This article reviews some of the theoretical notions and empirical phenomena which figure in current formal-semantic theories of focus. It also develops the connection between “alternative semantics” and “givenness” accounts of focus interpretation.

This thesis examines three research questions under the framework of Regulatory Focus Theory (Higgins, 1997, 1998). These research questions are organized into three essays. The first essay examines the malleability of regulatory construction of goals. I demonstrate that regulatory construction of a goal is subject to goal distance—the perceived discrepancy between current and desired end state. When goal distance is large, the goal is more likely to be construed as a promotion-focused goal; when goal distance is small, the goal is more likely to be construed as a prevention-focused goal. This effect is mediated by the intensity of anticipated affect (pleasure of goal attainment versus pain of goal failure). The second essay examines a fit between sustainability and a prevention focus. I demonstrate that sustainability claims activate prevention concerns in consumers. Consumers make prevention-focused inferences about products of sustainable companies. Finally, regulatory fit between a sustainable product and prevention-focused product claims leads to enhanced product evaluations. The third essay examines the influence of regulatory focus in sequentially presented choice sets. I demonstrate that regulatory focus influences evaluations of equivalent sequentially presented choice alternatives, the amount of search and choice of option form a sequential set. Prevention-focused individuals defer favorable evaluations until choice options presented later in the sequential set. They perform more search compared to promotion-focused individuals and select an option encountered later in the sequence. Theoretical contributions and practical implications of these essays are discussed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-241).

Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings.

(Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents.

This paper aims at presenting different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, a Guang language. We can differentiate between marked and unmarked focus strategies. The marked focus expressions are first syntactically characterized: the focused constituent is in sentence-initial position and is second always marked obligatorily by a focus marker, which is nɩ for non-subjects and N for subjects. Complementary to these structures, Foodo knows an elliptic form consisting of the focused constituent and a predication marker gɛ́. It will be shown that the two focus markers can be analyzed as having developed out of the homophone conjunction nɩ and that the constraints on the use of the focus markers can be best explained by this fact.

The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.

Three different topics associated with their respective applications are proposed in this thesis. The first application is the implementation of a PC-Based Vision Inspecting Machine. The Second topic is to carry out a advanced Auot-focusing technology. And the third topic is focused on the implementation of a Depth-from-Focus Technology.

In the research of focus on intonation languages, it is generally assumed that the stress not only signals the focus but also contributes to the different truth condition in sentences containing focus particle only. This phenomenon is known as ¡¥association with focus¡¦ (Jackendoff, 1972; Rooth, 1985, 1992, among others). However, this phenomenon has not been comprehensively studied in tonal languages such as Chinese. To further investigate whether the stress signals the focus in triadic sentences with zhi ¡¥only¡¦ and whether there is a preferred default focus interpretation, the study probes into the issue with respect to younger participants, i.e., teenagers in junior high schools. The study contains triadic sentences such as dative construction, double object construction and ba construction. Participants were asked to choose the focus which zhi ¡¥only¡¦ is associated with in a multiple choice questionnaire after the stories and test sentences were shown by a powerpoint file in the computer. There were three experiments in this study. In Experiment 1, 116 participants in the regular classes judged a contrastive stress awareness task and a modified Truth Value Judgment (TVJ) Task. Experiment 2 (TVJ task only) followed Experiment 1 except for using unfamiliar Cartoon figures. Experiment 3 (the contrastive stress awareness task and the TVJ task) reduplicated Experiment 2 in English. The participants in Experiment 2 and 3 were the same 30 participants in the gifted class. The results, first, further confirmed that even though Chinese teenagers were aware of the contrastive stress, they did not use it for disambiguating sentences with zhi ¡¥only¡¦ in both Chinese and English. Second, the participants tended not to choose the default wide VP focus but narrow focus. However, contrary to the default narrow DO focus that Chinese adult speakers preferred, the teenager participants favored the narrow focus which usually falls on the neutral stress (sentence-final) position. The phenomenon is even more salient in ba construction. Third, in English, contrastive stress was not used for disambiguation although they were aware of the stress. The interpretation of English focus particle only was similar to that of Chinese, so it was ascribed to L1 transfer.

The need for low propellant weight, high efficiency propulsion systems is a glaring need for various space missions. This thesis presents the thrust modeling of the Dense Plasma Focus plasma motion phases. It also contrasts some of the engineering tradeoffs between the existing coaxial plasma thrusters and the Dense Plasma Focus. Modeling the thrust generated by the DPF started with seeing how far the working models for the MPD would take the DPF. The effect of pulsed compared to quasi-steady state operation is computed. There is no known experimental data regarding thrust measurements for any DPF, so the thrust is analytically calculated using experimental data for the TAMU DPF. The calculated thrust is slightly higher than the thrust predicted by the models. The developed model shows that the force generated by the DPF will produce a thrust roughly three times the thrust for the MPD for similar input currents and electrode geometry. For the TAMUDPF to compete with the MPD as a thruster, it will need to be able to fire roughly 75 more times a second than the MPD.