Additive particles and focus

Additive particles such as ‘also’, ‘even’ are usually analyzed in relation to the sentence. When confronted with texts spontaneously produced by a speaker, it is, however, necessary for the analyst to go beyond the sentence boundary: this article defends the point of view that three levels of analysis — syntactic, semantic, and “pragmatic” (in the sense of the organization of coherent discourse) — must be taken into account to explain the behavior of these particles. Three specific points are made: A. An utterance in context forms part of the information structure (referential movement) of the text as a whole: information is introduced, maintained, or developed. This information structure determines both the constituent the particle relates to and the particle's meaning value. B. It follows that certain syntactic positions that are in principle possible for particles in a sentence are not attested in certain specifiable discourse contexts because the information structure of that utterance in that context disallows them. C. Learners' utterances tend to be more “iconic” than those of native speakers in the sense that learners have to rely more on their fully transferable knowledge of the information structure of a particular text type. Hence the interaction of this structure — a factor at work in all texts — with additive particles emerges more clearly in learner texts than in texts produced by native speakers

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