14. Focus Fronting

Cruschina, Silvio; Remberger, Eva‐Maria; Dufter, Andreas; Stark, Elisabeth

doi:10.1515/9783110377088-014

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Examples of this include contrastive focus and mirative focus fronting in Romance (cf. Cruschina & Remberger 2017;Cruschina 2019 In some ways, the Tima pattern is similar to the ones observed in other languages. However, Tima differs from other well-known patterns of contrastive marking in that it has two distinct morphological markers, i.e.…”

Section: Contrast As a Gradient Concept: Implications From Timasupporting

confidence: 73%

“…He argues that "contrastivity in this sense means that a particular content or a particular speech act is unexpected for the hearer from the speaker's perspective" (Zimmermann 2007: 148). In a similar vein, using the label of "mirativity", Brunetti (2009), Cruschina (2012, and Cruschina & Remberger (2017) argue that the unexpectedness of the current alternative can also explain syntactic effects of focus marking in various Romance languages; Matić (2003: 287-296) finds a similar effect for fronted foci in Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, and Modern Greek.…”

Section: Previous Approachesmentioning

confidence: 89%

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Morphological marking of contrast in Tima

Becker

Schneider-Blum

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Tima (Niger-Congo, Sudan) has two morphological means to express contrast: focus marking and selective marking. We take the distribution of both marking options and their interaction as evidence for a broad approach to contrast, the latter being a gradient phenomenon rather than a categorical one. We show for Tima that exhaustivity and unexpectedness play a role in determining the strength of the contrast, with the selective marker and focus marker occurring with weaker and stronger types of contrast respectively. While the selective marker signals the existence of a set of alternatives singling out one alternative, the focus marker requires that the information under focus is either exhaustive or unexpected.

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Section: Contrast As a Gradient Concept: Implications From Timasupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: Previous Approachesmentioning

confidence: 89%

Morphological marking of contrast in Tima

Becker

Schneider-Blum

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…We argue that preposed mica is parallel to another syntactic operation available in Standard Italian: focus fronting (Bentley 2010;Cruschina 2012;Bianchi et al 2015;Cruschina & Remberger 2017). It is commonly accepted that a fronted focus constituent in Standard Italian bears a corrective interpretation (24) (Rizzi 1997), whereas an informational focus must appear postverbally (25) (Cruschina 2021 The corrective focus in (24) has been defined by Cruschina (2012) (but see also references therein) and Bianchi & Bocci (2012) in pragmatic terms as a correction to a previously asserted proposition.…”

Section: Preposed Mica As Corrective Focusmentioning

confidence: 93%

Mica preposing as focus fronting

Magistro

2022

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper deals with the Italian presuppositional negation marker mica. This particle can surface differently in the negative circuit, e.g. either in a clause-initial or a clause-internal position. However, depending on its position, different types of focus and pragmatic requirements are found. We consider the initial mica as an instance of corrective focus and the clause-internal one as encoding a more generic contrastive focus. We show that this is in line with the recent findings on focus typology of Italian.

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“…There is an extensive literature on focus fronting in Romance ( 24), and quite some debate as how to classify and characterize these structures (see references in Jiménez-Fernández & Camacho Taboada 2014, Jiménez-Fernández 2015, Bianchi et al 2015, Cruschina & Remberger 2017, Cruschina 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Against this backdrop, the goal of this article is to bridge the gap between (i) existing analyses of XVS in French, which do not incorporate a comparative Romance and diachronic perspective, and which are not based on recent conceptual frameworks for topic and focus, and (ii) (synchronic) comparative Romance analyses (Cruschina & Remberger 2017, Leonetti 2017, Cruschina 2021, and (diachronic) French analyses (Wolfe 2021), which do not take into account the finer details of French XVS. Taking into account both the morphosyntactic (section 2) and discourse-pragmatic (information-structural) status (section 3) of the fronted constituent, I will argue that XVS in French, whether X is an adverbial phrase (1-2) or an adjectival phrase (an adjectival attribute) (3), is a subset of two classes of XVS attested in Romance: resumptive preposing (section 3.1) and focus preposing (section 4).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Parametric variation in Romance synchronic V2 through a French lens

Lahousse

2022

isogloss

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In this article I provide an analysis of XVS order in (Modern) standard French, and reconcile it with comparative analyses of XVS in (Modern) Romance by taking into account recent conceptual accounts for topic and focus. I concentrate on XVS clauses in Modern standard French where X is an adverbial or an adjectival phrase, and provide empirical evidence for the assumption that – contrary to what is often assumed – these are similar to XVS clauses in Romance and not subject to a special syntactic licensing constraint distinguishing them from other Romance languages. I claim that XVS clauses in (Modern) standard French display systematicity in that the initial element X is either [+anaphoric] or [+scalar] and that this is the result of micro-parametric rather than nano-parametric variation: the sentence-initial AdjPs and AdvPs in XVS are no individual lexical items but belong to a lexically defined subset of AdvPs and AdjPs. Instances of XVS introduced by a [+scalar] constituent are argued to be subsets of Romance mirative focus fronting, while those introduced by a [+anaphoric] constituent are subsets of Romance resumptive preposing. I argue that XVS in standard French is productive with fronted rare ‘rare’ and nombreux ‘numerous’, because these adjectives are both [+anaphoric] and [+scalar]. This shows that V2 is still active in standard French.

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14. Focus Fronting

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Morphological marking of contrast in Tima

Morphological marking of contrast in Tima

Mica preposing as focus fronting

Parametric variation in Romance synchronic V2 through a French lens

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