| Title: | Focus Fronting Between Declaratives and Exclamatives |
| Authors: | Silvio Cruschina, Ion Giurgea, Eva-Maria Remberger |
| Publication: | Revue roumaine de linguistique, LX (2-3), p. 257-275 Variation syntaxique / Syntactic Variation Edited by Jenneke van der Wal, Adina Dragomirescu and Alexandru Nicolae |
| p-ISSN: | 0035-3957 |
| Publisher: | Editura Academiei |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2015 |
| Abstract: | In many languages, including Romance and German, Focus Fronting (FF) is generally associated with an emphatic intonation and interpretation, so that sentences hosting FF are often indiscriminately mistaken for exclamative clauses. In this paper we demonstrate that, despite its special interpretive and prosodic properties, FF is a syntactic construction that is independent from illocutionary force and from clause-typing since it typically marks declaratives, but may also be found in interrogative and exclamative clauses. An interpretation of surprise and unexpectedness is present in these structures with FF, which we thus call Mirative Focus Fronting (MFF). On the basis of criteria such as presuppositionality and the position of the prosodic main prominence, we show, on the one hand, that in non-interrogative contexts, sentences featuring MFF have in fact an assertive force and are therefore genuine declaratives; on the other, a special type of Focus Fronting must be identified which occurs in genuine exclamatives (hence the name Exclamative Focus Fronting, EFF), but which is associated with a special prosodic pattern and is limited to specific types of constituents (mostly, scalar adjectives and adverbs). |
| Key words: | focus fronting, declaratives, exclamatives, mirative focus, scalarity |
| Language: | English |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
Citations to this publication: 5
| 5 | Ion Giurgea | Preverbal Subjects and Topic Marking in Romanian | RRL, LXII (3), 279-322 | 2017 | pdf html |
| 0 | Zoe-Larisa Bădoiu | The characterization of exclamative clauses: presupposition, negation, and question-answer pair | JRLS, 11, 477-483 | 2017 | pdf html |
| 1 | Florin Sterian | Bibliografia românească de lingvistică (BRL, 58, 2015). Lucrări de lingvistică apărute în țara noastră în cursul anului 2015 | LR, LXV (2), 181-333 | 2016 | |
| 2 | Ion Giurgea | On the interpretation of focus fronting in Romanian | BWPL, XVIII (2) | 2016 | pdf html |
| 5 | Ion Giurgea | Types of Exclamative Clauses in Romanian | RRL, LX (1) | 2015 | pdf html |
References in this publication: 5
| 2 | Irene Tirado Camarena | Vaya como cuantificador en expresiones nominales | CILPR2013/4, 463-476 | 2016 | pdf html |
| 5 | Ion Giurgea | Types of Exclamative Clauses in Romanian | RRL, LX (1) | 2015 | pdf html |
| 5 | Ion Giurgea | Exclamativele în română și alte limbi romanice | SIL5, 264 | 2015 | |
| 5 | Ion Giurgea, Eva-Maria Remberger | Verum focus and polar questions | BWPL, XIV (2) | 2012 | pdf html |
| 67 | Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (coord.) | Gramatica de bază a limbii române | Univers Enciclopedic Gold | 2010; 2016 |
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