Focalizers and Discourse Relations

The main concern of the present contribution is the relation between the focussing function of certain particles called focalizers and the relations in discourse. We focus our attention on the English focalizers also, only, even, and their Czech counterparts také, jenom, dokonce, and base our analysis on the data from the English–Czech annotated parallel corpus PCEDT.We attempt to find out in which respects and under which conditions the selected focalizers may be said to serve in a discourse as discourse connectives and which particular discourse relations are indicated by the focalizers in question. Our analysis confirms the hypothesis that the particles also, only and even as well as their Czech equivalents play basically a discoursive role of explicit connectives, though in a different way and to a different extent. 1. Motivation and Research Questions The analysis of the so-called focalizers, i.e. particles such as E. also, only, even, and their Czech counterparts také/rovněž/též/zároveň for also, jen/jenom/pouze for only and dokonce for even, based on the data from the English–Czech parallel corpus PCEDT and studied from two aspects in Hajičová and Mírovský (in prep), namely (i) their position in the sentence surface word order, and (ii) their semantic scope, has demonstrated that the intepretation of the semantic scope of these particles is highly dependent on the previous context and in several respects has an important influence on the interpretation of discourse relations. In a certain way, this issue is closely connected also to the debate on the status of these particles in the word-class system in relation to conjunctions and adverbs (see Štěpánková, 2014). These observations have led us to formulate the following two research questions: © 2020 PBML. Distributed under CC BY-NC-ND. Corresponding author: hajicova@ufal.mff.cuni.cz Cite as: Eva Hajičová, Jiří Mírovský, Barbora Štěpánková. Focalizers and Discourse Relations. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics No. 115, 2020, pp. 187–197. doi: 10.14712/00326585.011. PBML 115 OCTOBER 2020 (i) in which respects and under which conditions the selected focalizers may be said to serve in a discourse as discourse connectives, (ii) which particular discourse relations are indicated by the focalizers in question.