Focus types and focus realisations

2.3.2.1 Focus types

Focus has been assigned different classifications in the literature (Zimmerman & Onea, 2011). The most widely discussed types are contrastive focus and non-contrastive focus (Kiss, 1998; Krefika, 2008; Zimmerman & Onea, 2011). Again, these types are given different names in the literature. Kiss (1998) in his treatment of focus uses the terms identificational focus and informational focus. These two types of focus serve as the part of the pragmatic proposition by which the assertion is different from the presupposition. However, identificational focus has been associated with the notion of exhaustiveness and exclusiveness (Kiss, 1998), which is not found in information focus. In this regard, it is worthwhile noting that the two terms, namely contrastive focus and identificational focus, are used interchangeably in this thesis. Li (2008, p. 760), adopting the term contrastive focus instead of identificational focus, explains that exhaustiveness refers to the idea that “the constituent under contrastive focus in a sentence is a complete list of the entities that makes the truth value of the proposition true”, while exclusiveness means that “those and only those entities under contrastive focus will make the truth value of the proposition true, excluding other entities”. This can be illustrated by considering the it-cleft construction in the following example taken from Li (2008):

(5) It was a hat and a shirt that Mary bought yesterday. (Li, 2008; 760)

In this example, the truth value of the it-cleft construction is true if a hat and a shirt are the things (exhaustiveness) that Mary bought and nothing else (exclusiveness). In other words, if Mary had bought a hat, a shirt and something else such as a pair of shoes, this makes the sentence above false (Li, 2008; 760).

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On the other hand, information focus is usually associated with topic presentation and newness, generally referring to non-presupposed information (Halliday, 1967; Kiss, 1998; Zimmerman & Onea, 2011).

(6) a. It was a hat that Mary picked for herself.

b. Mary picked herself a HAT. (Kiss, 1998, p. 251)

Comparing the two sentences above, English it-cleft constructions evoke an exhaustive interpretation as in (6a), which means that Mary did not pick other items with the hat (this contradicts other possible alternatives as explained in 5) and in this case the sentence conveys identificational focus. The sentence in (6b) expresses the non- presupposed nature of information and hence conveys information focus (Kiss, 1998, p. 251).

Kiss (1998) argues that the two types of focus differ in the way they are pragmatically and semantically used. She proposed a distinction between the two focus types based on the claim that an instance of identificational focus has different syntactic and semantic properties to a case of information focus. She suggests that the contrastive value in identificational focus facilitates the identification of an appropriate alternative that best refers to the asserted constituent in the utterance and excludes the remaining alternatives evoked. In contrast, information focus carries a presentational value and requires less formal marking, making it suitable for introducing a piece of new information into the discourse (Kiss, 1998; see also Zimmerman & Onea, 2011 for discussion). According to Zimmerman and Onea (2011), the distinction between the two focus types is recognised through both formal realisation and their pragmatic functions, which will be discussed below.

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2.3.2.2 Focus realisation

The grammatical realisation of focus constituents in languages varies and includes specific prosodic realisation, special morphological realisation and syntactic reordering. In the case of the focus constructions that are under investigation, the grammatical realisation of focus constituents is realised through both syntactic reordering and the insertion of additional lexical material (e.g. It is ...that…), apart from the preposing construction that consists of reordering only. Zimmerman and Onea (2011) provide examples for the realisations that they have taken from different languages. The following example is taken from English to illustrate the prosodic realisation of an object and a verb focus, respectively, by means of accent placement:

(7) a. Q: What did Peter sell?

A: Peter sold [the CAR\]FOC. b. Q: What did Peter do with the car?

A: He [SOLD\]FOC the car.

(Zimmerman & Onea, 2011, p. 1658)

Focus realisation by means of syntactic reordering is evident in Hungarian, where the constituent focused on is realised by placing it immediately before the verb. Zimmerman & Onea (2011) provide the following example taken from Szabolcsi (1981) to illustrate this kind of focus realisation:

(8) a. Pe´ ter [a padlo´n]FOC aludt. Peter on floor slept ‘Peter slept on the FLOOR’.

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b. A padlo´n [Pe´ter]FOC aludt. on floor Peter slept ‘PETER slept on the floor’.

(Zimmerman & Onea, 2011, p. 1661)

Zimmerman and Onea’s (2011) assumption is based on the fact that focus involves unexpected facts or a discourse shift that are/is difficult for the hearer to accommodate. Therefore, the speaker tries to assist the hearer with updating their background assumption by choosing “to use a non-canonical, i.e., a structurally more complex sentence that comes with additional grammatical marking in the form of, for instance, a particular intonation contour, syntactic movement, a cleft structure, or the insertion of morphological markers” (Zimmerman & Onea, 2011, p. 1665), as shown above.

Following a constructional grammar approach, Lambrecht (1994, 2001, 2010) argued that the dominant strategies for indicating focus vary as a function of language- specific constraints on syntax and prosody. In English, for example, the predominant means of realising or marking focus (i.e., the new or relevant information about the topic of an utterance) is through the use of word-level stress accent (i.e., stress or pitch accent) (Lambrecht, 1994; Reichle, 2010), which has relative freedom in its placement (Reichle & Birdsong, 2014). To exemplify, in the sentence “I’m eating PIZZA for dinner”, the spoken language marks “pizza” as focal through the stress or pitch accent, which in turn caries either an informational meaning (e.g. it evokes new or relevant information, perhaps in response to a preceding question within the discourse) or a contrastive sense (e.g., the speakers contrast pizza with other dining alternatives that may be already present in the discourse). However, English also provides syntactic means for realising focus, which will be discussed in the following section.

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