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How Words Work (2)

© Brenda Townsend Hall

Focus

Drilling in the classroom is no longer a technique much favoured by teachers. Yet for emphasising the role of sentence stress, it remains a useful tool. The importance of stress in marking the focus of information in a sentence is not easily perceived by learners and they can easily misunderstand what they hear and, in turn, be misunderstood by not stressing the appropriate elements themselves.

In the following sentence, the focus could be on any of the separate elements:

My father wasn't born in this country.

My father wasn't born in this country. (Yours was) My father wasn't born in this country. (My mother was) My father wasn't born in this country. (You are wrong to say that he was) My father wasn't born in this country. (Even though he lives here). My father wasn't born in this country. (He was born in another country)

In principle, if no marked focus is intended, the sentence stress falls on the end of a clause - hence the last of the examples above is the predictable one.

For particular emphases, stress on certain elements may be supplemented by changes to the expected order of elements in a sentence. The most common of these changes are fronting, inversion, cleft sentences and postponement.

Fronting is a device for bringing into prominence an element which would not normally be found as the theme of the sentence. In the dialogue:

I'd really like a cold beer.
Then a cold beer you shall have!

the fronting implies enthusiasm: it is a common device in spoken English. It can also be used for a self-consciously literary quality:

Red are the roses and blue the sky.

Inversion of subject and verb when an adverbial element is also present has the effect of throwing the focus on the subject:

Especially impressive was the piano concert.

Inversions are another common feature of spoken English:

Here comes John.
There's my hat.

With negative adverbials, subject verb inversion tends to convey greater emotion:

Never have I seen such a mess.

Cleft sentences focus on the prominent element by dividing the sentence into two clauses:

I can't stand this heat.
It's this heat, I can't stand
or
What I can't stand is this heat
or
This heat is something I can't stand.

Postponement of an element ensures that the stressed element makes use of the natural tendency towards end focus. This is most noticeable in passive structures where the agent is mentioned:

she was examined by a specialist However, other sentence elements can be postponed for a change