earticle

영어

This paper aims to show the focus expressions and their communicative effectiveness frequently used in Chinese people’s daily communication. It discussed the three types of focus: informational focus, contrastive focus, and figurative focus. The contents and results are as follows: First, the informational focus is to deliver the most important information with high value of information and communicative dynamism, by which the speaker wants to raise the hearer’s attention. It is used for expressing the speaker’s opinion, assertion, suggestion, attitude, feelings etc. It is discussed in terms of how to be expressed and how to bring about communicative effectiveness. Second, the contrastive focus is used to briefly and clearly express a contrast with exclusiveness among explicit or implicit alternatives to a contrastive focus constituent in either the linguistic context or the utterance situation. It is often expressed with a focus marker ‘shi’, ‘shi···de’ sentence structure, or ellipsis. The ellipsis is selectively applied with reference to the speaker’s utterance purpose of salient focus delivery. The contrastive focus expressed through ellipsis brings about linguistic economy and salient focus delivery in communication. Third, the figurative focus is used to specify the distinct characteristic, feature, ability, professional field, job etc of the referent(person). It is expressed by means of metonymic expressions on the basis of the metonymic notion [Body Terms for Person]. In other words, abstract notions(characteristic, feature, ability, professional field, job etc) are clearly and lively expressed by means of concrete body terms, which helps the listener to easily understand and appropriately respond to the speaker’s figurative focus.