Rhematizers Revisited

• Authors: Eva Hajičová
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In our contribution, we have tried to re-examine the previous findings on the properties of a certain class of particles, and we have come to the following conclusions: (i) there is a special class of particles that have a specific position in the TFA of the sentence; (ii) these particles have some common features with negation; (iii) these particles called in literature rhematizers, focalizers or focusing particles need not be restricted to a position indicating the focus (rheme) of the sentence; rather, they can occur also in the topic of the sentence; (iv) there can be more than a single focalizer in a sentence; (v) it is therefore necessary to distinguish between the focus of the whole sentence and the focus of a focalizer; (vi) the scope of a focalizer has important consequences for the semantic interpretation of the sentence; (vii) a consistent annotation of language corpora that takes into account the topic-focus articulation of the sentences as a component part of the underlying sentence structure makes it possible to get a deeper and broader insight into the issue under investigation.

Keywords

EN

RHEMATIZER; FOCALIZER; TOPIC-FOCUS ARTICULATION; PRESUPPOSITION; INTONATION CENTER

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Linguistica Pragensia
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 57-70

Contributors

author

Eva Hajičová

• Linguistica Pragensia- redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic

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