The Grammar of Focus (review)

The editors of this collection of articles are concerned primarily with exploring the formal theoretical mechanisms needed to account for focus constructions within the framework of generative grammar and offshoots such as principles and parameters. The book provides a lucid assessment of past analyses and a reappraisal of current issues concerning grammatical focus. Rather than insisting on a single a priori definition of focus, the editors have chosen to bring together the results of eleven empirically-based analyses of formally and semantically different types of focus constructions. These studies involve such genetically and typologically diverse languages as Arabic, Wolof, Turkish, Portuguese, Luganda, Malayalam, and Basque. The formal mechanisms these languages employ to express focus include unique combinations involving pitch, stress, and morphological markers of various kinds, as well as word order, cleft devices, and other syntactic features. In their introduction (1–22) the editors trace key developments in the study of focus beginning with Noam Chomsky’s writings of the 1950s and enumerate the relevant theoretical questions yet to be answered.

The approach to the data explored is essentially deductive and free of any previously imposed uniform solutions. Each article confronts a separate issue pertaining to the focus constructions found in a particular language or set of languages. At the same time, all of the articles are well-grounded in current grammatical theory, and their conclusions contribute to a broader understanding of focus in universal grammar. Several of the authors are native speakers of the languages they analyze. In ‘Aspects of the syntax of focus in Portuguese’ (23–53) Manuela Ambar explores the difference between contrastive focus and presentational focus to argue that different types of pragmatic constructions across languages result from movement operations to a focus projection where focus is licensed. In ‘Bound focus or How can association with focus be achieved without going semantically astray?’ (55–82) Joseph Bayer explores the syntactic effects of focusing particles such as even, only. In ‘Are there cleft sentences in French? (83–118) Anne Clech-Darbon, Georges Rebuschi, and Annie Rialland argue that the notion ‘cleft sentence’ does not correspond to any single syntactic construction in French. Nomi ErteschikShir’s ‘Focus structure and scope’ (119–50) explores scope-related properties of topic and focus in English and German. In ‘The interaction between focus and tone in Bantu’ (151–77) Larry M. Hyman gathers data from several Bantu languages to demonstrate how the grammar mediates between focus and tone in various ways. Sarah D. Kennelly’s ‘The syntax of the P-focus position in Turkish’ (179–211) discusses a group of focus-related existential quantifiers. ‘Word order and focus positions in Universal Grammar’ (213–44), by Ayesha Kidwai, explores focus-marking mechanisms in Malayalam, Hindi-Urdu, and several other South Asian languages. Alain Kihm’s ‘Focus in Wolof: A study of what morphology may do to syntax’ (245–73) discusses the role of Wolof morphology in expressing contrastive focus through the creation of cleft-like sentence structures. In ‘Focus in Somali’ (275–309) Jacqueline Lecarme provides a minimalist account for the distribution of the focus-marking particles waa/baa. In ‘Focus in Basque’ (311–33) Jon Ortiz de Urbina re-examines two recent proposals on focalization in Basque. Finally, Jamal Ouhalla’s ‘Focus and Arabic clefts’ (335–59) argues, primarily on the basis of data from Moroccan Arabic, that focus-marking devices in general involve existential closure over a choice function.

This volume is important not because it purports to solve all of the general theoretical issues it raises. Rather, its value lies in how well the contributing articles illustrate the importance of linguistic diversity and empirical descriptive research to future explorations of focus and other aspects of language structure.