Focus Below the Word Level

Intonational focus can be observed on parts of words that appear to lack intrinsic meaning, and triggers alternatives that are similar in form. In order to provide a unified treatment of focus above and below the word level (they do, after all, behave the same in most respects), I develop a theory of denotations for arbitrary word parts in which focused word parts denote their own sound and the unfocused parts are functions from sounds to word meanings. This allows focus theories to generalize below the word level; any differences with focus above the word level are located in the semantics of word parts. The paper also explores phonological constraints on focus placement, and shows that the focusability of a word part depends solely on its prosodic status, not on any semantic factors.

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