Chapter published in:
Focus on Additivity: Adverbial modifiers in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages
Edited by Anna-Maria De Cesare Greenwald and Cecilia Andorno
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 278] 2017
► pp. 23–44

Syntax and semantics of additive focus markers from a cross-linguistic perspective

A tentative assessment of the state of the art

| Freie Universität Berlin | Universität Freiburg
Looking back on three decades of research on focus markers, I will make a cautious attempt to give an overview over this rich set of relevant publications, trying to identify and distinguish general trends, important results, open questions, obvious gaps and errors. I will provide further evidence for the view that focus markers interact with the information structure of a sentence or text, i.e. with a structured proposition or text segment analyzed in terms of focus and scope by extending this analysis also to the relevant “discourse markers”. A comparative analysis of data from various languages reveals the most frequent parameters of variation in the identification of the focus and scope of a focus marker. Finally, I will show that cross-linguistic generalizations in the relevant domain are only possible if the comparison is restricted to a certain core group of markers.
Keywords: focus marker, focus, scope, discourse markers, verum focus, comparability, cross-linguistic generalizations, semantic map
Published online: 24 August 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.278.01kon
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