Grammatical Effects of Topic and Focus Information

Abstract

As for focus information, I show that pitch accent is responsible for focus interpretation, with apparent syntactic movement playing no significant role for focus interpretation. Sentential stress patterns and their implications for focus interpretation are examined. In particular, this dissertation examines whether scrambling has anything to do with focus. While I show that nuclear stress falls on the most deeply embedded XP in the base position, whether the sentence is scrambled or not, Saito's (1989) early observation is maintained that scrambling is an optional syntactic operation with no semantic effect as far as focus interpretation is concerned. As for the question of syntactic focus movement, constructions which are often claimed to be involved with focus movement, so-called 'sluicing' and cleft constructions, are examined only to refute the existence of syntactic focus movement. Also word order variations in copular constructions are examined to see how topic and focus information are relevant in restricting sentence word order.