Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

3.2 Focus and focal presupposition
Before turning to topic-marking constructions that involve the *bi-√ prefix, it is probably
best to devote a few pages to focal presupposition. Just as negation plays a critical role in
differentiating presupposition and entailment, it can also serve as a useful context for the
elucidation of focus and focal presupposition. Take, for example, a relatively simple set
of three variations on the same sentence in which the focal intonation (as indicated by
capital letters) occurs on a different constituent in each variant.
(12) a. Mary PUNCHED the mayor on Wilshire Boulevard.
b. Mary punched THE MAYOR on Wilshire Boulevard.
c. Mary punched the mayor ON WILSHIRE BOULEVARD.
Each of these three intonational variants serve as the response to three distinct wh-
questions. 27
(13) a. What did Mary do to the mayor on Wilshire Boulevard?
b. Who did Mary punch on Wilshire Boulevard?
c. Where did Mary punch the mayor?
27 The three intonational variants in (12) also have explicit syntactic variants that make use of the cleft (“It is the mayor
that . . .”) and pseudo-cleft (“What Mary did was . . .”) constructions, but in the interest of brevity I have not gone into
the matter here. See below in section 4.6 for a discussion of the difference between informational focus (typically
coded through intonation) and identificational focus (usually coded by some kind of movement or morphosyntactic
configuation).
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