The prosody of focus: non-contrastive, contrastive and verum focus in Slovenian, English and Russian

The Prosody of Contrastive Topic and Focus in Spoken English

On the one hand, these different researchers differ from each other in identifying exactly what the prosodic correlate of topic/theme is. Büring (2002: 27) and Kadmon (2001: 380), following Pierrehumbert (1980), suggest that ‘contrastive topics’ are realized by an entire tune, either H* LH% or L+H*LH%. Steedman (2000) associates his ‘theme’ with the pitch accent L+H*. Gundel & Fretheim (in pres...

Prosody of contrastive focus in estonian

The study contributes to the cross-linguistic discussion on the prosodic correlates and categorial status of contrastive focus. It brings in data from Estonian, a flexible word order language where the prosodic expression of Information Structure has been very little studied. The study compares narrow contrastive focus with narrow and broad information focus in semi-spontaneous production data,...

Contrastive Focus and Contrastive Topics in Greek

This paper puts forward the idea that in Greek contrast is an independent feature, represented in syntax by a preverbal position. Contrast can be assigned to diierent sorts of entities, topics and foci, once a set/list of contrasting alternatives/entities has been introduced or directly implied by the discourse. Evidence for an independent treatment of contrast is provided by similarities in th...

Contrastive Topic and/or Contrastive Focus

Contrastive Focus

The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as ...