Topic and Focus

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Constraints on Intonational Prominence of Focalized Constituents

   • Gorka Elordieta

   Pages 1-22

3. Polish Narrow Focus Constructions

   • Ardis Eschenberg

   Pages 23-40

4. Intonation and Thematic Roles in Riau Indonesian

   • David Gil

   Pages 41-68

5. The Intonational Realization of Contrastive Focus in Chickasaw

   • Matthew Gordon

   Pages 69-82

6. Types of Focus in English

   • Carlos Gussenhoven

   Pages 83-100

7. The Prosody of Topic and Focus in Spontaneous English Dialogue

   • Nancy Hedberg, Juan M. Sosa

   Pages 101-120

8. Perceiving Focus

   • Emiel Krahmer, Marc Swerts

   Pages 121-137

9. The Semantics of Questions and the Focusation of Answers

   • Manfred Krifka

   Pages 139-150

10. Contrastive (Predicate) Topic, Intonation, and Scalar Meanings

    • Chungmin Lee

    Pages 151-175

11. Prosody and Scope Interpretations of the Topic Marker ‘Wa’ in Japanese

    • Kimiko Nakanishi

    Pages 177-193

12. Focus and Taiwanese Unchecked Tones

    • Ho-Hsien Pan

    Pages 195-213

13. Bengali Intonation Revisited: An Optimality Theoretic Analysis in which FOCUS Stress Prominence Drives FOCUS Phrasing

    • Elisabeth Selkirk

    Pages 215-244

14. Information-Structural Semantics for English Intonation

    • Mark Steedman

    Pages 245-264

15. Discourse Structure and Intonational Phrasing

    • Klaus von Heusinger

    Pages 265-290

During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The workshop was designed to lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts between linguists devoted to the study of meaning and linguists engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. This volume contains papers emerging from the Santa Barbara Workshop on Topic and Focus. A wide variety of methodologies and research interests related to topic and focus are represented in the papers. Some works present results of phonetic studies, either acoustic or perceptual, on the expression of topic and/or focus; others examine semantic or pragmatic features of topic and/or focus, while others are concerned with the interface between intonation and meaning. Data from several different languages are represented in the papers, including several languages with relatively little documentation particularly in the venue of topic and focus, e. g. Basque, Chickasaw, Indonesian, Polish, Taiwanese. The broad sample of languages coupled with the wide variety of research topics addressed by the papers promise to enrich our typological understanding of topic and focus phenomena and provide an impetus for further research. The following paragraphs offer brief summaries of the papers contained in this volume: Gorka Elordieta’s paper describes prosodic conditions governing focus in a dialect of Basque with pitch accents.

• Intonation
• Klang
• Language
• Pragmatics
• communication
• discourse
• semantic
• semantics

• Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  Chungmin Lee

• University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

  Matthew Gordon

• University of California, Los Angeles, USA

  Daniel Büring

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