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Article: Are there two distinct Foci in Italian?(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Southwest Journal of Linguistics
- Article date:
- December 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Linguistic Association of the Southwest. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ABSTRACT. It is commonly assumed in the literature (e.g. Rochemont 1986, E. Kiss 1998, Zubizarreta 1998, Belletti 2004, among others) that two distinct FOCI exist: a Focus that expresses new information and a Focus that expresses exhaustivity or contrast. The two Foci not only would have a different interpretation but also a different prosody and a different syntactic structure.
The aim of this paper is to prove that, at least in Italian, Focus is a single phenomenon. I show that E. Kiss's (1998) arguments in favor of a distinction between two Foci in Hungarian and English do not hold for Italian and that focal stress is always of the same type and is assigned by ...