Focus and old information: Polarity focus, contrastive focus, and contrastive topic

This dissertation investigates three types of focus involved in old information, such as polarity focus, contrastive focus, and contrastive topic, in the case of the predicate-doubling/do-support constructions in Korean. The main claims defended in this thesis are: (i) that the two constructions refer to a discourse referent that is anchored to a proposition already introduced in preceding discourse and (ii) that the two constructions express new information, that is, each of these three types of focus.; It is shown that the types of old/given discourse referents to which the nominalized predicate of the predicate-doubling/do-support constructions is anaphorically linked may be either discourse-evoked, discourse-inferrable, context-inferrable, or context-evoked. Special attention is paid to the semantic island effect of the two constructions, which blocks the association of wh-words with the Q-morpheme. It is shown that the semantic island effect correlates with the notion of old/givenness. Attention is also paid to the compatibility of the two constructions with the contrastive particle -(N) UN, which attaches to old/given discourse referents.; It is suggested that the predicate-doubling/do-support constructions express polarity focus in relation to preceding discourse, whereas they mark contrastive focus in relation to subsequent discourse. The former case releases additional information---a speaker's reluctance to make a commitment to the truth of a proposition---other than highlighting the truth of the proposition. The latter case is a way of specifying the reason for the reluctance. Attention is paid to the polarity focus item of the two constructions, the verb ha- 'do' or the duplicated predicate, which is very restricted in lexical content. It is also suggested that the verbal constituents that are preposed to the sentence-initial topic position from the predicate-doubling construction exhibit contrastive topic.