The Meaning Of Topic And Focus


The Meaning Of Topic And Focus
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The Meaning Of Topic And Focus


The Meaning Of Topic And Focus
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Author : Daniel Büring
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2012-08-21

The Meaning Of Topic And Focus written by Daniel Büring and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-08-21 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.


This study provides an illuminating and ground-breaking account of the complex interaction of intonational phenomena, semantics and pragmatics. Based on examples from German and English, and centred on an analysis of the fall-rise intonation contour, a semantic interpretation for two different pitch accents - Focus and Topic - is developed. The cross-sentence, as well as the sentence internal semantic effects of these accents, follow from the given treatment. The account is based on Montogovian possible world semantics and Chomskian generative syntax.



Topic And Focus


Topic And Focus
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Author : Chungmin Lee
language : en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date : 2006-12-18

Topic And Focus written by Chungmin Lee and has been published by Springer Science & Business Media this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2006-12-18 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.


During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The workshop was designed to lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts between linguists devoted to the study of meaning and linguists engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. This volume contains papers emerging from the Santa Barbara Workshop on Topic and Focus. A wide variety of methodologies and research interests related to topic and focus are represented in the papers. Some works present results of phonetic studies, either acoustic or perceptual, on the expression of topic and/or focus; others examine semantic or pragmatic features of topic and/or focus, while others are concerned with the interface between intonation and meaning. Data from several different languages are represented in the papers, including several languages with relatively little documentation particularly in the venue of topic and focus, e. g. Basque, Chickasaw, Indonesian, Polish, Taiwanese. The broad sample of languages coupled with the wide variety of research topics addressed by the papers promise to enrich our typological understanding of topic and focus phenomena and provide an impetus for further research. The following paragraphs offer brief summaries of the papers contained in this volume: Gorka Elordieta’s paper describes prosodic conditions governing focus in a dialect of Basque with pitch accents.



The Meaning Of The Sentence In Its Semantic And Pragmatic Aspects


The Meaning Of The Sentence In Its Semantic And Pragmatic Aspects
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Author : P. Sgall
language : en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date : 1986-05-31

The Meaning Of The Sentence In Its Semantic And Pragmatic Aspects written by P. Sgall and has been published by Springer Science & Business Media this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1986-05-31 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.




Topic Focus Articulation Tripartite Structures And Semantic Content


Topic Focus Articulation Tripartite Structures And Semantic Content
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Author : Eva Hajicová
language : en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date : 2013-03-09

Topic Focus Articulation Tripartite Structures And Semantic Content written by Eva Hajicová and has been published by Springer Science & Business Media this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-03-09 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.


1. 1 OBJECTIVES The main objective of this joint work is to bring together some ideas that have played central roles in two disparate theoretical traditions in order to con tribute to a better understanding of the relationship between focus and the syn tactic and semantic structure of sentences. Within the Prague School tradition and the branch of its contemporary development represented by Hajicova and Sgall (HS in the sequel), topic-focus articulation has long been a central object of study, and it has long been a tenet of Prague school linguistics that topic-focus structure has systematic relevance to meaning. Within the formal semantics tradition represented by Partee (BHP in the sequel), focus has much more recently become an area of concerted investigation, but a number of the semantic phenomena to which focus is relevant have been extensively investi gated and given explicit compositional semantic-analyses. The emergence of 'tripartite structures' (see Chapter 2) in formal semantics and the partial simi larities that can be readily observed between some aspects of tripartite structures and some aspects of Praguian topic-focus articulation have led us to expect that a closer investigation of the similarities and differences in these different theoretical constructs would be a rewarding undertaking with mutual benefits for the further development of our respective theories and potential benefit for the study of semantic effects of focus in other theories as well.



Sense And Sensitivity


Sense And Sensitivity
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Author : David I. Beaver
language : en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date : 2009-01-30

Sense And Sensitivity written by David I. Beaver and has been published by John Wiley & Sons this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-01-30 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.


