Focus (linguistics)
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In linguistics, the focus determines which part of the sentence contributes the most important information. The focus may be highlighted either prosodically or syntactically or both, depending on the language. Although most articles in linguistic theory on focus are devoted to its effects in English, the effects of the relation between prominence and salience have been observed not only in topic-prominent languages such as Korean and Japanese, but also in languages such as Hungarian, Italian and Russian.
Focus, due to its often uncertain and broadly applied definition, has been analysed in a variety of ways by linguists. Early proposals for focus made it a feature bound to a single word within a sentence. In The Sound Pattern of English by Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky, the authors formulated a Nuclear Stress Rule which proposed this relation between the main stress of a sentence and a single constituent. The purpose of this rule was to capture the intuition that within each sentence, there is one word in particular that is accented more prominently due to its importance - this is said to form the nucleus of that sentence.
Focus was later suggested to be a structural position at the beginning of the sentence (or on the left periphery) in Romance languages such as Italian, as the lexical head of a Focus Phrase (or FP, following the X-bar theory of phrase structure).
Since this word is prominent sententially in a way which can contrast with lexical stress, this was originally referred to as "nuclear" stress by Chomsky and Halle. Differences between this original idea of focus and newer conceptions include the idea that focus is no longer generally thought to be marked on specific words or even positions within a sentence, but is now widely seen as the correspondence between heavy stress or pitch accent and informational salience linked to an ongoing discourse.
When focus is used as a feature, one theory in semantics is that it becomes a diacritic marking one version of a sentence (the one with that specific focus) from other interpretations of the sentence which do not vary in word order, but may vary in the way in which the words are taken to relate to each other. The different versions are said to differ in mathematical scope, with the sentence describing a wider range of circumstances having a wider scope than the more restrictive sentence.
Issues in specifying the stress-focus correspondence led to a major revision of focus as a set property. This spread focus out amongst a set of adjacent words, while allowing it to retain nuclear stress as a default condition. Since the focus corresponds to the main stress of the sentence, moving focus is possible by either strengthening the stress of nearby words or destressing anaphors, or words which relate to something previously stated and thus which it would be efficient not to repeat.
In addition to avoiding the restrictions inherent in marrying focus to a specific ordering of words, the change from the focus (singular) to focal sets and multiple foci allows for a better description of wide/narrow scope and its relation to the semantic concepts of implication and entailment.
Sound structure (phonological and phonetic) studies of focus are not as numerous, as relational language phenomena tend to be of greater interest to syntacticians and semanticists. But this may be changing: a recent study found that not only do focused words and phrases have a higher range of pitch compared to words in the same sentence but that words following the focus in both American English and Mandarin Chinese were lower than normal in pitch and words before a focus are unaffected. The precise usages of focus in natural language are still uncertain. A continuum of possibilities could possibly be defined between precisely enunciated and staccato styles of speech based on variations in pragmatics or timing.
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[edit] Sources
- Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle (1968). The Sound Pattern of English. MIT Press.
- Cinque, Guglielmo (1993). 'A null theory of phrase and compound stress'. Linguistic Inquiry 24:239-267.
- Jackendoff, Ray (1972). Semantic Structures. MIT Press.
- Neeleman, Ad and Tanya Reinhart (1998). 'Scrambling and the PF-Interface'. In The Projection of Arguments, CSLI Publications, 309-353.
- Ocampo, Francisco (2003). On the notion of focus in spoken Spanish: An empirical approach. In Theory, Practice, and Acquisition, ed. by Paula Kempchinsky and Carlos-Eduardo Pineros. Sommerville: Cascadilla Press, 207-226.
- Pereltsvaig, Asya (2002). 'Topic and focus as linear notions: evidence from Russian and Italian'. Proceedings of the Conference on the Interaction between Syntax and Pragmatics at UCL.
- Rooth, Mats (1992). 'A theory of focus interpretation' Natural Language Semantics 1:75-116.
- Szendrői, Kriszta (2004). 'Focus and the interaction between syntax and pragmatics'. Lingua 114.
- Xu, Y., C. X. Xu and X. Sun (2004). 'On the temporal domain of focus'. In Proceedings of International Conference on Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, Japan: 81-84.
