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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