Focus, Contrastive Topic and Theories of Focus

This paper categorizes currently available theories of focus into two major types a 'discourse structure approach'(DSA) and a 'sentence structure approach'(SSA) The former DSA is intended to refer to a type of approach that analyzes focus only in terms of the discourse structure in which a focused sentence occurs. The alternative semantics approach which is the most widely available theory of focus belongs to this The latter SSA is meant to refer to a type of theory that analyzes focus in terms of sentence-internal structure, This study supports the SSA be revealing some empirical problems of the DSA that arise is analyzing two different kinds of focus, the A-accented focus and the B-accented focus (contrastive topic), and provides a brief sketch of a comprehensive analysis of focus and contrastive topic.