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Narrow Focus and Fronting Strategies
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Narrow Focus and Fronting Strategies

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2023) | Viewed by 10008

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Mara Frascarelli

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Roma Tre, 00146 Rome, Italy
Interests: interface analysis of discourse-related categories (esp. Focus, Topic, Correction, Mirativity); interpretation of null subjects in consistent, partial and radical languages; experiment-based comparative analysis of typologically different languages; acquisition of discourse-related phenomena;
Dr. Giorgio Carella

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Roma Tre, 00146 Rome, Italy
Interests: generative grammar; discourse grammar; interface phenomena; prosody; experimental-data collection; competence assessment; item analysis;

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Focus is a discourse category which has been given great attention by scholars in the last 50 years and is traditionally described as “that part of information that is assumed by the speaker not to be shared by the hearer” (Jackendoff 1972), while the unfocused part of the sentence provides background information. However, several works have shown the necessity to distinguish different Focus types for their formal, semantic and pragmatic properties (cf. Kiss 1998, Krifka 2007, Bianchi 2013, Bianchi et al. 2015, among others).

From a structural viewpoint, Focus can be realized in situ in a great number of languages. Nevertheless, Focus Fronting (FF) is also a major strategy, especially for some specific Focus types (cf., among many others, Alboiu 2004, Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007). However, its specific realization shows diverse patterns and seems to be prominently optional in a number of languages, calling into question the assumption that movement operations are driven by narrow syntax requirements (i.e., the interpretation of formal features in dedicated functional projections). Since such requirements should not be flexible, FF stands up as a vexed question.        

Given this scenario, this Special Issue aims to offer a fine-grained analysis of FF (and related marked strategies, such as clefting) across natural languages, concentrating in particular on Corrective Focus (cf. Neeleman et al. 2006; Bianchi and Bocci 2012, among others) and Mirative Focus (cf. Bianchi et al 2016).

We strongly encourage interested scholars and researchers to contribute to this Special Issue, submitting a paper on marked Focus strategies, preferably comparing typologically different languages. Contributions addressing the thematics of fronting optionality and investigating Slavic and non-Indo-European languages will be prioritized.

Interested authors are requested to submit a title and an abstract of 400–600 words. Relevant deadlines are given in the completion schedule below.

Abstracts should be sent to the Languages editorial office ([email protected]). They will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue.

Notification of acceptance will be given by the end of February. Full manuscripts will then undergo double-blind peer-review.

Tentative completion schedule:

  • Abstract submission deadline: 15 January 2022
  • Notification of abstract acceptance: 28 February 2022
  • Full manuscript deadline: 15 September 2022

Invited contributors:

  • Silvio Cruschina
  • Victor Junnan Pan

References

Alboiu, Gabriela. 2004. Optionality at the interface: Triggering focus in Romanian. In Triggers, ed. by Henk van Riemsdijk NS Anne Breitbath, 49–75. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bianchi, Valentina. 2013. On ‘focus movement’ in Italian. In Information structure and agreement, ed. by Maria Victoria Camacho Taboada, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González, and Mariano Reyes-Tejedor, 193-216. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bianchi, Valentina, and Giuliano Bocci. 2012. Should I stay or should I go? Optional focus movement in Italian. In Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 9, ed. Christopher Piñon, 1–16. Paris: EISS.

Bianchi, Valentina, Giuliano Bocci and Silvio Cruschina. 2015. Focus fronting and its implicatures. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2013, ed. by Aboh Enoch, Jeannette Schaeffer and Petra Sleeman, 3-20. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bianchi, Valentina, Giuliano Bocci and Silvio Cruschina. 2016. Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures. Semantic and Pragmatics 9 (3).

Hartmann, Katharina and Malte Zimmermann. 2007. In place – out of place: Focus in Hausa. In On information structure, meaning and form: Generalizatons across languages, ed. by Schwabe Kerstin and Susanne Winkler, 365–403. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kiss, Katalin É. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74: 245-273.

Krifka, Manfred. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In Interdisciplinary studies on information structure, ed. by Féry Caroline and Manfred Krifka, 13–55. ISIS: Universitätverlag Potsdam.

Neeleman, Ad, Elena Titov, Hans van de Koot, and Reiko Vermeulen. 2007. A syntactic typology of topic, focus and contrast. In Alternatives to Cartography, ed. by van Craenenbroek Jeroen, 15-52. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Prof. Dr. Mara Frascarelli
Dr. Giorgio Carella
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

 

Keywords

  • informative focus
  • corrective focus
  • mirative focus
  • focus strategies
  • fronting
  • optionality
  • discourse grammar
  • narrow syntax

