Focus-Marking in Chinese and Malay : A Comparative Perspective

Focus-Marking in Chinese and Malay: A Comparative Perspective Jie XU (it*?,) Department of Chinese Studies National University of Singapore Singapore 119260 chsxuAnus.edu.sg Abstract Cross-linguistically, there are two devices for grammar to process the focus mark [+FocusJ: the fronting of focused constituents and the insertion of a Focus Mark such as the English 'be' before focused constituents. In this mode of formulation, a comparative study of Focus and Focus-Marking in Chinese and Malay has been conducted. These two languages are similar and different. They are similar in opting for the use of Focus Mark instead of focused constituents movement. They are different in the nature of Focus Mark itself Focus mark is the copular verb SHI A in Chinese, but, as the language simply does not have a copular verb, in Malay two complementary particles KAH/LAK are chosen, and all other contrasts in Focus-Marking between the two languages are demonstrated to follow from the difference in the nature of Focus Mark and some other independently motivated conditions in a modularized theory of grammar. 1 Introduction In the literature, `Focus'- related issues have been studied from different perspectives. Following Culicover and Rochemont (1983, 1990) and Horvath (1986), we in this paper assume that this essentially semantic conception of 'Focus' can be characterized as a purely formal syntactic feature [+Focus] or [+F], which gets assigned to constituents at a certain appropriate level of syntactic representation, triggering such syntactic operations such as 'Movement' and 'Adjoining' under the general syntactic principles and constraints. This paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 we will first review some basic assumptions about the formal characterization of [+FOCUS], then moving quickly onto the question of how [-I-FOCUS] is reflected in the formal syntax, especially how it is marked syntactically. Section 3 is devoted to a discussion of the nature of Focus Mark shi A in Chinese. Comparable phenomena in Malay are viewed from a comparative perspecitve in Section 4. We will demonstrate that question words are inherently assigned the focus feature in Section 5. Section 6 is a short one on some remarkable and relevant phenomena from historical and dialectal grammars of Chinese. Our major conclusions are summarized briefly in Section 7. 2 [FFOCUS]: From a Pragmatic Conception to a Purely Syntactic Feature It is noted in some early generative literature that one aspect of semantic interpretation of a sentence is a division of its reading into FOCUS and PRESUPPOSITION. As a working definition, we follow Jackendoff (1972) to assume (1) below. (1) FOCUS: The information in the sentence that is assumed by the speaker not to be shared by him and the hearer. PRESUPPOSITION: The information in the sentence that is assumed by the speaker to be 2 shared by him and the hearer. According to (1), for a normal sentence, the matter is whether the FOCUS or FOCI is reflected syntactically or not, rather than whether it has a FOCUS at all. Sentence (2) below, for example, may be analyzed as (3) in terms of FOCUS …

Content truncated to 500 words