Focus

We will mainly discuss the notion of focus, especially as it is articulated in work on the pragmatics-grammar border. As outlined , focus can relate to what is being said about the topic of the sentence. Recalling our distinction between semantic givenness/newness and cognitive givenness/newness, we can label this semantic focus. However, as we pointed out , this notion overlaps with cognitive givenness/newness – what is in the mind’s eye – and, indeed, there are some features that are better discussed in these terms. We can label this cognitive focus, encompassing the issues of salience that was discussed . It is worth bearing in mind that here we are also dealing with how people package information into chunks. For example, a speaker can introduce new information about an entity in one chunk and provide further new information about that entity in another chunk. Below we touch on some key areas.