In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, focus (
abbreviated
An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...
) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed
prosodically by a
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
,
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
,
semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy
Philosophy (f ...
,
pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...
, and
sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...
.
Functional approaches
Information structure has been described at length by a number of linguists as a grammatical phenomenon. Lexicogrammatical structures that code prominence, or focus, of some information over other information has a particularly significant history dating back to the 19th century. Recent attempts to explain focus phenomena in terms of discourse function, including those by
Knud Lambrecht and
Talmy Givón
Thomas Givon (also known as Talmy Givón) (born June 22, 1936) is a linguist and writer. He is one of the founders of "West Coast Functionalism", today classified as a usage-based model of language, and of the linguistics department at the Unive ...
, often connect focus with the packaging of new, old, and contrasting information. Lambrecht in particular distinguishes three main types of focus constructions: predicate-focus structure, argument-focus structure, and sentence-focus structure. Focus has also been linked to other more general cognitive processes, including
attention
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "Atte ...
orientation.
In such approaches, ''contrastive focus'' is understood as the coding of information that is contrary to the presuppositions of the
interlocutor.
The
topic–comment
In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or Focus (linguistics), focus) is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structu ...
model distinguishes between the topic (theme) and what is being said about that topic (the comment, rheme, or focus).
Formalist approaches
Standard formalist approaches to grammar argue that
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
and
semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy
Philosophy (f ...
cannot exchange information directly (''See Fig. 1''). Therefore, syntactic mechanisms including features and
transformations include prosodic information regarding focus that is passed to the semantics and phonology. Focus may be highlighted either prosodically or syntactically or both, depending on the language. In syntax this can be done assigning focus markers, as shown in (1), or by preposing as shown in (2):
(1) I saw
OHN Ohn is a Burmese name, used by people from Myanmar. Notable people with the name include:
* Daw Ohn (1913–2003), Burmese professor in Pali
* Ohn Gyaw (born 1932), Burmese Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1991 to 1998
* Ohn Kyaing (born 1944), Bur ...
f.
(2)
OHN Ohn is a Burmese name, used by people from Myanmar. Notable people with the name include:
* Daw Ohn (1913–2003), Burmese professor in Pali
* Ohn Gyaw (born 1932), Burmese Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1991 to 1998
* Ohn Kyaing (born 1944), Bur ...
f, I saw.
In (1), focus is marked syntactically with the subscripted ‘f’ which is realized phonologically by a nuclear
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
.
Clefting
A cleft sentence is a complex sentence (one having a main clause and a dependent clause) that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular Constituent (linguistics), constituent into Focus (linguisti ...
induces an obligatory intonation break. Therefore, in (2), focus is marked via word order and a nuclear pitch accent.
In English, focus also relates to phonology and has ramifications for how and where
suprasegmental
In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, str ...
information such as
rhythm
Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular recu ...
,
stress
Stress may refer to:
Science and medicine
* Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition
* Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
, and
intonation is encoded in the grammar, and in particular intonational tunes that mark focus.
Speakers can use pitch accents on syllables to indicate what word(s) are in focus. New words are often accented while given words are not. The accented word(s) forms the focus domain. However, not all of the words in a focus domain need be accented. (See
for rules on accent placement and focus-marking). The focus domain can be either ''broad'', as shown in (3), or ''narrow'', as shown in (4) and (5):
(3) Did you see a grey dog or a cat? I saw
grey DOGf.
(4) Did you see a grey dog or a grey cat? I saw a grey
''DOGf.
(5) Did you see a grey dog or a black dog? I saw a
''GREYf dog.
The question/answer paradigm shown in (3)–(5) has been utilized by a variety of theorists
to illustrate the range of contexts a sentence containing focus can be used felicitously. Specifically, the question/answer paradigm has been used as a diagnostic for what counts as new information. For example, the focus pattern in (3) would be infelicitous if the question was ‘Did you see a grey dog or a black dog?’.
In (3) and (4), the pitch accent is marked in bold. In (3), the pitch accent is placed on ''dog'' but the entire noun phrase ''a grey dog'' is under focus. In (4), the pitch accent is also placed on ''dog'' but only the noun ''dog'' is under focus. In (5), pitch accent is placed on ''grey'' and only the adjective ''grey'' is under focus.
