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In:Focus on Additivity: Adverbial modifiers in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages
Edited by Anna-Maria De Cesare and Cecilia Andorno
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 278] 2017
► pp. 23–44

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Chapter 1
Syntax and semantics of additive focus markers from a cross-linguistic perspective

A tentative assessment of the state of the art

 | Freie Universität Berlin | Universität Freiburg
Published online: 24 August 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.278.01kon
Abstract
Looking back on three decades of research on focus markers, I will make a cautious attempt to give an overview over this rich set of relevant publications, trying to identify and distinguish general trends, important results, open questions, obvious gaps and errors. I will provide further evidence for the view that focus markers interact with the information structure of a sentence or text, i.e. with a structured proposition or text segment analyzed in terms of focus and scope by extending this analysis also to the relevant “discourse markers”. A comparative analysis of data from various languages reveals the most frequent parameters of variation in the identification of the focus and scope of a focus marker. Finally, I will show that cross-linguistic generalizations in the relevant domain are only possible if the comparison is restricted to a certain core group of markers.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Basic properties reconsidered
    • 2.1Positional variability
    • 2.2Interaction with information structure (focus and scope)
  • 3.Comparability
  • 4.Parameters of variation
    • 4.1Marking the focus
    • 4.2Marking scope
  • 5.Discourse markers as a special case of focus markers
  • 6.Recent comparative and typological studies
  • 7.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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