Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Volume/Issue:
Volume 55: Issue 3-4
Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “discourse-new”
Author:
Elisabeth Selkirk University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Linguistics South College Amherst MA 01003 USA

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Pages:
331–346
Online Publication Date:
04 Oct 2008
Publication Date:
01 Dec 2008
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1556/aling.55.2008.3-4.8
Keywords:
contrastive focus; givenness; second occurrence focus; F-marking; G-marking; prosody
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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 discourse-given constituents (Féry-Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discourse-new 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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Cover Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Print ISSN:
1216-8076
Online ISSN:
1588-2624

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Editor(s)-in-Chief: Katalin É. Kiss,
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Acta Linguistica Hungarica
Language English
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Foundation		 1951
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ISSN 1216-8076 (Print)
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