Stress and focus in English (1983)

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter addresses the issue of how to relate focus and stress in English sentences, particularly within the framework of the (Revised) Extended Standard Theory. Specifically, it shows that, with some refinement, the grammatical model of Chomsky and Lasnik (1977) accommodates an insightful analysis of the relationship between focus and stress, while preserving the Autonomous Systems view of Hale et al. (1977). The chapter is organized as follows. Section 4.2 drives Prosodic Structure from surface structure by the rules of accent placement. Section 4.3 is concerned with the assignment of focus on S-structures. Section 4.4 suggests a number of additional rules of Discourse Grammar whose function is to define contextual conditions for the interpretation of focus as presentational, contrastive, emphatic, etc. Section 4.5 summarizes the results and compares the framework developed in this chapter with a number of others that have appeared in the linguistic literature.