222 María de los Ángeles Gómez-González
to – and symbolizing – complex conceptualizations, but it is not to be iden-
tified with those conceptualizations.
Further, this conception of D-Topic does not always point to one par-
ticular element in a proposition, or to one particular constituent. For one
thing, D-Topics also allow for degrees of topical relevance and degrees of
activation and identifiability that are incrementally built up in the scaffold-
ing of discourse, not to forget the elusiveness and fuzziness implicit in the
criteria upheld to assign D-topical status, i.e. ‘aboutness’, ‘activation’, or
‘identifiability’.
2.2. Focus
Here we shall depart somewhat from FG practice, which attaches Focus
status to those pieces of information which represent the “relatively” most
important or salient information (Dik 1978: 19; 1997). To my mind, this
description is better captured under the title ‘Focus of attention’ (Section
2.4) – equivalent to the FG account of focality^11 – because discourse infor-
mation may become prominent (‘important’ or ‘salient’) not only as a
result of its focal status, but also, among other things, for its topical quality
and its thematic (vs. rhematic or final) arrangement, each of these dimen-
sions involving corresponding lexico-grammatical, phonological and
paralinguistic expressions (cf. Cornish this volume).
In this chapter Focus represents a purely phonological term, equivalent
to Focus accent. It designates intonational prominence in an informational
unit (see note 3), which may be associated not only with information pack-
aging but with other linguistic dimensions as well (e.g. illocution, string-
based deaccenting) and which may also be a consequence of non-linguistic
effects. As indeed stated in FG, Focus accent is taken to represent the pro-
sodic means whereby – in combination with morphosyntactic devices such
as morphological markers, word-order variation and special lexico-
grammatical constructs – the syntactic domain of Focus (the Focus do-
main) is expressed. Accordingly, a semantic element belonging to the
Focus component of a pragmatically structured proposition is said to be in
Focus or focal (as opposed to being ‘in the presupposition’ or ‘presupposi-
tional’), regardless of whether the constituent coding it carries an accent or
not. For example, in I went to the movies as a reply to What did you do last
night?, both the (relatively) unaccented constituents went and to together
with the accented constituent movies are in Focus (Lambrecht 1994: 209)
[emphasis mine].^12 And, again as remarked in FG, Focus accent may fall
either upon New (inactive) information or upon Given (active) information.