Some Remarks on Focus Adverbs

Much of what we have to say in the present paper should be thought of as an attempt to get a better understanding of the intricate complexities surrounding focus adverbs. To this end, we discuss a number of restrictions which govern the occurrence of different classes of focus adverbs in Dutch. German and English We are aware that in doing so we limit ourselves primarily to the descriptive level-a decision which some may well disapprove of. Indeed, when Pullum (1988) speaks of the 'slow agony of empirical endeavor', the characterizes this posiaon in the following way. 'Simply listing facts will do us no good . . . It it easy. It is boring. Anyone can do it. But ultimately it is useless to serious linguistic research.' It goes without aying that we, too, completely disagree with this way of presenting the matter. When one tries to characterize focus phonemena, it is immediately clear that there are numerous lexical differences which interact in subtle ways with regular syntactic and semantic patterns. In our opinion, a linguistically interesting theory of focus should be able to account for these differential patterns. The strategy followed explicitly by Altmann (1976. 1978) and Jacobs (1983). and implicitly by many others, which is to concentrate a few common focus particles (often the words for only and even), and to hope that the rest will somehow conform to the patterns exhibited by the selected items, may lead to some initial progress, but must eventually be replaced by a more comprehensive effort. It is dangerous to rely too much on the assumed homogeneity of linguistic classes, especially in the closed-class systems. It is also important to gain a comparative perspective on focus adverbs by comparing items from different languages if a theory is to be constructed with the explanatory depth and broad empirical coverage of current theories of WH-movement or anaphoric dependencies. We give a number of examples where it is useful to compare items taken from English, German and Dutch. To summarize: this paper reviews some of the major problems which a comprehensive theory of focus adverbs needs to address, describes some of the variations to be found among focus adverbs, and places this against the background of some of the available accounts of focus adverbs