Focus in Generative Grammar
- Author(s): Michael Rochemont 1
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations:1 University of British Columbia, Vancouver
- Format: PDF
- Publication Date January 1986
- e-Book ISBN: 9789027286338
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/sigla.4
The topic of this book is the notion of ‘focus’ and its linguistic characterization. The main thesis is that focus has a uniform grammatical identification only as a syntactic element with – in English at least – a certain systematic phonological interpretation and – presumably universally – a range of semantic interpretations. In broad respects, the framework within this investigation is conducted is that of Chomsky & Lasnik (1977) and the subsequent Government and Binding framework. After considering defining the location of prominence in a focused phrase in terms of constituent structure, the author argues that an argument structure approach to the focus phrase/prominence relation is more promising. This is then exemplified in analyses of cleft focus and constructional focus.
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