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 1078 KiB  
Article
Narrow Focus Without Prosody: Some Observations from the Written Italian of University Students
by Elisa Di Domenico
Languages 2024, 9(12), 357; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9120357 - 25 Nov 2024
Viewed by 232
Abstract
In this work, we analyze the narrow focus strategies in the written Italian of university students. Although prosodic prominence is a characterizing feature of focus—functionally more important than morphosyntactic marking, according to some authors—we assume that prosody is essential for language comprehension and [...] Read more.
In this work, we analyze the narrow focus strategies in the written Italian of university students. Although prosodic prominence is a characterizing feature of focus—functionally more important than morphosyntactic marking, according to some authors—we assume that prosody is essential for language comprehension and hence, in the written modality, focus prosody is assigned by the reader on the basis of the morphosyntactic cues that mark focus. The data on which we base our analysis are selected from two existing corpora, containing more formal and less formal monological texts produced by students attending university throughout Italy. The investigation brings to light a similar pattern, as well as some differences, between the two sub-corpora examined. Besides a widespread use of focus particles, and the virtual absence of the O(S)V strategy, we noticed many instances of focalization inside the copular domain, particularly in the more formal sub-corpus. This pattern is discussed in relation to some of the relevant literature and the nature of the texts examined. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Narrow Focus and Fronting Strategies)
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27 pages, 26649 KiB  
Article
Focus Fronting in a Language with In Situ Marking: The Case of Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà
by Malte Zimmermann and Constantine Kouankem
Languages 2024, 9(4), 117; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9040117 - 26 Mar 2024
Viewed by 1109
Abstract
This paper discusses the structural realisation of contrastive focus in the Grassfields Bantu language Bamileke Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà, yet another language with grammatically optional focus fronting. We show that the realisation of contrastive focus in Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà is by default marked in situ with the morphological [...] Read more.
This paper discusses the structural realisation of contrastive focus in the Grassfields Bantu language Bamileke Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà, yet another language with grammatically optional focus fronting. We show that the realisation of contrastive focus in Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà is by default marked in situ with the morphological focus marker á. We further show that á introduces an additional, not-at-issue exhaustivity inference as part of its lexical meaning. Taken together, this means that two often-discussed interpretive triggers of grammatically optional focus fronting, namely, contrastivity and exhaustivity, are not responsible for triggering Mǝ̀dʉ́mbà’s focus left-dislocation. Rather, the main semantic contribution of focus fronting consists in triggering an existence presupposition, a discourse-semantic effect well known from other focus–background bipartitions, possibly in combination with other, softer discourse-semantic effects, such as the special emphasis required in cases of discourse unexpectedness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Narrow Focus and Fronting Strategies)
22 pages, 2443 KiB  
Article
Focus Constructions Involving shì in Mandarin Chinese
by Victor Junnan Pan and Chang Liu
Languages 2023, 8(2), 103; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8020103 - 6 Apr 2023
Viewed by 2000
Abstract
Recent studies have shown that shì ‘be’… (de) focus sentences in Mandarin Chinese are not structurally uniform. One of the criteria to make distinctions among them is the Adjacency Condition, that is, only the right adjacent element of shì can be focused. [...] Read more.
Recent studies have shown that shì ‘be’… (de) focus sentences in Mandarin Chinese are not structurally uniform. One of the criteria to make distinctions among them is the Adjacency Condition, that is, only the right adjacent element of shì can be focused. The debate has been centered on the question of why this restriction only holds in certain types of sentences involving focus but not in all of them. We argue that the so-called Adjacency Condition is not a primary condition that regulates the distribution of different types of foci; instead, the presence or the absence of adjacency-like restriction precisely indicates the existence of two different syntactic structures involving foci: one gives rise to the adjacency effects, whereas the other one does not. Importantly, our central proposal is that any constituent that falls under the c-command domain of shì will have a chance to get a focus reading if prosodically prominent, which naturally holds for the constituents that are not adjacent to shì. Along this line, shì is analyzed as a focus domain indicator rather than the focus marker itself. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Narrow Focus and Fronting Strategies)
33 pages, 12149 KiB  
Article
Confronting Focus Strategies in Finnish and in Italian: An Experimental Study on Object Focusing
by Elina Ylinärä, Giorgio Carella and Mara Frascarelli
Languages 2023, 8(1), 32; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010032 - 17 Jan 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1947
Abstract
Focus is cross-linguistically associated with a number of different strategies, such as fronting, clefting, markers, and prosody. In some cases, the choice between one strategy or another is determined by language-specific rules, while in others, two or more strategies seem to be optional, [...] Read more.
Focus is cross-linguistically associated with a number of different strategies, such as fronting, clefting, markers, and prosody. In some cases, the choice between one strategy or another is determined by language-specific rules, while in others, two or more strategies seem to be optional, and thus, somehow “unpredictable”. In this experimental study, we investigate the syntactic strategies employed in object focusing in Finnish and in Italian by examining the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features underlying the choice of a specific Focus strategy. In particular, the present experiment is aimed to investigate two strategies employed in both languages for object Focus realization, namely, Focus in situ and fronting, in order to verify whether the choice between them is influenced by a specific type of feature, a combination of Focus-related features, the verb category involved, or the interplay between these three factors. The incidence of alternative constructions, in particular clefting in Italian and the -hAn discourse marker in Finnish, is also taken into consideration, and relevant asymmetries are analyzed in a comprehensive, comparative account. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Narrow Focus and Fronting Strategies)
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21 pages, 1170 KiB  
Article
The Realization of Information Focus in Catalan
by Silvio Cruschina and Laia Mayol
Languages 2022, 7(4), 310; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7040310 - 9 Dec 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2289
Abstract
Answers to wh-questions are the most widespread method to elicit information focus. When studying the syntax of focus, however, this method is problematic because the most natural answer to a wh-question is often a fragment that only includes the focus. This problem has [...] Read more.
Answers to wh-questions are the most widespread method to elicit information focus. When studying the syntax of focus, however, this method is problematic because the most natural answer to a wh-question is often a fragment that only includes the focus. This problem has led to considerable controversy in the literature about the position in which information focus is realized, particularly for Spanish, but also for Catalan. In order to enhance the naturalness and reliability of the question-answer test, we designed an experiment with a new elicitation technique (i.e., questions with a delayed answer) in which some material is inserted between the question and the point in which the participant is asked to answer the question, so that the Catalan participants would spontaneously utter a full sentence instead of a fragment, without being explicitly instructed to do so. The material of this production experiment was then adapted in a rating experiment on the acceptability of preverbal and postverbal information foci in Catalan. The results of this second study confirm the findings of the production experiment: postverbal focus is always preferred over preverbal focus, both in the case of subjects and objects. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Narrow Focus and Fronting Strategies)
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