Focus of attention in discourse 145- See Birner and Ward (1998: 159), as well as Gundel (1999: 299–300) on the
prosodic difference between ‘semantic focus’ (i.e. unmarked focus in a
topic-comment structure), and ‘contrastive focus’. - See in particular Hannay (1985a) for an FG account of this construction.
- In English, of course, preverbal subjects may also be focal, since (given an
appropriate context) they may receive a high pitch-accent, and thereby con-
vey new information relative to that context (A: Who ate the fish? B: JANE
ate the fish/did). - See also the point made by Reinhart (1981: 57) that the description ‘focus
of speaker’s [and addressee’s] attention’ may characterize topics and foci
alike. - Strictly speaking, Huffman as a CS linguist would not use the traditional
terms ‘subject’ and ‘verb’ here, preferring the descriptive terms ‘(first) par-
ticipant’ and ‘event’, respectively. However, I use the more traditional
terms here for ease of comparison with the IS conception. - This is not always the case, however: for example, in Huffman's (1997:
209–210) analysis of French clitic pronouns, the 3rd person clitic reflexive
se is claimed to blend CENTRAL and PERIPHERAL (as he calls it) FO-
CUS, since on the one hand it automatically links up with the IN-FOCUS
‘subject’ term (nominative in form, if a clitic pronoun: il/ils, though not
elle/elles, since these forms may occur in other relations to the EVENT
(verb) than that of P1 (initial argument)); and on the other, it involves a ‘re-
mention’ of the same participant. Nonetheless, I think that a case could be
made for French clitic se to encode the value CENTRAL FOCUS, by virtue
of its automatic binding by the HIGH FOCUS nominative term bearing sub-
ject function with respect to the verb, and in relation to the latter’s
inflectional form. In FG, predications containing a reflexive pronoun, in re-
lation to ones with a full term phrase (i.e. transitive clauses), are considered
to have undergone ‘argument reduction’, the reflexive pronoun being the
surface marker of this relation. Such clauses are clearly intransitive (like in-
herently pronominal verbs in French and other such languages). Hence the
reflexive (clitic in French) pronoun does not correspond to an argument se-
mantically, and cannot therefore be assigned any value pertaining to
argument expressions. See García (1977) for an excellent analysis of Span-
ish se within the CS framework. - The hyphen preceding given pronoun forms indicates that the clitic variant
is what is intended. - As Siewierska (1991: 148) points out, “though a constituent may be topical
or focal on discourse grounds, unless its topical or focal status is coded in
the structure of the clause, there is no basis for recognizing a special clause-
bound level of pragmatic organization distinct from the semantic and syn-
tactic levels of clause structure”.