Sense and Sensitivity advances a novel research proposal in the nascent field of formal pragmatics, exploring in detail the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language discourse. The authors develop a new account of focus sensitivity, and show that what has hitherto been regarded as a uniform phenomenon in fact results from three different mechanisms. The book Makes a major contribution to ongoing research in the area of focus sensitivity – a field exploring interactions between sound and meaning, specifically the dependency some words have on the effects of focus, such as "she only LIKES me" (i.e. nothing deeper) compared to "she only likes ME" (i.e. nobody else) Discusses the features of the QFC theory (Quasi association, Free association, and Conventional association), a new account of focus implying a tripartite typology of focus-sensitive expressions Presents novel cross-linguistic data on focus and focus sensitivity that will be relevant across a range of linguistic sub-fields: semantics and pragmatics, syntax, and intonational phonology Concludes with a case study of exclusives (like “only”), arguing that the entire existing literature has missed crucial generalizations, and for the first time explaining the focus sensitivity of these expressions in terms of their meaning and discourse function



Topic And Focus Markers In Spanish Portuguese And French


Topic And Focus Markers In Spanish Portuguese And French
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Author : Anja Hennemann
language : en
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
Release Date : 2020-06-12

Topic And Focus Markers In Spanish Portuguese And French written by Anja Hennemann and has been published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-06-12 with categories.


This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers - such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts - are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.



The Syntax Of Topic Focus And Contrast


The Syntax Of Topic Focus And Contrast
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Author : Ad Neeleman
language : en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Release Date : 2012-12-06

The Syntax Of Topic Focus And Contrast written by Ad Neeleman and has been published by Walter de Gruyter this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-12-06 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.


This book addresses how core notions of information structure (topic, focus and contrast) are expressed in syntax. The authors propose that the syntactic effects of information structure come about as a result of mapping rules that are flexible enough to allow topics and foci to be expressed in a variety of positions, but strict enough to capture certain cross-linguistic generalisations about their distribution. In particular, the papers argue that only contrastive topics and contrastive foci undergo movement and that this is because such movement has the function of marking the scope of contrast. Several predications are derived from this proposal: such as that a focus cannot move across a topic – whether the latter is in situ or not. Syntactic and semantic evidence in support of this proposal is presented from a wide range of languages (including Dutch, English, Japanese, Korean and Russian) and theoretical consequences explored. The first chapter not only outlines its theoretical aims, but also provides an introduction to information structure. As a consequence, the book is accessible to advanced students as well as professional linguists.



Information Structure And Sentence Form


Information Structure And Sentence Form
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Author : Knud Lambrecht
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 1996-11-13

Information Structure And Sentence Form written by Knud Lambrecht and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1996-11-13 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.


Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.



Focus


Focus
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Author : Peter Bosch
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 1999

Focus written by Peter Bosch and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1999 with Computers categories.


This collection of papers examines the theoretical, psychological and descriptive approaches to focus.



The Architecture Of Focus


The Architecture Of Focus
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Author : Valéria Molnár
language : en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Release Date : 2011-12-22

The Architecture Of Focus written by Valéria Molnár and has been published by Walter de Gruyter this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-12-22 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.


This collection investigates the architecture of focus in linguistic theory from different theoretical perspectives. Research on focus and information structure in the last four decades has shown that the phenomenon of focus is highly complex, the theoretical approaches manifold, and the data highly sensitive. The main emphasis has been placed on the integration of the notion of focus in generative grammar. In recent years, however, the approaches to focus and information structure underwent a radical change in perspective. The theoretical concept of focus, its related terms and phenomena became the object of research. Along with it, the research questions shifted: instead of locating focus in the architecture of grammar, linguists investigate the architecture of focus itself. The central underlying idea of this collection is to document this change in perspective with the aim of isolating essential keystones and research areas in both the theoretical and empirical domain. The book is structured accordingly. Following the introduction, there are four main sections: The general section discusses the theoretical foundations of focus within grammar. The second section hosts papers which investigate the representation of focus and topic at the syntax-pragmatics interface. The third section discusses the phonological representation of focus and its relation to meaning. The papers of the final section investigate different types of focus constructions in a variety languages. The collection of papers on the architecture of focus, its interpretation and representation mirror the establishment of the focus research field.