Integrating Contrastive Focus with Givenness and Topic-Comment: A hierarchical focus architecture of the Romanian Discourse-Prosody interface

Abstract

This paper presents the following results: (a) On the basis of an extensive overview of the currently Information Structure (IS) theories, the first goal of our paper is to update the IS terminology for the three important IS dimensions: ± Givenness, Background-Focus (also referred as Topic-Focus or Backgroud-Kontrast), and Topic-Comment (also Theme-Rheme). (b) We propose an intonational discourse-level hierarchy among the Contrastive Focus (First Occurrence Focus), Second Occurrence Focus, Informational (Discourse-New) Focus, and Deaccented (Discourse-Given) Focus, while the phonetic properties of the considered intonational inequalities remain to be statistically established and weighted through speech analysis for Romanian. (c) This discourse-level prosodic hierarchy is combined, in a separate and independent way, with the clause-and phrase-level intonational hierarchies driven by Sentence Accent Assignment Rules, Nuclear Stress Rule, and the more recently Sentence Break Assignment Rules. (d) Based on the intonational focus hierarchies at points (b) and (c) above, a new architecture for the Discourse-Prosody interface is outlined, aiming to replace the classical approaches of Topic-Focus and Theme-Rheme algorithms (which can provide only incomplete Information Structure) for prosody prediction of Romanian. (e) The notions of explicit and implicit contrastive focus are defined, and the meaningful relevance of the contrastive intonation for the Romanian finite-clauses is pointed out by significant percentages of the contrastivity phenomena on George Orwell's “1984” corpus. (f) Classes of examples illustrate and evaluate, for Romanian, the intonational-prosodic patterns of the contrastive and non-contrastive focus markers, categories, and domains.