Grammatical category
Also known as FOC · comment
7 statements · 43% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations
3 identifiers linking focus across the web's reference databases
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In linguistics, focus is a grammatical category that conveys the part of the sentence that 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. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major field of study in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.