2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
A Study on Semantic Functions of Fucus Marking Constructions
| Project/Area Number |
24520433
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Linguistics
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| Research Institution | Saga University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
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| Keywords | 焦点 / 情報構造 / 分裂文 / 倒置構文 / 指定文 / 措定文 / 変項名詞句 / 代名詞 |
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
Within the field of focus marking constructions, I have paid special attention to cleft sentences, specificational sentences and inversion in English and Japanese, and investigated their semantic and pragmatic functions. Not only information structure but also semantic functions of different types of NPs (cf. Nishiyama 2003) need to be accounted for to clarify the concept of focus. Specifically, I have shown: (1) the essential function of specification is the assignment of a value to a variable, which cannot be reduced to the function of predication or of equation; (2) the focus of specificational sentences is defined in terms of the contrast between the selected and non-selected values while that of inversion is defined in terms of the relative discourse familiarity of the elements in the sentence; (3) the it-cleft and the that-cleft perform different semantic functions; the former assigns a value while the latter confirms the identity of the value which has already been assigned.
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| Free Research Field |
言語学
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