Topic and Focus

This book contains a collection of papers exploring the cross-linguistic expression of topic and focus. A diverse set of perspectives from some of the leading scholars in the areas of semantics and intonation are represented in the collection.

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.

Includes a diverse set of perspectives from some of the leading scholars in the areas of semantics and intonation This book is unique in the breadth of its coverage of the topic and focus phenomena Material is presented in nine languages

Inhalt
Constraints on Intonational Prominence of Focalized Constituents.- Polish Narrow Focus Constructions.- Intonation and Thematic Roles in Riau Indonesian.- The Intonational Realization of Contrastive Focus in Chickasaw.- Types of Focus in English.- The Prosody of Topic and Focus in Spontaneous English Dialogue.- Perceiving Focus.- The Semantics of Questions and the Focusation of Answers.- Contrastive (Predicate) Topic, Intonation, and Scalar Meanings.- Prosody and Scope Interpretations of the Topic Marker 'Wa' in Japanese.- Focus and Taiwanese Unchecked Tones.- Bengali Intonation Revisited: An Optimality Theoretic Analysis in which FOCUS Stress Prominence Drives FOCUS Phrasing.- Information-Structural Semantics for English Intonation.- Discourse Structure and Intonational Phrasing.