Deriving the Properties of Structural Focus

Abstract

This paper proposes a theory of structural focus derived via focus movement which can account for all the focus-related facts attested in Hungarian, among them facts which other current theories cannot explain. It will claim that focus movement serves the purpose of creating a predicate-subject structure, in which the focus-moved constituent functions as a specificational predicate. The properties of both the focus and the background follow from the independently established properties of specificational predication constructions.Section 2 of the paper briefly introduces two recent theories of focus movement: the "movement for stress" theory of Szendrői (2003), and the "movement for the checking of the exhaustive identification feature" theory of Horvath (2005), pointing out the problems which they cannot handle. Section 3 presents the proposal argued for. Section 4 demonstrates how the problems observed in section 2 receive a natural solution in the proposed framework. Section 5 discusses a further consequence of the proposed theory, involving the definiteness effect attested in presentational constructions. Some current theories of structural focus Structural focus as a phonological phenomenonSzendrői"s (2003) influential theory of structural focus aims to provide a unified analysis of English-type prosodic focus and Hungarian-type structural focus: both are claimed to be motivated by the stress-focus correspondence principle (Reinhart 1995, and Zubizarreta 1998), according to which (1) The focus of a clause is a(ny) constituent containing the main stress of the intonational phrase, as determined by the stress rule.Whereas in an English-type language the stress-focus correspondence is usually attained by stress shift, in a Hungarian type language it is claimed to be achieved by the movement of focus into the position of main stress, at the left edge of the verbal projection. (Szendrői analyzes the Hungarian sentence as a VP. Topic constituents are claimed to be extrametrical adjuncts, which are skipped by the stress rule.) The V