Presentational focus changes in English

Erwin R. Komen, English language department

E.Komen@Let.ru.nl
Presentational focus is a form of focus that spans the core of a clause, while placing particular
highlighting on the subject (Andrews, 2007, Lambrecht, 1994, Sasse, 1987). This form of
focus is used mainly to introduce a new character in a discourse, as in (1a), but it is also used
to introduce an existing character in an unexpected place, as in (1b).
(1)

a. afringa com Arcestrates, ealre are eode

then

suddenly came Arcestrates

mid micelre mnio hismanna.

with

great

cyningc,

all
that peoples king
[coapollo:233]

company his of.men

Then suddenly came Arcestrates, king of all that people, with a great company of
his men.
b. Ongemang issum, com ham Pafnuntius. [coeuphr:88]
In.the.midst of.this

came home Paphnutius.

In the midst of this, Paphnutius came home.

While the presentational focus involving reintroduction of participants, as in (1b), requires
extensive manual study of a text in order to be recognized (Paphnutius comes home at a time
the main character Euphrosyne is not at all expecting him), the type where referentially new
subjects are introduced, as in (1a), is ideally suitable for a corpus study on syntactically
annotated texts that are enriched with referential information. Such texts are currently being
prepared semi-automatically by making use of the Cesax computer program (Komen,
2012). The information is added to existing texts taken from four syntactically parsed corpora
(Kroch et al., 2004, Kroch et al., 2010, Kroch and Taylor, 2000, Taylor et al., 2003). The
question we want to answer is in what way presentational focus strategies have changed, and
what that tells us about the interaction between syntax and focus.
This paper describes a corpus research that tracks the changes in the linguistic
expression of presentational focus in English by making use of the referentially enriched texts
using queries written in CorpusStudio (Komen, 2012). The results show that presentational
focus is characterized by (a) demarcation of the participant NP that is being introduced and
(b) positioning of this participant in such a way that it complies with the Principle of Natural
Information Flow (Comrie, 1989, Firbas, 1964, Kaiser and Trueswell, 2004), while it diverges
from the canonical word order where the subject precedes the finite verb. The interaction of
these principles with the changing syntax of English results in different strategies for
presentational focus: Old English uses the late-subject construction, while Late Modern
English has switched to an expletive construction, witness the results in Figure 1.

Proportion of presentational focus

occurring after the finite verb

70,0%
60,0%

NoExpletiveSbj

50,0%

WithExpletiveSbj

40,0%
30,0%
20,0%
10,0%
0,0%
N=260

N=164

OE

ME

N=62
Period eModE

N=53
LmodE

Figure 1 Postverbal presentational focus with syntactic subjects versus expletives

The line marked NoExpletiveSbj gives the proportion of clauses with a postverbal subject
that are referentially new. The line labelled WithExpletiveSbj gives the proportion of
clauses that use the expletive strategy.
The results illustrate the interaction between syntax and focus: the former requires word
order for the expression of grammatical functions in an amount that changes over time, while
the latter creatively makes use of the focus area demarcation possibilities available at any
given time, leading to different strategies for the expression of focus.
References
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