24.2663, Books: Finding Focus: Komen

Mon Jul 1 22:20:38 UTC 2013

LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2663. Mon Jul 01 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2663, Books: Finding Focus: Komen

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Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 18:20:28
From: Mariëtte Bonenkamp [lot at uu.nl]
Subject: Finding Focus: Komen

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Title: Finding Focus 
Subtitle: A study of the historical development of focus in English 
Series Title: LOT dissertation Series  

Publication Year: 2013 
Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
	   http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Book URL: http://www.lotpublications.nl/index3.html 

Author: Erwin R. Komen

Paperback: ISBN:  9789460931123 Pages:  Price: Europe EURO 27.84

Abstract:

This study reveals how two important focus articulations change over time in
written English. Constituent focus, often accompanied by contrast, makes use
of the clause-initial position in the oldest stages of English, but as this
position comes to be used for the grammatical subject over time, the it-cleft
construction is increasingly used for the expression of contrastive focus.
There is no one-to-one mapping between contrastive focus and the it-cleft: the
Old English it-cleft, on a par with modern Scandinavian counterparts, mostly
functions as a text-organization device, and a synchronic study of Chechen
shows that it uses the it-cleft exclusively for text-organization, while focus
is indicated by word order and wh-clefts. Presentational focus, which is used
where the main objective of a sentence is the introduction of a new
participant, prefers to have this participant after the finite verb, but the
strategy to achieve this goal changes over time: the word order flexibility of
Old English allows new major participants to appear as subjects after the
finite verb, but the growing demand of having grammatical subjects appear
before the finite verb results in the use of an expletive strategy in late
Modern English: the expletive is before the finite verb, while the logical
subject follows it. The study on the change in focus realizations makes heavy
use of texts that are enriched with referential information: the referential
status of each noun phrase, and a pointer to an antecedent if a noun phrase is
anaphoric. The success in using this information in order to determine focus
domains leads to an important hypothesis, which says that focus is
compositional in nature: focus articulations can be derived by combining
syntactic and referential information. Further work should explore this claim
in more detail.

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Written In: English  (eng)

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