(Re-)assessing the status of Second Occurrence Focus in information structure:Evidence from phonological processing and micropragmatic perspectives

Abstract

Second Occurrence Focus has traditionally been characterized as a focus unit resuming a previous focal unit in the linguistic context. Despite its into-nationally flat contour, the focality of Second Occurrence Focus has been asso-ciated with non-tonal parameters such as duration and intensity. Discussing phonological, processing and micropragmatic evidence, it is suggested that the behavior of Second Occurrence Focus hardly resembles that of typical (narrow) foci since (a) it shows an intonation contour which is more akin to that of non-focal constituents, (b) it can associate with focus-sensitive adverbs in non-focal contexts as well, and, (c) similarly to non-focused elements, its truth value is resistant to variations involving the illocutionary force of the sentence or other evidential or epistemic meanings. The view suggested in the paper is thus to recast the status of Second Occurrence Focus as a ‘backgrounded’ information unit.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.