Stress and Focus in English

Culicover, Peter W.; Rochemont, Michael

doi:10.2307/414063

Cited by 153 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Ladd 1996, Lambrecht & Michaelis 1998and Zubizarreta 1998. Evidence from languages which mark focus morphologically or by focus-movement (see Dik 1981) corroborate the assumption made for English since Rochemont (1978Rochemont ( , 1986 and Culicover & Rochemont (1983) that the wh-element is not only the focus of the question but that it also identifies the focus of the answer. Drubig (1998) in a recent proposal argues that wh-questions (as well as clefts) constitute a particular type of focusing construction, which exhibits connectedness effects, the so-called completive focus construction: "it specifies an open proposition which functions as the background and the wh-operator induces a focus effect on the constituent filling the gap" (p. 28).…”

Section: Basic Assumptions About Focussupporting

confidence: 60%

Silent Copy and Polarity Focus in VP Ellipsis

Winkler¹

2000

Ellipsis in Conjunction

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This paper investigates the issue of symmetric and nonsymmetric focus and deaccentuation in VP Ellipsis (VPE). In contrast to most previous approaches to the information structure of VPE (Rooth 1992b, Tomioka 1995, Fox 1998, which claim under a symmetry assumption that the function of VPE is to contrastively focus the remaining subject in relation to the subject in the antecedent clause, I show that in the unmarked case, focus and deaccentuation in the antecedent and the elliptical clause need not be symmetric. I propose a unified account of the information structure of VPE by assuming a single PF economy principle, Silent Copy, interacting with a syntactic focus theory which allows for layered focus structures. In particular, Silent Copy favors to leave a syntactic copy unpronounced provided focus is assigned to the head of the sentence internal polarity phrase. The arguments in support of this proposal rest to a substantial degree on a theory of focus in question-answer contexts, as proposed by Drubig (1998). I show that VPE characterized by nonsymmetric focus and deaccentuation occurs as an answer to a multiple wh-question giving rise to a presentational focus reading. The symmetric focus and deaccentuation type then falls out as a special case in which the VPE answers a narrowly focusing question.

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Section: Basic Assumptions About Focussupporting

confidence: 60%

Silent Copy and Polarity Focus in VP Ellipsis

Winkler¹

2000

Ellipsis in Conjunction

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“…Movement that represents discourse functions is not a new idea, and goes back to early seventies (Jackendoff 1973, Culicover and Rochemont 1983, and Rochemont 1986). Some authors have considered focus movement as an instance of Move triggered by a functional feature (Bailyn 2001, Kiss (to appear), among others).…”

Section: Focus Movement In Persianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus movement and the nature of uninterpretable features

Karimi

2003

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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“…Informational focus would then be non-corrective. This distinction between contrastive and informational focus is used by Culicover and Rochemont (1983), Vallduví and Engdhal (1996) or Gussenhoven (2008). While acknowledging the confusion present in the literature, this paper is consistent with the terminology that has been used in other intonational studies concerned with the realization of focus in Peninsular Spanish, namely Fernández-Soriano (2013, 2016), as these directly inform the present study.…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Realization of Focus in Asturian Spanish

Sánchez-Alvarado

2018

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics

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Spanish was classified as a language that only exploits syntactic mechanisms to mark focus. Recent experimental studies, nonetheless, have shown that speakers of different dialects are also able to use prosody to different degrees. This study aims to provide further understanding on the role played by prosody in the realization of focus in Spanish by looking at Asturian Spanish, a dialect in contact with another Romance language, Asturian. The data from a contextualized sentence completion task revealed that a phonological distinction between specific pitch categories (L+

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Stress and Focus in English

Cited by 153 publications

References 19 publications

Silent Copy and Polarity Focus in VP Ellipsis

Silent Copy and Polarity Focus in VP Ellipsis

Focus movement and the nature of uninterpretable features

The Realization of Focus in Asturian Spanish

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