The Focus Of Modern Chinese Research

The studies of focus have become a hot issue in domestic grammar circles, many scholars research the phenomena of focus combining with Chinese facts, with different views of language and from different perspectives, and produce plenty of literatures and abundant conclusions. But because of different theoretical backgrounds, thinking models and understanding to Chinese facts, scholars have produced a different interpretation to the phenomena of focus, and there are biggish differences in the study of focus. This dissertation tries to analyse deep theoretical issue about the study of focus in modern Chinese, and makes carding and interpretation to relevant phenomena, so this research will contribute to overall and further studies on focus in modern Chinese.There are twelve chapters in this dissertation, specifically as follows:Chapter one is an introduction. We mainly introduce research object, research meaning, research contents and research method, and make the explaination to the source of the corpus.Chapter two is the concept and essence of focus. We review domestic and overseas representative viewpoints, and analyze three issues of new information, exclusiveness and prominence relating to the concept of focus, and put forward the concept of focus:the focus is process of giving prominence to some segments in the discourse with suprasegmental and local prosodic grammatical means by the speaker; the speaker needs to pay attention to the demands of all the discourse and the importance of prominent units, also needs to deal with these demands according to personal communicative purpose in the choices of focus; so the construction of the discourse is finally decided by the choices of focus.Chapter three is the type of focus. We review domestic and overseas representative viewpoints, and analyze four issues of differentiation of informational focus, broad focus, focus operator/marker and focus operational strategy relating to the type of focus, and distinguish between independent focus forcing form and dependent focus forcing form, the former demands itself to become the focus of the sentence; the latter demands another one component in the sentence to become the focus of the sentence, including focus marker and focus operator, and put forward type system of focus from two perspectives of being based on focus forcing form and being based on focus operational strategy. Chapter four is the way of realizing focus——sentence stress. We review former viewpoints about the relation between focus and stress, and put forward two stress allocation models of focus:conventional allocation model and unconventional allocation model, the former means using common stress, and the latter means using special stress, corresponding to forward focus operational strategy and backward focus operational strategy, and discuss the prosodic expression of focus relating to new information.Chapter five is the analyses of some focus forcing forms in Chinese. We distinguish between focus forcing form and focus operational strategy, and think that stress is the way of expressing focus, and other lexical forms and syntactic forms are focus forcing forms, but the speaker can take forward focus operational strategy to satisfy their demands, also can take backward focus operational strategy not to satisfy their demands, so they can’t finally decide the focus of the sentence. We also analyze lexical focus forcing forms and syntactic focus forcing forms by illustration, and distinguish between focus marker and focus operator by means of negation test, and discuss the grammaticalization of focus marker.Chapter six is the basic logical meaning structure of focus. We analyze six concepts of presupposition, topic, background, expectation, contrastiveness and exclusiveness, subjective quantity relative to or relating to the focus, and think that one tripartite structure of focus is made up of focus forcing form, its pointing possible focus and other parts of the sentence in the surface structure of the sentence.Chapter seven is Chinese focus operator and logical operation of the tripartite structure. We analyze some focus operators in Chinese by means of negation test, including interrogative focus operator and interrogative focus marker, negative operator, definitive operator, frequency operator, modality operator, congnition and mentality operator, evaluation operator and magnitude operator, and discuss the scope, syntactic position and binding component of the dependent focus forcing form, and analyse the before-domain stress in the tripartite structure by means of logical operation.Chapter eight is the phenomena of the multi-force and the overlaying of multiple focus forcing forms. We describe specific phenomena of the multi-force, and analyze two ways of melting and co-existing among several focus forcing forms. We hold that there are two layers in the category of focus, one including all kinds of focus forcing forms and theirs possible focus, another one about the most prominent focal component in one sentence. We also analyze focus distribution in the compound sentence.Chapter nine is the realization of sentence focus and the operation of de-focalization. We review former viewpoints about the quantity of focus, and put forward the rule of realizing sentence focus based on the argument of unique focus, and concretize this rule to get three laws of focus structure, focus forcing and focus strength. We also put forward the operation of de-focalization, and point out its essence is making some prominent components to lose the prominence in the sentence, so these components become one part of the background, and provide cognitive presupposition for the realization of sentence focus of other components. We also discuss the degeneration of the focalization and focal shift in subordination structrue, and put forward the rule of focus harmony:the harmony of the focus can use common stress, but the disharmony of the focus can use special stress.Chapter ten is the issue of focus relating to interrogation. We review former viewpoints about the relation between focus and interrogation, and analyse the correspondence between interrogative expression and interrogative focus, and sum up two stress allocation models of focus in the interrogative sentence.Chapter eleven is the issue of focus relating to negation. We review former viewpoints about the relation between focus and negation, and analyse the relation between negative scope and negative focus, and sum up negation test that can distinguish between focus marker and focus operator.Chapter twelve is the conclusion. We summarize the primary viewpoints of this dissertation, and point out its shortcomings in this study and some future topics to be explored.