130 Francis Cornish
RIPHERAL (LOW) FOCUS (Huffman 1997: 211). Yet it is at least plausi-
ble that an alternative analysis in terms of CENTRAL FOCUS might be
made of French se, owing to its obligatory coreference with the nominative
term (‘subject’) which acts as its controller (see also footnote 13 above).
For García (1977: 152), Spanish se is outside the FOCUS system alto-
gether.
Furthermore, in the case of Latin, as Wallis Reid (pers. comm.) points
out, the demonstratives ipse and hic are at the top of the Deictic Scale (see
(9) above), and so clearly encode the value HIGH DEIXIS; and yet since
both pronouns may be fully declined, each may take nominative case (giv-
ing them HIGH FOCUS status) or alternatively an oblique case (where
they would signal LOW or PERIPHERAL FOCUS: in the latter case, this
combination would be as predicted by (b) above). Similarly, the
demonstrative is, which occurs near the bottom of the Deictic Scale in (9),
may take an oblique case, and so encode the value LOW FOCUS.
Now, given that these combinations hold, how can we make sense of
the apparently contradictory instructions which the ‘non-conforming’ com-
binations signal? That is, HIGH FOCUS + HIGH DEIXIS: ‘the intended
referent is assumed already to be in the addressee’s attention focus, but will
need a high degree of effort in order to locate it’; and LOW FOCUS +
LOW DEIXIS: ‘the intended referent is not assumed already to be in the
addressee's attention focus, but at the same time it is not necessary to ex-
pend a great deal of effort in order to locate it’. In my view, the only
sensible interpretation of these apparently contradictory combinations of
instructions would be as follows: ‘the intended referent is/is not already in
the addressee's attention focus (FOCUS system), but the referent at issue
is/is not important for the current discourse purpose (DEIXIS system)’.
Thus, it is the direct, not the indirect strategy associated with the DEIXIS
system which necessarily comes to the fore in such cases.
More thought clearly needs to be given to these kinds of relationships
between the various values encoded by given forms from within the two
systems at issue here, in order to try to better integrate the two complemen-
tary systems of DEIXIS and FOCUS in CS theory.
- The four Topic statuses recognized in standard FG
Functional Grammar uses both discourse-pragmatic and formal-coding cri-
teria to distinguish Topics in relation to Foci. Two basic properties of
discourse relevant to Topic and Focus status are those of topicality and fo-