Focus And Information Understanding In English Verbal Communication

Focus is a very important language phenomenon, and it plays a key role in English verbal communication. Thus it is a significant, valuable topic and deserves a deep discussion. The research of focus involves phonology, syntax, pragmatics, discourse analysis etc, and becomes a common interest of many schools of linguistics such as formal linguistics and functional linguistics. At present, scholars pay more attention to the classifications, focusing devices, the semantic relationship between focus and focus-sensitive operators, the position and projection rules of focus. However, they overlooked other aspects and didn't give a complete interpretation to the phenomenon of focus. In view of this, this thesis analyzes the factors affecting information focusing and the functions of focus after giving a review of focus theory.In English verbal communication, people are accustomed to making their main points—information focus prominent in one way or another. The way which is used to make main points prominent are called focusing devices. In English, focusing devices include phonetic devices, lexical devices and grammatical devices. In oral English, information focus can be conveyed mainly by phonetic devices, while lexical devices and grammatical devices are widely used in written English.English verbal communication is a dynamic process, in which focus should be comprehended in the concrete applicative environment rather than an isolated one. Because many social and psychological factors will influence the focus of the utterance, and even induce the focus meaning to deviate from the sentence meaning, people shouldn't consider that focus exists only in sentences. This thesis studies the factors which affect information focusing from cognitive-psychological aspect, social cultural aspect and contextual aspect respectively, and the pragmatic functions and textual functions of focus are discussed as well. The thesis reveals the essence of focus in English verbal communication, which is conducive to a successful communication.The thesis is organized as follows: Chapter 1 gives an introduction to the present research, which includes the background, significance, goals and the outline of the thesis; Chapter 2 reviews the theory of focus and previous studies of focus and information understanding; Chapter 3 makes a detailed study of the factors which affect information focusing, mainly from aspects of cognitive-psychology, social culture and context; Chapter 4 does research on the functions of focus from the perspectives of pragmatics and text; Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the research, in which major findings are summarized, limitations are pointed out, and suggestions for further investigation are given as well.