Transporte de Minerales

C ontrastive focus*^ is the other effect that may arise from overriding the default VO order in Greek. As mentioned elsewhere, contrastive focus modifies a false proposition/ assumption which the speaker takes to be explicitly or implicitly entertained by the hearer.** Often, the contrastive preverbal object is associated with some sort o f ‘repair’ or corrective’ effect o f a mistaken concept which the speaker knows or thinks is

’’A s seen in ch. 4, some take contrastive focus to be phonetically distinct from other types o f focus. Couper-Kuhlen (1984, 1986), following Chafe (1976), maintains that the degree o f pitch fall or drop after the prosodically marked syllable is important in defining the notion o f contrastivity. Also, W ells ( 1986) points out that there exists psycholinguistic evidence for hypothêWng a distinct category o f contrastive focus which is associated with maximal phonological prominence and in particular with pitch peak, kinetic tone, loudness peak and decrescendo.

'“According to Couper-Kuhlen (1984) there are two types o f contrastive accent: One where “the speaker concedes that a proposition (or an item in a proposition) is true but implies that some other contrasting proposition (or contrasting item) is false”, and another where “the speaker asserts that a proposition (or an item in a proposition) is true and simultaneously asserts that a contrasting proposition (or a contrasting item) is false” (ibid: 143-44).

entertained by the hearer. Consider the examples below;

(20) MONO MIA A H A Q SH e x a v a v o i ecbxct. OVS only [one statement]acc made-3pl [the Sevens]nom

‘The seven (leaders o f the GTcountries in the world) made only one statement. ’ ETl 11.7.94.

(21) IIOAT©OPTBO a u T ÔÇ o ô p o p o q «TréK irioe. OSV

much noise [this the road]nom acquired ‘This road became very noisy indeed.’

(22) BOTNA ATPIA é ô e ix v a v k« i o i ôi3o. OVS

mountains wild sho wed-3 pi and [the two]nom ‘...Both pictures showed wild mountains. .’

G. Yatromanolakis: ‘Useless novel’. Athens: Cedros 1993: 26.

(20) was uttered in the context o f the summit o f the G7 leaders which took place in Naples in July 1994. The news presenter, after giving some general information concerning the meeting in question, utters (20). There is no previous explicit linguistic mention o f the leaders having made more than one statement . However, the presenter is entitled to assume that the listeners implicitly expect that the latter may well be the case. This is perhaps so because the lexical item ‘summit’ may prompt a set o f expectations particularly related to a homonymous general schema (Barlett 1932, Mandler and Johnson 1977, Schank and Abelson 1977, Tannen 1979). Thus the summit schema will include, among others: leaders, agendas, decision-making, statements, declarations, press conferences, etc. It would then be natural that the listeners to this news item expect a lot o f decision-making and consequent issuing o f statements. In uttering (20) the presenter wants to cancel any such expectation, expressing at the same time an element o f surprise that the leaders have issued just a single statement (especially given the various critical phases the world seems to undergo currently). A similar example o f implicitly contrastive focus can be found in (21) above.

(22), on the other hand, is an instance o f an explicit contrast between the entity identified as focus and another entity which is linguistically present in the immediately preceding discourse The passage is taken from a modern novel recently published in Greece. The main theme o f the novel is the true story o f the tragic death o f two academics in the university o f Crete. Two professors o f astrophysics were killed by one o f their ex-postgraduate students during a departmental seminar. The killer escaped after the murder and he was assumed to be bidding in the Cretan mountains for some time until he was found dead by the police. The character o f the murderer constitutes the main topic o f the novel, which examines in some depth the disturbed personality o f the murderer.

In the specific passage which (22) comes from the writer talks about two pictures published in the local paper o f the area in which the killing took place. What the o-focus in (22) achieves is to explicitly state the contrast obtaining between two elements, namely ‘wild mountains’, which served as the shelter for the murderer, and ‘beauty o f the Cretan seashore in summer’, which is mentioned in the immediately preceding clause. In this way, the writer contrasts what might seem natural for the pictures to show, given the time and place and what the pictures in question really showed.

Finally, as in the case o f emphatic o-focus, had this o-focus been linearized postverbally, the contrastive effect would be lost'^. In sum, as already seen from the previous chapter, object nominals in orders which obey the v—>o PP were argued to be o f the type ‘new focus’ (newfoc). By contrast, object NPs in orders which violate this preference principle (P P l) were argued to be associated with emphatic or contrastive effects. These effects could thus be argued to compensate for the breaking o f the PPl