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In linguistics, focus (abbreviated FOC) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person whom Mary insulted.
In English it is also possible to use other sentence structures to show the topic of the sentence, as in the following: As for the little girl, the dog bit her. It was the little girl that the dog bit. The case of expletives is sometimes rather complex. Consider sentences with expletives (meaningless subjects), like: It is raining.
A cleft sentence is a complex sentence (one having a main clause and a dependent clause) that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular constituent into focus. In spoken language, this focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation. In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as ...
The only freedom in Hungarian word order is that the order of parts outside the focus position and the verb may be freely changed without any change to the communicative focus of the sentence, as seen in sentences 2 and 3 as well as in sentences 6 and 7 above.
Thus, sentence patterns can be thought of as bands whose pitch varies over the course of the sentence, and changes of syllable pitch cause fluctuations within the band. Furthermore, the details of Mandarin intonation are affected by various factors like the tone of the final syllable, the presence or absence of focus (centering of attention) on ...
In the sentence below from Livy, the sentence topic ("that year") and discourse topic ("the war") are in the middle of the sentence. The fact that war was waged on both land and sea is a weak focus placed in penultimate position; but the new and surprising information is that the number of Roman legions was no fewer than 23, and this comes at ...
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
"Focus phrase" is defined as "a specially-constructed short sentence or phrase that states a person's inner intent to refocus his or her attention immediately in a new pre-ordained direction". [citation needed] The term Focus Phrase has been studied academically as a part of a Semantics dissertation. [1]