The Focus in Spanish Language: Definition Problems and Syntactic Manifestations

The field of information structure, a meeting point of pragmatics with the traditional linguistic disciplines, is nowadays facing many terminological inconsistencies which hinder its theoretical consolidation, and the resulting practical application of its analytical models to concrete linguistic manifestations. The present article aims to revise the different conceptions of one of the central terms of this linguistic discipline, the focus, to contribute to its terminological elucidation. After presenting the existing definitions of focus as a pragmatic function, the author proceeds to analyse the information structure of its syntactic manifestations in concrete communicative situations in an attempt to determine how the assignment of this pragmatic function is conditioned by the degree of newness of the information, and what its relationship with the notion of contrast is. The study thus concludes with an outline proposal of a possible redefinition of the term and its main distinctive features.