Historically, generative proposals made focus a feature bound to a single word within a sentence. Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
and Halle formulated a Nuclear Stress Rule that proposed there to be a relation between the main stress of a sentence and a single constituent. Since this constituent is prominent sententially in a way that can contrast with lexical stress, this was originally referred to as "nuclear" stress. 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
Nucleus ( : nuclei) is a Latin word for the seed inside a fruit. It most often refers to:
*Atomic nucleus, the very dense central region of an atom
*Cell nucleus, a central organelle of a eukaryotic cell, containing most of the cell's DNA
Nucle ...
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
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
such as Italian, as the lexical head of a Focus Phrase (or FP, following the X-bar theory
In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970Chomsky, Noam (1970). Remarks on Nominalization. In: R. Jacobs and P. Rosenbaum (eds.) ...
of phrase structure
Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural langu ...
). Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always str ...
, Selkirk,[ Rooth,] Krifka, Schwarzschild[ argue that focus consists of a feature that is assigned to a node in the syntactic representation of a sentence.
Because focus is now widely seen as corresponding between heavy stress, or nuclear pitch accent, this feature is often associated with the phonologically prominent element(s) of a sentence.
Sound structure (]phonological
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
and phonetic
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
) 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
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...
and Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of ...
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
Staccato (; Italian for "detached") is a form of musical articulation. In modern notation, it signifies a note of shortened duration, separated from the note that may follow by silence. It has been described by theorists and has appeared in music ...
styles of speech based on variations in pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...
or timing.
Currently, there are two central themes in research on focus in generative linguistics. First, given what words or expressions are prominent, what is the meaning of some sentence? Rooth,[ Jacobs,] Krifka,[ and von Stechow] claim that there are lexical items and construction specific-rules that refer directly to the notion of focus. Dryer, Kadmon, Marti, Roberts,[ Schwarzschild,] Vallduvi, and Williams argue for accounts in which general principles of discourse explain focus sensitivity.[ Second, given the meaning and syntax of some sentence, what words or expressions are prominent?
]
Prominence and meaning
Focus directly affects the semantics, or meaning, of a sentence. Different ways of pronouncing the sentence affects the meaning, or, what the speaker intends to convey. Focus distinguishes one interpretation of a sentence from other interpretations of the same sentence that do not differ in word order, but may differ in the way in which the words are taken to relate to each other. To see the effects of focus on meaning, consider the following examples:
(6) John only introduced Bill to SUE.
In (6), accent is placed on Sue. There are two readings of (6) – broad focus shown in (7) and narrow focus shown in (8):
(7) John only ntroduced Bill to SUEf.
(8) John only introduced Bill to UEf.
The meaning of (7) can be summarized as ''the only thing John did was introduce Bill to Sue''. The meaning of (8) can be summarized as ''the only person to whom John introduced Bill is Sue''.
In both (7) and (8), focus is associated with the focus sensitive expression ''only''. This is known as association with focus. The class of focus sensitive expressions in which focus can be associated with includes exclusives (''only'', ''just'') non-scalar additives (''merely'', ''too'') scalar additives (''also'', ''even''), particularlizers (''in particular'', ''for example''), intensifiers, quantificational adverbs, quantificational determiners, sentential connectives, emotives, counterfactuals, superlatives, negation and generics.[ It is claimed that focus operators must ]c-command
In generative grammar and related frameworks, a node in a parse tree c-commands its sister node and all of its sister's descendants. In these frameworks, c-command plays a central role in defining and constraining operations such as syntactic mov ...
their focus.
Alternative semantics
In the alternative semantics Alternative semantics (or Hamblin semantics) is a framework in formal semantics and logic. In alternative semantics, expressions denote ''alternative sets'', understood as sets of objects of the same semantic type. For instance, while the word "Le ...
approach to focus pioneered by Mats Rooth, each constituent has both an ordinary denotation and a focus denotation which are composed by parallel computations. The ordinary denotation of a sentence is simply whatever denotation it would have in a non-alternative-based system while its focus denotation can be thought of as the set containing all ordinary denotations one could get by substituting the focused constituent for another expression of the same semantic type. For a sentence such as (9), the ordinary denotation will be the proposition
In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
which is true iff Mary likes Sue. Its focus denotation will be the set of each propositions such that for some contextually relevant individual 'x', that proposition is true iff Mary likes 'x'.[
(9) Mary likes UEsub>f.
In formal terms, the ordinary denotation of (9) will be as shown below:
* .
Focus denotations are computed using the ''alternative sets'' provided by alternative semantics. In this system, most unfocused items denote the singleton set containing their ordinary denotations.
* ]