Samek-Lodovici, Vieri; Dwyer, Karen; (2024) Experimental Testing of Focus Fronting in British English. In: Brysbaert, Jorina and Lahousse, Karen, (eds.) On the Role of Contrast in Information Structure. (pp. 21-40). De Gruyter Mouton

Text Samek-Lodovici & Dwyer - UCL RPS copy based on Dec 7 22.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 5 June 2025. Download (432kB)

Abstract

This paper presents experimental results concerning the grammaticality of focus fronting in British English. The experiment involved 101 participants who were asked to assess spoken stimuli involving in-situ and fronted focalization across open questions, closed questions, and corrective replies to an incorrect statement. The experiment showed that (i) in-situ foci were deemed significantly more natural than fronted foci across all three exchange types, (ii) fronted foci were deemed significantly more natural when used as replies to closed questions than open ques-tions, (iii) fronted foci were assessed as significantly more natural as replies to open questions than as corrective replies. We also provide our interpretation of these results, arguing that they provide empirical support for (a) the in-situ analysis of contrastive focalization (Rooth 1985, 1992), (b) the grammaticality of contrastive replies to open questions (Skopeteas and Fanselow 2011), (c) the definition of con-trast proposed in Neeleman and Vermeulen (2012), and (d) the degrading effect of linguistic processing on naturalness judgements.

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