Narrow Focus and Fronting Strategies

Focus is a discourse category which has been given great attention by scholars in the last 50 years and is traditionally described as “that part of information that is assumed by the speaker not to be shared by the hearer” (Jackendoff 1972), while the unfocused part of the sentence provides background information. However, several works have shown the necessity to distinguish different Focus types for their formal, semantic and pragmatic properties (cf. Kiss 1998, Krifka 2007, Bianchi 2013, Bianchi et al. 2015, among others). From a structural viewpoint, Focus can be realized in situ in a great number of languages. Nevertheless, Focus Fronting (FF) is also a major strategy, especially for some specific Focus types (cf., among many others, Alboiu 2004, Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007). However, its specific realization shows diverse patterns and seems to be prominently optional in a number of languages, calling into question the assumption that movement operations are driven by narrow syntax requirements (i.e., the interpretation of formal features in dedicated functional projections). Since such requirements should not be flexible, FF stands up as a vexed question. Given this scenario, this Special Issue aims to offer a fine-grained analysis of FF (and related marked strategies, such as clefting) across natural languages, concentrating in particular on Corrective Focus (cf. Neeleman et al. 2006; Bianchi and Bocci 2012, among others) and Mirative Focus (cf. Bianchi et al 2016).