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Finding a Focus

A vital skill for anyone who wants to communicate in written form is the manipulation of word order to convey emphasis in such a way, that a reader understands what is focused. Word order is influenced, and sometimes dictated, by syntax, but also by the desire to start off with what is known, and introduce new matters only in relation to that background. This dissertation addresses the question how syntax relates to information structure in general by investigating the development of constituent focus and presentational focus in English against the background of its changing syntax, while part of the analysis is substantiated by data from present-day Chechen. The introduction (chapter ‎1) introduces the notion of ―syntax‖ that I use as the expression of grammatical functions and relations as well as the definition of default word order. When the linguistic realisation of syntax is not possible through morphology, a language resorts to using word order. Related to this view of syntax is the hypothesis that changes in English syntax correlate with changes in focus: where the syntax of English increasingly requires word order, focus needs other ways to express itself. Against the background of the latest developments in psycholinguistics, which are related to the way in which humans process a text they read or a narrative they hear (chapter ‎2), chapter ‎3 offers a working definition of focus. The three different focus articulations (which differ due to the size of the domain in which the focus occurs) can co-occur with points of departure, and word order in general is also influenced by the ―Principle of Natural Information Flow‖. Chapter ‎4 introduces my working hypothesis about the relation between syntax, pragmatics and textorganization: any linguistic realization (including word order) can be seen as a combination of (at least) these three factors. The chapter continues by touching upon a change in English syntax that seems to have been the main trigger for the changes in focus that come up later in this study. The syntactic change is the loss of the V2 system, which ultimately led to a reduction of three subject positions to just one. I attempt to tease apart word order variation caused by syntactic and text-structural factors from variation that relates to focus. The chapter contains a detailed analysis of two texts (one from Old English and one from late Modern English), and finishes with initial observations as to the changes that took place in the expression of presentational and constituent focus. What chapter ‎4 also finishes with is the clear realization that detailed analyses of individual texts does not give us the generalizations in tendencies we are looking for, since they involve too little data (which means that we either miss phenomena, or have too little examples of phenomena to gain enough significance). This is why a corpus approach is called for, and the planning and execution of this approach spans chapters ‎5-‎9.