Universität Potsdam, Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik
PS: The Structures of English, Sommersemester 2002

Focus strategies in english sentences and their representation
in books for school age german learners of english

by

Anja Dinter

CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION 3

2. THE TERM FOCUS AND ITS FUNCTION IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR 4

3. POSSIBLE CONSTRUCTIONS TO ASSIGN FOCUS IN ENGLISH SENTENCES 6

3.1 FRONTING 6

3.1.1 Emphatic Topic, Contrastive Topic, ‘Given’ or Semi-Given Topic  6

3.1.1.1 Emphatic Topic  6
3.1.1.2 Contrastive Topic  7
3.1.1.3 ‘Given’ / Semi-Given Topic  7

3.1.2 Inversion 8

3.1.2.1 Subject-verb Inversion  8
3.1.2.2 Subject-operator Inversion 9

3.2 OTHER CONSTRUCTIONS TO ASSIGN FOCUS 10

3.2.1 Cleft Sentences (wh-type and it-type)  10
3.2.2 Postponement  12
3.2.3 The Passive 12

3.3 ADDITIONAL FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS  13

4. THE REPRESENTATION OF FOCUS STRATEGIES IN SCHOOL-BOOKS FOR GERMAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 14

4.1 THE GENERAL LACK OF FOCUS STRATEGIES IN SCHOOL-BOOKS 14
4.2 BOOKS SUITABLE FOR INTRODUCING FOCUS STRATEGIES TO STUDENTS  17

5. CONCLUSION  18

6. WORKS CITED 19

INTERNET 21

1. Introduction

The aim of the following work is mainly to present focus strategies in English sentences. The topic has been of great interest to me since such focus constructions are an important grammatical means of re-arranging the information within a sentence according to one’s intention. Being familiar with a wide variety of focus strategies is one possibility of improving one’s style, both in written and spoken English. Several university level grammar books provide a great number of different means to assign focus within a sentence. In the following course of this paper I’m first going to explain and discuss the term focus as well as its function in English grammar and then show the possible ways of organizing a message. Due to the above mentioned variety of focus strategies not all of them can be itemized here. I decided on presenting those focus constructions which, in my opinion, seem most relevant for the purposes of a foreign language student. The prescribed extent of this work makes a detailed description of each construction, as it can be found in scholarly grammar book, impossible. Therefore, only the most important attributes and particularities of each strategy are named. In most cases examples are added for visualization and a better understanding. In their publications linguists present different ways of classifying focus strategies which makes a clear division of the constructions relatively difficult. Furthermore different notions of which grammatical structure can be considered a focus strategy are existing. Under the respective headline these problems will be discussed in greater detail.

Dealing with these focus strategies and the purpose they serve raised the question if these constructions can be found in school-books for German learner’s of English as well. As a future English teacher I’m especially interested in that and therefore decided to examine several books available. The results of this examination, reasons for a necessary integration of focus strategies into a classroom context and suitable literature are mentioned in the final part of this work. Since focus strategies aren’t (yet) generally represented in school books this part is rather short in comparison to the one dealing with the focus constructions itself.

2. The Term Focus and its Function in English Grammar

In English grammar the term focus is used to refer to the highlighting of parts of a sentence for communicative purposes. One part of the sentence is moved to a place where it has the greatest communicative impact.¹ GRAUSTEIN et al. (1980) note that such an re-ordering of a sentence structure depends on the speaker’s or writer’s perspective of communication.² In the most usual sense, focus is what is emphasized in either an utterance or in writing. In speech, meaning can mainly be expressed by varying the pitch, loudness and other features³, whereas in written language the only way to achieve focus is to re-arrange the order of constituents within the sentence.

A sentence usually contains two different kinds of information – new and given. The term new information refers to the unknown part of a message. It is information the speaker assumes the hearer to be unfamiliar with. As given information we consider contents which have been mentioned already and are therefore taken for granted. This sort of information has usually been supplied by the context, the situation⁴ or simply by a preceding clause. Although, it needs to be taken in consideration, what has as well been mentioned in the above paragraph, is the fact that the speaker only assumes that the receiver of the message shares the same knowledge. When the speaker’s presented notion of given and new information differs from the hearer’s, the production of an ambiguous message or even a total misunderstanding may occur. According to GRAUSTEIN (1980), given information is equated with the term “theme” and new information with “rheme”⁵; in comparison LEECH / SVARTVIK (1991) use the terms “topic” and “focus”. Other linguists, as GREENBAUM / QUIRK (1990), prefer in their terminology the distinction “theme” and “focus”. However, the structure of a sentence depends on the emphasis one wants to give to different parts of the message. Normally, a sentence begins with given information, whereas new information is kept to the end of it. In other words, the theme is the initial part of a structure and the new information, which is the focus of the message, is normally oc- curring at the end of the information unit.⁶ This structure is due to the principles of end-focus and end-weight. In English sentences end-focus implies that “[…] the new or most important idea in a piece of information should be placed towards the end, where in speech the tone unit normally falls.”⁷ Not only does this principle apply to single pieces of information, but also to a whole sentence containing several pieces of information. Especially in writing, where intonation cannot be relied on for emphasis, a sentence structure in which the most important idea is saved-up to the end is considered to be most effective. The principle of end-focus is closely linked with that of end-weight, that is to say, with the tendency to place the more complex part at the end of a sentence. With reference to LEECH / SVARTVIK (1991) “The ‘weight’ of an element can be defined in terms of length (eg number of syllables) or in terms of grammatical complexity (number of modifiers, etc).”⁸

[...]

1 Gabriele STEIN / Randolph QUIRK (1990), p. 200

2 Gottfried GRAUSTEIN et al. (1980), p. 233

3 David CRYSTAL (1990), p. 198

4 Gottfried GRAUSTEIN et al. (1980), p. 233

5 Gottfried GRAUSTEIN et al. (1980), p. 233

6 Sidney GREENBAUM / Randolph QUIRK (1990), p. 397-98

7 Geoffrey LEECH / Jan SVARTVIK (1991), p. 175

8 Geoffrey LEECH / Jan SVARTVIK (1991), p. 175