Contrastive focus and emphasis

Zimmermann, Malte

doi:10.1556/aling.55.2008.3-4.9

Cited by 95 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…It was found that these realizations do not differ in their semantic type (Green & Jaggar 2003, Hartmann & Zimmermann 2007: instead, the marked form signals that the focused constituent (or the whole speech act) is unexpected for the hearer (Zimmermann 2008). These assumptions are consistent with findings for other African languages (Fiedler et al 2006).…”

Section: Using Annis An Example Querysupporting

confidence: 70%

Information structure in African languages

Chiarcos¹,

Fiedler²,

Grubic³

et al. 2009

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technologies for African Languages - AfLaT '09

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In this paper, we describe tools and resources for the study of African languages developed at the Collaborative Research Centre "Information Structure". These include deeply annotated data collections of 25 subsaharan languages that are described together with their annotation scheme, and further, the corpus tool ANNIS that provides a unified access to a broad variety of annotations created with a range of different tools. With the application of ANNIS to several African data collections, we illustrate its suitability for the purpose of language documentation, distributed access and the creation of data archives.

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Section: Using Annis An Example Querysupporting

confidence: 70%

Information structure in African languages

Chiarcos¹,

Fiedler²,

Grubic³

et al. 2009

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technologies for African Languages - AfLaT '09

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“…41 It is for this reason that structures like (43B) have been dubbed "partial focus movement" (Zimmermann 2007; see also Fanselow & Lenertová 2010). To put it differently, the answer (43B) apparently shows the coexistence of two overlapping foci: the broad focus required by question-answer congruence, and the narrow focus on the direct object which supports the mirative implicature.…”

Section: :36mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We have characterized the mirative import as a conventional implicature but, following an insight of Zimmermann (2007), we have argued that it is not purely anchored to the speaker: it is based on a shared modal base (the context set) and on an ordering source that can be anchored to one of the conversational participants, or to the whole conversational community.…”

Section: Concluding Remarks and Future Prospectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This structure may convey different interpretive effects in specific contexts. One interesting instance of such "focus fronting" conveys that the proffered information is unexpected or surprising (see, a.o., Zimmermann 2007 Hartmann & Zimmermann 2007: 385, (38)) In this paper we provide an empirical characterization of this structure in Italian and a formal analysis elucidating the role of focus. In Section 2 we show that this structure is characterized by specific prosodic and syntactic properties, differing from another instance of focus fronting that occurs in corrective replies to an assertion: this implies that the unexpectedness import is grammatically encoded, rather than being one out of many pragmatically possible uses of a general "focus fronting" structure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Bianchi

Bocci

Cruschina

2016

S&P

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This paper discusses the fronting of a focal constituent to a clauseinitial position which, in various languages, is associated with an import of unexpectedness. We provide prosodic and syntactic evidence from Italian showing that this phenomenon has distinctive grammatical properties with respect to other instances of "focus fronting". We argue that the fronted constituent bears narrow focus, and that the unexpectedness import conveys that the asserted proposition is less likely than one or more distinct focus alternatives (see Grosz 2011). We characterize this import as a conventional implicature, and we argue that likelihood is interpreted with respect to an informative modal base which is shared by the conversational community (the context set). We show that the unexpectedness import expressed by a speaker can be accepted or rejected by the other discourse participants: thus, it qualifies as an evaluative commitment of the speaker and, when accepted by the interlocutors, it can give rise to a shared evaluation.

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“…This kind of fronting has been taken to convey the implicature that the proffered information is unexpected or suprising (Abeillé et al 2008, Zimmermann 2007 accordingly, I will label this type of import 'mirative import'.…”

Section: The Mirative Importmentioning

confidence: 99%