Where do you like it? Experimental evidence on contrastive focus position in Greek

Journal article

We examine utterances that contain merely contrastive, corrective, confirmative, and mirative focus structures in Greek. Through a perception experiment, we provide evidence regarding listener preferences about the syntactic position (‘high’ vs ‘low’) of the contrastively focused objects in SVO vs OVS patterns. The results suggest that listeners consider utterances with all four focus types acceptable, regardless of whether the sentential object appears in a ‘high’ or ‘low’ position in Greek, unlike other languages. Moreover, specific listener preferences are brought to light for each focus type: there is a clear preference for a ‘low’ position for mere focus, versus a ‘high’ one for corrective, while there is almost equal preference for both positions in the mirative and the confirmative structures. These findings support the distinction among the different types of contrastive focus with their respective (semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, and intonational) properties.

Authors: Gorgiafentis, M; Sfakianaki, A; Tsokoglou, A; Baltazani, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
• Journal: Journal of Greek Linguistics
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 49-77
• Publication date: 2025-05-14
• Acceptance date: 2025-02-07
• DOI: 10.1163/15699846-02501004
• EISSN: 1569-9846
• ISSN: 1566-5844
• Language: English
• Keywords: contrastive focus; syntactic position; intonation; semantics-pragmatics; perception; Greek