Narrow Focus Without Prosody: Some Observations from the Written Italian of University Students

Abstract

In this work, we analyze the narrow focus strategies in the written Italian of university students. Although prosodic prominence is a characterizing feature of focus—functionally more important than morphosyntactic marking, according to some authors—we assume that prosody is essential for language comprehension and hence, in the written modality, focus prosody is assigned by the reader on the basis of the morphosyntactic cues that mark focus. The data on which we base our analysis are selected from two existing corpora, containing more formal and less formal monological texts produced by students attending university throughout Italy. The investigation brings to light a similar pattern, as well as some differences, between the two sub-corpora examined. Besides a widespread use of focus particles, and the virtual absence of the O(S)V strategy, we noticed many instances of focalization inside the copular domain, particularly in the more formal sub-corpus. This pattern is discussed in relation to some of the relevant literature and the nature of the texts examined.