Focus Theories

In this seminar students will get acquainted with strategies of representing the information-structural category of „focus“ at various levels of grammar (phonology / prosody, syntax, semantics). The term „focus“ refers to a constituent in a sentence whose interpretation evoques alternatives. Formally, this constituent is highlighted in comparison to out-of-focus elements. Languages exhibit variation wrt. the grammatical means they choose for marking focus. Apart from German and English, which realize focus by accent, we will also discuss languages that realize focus in a different way (e.g. Italian, Chichewa, Hausa, Hungarian). After an introduction into this central topic of information structure, we will discuss recent developments of focus theory, e.g. subject/non-subject asymmetries wrt. focus marking, resumption strategies, contrastivity, mirativity, ellipsis, and association with focus. Students who would like to participate are expected to read papers on a weekly basis and present a topic in class. A course certificate is provided on the basis of a term paper.

Teams:

Team 1: Nadine Beidinger, Narjes Eskandarnia, Aurelia Müller, Bethany Stoddard

Team 2: Daniel Aremu, Samaneh Darighoftar, Yassmina El Faida, Melissa Jeckel

Team 3: Nasimeh Bahmanian, Julian Form, Jana-Elina Jordan, Georgia Miotti, Eugene Vakhtin, Liyang Ye

Team 4: Giuseppina Grillo, Marie-Joe Kallab, Selin Buket Özerhan, Carla Spellerberg, Bahar Uludag, Sebastian Walter

Team 5: Haniel Enoka, Chinedu Fedrick, Stefan Maurer, Emilia Milano, Alicia Zimara

Literatur:

Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds.) (2016) The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.