Focalization Strategies in Spanish

Abstract

In Spanish, focused elements may appear at the beginning of a sentence. Following Chomsky (1971) and Sufler (1982), we will assume that the focus of an utterance is the phrase that contains the informational center which receives the main sentential stress. In this article, we will be concerned with two kinds of foci: an "informational" focus and a "contrastive" focus. 1 Following Halliday (1967), we will assume that the informational focus is the element which receives prominence within the message. As Halliday (1967:204) notes, this informational focus "reflects the Speaker* s decision äs to where the main bür-den of the message lies". For Sufler (1982:11), the informational focus "represents the most important or 'loaded' element in the sentence, and it tends to fall within the rheme under conditions of neutral stress and Intonation". 2 In these constructions, which we shall call informational focus constructions, and äs noted by Hernanz and Brucart (1987), the focused element appears in the front of the sentence, there is no pause between the focused element and the rest of the sentence, and subject/verb inversion is obligatory. In contrastive focus constructions, on the other hand, the focused element is being emphasized äs opposed to another element in the sentence. The focus bears emphatic Intonation, there is a pause between the focused element and the rest of the sentence, and subject/verb inversion is preferred, although not obligatory. Hernanz and Brucart further argue that informational focus (IF) inThis paper is an elaboralion of a paper under the same title presented at the Symposium on Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago in November, 1988. We would like to thank the participants and especially Margarita Süßer, Heles Contreras, Violeta Demonte, Malta Lujan, and Paula Kempchinsky for their comments and support We are also grateful to our two anonymous Probus reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments.See Rochemont (1986) for a discussion of focus in generative grammar, Campos (1986) for a discussion of focus applied to Spanish, and Campos (1989) for a discussion of the interrelation between focus and clitic placement in modern Galegan. See also Hernanz and Brucart (1987). See Surler (l 982) for further discussion of focus äs related to the Prague School notions of "theme" and "rheme' 1 .

On Spanish comparative subdeletion constructions*

“…That this is an instance of focus movement is supported by word order facts. As noticed by Torrego (1984) (see also Campos & Zampini 1990, Hernanz & Brucart 1987, among many others), focalization structures share one fundamental property with wh‐movement: subject‐verb inversion is required. In the following example from Torrego, the DO un viaje a las Canarias is undergoing focus movement.…”

In-situ wh-phrases in Spanish: locality and quantification

“…We dispute Jimenez's syntactic claim that there is any optionality in question strategies (movement versus in-situ) in Spanish : as we will see, the elaboration of an event presupposition has a syntactic counterpart in the topicalization of IP, whereas the restricted interpretation of the whquantification in the in-situ cases is related to the fact that wh-phrases in-situ are contrastively focused. As all contrastively focused constituents in Spanish (see Campos and Zampini, 1990 ;Uriagereka, 1995 ;Etxepare, 1997, among others), the wh-phrase in focus undergoes overt movement to an IP-external position. In-situ wh-strategies in Spanish are thus the product of quite a complex syntactic derivation : the in-situ wh-phrase undergoes focus movement to a left peripheral focus position, and this movement is followed by remnant topicalization of the IP.…”

Processing long-distance dependencies

“…The combination of Fronted Focus and CLLD is also sensitive to ordering restrictions that determine grammaticality. In the case of Fronted Focus, we can verify this generalization when comparing the grammaticality of (3.25a-b; CLLD > Fronted Focus) with the ungrammaticality of (3.25c-d; * Fronted Focus > CLLD Thus, the ordering of these types of elements has been noted as the generalization that topic precedes focus as well as question operators (Campos & Zampini, 1990). When these left periphery operations are combined, the only possible order is CLLD > {FF, wh} or, more generally, Topic > Focus.…”

“…Another structure that bears a high degree of resemblance to CLLD is Fronted Focus. In terms of information structure, the main difference between these two structures is that CLLD is an expression of topicalization in Spanish, whereas Fronted Focus, as evident from its name, is a focalization strategy (Campos & Zampini, 1990). Vallduví & Engdahl (1996) describe focus as the part of the sentence that is "the informative, newsy, dominant, or contrary-to-expectation part" (p. 462).…”