A DERIVATIONAL APPROACH TO THE FOCUS STRUCTURE

ABSTRACT: I present a derivational analysis of the construal of the focus structure of the sentence. I propose that the [+F] feature is an optional formal feature that can be assigned to multiple tokens of the numeration. Hence, the focus structure is derived via Merge (creation of a set) in a strictly compositional way. I argue that with the adoption of this theory we can circumvent many of the empirical and theoretical shortcomings of previous Nuclear Stress Rule-based approaches, and, furthermore, that it allows us to account for split focus constructions (answers to multiple Wh questions) in a natural way. 1-Introduction 1 In this paper I present a new theory of the composition of the Focus Structure (henceforth, F-structure) based in a dynamic construal of syntactic phrases. As will be shown, this theory allows building up the F-Structure of a sentence directly in the narrow syntactic component, and hence, it provides the structural description for the interpretiv