Samek-Lodovici, V; (2018) Contrast, Contrastive Focus, and Focus Fronting. (UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 30 , pp. pp. 57-77 ). University College London (UCL), Division of Psychology and Language Sciences.: London, UK.

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Abstract

This paper compares the definitions of contrast in Krifka (2008) and Neeleman and Vermeulen (2012) carefully establishing whether they predict contrast to be present or absent across five classes of conversational exchanges: open questions, closed questions, and corrective, confirmative, and additive exchanges. Using focus fronting in British English as a cue for the presence of contrast, it shows that Neeleman and Vermeulen’s definition better fits the distribution of contrast across the examined exchanges. The paper also shows that focus à la Rooth (1992) plus contrast à la Neeleman and Vermeulen is sufficient to model focalization across the five exchange classes examined here, thus providing evidence against treating the examined exchanges as eliciting different types of focalization.

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