‘Contrastive Focus’ was divided into ‘Parallel Focus’ and ‘Counterpresuppositional Focus’. Parallel Focus is involved in such construction as: (32) ‘John’ bought ‘a book’, and ‘Mary’ bought ‘a magazine’ In such constructions there are typically two or more pairs of constituents such as (John, a book) and (Mary, a magazine), which are contrasted to each other. For this type of contrast it is immaterial whether the constituents involved present new or given information. Parallel Focus constructions typically have a rather pronounced prosodic pattern in which all the constituents from the relevant pairs get rather strong accent: (33) /¯‘JOH’N bought ‘a’ /¯ ‘BOOK’, and /¯‘MARy’ bought ‘a’ /¯‘Magazine’ ‘Counterpresuppositional Focus’ constituents explicitly or implicitly reject and correct a (presumed) presupposition on the part of the Addressee. The Speaker not only wishes to add something to the pragmatic information of A, but also to further specify, change, or correct something in A’s pragmatic information. Probably for this reason, Counterpresuppositional Focus constructions seem to have the most outspoken prosodic prominence patterns in many languages.
- Dik (1989), a pag.394