5 - Pragmatic relations: focus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Definition of focus
Focus, presupposition, and assertion
In Chapter 4, I used the term “focus” as a convenient shorthand to refer to the status of certain sentence constituents which systematically differed from topic expressions in their pragmatic function and in their formal expression. It would therefore seem natural to define focus as the “complement of topic.” The complementarity of the two notions is suggested e.g. by the alternative concept pair theme/rheme, whose members are often seen as complementing each other. Using Chafe's characterization of the (topical) subject as the “hitching post for the new knowledge” (cf. Section 4.1.1), we might then say that the focus of a sentence is the “new knowledge hitched to the topic post,” i.e. the new information conveyed about a topic.
Within the present framework, there are at least two reasons for not adopting such a definition. First, if we assume – as I do – that focus has to do with the conveying of new information, and that all sentences convey new information (Section 2.3), all sentences must have a focus. However, not all sentences have a topic (see Sections 4.2.2 and 4.4.4.1). Therefore focus cannot simply be defined as the complement of topic. Second, in the present framework the terms “new knowledge” or “new information” are loose equivalents for the term “pragmatic assertion,” which I defined in Chapter 2 as a proposition that is superimposed on and that includes the pragmatic presupposition (see Section 2.3).
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- Information Structure and Sentence FormTopic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents, pp. 206 - 333Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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