Open AccessFocus Triggers and Focus Types from a Corpus Perspective
Author(s) -
Arndt Riester,
Stefan Baumann
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
dialogue and discourse
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.25
H-Index - 5
ISSN - 2152-9620
DOI - 10.5087/dad.2013.210
Subject(s) - focus (optics) , perspective (graphical) , linguistics , computer science , pitch accent , stress (linguistics) , phrase , contrast (vision) , annotation , information structure , sentence , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , speech recognition , prosody , philosophy , physics , optics
The article discusses several issues relevant for the annotation of written and spoken corpus data with information structure. We discuss ways to identify focus top-down (via questions under discussion) or bottom-up (starting from pitch accents). We introduce a two-dimensional labelling scheme for information status and propose a way to distinguish between contrastive and non-contrastive information. Moreover, we take side in a current debate, claiming that focus is triggered by two sources: newness and elicited alternatives (contrast). This may lead to a high number of semantic-pragmatic foci in a single sentence. In each prosodic phrase there can be one primary focus (marked by a nuclear pitch accent) and several secondary foci (marked by weaker prosodic prominence). Second occurrence focus is one instance of secondary focus.