# Contrast and focus sub-types across European languages: an experimental study

Bianca Maria de Paolis, Alina Masla

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

## To cite this version:

Bianca Maria de Paolis, Alina Masla. Contrast and focus sub-types across European languages: an experimental study. SLE2025 - 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Aug 2025, Bordeaux, France. hal-05052340

HAL Id: hal-05052340

https://hal.science/hal-05052340v1

Submitted on 30 Apr 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
# Contrast and *focus* sub-types across European languages: an experimental study

Bianca Maria De Paolis, Alina Masla (University of Turin, Italy)

The relationship between *focus* and contrast has emerged as a key topic in studies on information structure. Building on the framework of Alternative Semantics [1], many scholars argue that contrast should not be treated as a distinct notion from *focus*, but as an inherent aspect of it, manifesting in various intensities. Under this perspective, contrast is not either absent or present (and focus either neutral or contrastive), but rather develops along a *continuum*, resulting in *focus* sub-types marked through distinct linguistic configurations [2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

This hypothesis has been tested in several languages, with a noteworthy argument presented by [7]. The study suggests that in languages such as Italian and French, which use both syntax and prosody to encode information structure, it is the additive combination of these two strategies that establishes the *continuum* of contrast.

The present study aims to extend this hypothesis by examining *focus*-marking strategies in German and Russian. Although *focus* in these languages has been largely studied [8, 3, 9, 10, 13, 14], the novelty of our analysis lies in the use of the same protocol employed in [7], ensuring full comparability of the results.

In addition to the existing corpus of 35 Italian and French speakers from [7], data were collected from 5 speakers of German and 10 speakers of Russian. Using a task adapted from [11], participants produced six target utterances, in which *focused* subjects represent three levels of contrastiveness: broad *focus*, identification *focus*, and correction *focus*.

The data are being evaluated with a two-factor linear regression model. Preliminary findings show that the four languages studied exhibit differences in how linguistic markers are mapped onto specific *focus* subtypes. In Italian, prosody primarily signals identification, with syntax (clefts) added specifically to mark correction. In French, clefts serve as the primary marker for identification, with prosody layered on top in corrective utterances. In Russian, word order (e.g., focus fronting, postverbal subject) is the main strategy, with prosody added on canonical word orders to indicate correction. In German, *focus* is mainly delivered by prosody, through phonetic cues such as f0, intensity and glottalization; the differentiation between identification and correction is achieved by a specific modulation of pre-nuclear and nuclear prominences [12].

These results highlight two key aspects: first, they confirm that *focus* and contrast, along with *focus* subtypes created by their interaction, are signalled through distinct combinations of linguistic markers. Second, they reinforce the concept of a *continuum* of contrast, rather than pointing to a binary distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive *foci*. As stated in [2], “the greater the contrast, the greater the potential,” and, as our findings suggest, the more linguistic means are employed to mark it. Crucially, Italian, French, German, and Russian demonstrate varying patterns of either additivity or trade-off between prosody, word order, and syntax, all of which, in some way, fit into this model. Our findings also underscore the need for future research to apply a repeatable and replicable methodology across a broader range of languages, fostering robust cross-linguistic comparisons.
References

[1] Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. *Natural Language Semantics*, 6:75–116.

[2] Cruschina, Silvio. 2021. The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax. *Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics*, 6(1):1–30.

[3] Féry, Caroline. 2013. Focus as prosodic alignment. *Natural Language & Linguistic Theory*, 31(3):683–734.

[4] Krifka, Manfred. 2008. Basic notions of information structure. *Acta Linguistica Hungarica*, 55(3-4):243–276.

[5] Molnár, Valeria. 2002. Contrast from a contrastive perspective. *Language and Computers*, 39:147–162.

[6] Vallduví, Enric & Vilkuna, Maria. 1998. On rheme and kontrast. In Peter Culicover & Louise McNally, (eds.), *The Limits of Syntax*, Academic Press, New York, 79–108.

[7] De Paolis, Bianca Maria. 2024. Focus-induced variations in prosody and word-order in native and non-native Italian and French. Doctoral dissertation, Università di Torino / Université Paris 8.

[8] Büring, Daniel. 1997. The Meaning of Topic and Focus: The 59th Street Bridge Accent. London, Routledge.

[9] Féry, Caroline. 1993. German intonational patterns. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

[10] King, Tracy Holloway. 1995. Configuring topic and focus in Russian. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

[11] Gabriel, Christoph. 2010. On Focus, Prosody, and Word Order in Argentinian Spanish. A Minimalist OT Account. In *Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem*, Special issue 4:183–222.

[12] Roessig, Simon. 2024. The inverse relation of pre-nuclear and nuclear prominences in German. *Laboratory Phonology*, 15(1): 1–43.

[13] Bryzgunova, Elena Andreevna. 1983. Zvuki i intonacija russkogo jazyka (6th edition). Russkij jazyk, Moskva.

[14] Janko, Tat'jana Evgen'evna. 2008. Intonacionnye strategii russkoj reči v sopostavitel'nom aspekte. Jazyki slavjanskichkul'tur, Moskva.