Other fronting movementsan Arsenal supporter I wouldn’t trust”. Thus, in terms of the information it contains,
the stressed element can be seen as the new stuff and what follows, the old:
(113) an Arsenal supporter I wouldn’t trust
new old
We call the stressed element that carries new information the focus.
As to the position of the focus, this is a little more difficult to determine. For one
thing, foci and questions do not sit happily together:
(114) a men who would trust
b who would men trust
If we want to have a focus and a wh-question in the same clause, we have to indicate
the focus by stress alone rather than by movement:
(115) who would trust men
(115) might be used in response to someone asking ‘who would trust women?’, with
the meaning that it’s men who are untrustworthy, not women. However, this
complementary distribution between foci and wh-elements should not lead us to
assume that the focus sits in the specifier of the CP. We can see this from the fact that
in embedded clauses the focus, like the topic, follows the complementiser:
(116) I said that men I wouldn’t trust
From this perspective, it seems as though the focus sits in a similar position to the
topic, adjoined to the IP in embedded contexts. This assumption is also problematic, as
if both the topic and the focus were adjoined to IP, one might expect them to be able to
appear in any order. But this is not so:
(117) a I said that, in this room, potatoes I wouldn’t store
b *I said that potatoes, in this room, I wouldn’t store
At the moment it is not obvious how we can accommodate these data and in particular
the position of the focus remains a mystery. We will put the issue to one side until
after we have looked at one more case of movement to the front of the clause.
5.3 Negative fronting
A third movement which places an element at the front of the clause involves negative
phrases:
(118) never in my life have I been so embarrassed
This kind of movement is even more like wh-movement than the other two we have
looked at as it is accompanied by an inverted auxiliary, which topicalisation and focus
fronting are not. We might be tempted, therefore to propose that negative fronting
moves the negative element in to the specifier of CP. Unfortunately, the following
datum questions this assumption:
(119) I said that never in my life have I been so embarrassed