ABSTRACT
This chapter reports an experiment which was run with the aim of providing an empirically-derived basis for a definition of focus, in terms of its semantic reality for the native speaker and in terms of its phonological and syntactic exponents in the grammar of English. This is a desirable goal, since previous discussions of information focus and related concepts such as new/given information, contrastive focus and emphasis, have been vitiated by a priori assumptions about these loosely defined semantic categories and their exponents in phonological systems of stress or intonation. In order to obtain spontaneously uttered sentences which contained a variety of locations and degrees of focus, and yet which were reasonably controlled with regard to other intonational and syntactic variables, a technique devised by Currie was used. The purpose of phonological statement is to link phonetic events to categories established at other linguistic levels, example, lexical and grammatical.
