Different Kinds of Focus in Persian

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Abstract

Focus, a pragmatic phenomenon, in Persian is in a close relation with prosody, syntax, semantics, and to some extent morphology. Since Persian is a scrambling language (Karimi 1999, 2003), different word orders accompanied by sentence stress, couls signal different foci. At the same time different markers structures, like clefts, are also going hand in hand with prosody to indicate focus of the sentence. Even a focus marker morpheme like KE marks the foci with prosody. This paper briefly introduces two kinds of foci in Persian, Broad Focus and Narrow Focus. These two different types of foci have different prosodic, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features that are outlined in the paper.

References

 
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