Focus and the interaction between syntax and pragmatics - Preface

A well-formed sentence satisfies all the syntactic, semantic, morphological and phonological principles of the grammar. If it does, the utterance is an expression of the given language. This does not imply, however, that the utterance of such a sentence can be used appropriately in any discourse context. Discourse is organized by information packaging devices, such as topic, focus etc. If the information structure of a particular expression does not match the information packaging required by the context, the expression is infelicitous in that context, albeit grammatically wellformed. For instance, the utterance in (1b) is not felicitous in the context of (1a), even though it is a well-formed expression of English.

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