What are the linguistic means for expressing different types of foci such as (narrow) information focus and contrastive focus in Romance languages, and why are there such differing views on such a presumably clear-cut research subject? Bringing together original expert work from a variety of linguistic disciplines and perspectives such as language acquisition and language contact, this volume provides a state-of-the-art discussion on central issues of focus realization. These include the interaction between prosody, syntax, and pragmatics, the typology of word order and intonation languages, the differentiation between focus and related notions such as contrast and presupposed modality, and the role of synchronic variation and change. The studies presented in this volume cover a broad range of Romance languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, and different varieties of Spanish. Moreover, the book also offers new insights into non-Romance languages such as English, German, and Quechua.

• Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction: Core issues of focus realization in Romance
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Methodology
  • 3. Focus categories
  • 4. Diatopic variation
  • 5. Outline of the volume
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Part I. Prosody and word order
• Chapter 2. Language variation at the prosody-syntax interface: Focus in European Spanish
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Methodology
  • 3. Results
  • 4. A preliminary perception experiment
  • 5. Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
  • Appendix
• Chapter 3. Focus realization at the prosody-syntax interface: Yucatecan Spanish opposed to Standard Mexican Spanish
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Data base and methodology
  • 3. Contrastive focalization in Yucatecan Spanish compared to standard Mexican Spanish
  • 4. Syntax-prosody interface
  • 5. Language contact
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 4. Acceptability and frequency in Spanish focus marking
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Two types of focus and three syntactic positions
  • 3. Data
  • 4. Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
  • Appendix. Description of acceptability judgment experiment conducted by the author
• Part II. Prosody, focus, and related pragmatic functions
• Chapter 5. Prosodic nuclear patterns in narrow and broad focus utterances: Pragmatic and social factors in Central Mexican Spanish
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Hypotheses
  • 3. Methodology
  • 4. Pitch accent distribution for BF and NF in CMS
  • 5. Interaction between foci and other pragmatic and discursive values in prosodic use
  • 6. Sociolinguistic correlates of focus pitch accents
  • 7. Discussion
  • 8. Conclusions
  • References
  • Appendix
• Chapter 6. Distinguishing contrast and focus at PF: A view from Italian
  • 1. Topic, focus and contrast in Italian sentences
  • 2. Focus and contrast: Two notions or the same notion?
  • 3. The prosody of focus and contrast in some Italian varieties
  • 4. The Experiment: Focus and contrast in Rionero Italian
  • 5. General discussion and conclusions: A different prosodic representation of contrast and focus
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix. List of sentence types used in the experiment
• Part III. Modality and exclamatives
• Chapter 7. Presupposed modality
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Expressions of surprise and obviousness in the linguistic literature
  • 3. Presupposed modality
  • 4. Conclusions and perspectives
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 8. NP exclamatives and focus
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The structure of NP exclamatives
  • 3. NP exclamatives, clefts, and focus-fronting constructions
  • 4. Exclamative NPs and focus
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Part IV. Cleft constructions
• Chapter 9. Adverbial cleft sentences in Italian, French and English: A comparative perspective
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Defining (cleftable) adverbials
  • 3. Adverbials in Italian, French and English clefts: Corpus findings
  • 4. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 10. Cleft sentences in the history of French and English: A case of pragmatic borrowing?
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Language contact in medieval Britain
  • 3. Clefts in French and English
  • 4. Conclusion
  • References
• Part V. Focus and language acquisition
• Chapter 11. Developing strategies for encoding additive and contrastive relations in French and German child narratives
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The acquisitional task for children learning French and German: Background and research questions
  • 3. The development of additive and contrastive discourse relations: Methods
  • 4. The development of additive and contrastive discourse relations: Results
  • 5. Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 12. Focus, prosody, and subject positions in L3 Spanish: Analyzing data from German learners with Italian and European Portuguese as heritage languages
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Focus and focus-induced word order variation
  • 3. Empirical study
  • 4. Representing interlanguage grammars
  • 5. Concluding remarks
  • References
• Index