Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “Discourse-New”

  • 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 discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew 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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Metadaten
Author details:Elisabeth Selkirk
URN:urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19670
Publication type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Publication year:2007
Publishing institution:Universität Potsdam
Release date:2008/07/25
Tag:F-marking; G-marking; contrastive focus; givenness; prosody; second occurrence focus
RVK - Regensburg classification:ER 300
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):License LogoKeine 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 1614-4708 ISBN 978-3-939469-88-9
URN: urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-15472
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