Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of "discourse-new"
- New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given.
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| Author: | Elisabeth Selkirk |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1112162 |
| URL: | http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/publications/isis06_8selkirk.pdf |
| ISBN: | 978-3-939469-88-9 |
| Parent Title (German): | The notions of information structure / Caroline Féry (ed.) ; Working Papers of the SFB 632, Interdisciplinary studies on information structure (ISIS) ; Vol. 6 |
| Document Type: | Part of a Book |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2008/11/06 |
| Year of first Publication: | 2007 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2008/11/06 |
| Tag: | F-marking; G-marking; contrastive focus; givenness; prosody; second occurrence focus |
| Page Number: | 22 |
| First Page: | 125 |
| Last Page: | 146 |
| Source: | http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/publications/isis06_8selkirk.pdf ; (in:) C. Féry / G. Fanselow / M. Krifka : Working Papers of the SFB 632, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS), 6, 2007, S.125-146. |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 207576092 |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
| Sammlungen: | Linguistik |
| Licence (German): |  Deutsches Urheberrecht |
