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<p>Dear Kasper,</p>
<p>the clearest cases of focusing are cleft-sentences. At the same
time, it is clear that many sentence components are not amenable
to clefting, and many of those that are not are nevertheless
lexical rather than grammatical. Thus I suppose focusability will
not, for your purposes, be operationalized as amenability to
clefting.</p>
<p>Thus you need to consider milder forms of focusing. If
contrastive stress counts, then it remains true that many items
that have otherwise been regarded as grammatical can bear
contrastive stress. Think of exchanges such as this:</p>
<p>Will you do it? - I <b>would</b> do it if [so and so].</p>
<p>In my understanding, what is focused here is exactly the
conditional modality, so what is stressed is its expression.</p>
<p>My attempt at a definition may seem circular until I spell out
how constraints on the distribution of items and classes of items
are formulated and quantified. (It has probably been done
somewhere in the literature.) This is independent of a prior
definition of 'grammar'; it just refers to cooccurrence of items
in constructions. When I have spelled out some cases, I may take
the liberty of sending you the URL.</p>
<p>Allow me to repeat that if you take grammaticalization seriously
as a gradual phenomenon, then grammatical status, too, is not a
yes-or-no matter, but rather one of degree. Consequently, no
single binary criterion like focusability will suffice for its
operationalization.</p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Christian<br>
</p>
-- <br>
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<p style="font-size:90%">Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann<br>
Rudolfstr. 4<br>
99092 Erfurt<br>
<span style="font-variant:small-caps">Deutschland</span></p>
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