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Focus and Relativization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Paul Schachter
Paul Schachter*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

In many languages, focus constructions and constructions involving restrictive relative clauses show striking formal similarities, a fact which suggests that there is some deep, non-language-specific relationship between the constructions. The most tenable hypothesis about the nature of this relationship seems to be that both constructions involve the promotion of material from an embedded into a matrix sentence, a syntactic process that may be correlated with the semantic process of foregrounding one part of a sentence at the expense of the rest.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , March 1973 , pp. 19 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Linguistic Society of America 1973

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