In spoken languages, focus (i) is normally realized by phonological prominence, which in English is effected by higher pitch, greater loudness and longer duration (e.g. Katz and Selkirk 2011). Semantically, it (ii) signals the activation of alternatives (e.g. Rooth 1996), and (iii) it has diverse effects, ranging from contrastive (as in (1)a) to exhaustive (as in (1)b). 1(1) a. I'll introduce John to Mary, and then I'll introduce BILL to her.b. If you invite John OR Mary, the party will be a success. => no inference that the party will be a success if the addressee invites John AND MaryFinally, it has been speculated that (iv) the realization of focus is driven by a biological 'effort code' whereby greater pitch excursions (and thus greater effort on the speaker's part) are associated with greater emphasis/importance; (Gussenshoven 2001(Gussenshoven , 2004). 2 Following Wilbur 2012, as well as Crasborn and van der Kooij 2013 and Kimmelman 2014, we argue that versions of all four properties hold of ASL and LSF focus, which suggests that focus has a unified semantics and to some extent a unified semantics/phonology interface across modalities; in particular, contrastive and exhaustive focus can be realized by the same prosodic means. Earlier studies emphasized the diversity of focus realization in ASL, and the importance of syntactic movement (Wilbur 2012), which made it hard to isolate the role of prosody. By contrast, detailed production studies of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) and Russian Sign Language (RSL) displayed in situ strategies of (corrective and informational) focus marking involving modulations of sign speed, size and duration, combined with non-manual markers in NGT (Crasborn and van der Kooij 2013;