Topic and Focus

Gundel, Jeanette K.; Fretheim, Thorstein

doi:10.1002/9780470756959.ch8

Cited by 208 publications

(115 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…There is often no focus in the theme, as the question-under-discussion (or topic) is established, and so alternatives are not evoked. However, there are a number of common functions of focus in the theme: to mark a contrast with another theme in the immediate context, as in (7), or to mark a change in topic (Gundel & Fretheim 2004). (Note that the changing topic function is often called 'aboutness topic').…”

Section: Do H-tones Mark Information Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Calhoun

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper investigates the functions of prosodic phrasing in the Austronesian VSO language Samoan. Two types of sentences are investigated, exclusives (involving the particle na'o 'only') and equatives. Two complementary methodologies were used, a production study and an acceptability judgment study, to examine the prosodic realisation and relative naturalness of different word orderings of the two sentence types. The particle na'o has an unusual distribution: preceding the initial constituent, be it the verb or a fronted noun phrase; or following the verb, but only modifying the absolutive (object). It was found that post-verbal absolutives modified by na'o are usually not preceded by a phrase boundary, unlike unmodified absolutives which are consistently preceded by a high phrase tone (H-) (cf. Yu 2009). Equatives in Samoan involve clauses which are the juxtaposition of two noun phrases, one the rheme (focus) and the other the theme (topic). It was found that rhemes are usually followed by a phrase break, while for themes this is optional. Rheme-theme order was strongly preferred to theme-rheme order. These findings are argued to show a close relationship between information structure, constituent ordering and prosodic phrasing in Samoan. The preferred order of constituents in Samoan is rheme-theme, with a high phrase tone marking the end of the rheme. The absolutive argument is strongly preferred to be at the start of the theme.

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Section: Do H-tones Mark Information Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Calhoun

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Por otra parte, las parejas HH% y LH%, y HL% y LL%, siguen moldes parecidos. Naturalmente, estas tipologías acentuales dependen de la lengua, el tipo de discurso y el estilo personal, por lo que no pocos autores han cuestionado esta distinción (Brown et al, 2013;Gundel y Fretheim, 2004;Krahmer y Swerts, 2001;Terken y Hirschberg, 1994). (2005) indican que el acento en español puede ser: prenuclear (L*+H), nuclear broad focus (H+L*) y nuclear narrow focus (L+H*).…”

Section: El Acento Contrastivo De Novedadunclassified

Caracterización prosódica del foco de tema y rema en las noticias

Manchón

2014

Círculo De Lingüística Aplicada a La Comunicación

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El estudio de la prosodia con función paralingüística avanza en la actualidad en dos frentes, el análisis discursivo de la estructura informativa y el análisis prosódico de las categorías textuales. Por una parte, el discurso oral informativo en los medios representa un tipo de discurso estable y modélico, por lo que facilita el análisis discursivo. Por otra parte, la locución informativa constituye un reto dadas las especiales condiciones comunicativas del acto. Este estudio analiza un corpus de cinco noticias emitidas en tres canales de televisión y por parte de tres locutores diferentes. Primero, los segmentos discursivos son definidos como unidades de tema y rema. A continuación se localizan los focos de información nueva, vieja y mediada. Y por último, se mide el rango tonal (porcentual), la duración de la sílaba tónica y el pico tonal de un total de 228 acentos. El análisis factorial ANOVA muestra una caracterización del foco de rema mediante alargamiento silábico y una caracterización del foco discursivo mediante pico tonal.mas: prosodia del foco 36Estos rasgos generales se acentúan o matiza en los tres estilos de locución. Mientras el estilo espontáneo usa menos el pico tonal y se limita al alargamiento silábico para marcar la información nueva, el estilo sensacionalista aplica el pico tonal para los tres tipos de focos y el estilo referencial público marca el rema con la duración y el acento discursivo con un pico tonal como inflexión melódica de su cantinela.Palabras clave: estructura informativa, foco, prosodia, locución AbstractProsodic characterization of theme and rheme foci in news. The study of prosody with regard to the paralinguistic function is progressing in two areas, the discursive analysis of the information structure, and the prosodic analysis of textual categories. On one hand, the oral information discourse in the media is an established exemplary type of discourse thus its analysis is patterned-oriented. On the other, the news locution is a still a sort of an announcers' challenge due to the most peculiar communication conditions of the act. This study analyses a corpus of five news announced in three television channels by three different news readers. First, the discourse segments are defined as theme and rheme units. Next, the new, old and meditated information foci are spotted.And lastly, it is measured the pitch range (in percentages), the duration of the stressed syllable and the pitch peak of a corpus of 228 foci. The ANOVA factorial analysis characterizes the rheme focus by the syllable lengthening and characterizes the mediated focus by the pitch peak. These global features are stressed or nuanced by the announcer's personal style. Whereas the spontaneous style does not make a great use of the pitch peak and is centered on the duration structure to mark the news information, the sensationalist style applies the pitch peak to all three types of accents, and the standard public style marks the rheme focus with duration and the discursive focus with the pitch peak as a turning po...

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“…A more general representation of the ThAS for (2) reminiscent of the "Structured Meaning" approach of Cresswell (1973Cresswell ( , 1985 and von Stechow (1981) (Brown 1983:67). By the same token, the notion of theme is also partly speaker-determined, not text-based as is the notion of topic of Gundel (1974); Gundel and Fretheim (2001).…”

Section: Tones and Information Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Information-Structural Semantics for English Intonation

Steedman¹

Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

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the present author, have offered different but related accounts of intonation structure in English and some other languages. These accounts share the assumption that the system of tones identified by Pierrehumbert (1980), as modified by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) and Silverman et al. (1992), has as transparent and type-driven a semantics in these languages as do their words and phrases. While the semantics of intonation in English concerns information structure and propositional attitude, rather than the predicate-argument relations and operator-scope relations that are familiar from standard semantics in the spirit of the papers collected as Montague 1974, this information-structural semantics is fully compositional, and can be regarded as a component of the same semantic system. The present paper builds on Steedman (1991) and Steedman (2000a) to develop a new semantics for intonation structure, which shares with the earlier versions the property of being fully integrated into Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, see Steedman 2000b, hereafter SP). This grammar integrates intonation structure into surface derivational structure and the associated Montague-style compositional semantics, even when the intonation structure departs from the restrictions of traditional surface structure. Many of the diverse discourse meanings that have been attributed to intonational tunes are shown to arise via conversational implicature from more primitive literal meanings distinguished along the three dimensions of information structure, speaker/hearer commitment, and contentiousness.

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Topic and Focus

Cited by 208 publications

References 33 publications

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Caracterización prosódica del foco de tema y rema en las noticias

Information-Structural Semantics for English Intonation

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