摘要
本文主要介绍国外焦点理论研究的一些成果。第一部分是焦点的概念及分类,第二部分是焦点结构的概念及其对语言现象的解释,第三部分是焦点的性质,第四部分介绍国内目前对焦点理论关注的情况。
Focus is an important phenomenon in natural language,which has aroused a deep interest a - mong many linguists,functional and formal,including those who work in different fields,such as phonology,syntax,semantics and discourse analysis.As a result,there has emerged a lot of litera - tures on focus as well as various viewpoints.Focus was studied firstly by functionalists.Halliday(1967)initially used'focus'to refer to the prosodically prominent part of a sentence.From then on,functionalists have kept their interest in fo - cus all the time.In effect,the pragmatic property of focus,or that aspect of focus that is closely re - lated to information transferring in communication,would sooner or later catch the functionalists ' at - tention.Formalists also have interest in focus.'The grammar of focus has been studied in generative grammar from its inception.It has been the subject of intense,detailed cross - linguistic investigation for over20years,particularly within the Principles and Parameters framework.'(Rebuschi&Tuller1999)Formalists research into focus because it has its own morphosyntactic coding,which shows that focus has syntactic properties and can be studied within the framework of formal linguistics.This current paper makes an introduction to western studies of focus,covering three fundamen - tal aspects:1)the concept of focus and its classification;2)the concept of focus structure and the explanation of linguistic phenomena in terms of focus structure;and3)the properties of focus.In each section,introduced are three or four representative points of view on the aspect under discussion.As the morphosyntactic coding of focus plays an important role in the judgment of the properties of focus,this paper doesn ' t introduce the morphosyntactic coding of focus in a separate section,but only includes it in the discussion of the properties of focus.In order to avoid unneces - sary repetition,this paper does not include those studies that have been surveyed recently on the ac - cent and focus projection(Chen2003),and those topics discussed in Li et al.(2003)concerning fo - cus association and focus interpretation.In the end of the paper,domestic research on focus is briefly sketched.The Chinese literatures on focus mainly concentrate on its definition,types as well as its morphosyntactic coding.Quite dif - ferent from their western counterparts,few of them employ theories of focus structure to explain various language facts.
出处
《现代外语》
CSSCI
北大核心
2003年第4期428-438,共11页
Modern Foreign Languages
关键词
焦点
焦点结构
焦点的性质
focus,focus structure,properties of focus
