Confronting Focus Strategies in Finnish and in Italian

An Experimental Study on Object Focusing

Bibliographic Data

ID5900906
AuthorsElina Ylinärä (0000-0002-5008-1086, University of Naples - L'Orientale), Giorgio Carella (0000-0002-7729-5789, Roma Tre University), Mara Frascarelli (0000-0002-8451-3721, Roma Tre University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume8
Issue1
Pages32
Publication date2023-01-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguages (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages8010032
OpenAlexW4316806139
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited70

Focus is cross-linguistically associated with a number of different strategies, such as fronting, clefting, markers, and prosody. In some cases, the choice between one strategy or another is determined by language-specific rules, while in others, two or more strategies seem to be optional, and thus, somehow "unpredictable". In this experimental study, we investigate the syntactic strategies employed in object focusing in Finnish and in Italian by examining the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features underlying the choice of a specific Focus strategy. In particular, the present experiment is aimed to investigate two strategies employed in both languages for object Focus realization, namely, Focus in situ and fronting, in order to verify whether the choice between them is influenced by a specific type of feature, a combination of Focus-related features, the verb category involved, or the interplay between these three factors. The incidence of alternative constructions, in particular clefting in Italian and the -hAn discourse marker in Finnish, is also taken into consideration, and relevant asymmetries are analyzed in a comprehensive, comparative account

Feature (linguistics · Focus (optics · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Object (grammar · Prosody · Realization (probability · Verb · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Mathematics · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence