Toward a Typology of Focus and Focus Constructions

takes preliminary steps towards a typology of focus and focus constructions. Focus is taken to be a syntactic feature assigned freely to word level categories at Numeration licensed either by integration into a wider domain (presentational focus) of by overt/covert movement to a functional projection headed by a polarity formative (contrastive/exhaustive focus). Crosslinguistic variation in the target position of focus movement (sentence-peripheral vs. verb-adjacent) support the stipulation of two polarity projections, one in COMP and one in INFL, with different effects on interpretation. The evidence of the WH/focus relationship, on the other hand, suggests that question and answer instantiate a distinct type of focus-background partition (completive focus) independent from and orthogonal to primary information structure. Analyzing clefts as another type of completive focus constructions solves a serious problem confronting the movement analysis of narrow focus: in a number of languages showing striking parallels between focus and relative constructions (Schachter 1973) sentence-peripheral foci bind resumptive pronouns without WCO or island effect. This paper investigates a clef