Meeting time. Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30-2:00, Room KCB 201.

Instructor. Paul Hagstrom, 621 Commonwealth Ave., room 105. Email: hagstrom@bu.edu (likely to get a quick response). Phone: 617-353-6220. Office hours: T 10:30-11:30, W 4-5, R 5-6.

Prerequisites. CAS LX 250 (Foundations of Language), or consent of instructor.

Course description. Exploration of linguistic focus from several perspectives. Developing a theoretical understanding of how languages signal focus through syntax and intonation, and how focus interacts with semantics and pragmatics, we examine how diverse aspects of language knowledge interact as a system.

Longer description. Exploration of focus in natural language, integrating syntax, phonology, semantics, morphology, and pragmatics in pursuit of a general understanding of the cross-linguistic diversity of focus phenomena and the ways in which different linguistic processes cooperate to express focus.

Within linguistic research, the term “focus” refers to a property that highlights a linguistic element in comparison to others. Although its origin is arguably in the domain of semantics—the intention to communicate a contrast—focus in natural language has profound and wide-ranging effects on the structure of discourse and on the form, interpretation, and pronunciation of sentences. When something is focused in a sentence, languages often express this through a combination of changes in word order, use of special morphology, alteration of the pitch contour, and construction of contrasting sets in interpretation. The placement of focus in a sentence makes the difference between a sentence that fits in a discourse and one that does not. This course looks at focus from all of these perspectives in order to arrive at a general understanding of the phenomenon, and a deeper view of how syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology fit together in an overall theory of human language.

In this course, we will survey the focus-related phenomena, issues, proposals, and debates, drawn from the current linguistic literature. We will attempt to tease apart several different concepts that can be described as “focus” (contrast, center of attention, new information), and we will explore the phonological effects of focus and how they can be described and predicted, look at some of the morphological mechanisms that languages employ to mark focus in a sentence, the syntactic effects that different types of focus have, the relationship to and interaction with the formation of questions, the course of acquisition for focus-related effects in children, and various other topics, including one of each student’s choosing, to be investigated independently and reported on (briefly) at the end of the course. By the end of the course, students will have an appreciation for the depth of the interactions between focus and the various linguistic subfields, and a basic understanding of the typological variation in focus constructions.

Electronic communication We live in an electronic age. You are expected to be reachable by email. The central communication center for the course is the course blog. Announcements, notes on readings, homework errata, and other information will be posted there on a regular basis, and things that are posted there will be assumed to have been communicated. You are able (and encouraged!) to post questions and comments in response to this information on the course blog as well. Homework assignments can be sent (whenever feasible) by email. The only caveat there is that if you use special fonts or an obscure word processor, you should send it to me early enough that I can verify that I can read the file. Word, PDF, plain text, RTF, even LaTeX—all fine. Do not send me a WordPerfect file. And of course where email is impractical, handing in a paper copy is fine.

Course Requirements. Reading. There will be readings for each class session. All readings mentioned on the schedule are required, and should be completed by the beginning of class. Attendance and participation. Regular attendance is required, and participation in classroom discussions is expected. Homework assignments There will be homework assignments on roughly a weekly schedule for approximately the first two-thirds of the course, at which point work on the final project will commence. Final project. The final project will span roughly the last third of the course. There will be a short proposal due initially. Following that, there will be a short class presentation of the issue and results, and a final write-up of the project. The presentations will be about 10 minutes long and will take place over the last few class meetings of the semester, and the write-up (expected to be in the vicinity of 8-10 single-spaced pages long), is due on the last day of classes.

Late assignments. Late assignments will not be accepted without prior arrangement.

Readings. There is no textbook for this course. Individual readings (articles, book chapters) will be assigned throughout the semester. These readings will be available in the hallway outside my office suite, in a folder labeled LX518. You may take the readings out for no more than an hour to make a personal photocopy, and then they should be returned to the folder so that others may photocopy them.

CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. As a member of a CAS course, it is essential that you read and adhere to the CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. In particular, several types of plagiarism (any attempt to represent the work of another as your own) are defined by this academic conduct code. You can read the CAS Academic Conduct Code online, or get a copy in CAS 105.