Focus marking and focus interpretation

• Published in: Lingua 2011-09, Vol.121 (11), p.1651-1670
• Main Authors: Zimmermann, Malte, Onea, Edgar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alternatives; Contrast; Focus; Information structure
• ISSN: 0024-3841; 1872-6135
• DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.002

► Focus is a universal notion of information structure. ► The formal realization of focus differs in different languages. ► There is no one to one mapping between focus and focus marking. ► We give an overview of focus marking strategies. ► We give a theory of focus interpretation. The languages of the world exhibit a range of formal phenomena (e.g. accenting, syntactic reordering and morphological marking) that are commonly linked to the information-structural notion of focus. Crucially, there does not seem to be a one-to-one mapping between particular formal features (focus marking devices) and focus, neither from a cross-linguistic perspective, nor within individual languages. This raises the question of what is actually being expressed if we say that a constituent is focused in a particular language, and whether, or to what extent, the same semantic or pragmatic content is formally expressed by focus-marking across languages. This special issue addresses the question of focus and its grammatical realization from a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives. In this introductory article we elaborate on this question by making an explicit proposal about what we take to be the correct way of thinking about the information-structural category of focus and its formal realization. In the first part, we introduce a unified semantico-pragmatic perspective on focus in terms of alternatives and possible worlds. In the second part, we present a cursory cross-linguistic overview of focus marking strategies as found in the languages of the world. Finally, in the third part, we discuss the connection between the notion of focus, different pragmatic uses of focus and different focus marking strategies employed in the grammars of natural languages.