4.1.2. New information focus
In new information focus, only a part of the sentence conveys new information. Generally, it can be used as an answer to a specific question, as in the discourse stretch below.
wh
A: ix2 buy qartichoke
foc
B: ix1 car new buy ix1
‘What did you buy?’ ‘I bought a new car.’
In the example above, new car is the part of the sentence conveying new information. On the other hand, the subject (ix1) and the verb (buy) represent the background, which conveys old information. Generally, new information focus follows the background. Another similar example is presented below.
wh
A: food various ix2 impossible_no_way which
foc
B: ix1 c-a-p-p-e-r-i pe ix1 impossible_no_way
‘What kind of food do you hate most?’ ‘I hate cappers.’
However, in LIS it is also possible to find ellipsis in place of the part of the sentence conveying background information. Indeed, for signers this is the most natural strategy to answer a specific question. The example below reports a case in which new information (pizza) is conveyed by focus and background information is elided as a result of ellipsis.
wh
A: food various like most which
foc
B: pizza
‘What kind of food do you like most?’ ‘Pizza.’
New information focus can also be expressed by question-answer pairs, specifically by the answer of the construction. This is a strategy often used by signers to give prominence to the item contained in the answer. Note that the question part of this construction and typical content interrogatives (SYNTAX 1.2.3) have different non-manual markers.
wh foc
ix1 food like which pizza
‘The kind of food I like is pizza.’
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant Agreement No 693349.