The definition of Focus in the framework of the
Language into Act Theory (LAT) (Emanuela Cresti – LABLITA, UniFi)
The primary information structure of the utterance is
the Topic-Comment pattern.
The information units (IUs) taking part to this
structure behave as “linguistic islands” (Cresti & Moneglia 2010), i.e.
they are related by an informational relation but their linguistic material is not
bound across the IU boundaries by both syntactic and semantic relations. More
specifically, a Topic IU and a Comment IU are linked through a relation of “pragmatic
aboutness” within the utterance and each IU is a local syntactic configuration
and a semantic compositional entity. The communication will present evidences
of the above assumptions through the interpretation of spontaneous speech utterances.
In the LAT perspective, the
semantics of both Topic and Comment IUs implies various levels of
representation and Focus is a “high level” semantic function. This hypothesis has
several implications:
a)
first
of all, despite the fact that the two concepts of Focus and Comment may
collapse in a lot of influential literature (Chomsky 1972, Jackendoff 1972, Lambrecht
1994) , the concept of Focus must be distinguished from that of Comment, given
that the nature of the last one is informational and based on a pragmatic
function (accomplishement of illocution, Cresti 2000), while the former belongs
to the locutive act and to the semantic structure of each IU;
b)
this
explains the distribution of Focus: since a Focus is a “simple” semantic
function, regarding one level of the semantic structure, it is not forbidden
its occurrence also in a Topic semantic island (fuori dall' asse ereditario /=TOP= che cosa vuol <dire> ?=COM= ‘out of the hereditament, what does it mean’;
se ce n' è ancora /=TOP= uno sì //=COM= ‘if there are some more, one yes’);
c)
actually Focus is a necessary semantic feature
of both Topic and Comment IUs, depending on their peculiar informational nature, consequently we claim the existence of a topic Focus and a comment
Focus;
d)
the topic Focus and the comment
Focus develop different semantic functions, the first one corresponding to a conclusive cognitive function and the
second to an attention alerting function;
e)
Focus
is necessarily marked by prosody (perceptual prominence);
f)
given
that every Topic IU is performed by a prosodic unit (prefix) with a prominence at its end, if there is a Topic IU there
is a prosodic prominence marking a topical Focus;
g)
in spite of the assumption of the most part of the literature,
that makes the hypothesis of a Contrastive Focus in the case
of topical Focus (Büring 2003), topic Focus is unmarked from this point of
view.
h)
given that there cannot be a Topic IU without a Focus (the same is
valid for Comment) and given that nearly
10% of utterances records more than one Topic IU, an utterance can record even three (or more) Foci (la maggior parte /=TOP= […] quelli che hanno portato Pinocchio /=TOP= va proprio bene quello che hanno //=COM= ‘the most part, those who brought Pinocchio, it is all right’).
The talk will illustrate the semantic definition of topic Focus and comment
Focus within LAT, arguing against assumptions based on the “Common Ground” hypothesis (Stalnaker 1974) and the semantic determination
of the Focus through the context (Krifka 2006).
The detection of Focus prominence will be exemplified with
two different methods:
Prominence detection based on manual syllabic segmentation
(Gagliardi 2009, Tamburini 2005 ; Ph. Martin 2010).
References
Cresti Emanuela (2000), Corpus di italiano parlato, Accademia della Crusca, Firenze
Cresti&Moneglia (2010), Informational patterning theory and the
corpus-based description of spoken language. The compositionality issue in the
Topic-Comment pattern, in Moneglia, Panunzi (eds), Bootstrapping information from corpora in a coss-linguistic perspective,
FUP, Firenze, pp. 13-45
Büring Daniel (2003), On D-trees,beans, and B-accent, in
“Linguistics and Phyosophy “ 26, pp511-545.
Jackendoff Ray (1972), Semantics in generative grammar, MIT
Press, Cambridge
Lambrecht Knud (1994), Information structure and sentence form,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Stalnaker Robert (1974), Pragmtic presupposition, in Milton,
Munitz, Unger (eds) Semantics and
Philosophy, Newyotk University Press, NewYork, pp197-214
Krifka Manfred (2006), Basic notions on information structure,
in Féry, Fanselow, Krifka (eds), Interdisciplinary
studies on information structure, and in “Acta Linguistica Hungarica”, 55.
Gagliardi Gloria (2009), Correlati fonetico-acustici dell’informatività, Tesi di Laurea,
Università di Bologna
Tamburini F. (2005), Identificazione automatica della prominenza frasale nel linguaggio
parlato, in Cosi P. (acd), Misura di
Parametri. 1° Convegno nazionale AISV, EDKeditore, Brescia, pp 725-754
Martin Philippe (2010), Prominence detection without syllabic
segmentation , in Speech
Prosody, Satellite work-shop on prosodic prominence, http://www2.unine.ch/webdav/site/speechprosody-prominence/shared/proceedings/Prominence_2010_MARTIN.pdf