{"id":63422,"date":"2024-04-13T19:56:15","date_gmt":"2024-04-14T00:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=63422"},"modified":"2024-04-14T16:26:34","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T21:26:34","slug":"victor-hugo-helas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=63422","title":{"rendered":"Victor Hugo, h\u00e9las"},"content":{"rendered":"

Focus<\/strong><\/em> is perhaps the single most perniciously ambiguous word in the field of linguistics. In Beth Ann Hockey's 1998 dissertation, \"The interpretation and realization of focus: an experimental investigation of focus in English and Hungarian<\/a>\", she wrote:<\/p>\n

Linguists have associated the word \u201cfocus\u201d with a wide variety of phenomena. In addition a wealth of other terms including \u201cnew,\u201d \u201cemphasis,\u201d \u201cstress,\u201d \u201crheme,\u201d \u201ccomment,\u201d \u201caccented,\u201d \u201cprominent,\u201d \u201cinformative\u201d and \u201ccontrast\u201d have been attached singly or in combination to phenomena that seem to be the same as, similar to or overlapping with those that have been called focus.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beth Ann quotes a few relevant passages from Lewis Carroll, including<\/p>\n

\u2018That's a great deal to make one word mean,\u2019 Alice said in a thoughtful tone.<\/em><\/span>
\n\u2018When I make a word do a lot of work like that,\u2019 said Humpty Dumpty, \u2018I always pay it extra.\u2019<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The other day, a talk about\u00a0 perception of prosodic \"focus\" by French and English adults and children reminded me of this ambiguity. It also brought up an issue that I've been wondering about for more than 50 years, since Jacqueline Vaissi\u00e8re<\/a> half-persuaded me that French lacks any prosodic signaling of \"focus\". I expressed this half-persuasion in \"Intonational focus<\/a>\", 4\/29\/2011, where I wrote<\/p>\n

There are some languages (e.g. French) where intonational focus apparently doesn't exist, at least not in the same way as in English. Instead, I'm told, speakers must use cleft constructions (\"C'est X qui Y\") or other re-phrasing in order to do the things that English speakers can do with intonation alone, such as to adapt a proposition in response to different possible questions, or to underline a parallel contrast.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because I sometimes hear native speakers of French using what seems to me like intonational focus \u2014 sometimes combined with syntactic methods for signaling information structure, and sometimes not \u2014 I've wondered whether intonational focus might be stigmatized in standard spoken French, rather than completely absent. But I accept that some things that English speakers are happy to do with intonation are really impossible in French, for example focusing or contrasting prepositions or verbal auxiliaries: \"It's *under* the box (not *top* of it)\"; \"It *was* there (but now it's gone)\".<\/span><\/p>\n

And a few years later, a few of us proved that French speakers encode corrective focus in number strings prosodically, just like speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese do, but unlike speakers of Korean and Japanese (Yong-cheol Lee,\u00a0 Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Ang\u00e9lique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman, \"A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus<\/a>\", IEEE-ICASSP 2015).<\/p>\n

Corrective substitution (e.g. \"3 1 5<\/strong><\/span> 6\" in place of mis-heard or mis-remembered\u00a0 \"3 1 9<\/strong><\/span> 6\" is only one of the many things that the word \"focus\" is used for; and \"focus\" on one number in a string is a case where there are no easy syntactic solutions. So this is just one small skirmish in the larger \"prosodic focus in French?\" battle, which in turn is just part of the \"prosodic theory\" campaign in the \"communicative intention\" wars.<\/p>\n

But anyhow, this encouraged me to finally look for \"focus\" in some samples of actual French talk. Or at least at one sample — I went to LibriVox, and randomly picked a reading of Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d\u2019un Condamn\u00e9<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I noticed a relevant example in the second sentence of the preface — but a couple of paragraphs later, there's a sentence with a whole bunch of them:<\/p>\n

Il le d\u00e9clare donc, et il le r\u00e9p\u00e8te, il occupe, au nom de tous les accus\u00e9s possibles, innocents ou coupables, devant toutes les cours, tous les pr\u00e9toires, tous les jurys, toutes les justices.<\/span><\/p>\n

(If your French is not up to the job, I'll turn you over to Google Translate<\/a>, which is close enough…)<\/p>\n

Let's skip\u00a0 the de-accentuation (or whatever it is) of donc<\/em> in the first phrase, and focus on the adjectives tous<\/em> or toutes<\/em> in the final four phrases. Aligned pitch tracks are given below, and you can hear and see that in each case, the word tous<\/em> or toutes<\/em> is \"focused\", in some sense of that term:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

Is this just \"emphasis\"? Or is it indicating the choice of all<\/em> rather than some<\/em> or most<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Could the reader have placed the \"focus\" in those phrases on cours, pr\u00e9toires, jurys, justices<\/em>? If she had done so, how would it change the meaning?<\/p>\n

I'm not confident enough in my knowledge of French to be sure — but I believe that in an English translation with a similar sequence of phrases, my choice would matter:<\/p>\n

… all<\/strong> the courts, all<\/strong> the tribunals, all<\/strong> the juries, all<\/strong> the justice systems
\n… all the courts<\/strong>, all the tribunals<\/strong>, all the juries<\/strong>, all the justice systems<\/strong><\/p>\n

And I imagine that the French situation is similar.<\/p>\n

\n

[Note: this post's title is the common version of what Andr\u00e9 Gide<\/a> is said to have said when asked to name the greatest French poet — for more on the folklore and the facts, see Justin O'Brien, \"Hugo,-h\u00e9las!<\/a>\", French Review<\/em> 1964.]<\/p>\n

[Also, Beth Ann's Lewis Carroll quotes — and a lot of other good stuff — can be found in Chapter VI<\/a> of Through the Looking Glass.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

See also \"L\u00c0 encore…<\/a>\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Focus is perhaps the single most perniciously ambiguous word in the field of linguistics. In Beth Ann Hockey's 1998 dissertation, \"The interpretation and realization of focus: an experimental investigation of focus in English and Hungarian\", she wrote: Linguists have associated the word \u201cfocus\u201d with a wide variety of phenomena. In addition a wealth of other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pragmatics","category-prosody"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63422"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63499,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63422\/revisions\/63499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}