Semantic Focus Domain Of English Syntactic Constructions And Its Cognitive Motivations

The concept of focus was first advanced by Halliday (1967) for the description of the information structure, which consists of a sequence of information units that do not coincide with syntactic constituent structure. Halliday defines the concept of focus as new information, which varies according to the context. On the basis of Halliday's research, Chomsky (1971) argues that focus is essentially a phonological phenomenon, and claims that focus is "the phrase containing the intonation centre", and the presupposition is "determined by the replacement of the focus by variable".These two concepts greatly influence the direction of research in focus in the past decades. However, modern linguists take exceptions to them. They argue that focus usually carries new information, but old information can also constitute focus. That the concept of focus is the new information is open to question. And focus and intonational prominence can be disjoint. There is also some semantically relevant focus, i.e. the deaccented focus, where there is no intonational marking of focus on the focal element(s) (Partee 1999: 213-231).Incorporating those definitions of focus in former research, we can propose the definition of focus employed in this study as follows (subject to further revisions): Focus is the most important and prominent information, with the most information value that can denote the communicative intention of the speaker or author of the discourse. Focalizing devices such as stress, word order or syntactic structures can mark information focus.In modern linguistic research, different linguistic subfields have made enormous efforts to probe into focus and made some achievements. However, various approaches to focus-phenomena taken by different schools of linguistic lead to a wide diversity of interpreting focus which makes the research on focus a tough job. This dissertation constitutes a preliminary and tentative endeavor to study it.This thesis starts from the interpretations of semantic focus. It argued that semantic focus is intrinsically the most important and prominent information, with the most information value that can denote the communicative intention of the speaker or author of the discourse. Then it makes an exploratory study on the features of semantic focus domain in respects of its smallest information unit, placement, unmarked structure, context-dependence and focus structure of complex sentences. Next, through a detailed analysis of English focus domain, it is found that the devices of focalization can be phonetic, lexical and grammatical. Last but not the least, as former research into focus is independent of human conceptual aspects, this paper provides a new approach to the study of focus domain. Through the study in cognitive perspective, we find that not only does focus domain carry the most important information, but it also embodies participant's conceptual state. Based on this, this thesis borrows some cognitive linguistic theories to elaborate focus structure so as to prove that the generation of focus structure is not autonomous.