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title: The Meaning of Topic and Focus : The 59th Street Bridge
Accent Routledge Studies in German Linguistics ; 3
author:
publisher: Taylor & Francis Routledge
isbn10 | asin:
print isbn13: 9780203448014
ebook isbn13: 9780585452937
language: English
subject Focus (Linguistics) , Grammar, Comparative and general--
Topic ment, Intonation (ics) , Semantics,
Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax.
publication date: 1997
lcc: 1997eb
ddc: 415
subject: Focus (Linguistics) , Grammar, Comparative and general--
Topic ment, Intonation (ics) , Semantics,
Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax.
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THE MEANING OF TOPIC AND FOCUS
The 59th Street Bridge Accent
Daniel Büring’s study provides an illuminating and highly original account of plex interaction of
intonational phenomena, semantics and pragmatics. Based on examples from German and English, and
centred on an analysis of the fall-rise intonation contour, a semantic interpretation for two different pitch
accents—Focus and Topic—is developed. The effects of these accents, some on sequences of sentences and
others on single sentences follow from the given treatment. The account is based on Montagovian possible-
word semantics and Chomskian generative syntax.
The theory allows for a maximally tripartite information structure, consisting of (an optional) Sentence-Topic,
Background and Focus. Both Focus and Sentence-Topic correspond to distinct tone sequences in the sense
of Pierrehumbert’s positional theory of pitch accents. Rooth’s treatment of Focus is adopted and
supplemented with a theory of Sentence-Topic interpretation, which consists of topic effect on the
appropriateness conditions and topic implicatures.
Among the phenomena discussed are:
• question-answer congruence
• contrastive topics
• topic implicatures
• focus-affected readings of adnominal quanti