UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (1999)
A stress-driven approach to the syntax of focus
KRISZTA SZENDROI
A focused constituent contains the most prominent stress of the clause.
(Selkirk 1984, Reinhart 1995) Reinhart accounts for this by a PF/LF mapping
rule. I extend this view to Hungarian, a language with contrastive
focus-movement and show that a range of data, some of which pose a problem for
a feature-driven approach, can be accounted for straightforwardly. Among these
are the uniqueness of focus-movement and the fact that verb-focusing does not
strand the particle of particle-verbs (verb-movement generally strands it). The
analysis extends to blocking effects between focusing and a phenomenon called
'particle climbing'.
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