Contrastiveness and New Information: a new view on Focus

Abstract

After a brief overview of the syntactic representation of Focus in section 1, data from a North-eastern Italian variety are analysed and discussed in section 2. This leads, in section 3, to the identification of some basic features which, combined, provide a way of capturing the breakdown of the properties of the two types of contrastive focus; section 4 investigates whether these features find expression at the syntactic level, and addresses some remaining issues. Some of the prosodic properties of the two types of contrastive focus are examined in section 5, and in section 6 we present a few concluding remarks.