Focus Ambiguities  

Oleh:

Jacobs, Joachim

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Semantics (Sebagian Full Text) vol. 8 no. 1-2 (Dec. 1991), page 1-36.
Topik: Focus ; Ambiguities; German Sentences.
Fulltext: vol 8, no 1, p 1-36.pdf (1.29MB)

Isi artikel

In what follows I will discuss ambiguities related to focus and stress in German sentences. Some of these ambiguities will be typical instances of what is now widely called 'focus projection', a term which was introduced by T. Hohle in his seminal paper of 1982. Focus projection arises in phrases with specific 'normal' stress patterns and consists in the possibility of assigning to such phrases several focus-background structures (FBS), differing from each other in the size of the constituent in focus. For example, in example (1), (1) Peter schlagt'Erich. with main stress on the object NP, this NP may be focus, but also larger units containing it, namely the predicate schlagt Erich or the whole sentence. What I will try to show is that within the theoretical framework sketched in Jacobs (1988a) focus projection proves to be a non-general, non-homogeneous and, in a way, a non-essential phenomenon. Focus projection is non-general in the sense that its typical pattern discussed in the literature—'normal' stress, larger foci properly including smaller foci—does not cover all instances of focus ambiguity. Focus projection is non-homogeneous because, even if one confines oneself to the typical cases, it comprises several completely different kinds of ambiguity. Finally, focus projection is non-essential if—as the term suggests—it is interpreted as involving percolation of focus features. In order to explain any of the ambiguities to be discussed here, the grammar does not have to contain technical mechanisms that move focus features along certain paths in structural trees.1 Rather, all of these ambiguities follow from independently motivated rules relating different levels of grammar or constraining grammatical representations. I will also try to show that within (a slightly modified version of) the theoretical framework mentioned above some of the notorious empirical problems of focus projection find a solution, and that they do so without introduction of additional theoretical machinery.2

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