Focusing On Focus : A Formalization

We present an operable definition of focus which is argued to be of a cognito-pragmatic nature and explore how it is determined in discourse in a formalized manner. For this purpose, a file card model of discourse model and knowledge store is introduced enabling the decomposition and formal representation of its determination process as a programmable algorithm (FDA). Interdisciplinary evidence from social and cognitive psychology is cited and the prospect of the integration of focus via FDA as a discourse-level construct into speech synthesis systems, in particular, concept-to-speech systems, is also briefly discussed.

