ABSTRACT
The hypothesis presented in this paper is that the tonal specification of English utterances and the pragmatic notion of focus are closely connected. Indeed, the central idea put forward is that the intonational system of English is largely a device for signalling focus. A corollary of this idea is that many of the functions usually ascribed to intonation in English — attitudinal, grammatical, discoursal and the like — are best viewed as being derived from the focus marking of an utterance. It is argued that the disagreement encountered in the literature on what might be called the 'intonation meaning question' may be a function of the fact that different analysts latch onto different, but equally valid, interpretations of an underlying focus marking and present their interpretation as the function of a particular intonational feature.
