Manifestation of informational focus

This article shows that the sentence-final position, also the most deeply embedded position on the recursive side of branching, is the default position for informational focus in Chinese. It claims that informational focus is always grammatically realized in natural language but in different ways across languages. In European languages focus has a systematic manifestation in pitch accent, whether or not the focused element is situated in the syntactically favored focus position. In Chinese the focused element takes the default focus position as far as possible. Phonological realization is a compensatory device where the expression intended to be focused cannot occur in the default position due to some structural limitation.

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