Focus, Coherence and Emphasis

First published in 1984, this book examines a number of questions on the boundary of competence and performance - whose solutions have implications for linguistic theory in general. In particular, the form of grammatical statements, the relationship between various rules of grammar, the interaction between sentence in a sequence, and the inferences to be drawn from linguistic behaviour to linguistic knowledge. The author argues that many grammatical processes, inadequately handled by conventional sentence-grammars, require a text grammar in which the basic constitutive processes of information and deixis can be specified. They ago further to investigate the novel hypothesis that emphatic structure provides a crucial condition for the application of transformational rules, paying particular attention to the 'movement-rules' using mostly data culled from actual usage.

Paul Werth

List of figures and tables; Preface and acknowledgments; Part I: Generalia; 1. Introduction: Bringing Things into Focus 1.1 The field of scrutiny 1.2 A Programme 1.21 What do we know about texts? 1.22 What do we need to find out? 1.3 Defining terms 1.4 Aims and structure of the book Notes to Chapter One; Part II: Setting up the system; 2: Discourse 2.1 What IS a discourse 2.2 Summary: the properties of discourse 2.3 Sentences, propositions and semantic notation 2.4 Sketch of a model of D-grammar 2.5 Review section Notes to Chapter Two; 3. Context 3.1 Linguistic and extralinguistic context: competence or performance? 3.2 Review section: context-of-utterance 3.21 Immediate situation 3.22 Towards a model of situation 3.3 Frames and scenes 4.3 States-of-affairs 3.5 The common ground 3.6 Relevance Notes to Chapter Three; 4. Connectivity 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Cohesion 4.21 Anapora: a first glance 4.3 Collocation 4.4 Connectors 4.5 Coherence 4.51 An informal analysis 4.52 The coherence constraint Notes to Chapter Four; 5. Theoretical Considerations: Sharpening the Focus 5.1 Constraints in general 5.11 Review in action 5.12 Coherence constraints: general considerations 5.2 Positive coherence and synonymy 5.3 Negative coherence and antonymy 5.4 The coherence constraint: precise formulation Notes to Chapter Five; Part III: A text-grammar; 6. Emphasis 6.1 Emphasis-placement: an illustration 6.2 Is emphasis a surface-structure phenomenon? 6.21 What a phonological 6.22 A possible phonological account of emphasis 6.23 Some counterexamples 6.24 Summary: emphasis-interpretation from surface-structure 6.3 Is emphasis semantic/pragmatic in nature? 6.31 What a semantic/pragmatic account must do 6.32 Rules for emphasis 6.33 Arguments for the semantic/pragmatic nature of emphasis 6.4 Nature and behaviour of Reduction 6.5 Nature and behaviour of Accent 6.6 Nature and behaviour of Contrast 6.7 Review Section Notes to Chapter Six; 7. Contrast 7.1 Contrast on grammatical items 7.2 Contrast on lexical items 7.3 Summary: Contrast on grammatical and lexical categories 7.4 Semantic properties of sets 7.5 C and negative coherence Notes to Chapter Seven; 8. Anaphoric Connectivity 8.1 Résumé of anaphora 8.2 Reference 8.3 Type of anaphor 8.4 The role of emphasis 8.5 Anaphora as coherence 8.6 Reciprocal anaphora: two views 8.61 The view from G-B 8.62 Each 8.63 Other 8.64 Quantifier-floating 8.65 Reciprocals in complex sentences 8.66 Ambiguity of the phrasal form 8.67 Reciprocals and discourse 8.7 Anaphora and coherence Notes to Chapter Eight; 9. Syntactic Variation: Getting Movement into Focus 9.1 Introduction: "Movement" in recent grammatical models 9.2 Topic-comment articulation: review section 9.21 TCA and emphasis 9.22 The TCA constraint 9.3 Syntactic effects: summary of predictions 9.4 "Unmoved" structures 9.41 Behaviour of stress in unmoved structures 9.5 Passives: predictions of TCA constraint 9.51 Contexts with and without passives 9.52 Why passivise at all? 9.6 "Emphatic" constructions 9.61 Examples of emphatic constructions in context 9.62 Why cleft of pseudo-cleft? Notes to Chapter nine; 10. Conclusions 10.1 Summary 10.2 Implications 10.3 Empirical evidence for emphasis; Bibliography and Author-Index; Subject-Index