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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:1967 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Selkirk, Elisabeth |
| Publisher | Universität Potsdam, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |
| Source Sets | Potsdam University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | InBook |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php |
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