Types of Focus in English

Gussenhoven, Carlos

doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-4796-1_5

Cited by 125 publications

(84 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Focus usually refers to the new, important information in the sentence (Gussenhoven, 2007;Jackendoff, 1972), and is expressed differently in Turkish and Dutch. Second-generation heritage speakers are a special type of bilinguals, because, although they acquired their heritage language as their first language (L1), they are dominant in their second language (L2), which is the language of the society in which they were born (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus in Dutch reading: an eye-tracking experiment with heritage speakers of Turkish

Rijswijk

Muntendam

Dijkstra

2017

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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This study examines whether heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands interpret focus in written Dutch sentences differently from L1 speakers of Dutch (controls). Where most previous studies examined effects from the dominant L2 on the heritage language, we investigated whether there are effects from the weaker heritage language on the dominant L2. Dutch and Turkish differ in focus marking. Dutch primarily uses prosody to encode focus, whereas Turkish uses prosody and syntax, with a preverbal area for focused information and a postverbal area for background information. In written sentences no explicit prosody is available, which possibly enhances the role of syntactic cues in interpreting focus. An eye-tracking experiment suggests that, unlike the controls, the bilinguals associate the preverbal area with focus and the postverbal area with background information. These findings are in line with transfer from the weaker L1 to the dominant L2 at the syntax-discourse interface.ARTICLE HISTORY

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus in Dutch reading: an eye-tracking experiment with heritage speakers of Turkish

Rijswijk

Muntendam

Dijkstra

2017

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…These differences may be related to different focus types. The experimental techniques in the present study would elicit corrective focus (also in Jun & Lee, 1998), unlike those in Lee and Xu (2010) which may correspond to presentational (Gussenhoven, 2007) or informational focus (Féry, 2013). Third, the differences in the structure of the experimental materials may have led to different results.…”

Section: Defocusing In Seoul Koreanmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…This paper explores the prosodic markers of one kind of narrow focus, corrective focus, which is related to rejecting and correcting what has been already said in a conversation (see Gussenhoven, 2007) in Seoul Korean (henceforth Korean). Narrow focus here refers to a word-sized unit being highlighted, as opposed to broad focus on a larger unit (see e.g., Ladd, 2008, p. 215).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic Marking of Narrow Focus in Seoul Korean

Nolan

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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This paper explores prosodic marking of narrow (corrective) focus in Seoul Korean. Korean lacks lexical stress and it has a phonologized association between the Accentual Phrase (AP) initial segment and intonation. In the experiment, 4 speakers read sentences including a two-item list which were designed to elicit either an L or H AP-initial tone. The durational variations, the pitch events at prosodic boundaries, and F 0 span in 32 sentences read neutrally and 64 sentences read with one of the items under focus were analyzed. The results show that the focused constituent consistently initiates a new prosodic phrase. In comparison to the neutrally spoken or defocused counterpart, the focused constituent was more likely to be realized as an Intonational Phrase (IP) in some contexts. Bitonal IP boundary tones were more likely to occur under focus than monotonal tones. In addition, in focused constituents, durational expansion particularly at the phrase-edges, expansion in F 0 span, and raising of the phrase-initial pitch were observed. On the other hand, defocused constituents were not phonetically reduced compared to the neutral counterparts. The results imply that the phonetic cues spreading over the focused constituent complement the exaggerated prosodic boundaries.

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“…New information, on the other hand, is generally referred to as new and is introduced by means of a linguistic device referred to as focus (Krifka 2008;Prince 1981). Different types of focus have been distinguished in terms of their domains, the most general distinction being broad vs. narrow focus (Gussenhoven 2007;Ladd 1980;Lambrecht 1994;Roberts 1996;Selkirk 1986). The former implies that more than one constituent or even all the information in the sentence is new, while the latter entails that the focus involves only one constituent or a smaller unit.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

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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Types of Focus in English

Cited by 125 publications

References 29 publications

Focus in Dutch reading: an eye-tracking experiment with heritage speakers of Turkish

Focus in Dutch reading: an eye-tracking experiment with heritage speakers of Turkish

Prosodic Marking of Narrow Focus in Seoul Korean

The Realization of Focus in Asturian Spanish

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