FG and the dynamics of discourse 223Examples given by Siewierska (1991: 174) are Sonia and Joyce came to
help me. Sonia worked like mad, but Joyce was horribly slow; or I heard
that Peter got married. Peter’s married. How amazing! I don’t believe it!
[emphasis mine].
In principle, I see no objection to Dik’s (1997: 315ff.) distinction be-
tween New Focus (NewFoc) and Contrastive Focus (ContrFoc), broadly
evoking the widely agreed differentiation between broad and narrow Focus
(Selkirk 1984; Lambrecht 1994; Ladd 1996).^13 However, I would contend
that besides assigning ContrFoc a number of functionalities (Parallel Focus
and Counter-presuppositional Focus, which comprises Replacing Focus,
Expanding Focus, Restricting Focus and Selecting Focus), a further subdi-
vision within NewFoc should be also posited in order to account for the
structural and attentional domains of two construction-types that are recur-
rent across languages, namely utterance-Focus (UttFoc) and predicate-
Focus (PredFoc) (cf. Lambrecht 1994; Vallduví and Engdahl 1996; Lam-
brecht and Polinsky 1997).
In a UttFoc construction (e.g. (3) below) both the Subject and the predi-
cate are in Focus, i.e. the Focus extends over the entire proposition. The
purpose of the assertion is to express a proposition which is linked neither
to an already established D-Topic nor to a presupposed open proposition.^14
In other words, crucial in UttFoc constructions is the absence of a presup-
position attached to either the Subject or the Predicate, and resultingly the
identity of assertion and Focus (cf. Kuno’s 1972 ‘neutral description’; Al-
lerton and Cruttenden’s 1979 ‘all-new utterance’; and Kuroda’s 1972
‘thetic sentence’). UttFoc has been attributed to:
(a) impersonal expressions, that is, events, states, situations or facts in
which no referential entity is present and therefore nothing can be
said about it;
(b) presentative constructions, which introduce entities, but fail to report
an event about them;
(c) any state of affairs presented as a compact whole representing noth-
ing but new information.
It is the absence of a presupposition and the identity of assertion and
Focus that distinguishes UttFoc in (3) both from the PredFoc construction
in (4) and the ContrFoc in (5) below. In the PredFoc category the Predicate
is in Focus and the Subject (and possibly some other argument or adjunct)
is within the presupposition: the purpose of the assertion is to pragmati-
cally predicate some property of an already established discourse referent;