Bite one's thumb and turn one's nose: A minimal pair of focus assignment in "Romeo and Juliet"
Manfred Krifka
January 2024 

The paper investigates a passage in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" that involves a string-identical minimal pair in distinct contexts that require different focus assignments, one with narrow focus and one ith wider focus. It shows that oral performances realize these string-identical expressions differently. It also shows that literary translations quite often realize the different interpretations of the string-identical originals and offer distinct written forms, employing cleft constructions, focus movement, or orthographic highlighting. This is shown with translations into German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Turkish, and Japanese.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007995 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
keywords:	focus, focus projection, prosody, highlighting, translation, shakespeare, semantics, syntax, phonology
Downloaded:	117 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]