FOCUS
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P113
2025-08-23
535
FOCUS
An account of the way in which some items of information in a text are easier to retrieve or recall than others. For example, readers appear to accord different levels of attention to main characters in a novel than to subsidiary ones. The set of currently focused items appears to be revised when an episode in a narrative comes to an end. Characters specifically associated with the episode become defocused, and references to them are more difficult to resolve.
A distinction can also be made between items in explicit focus, which have been mentioned in a text and foregrounded by the reader, and items in implicit focus, which may not have been specifically mentioned but are ‘givens’ associated with those that have been. If a house is in explicit focus, its constituent parts (rooms, walls, roof) are in implicit focus. This explains how readers make bridging inferences which link sentences such as: I looked around the house. The kitchen was very spacious.
Focus is an important concept in accounting for anaphor resolution, especially in listening. A reader can, if necessary, look back at an earlier part of the text to resolve a problematic anaphor (she, it, the incident I mentioned earlier). That option is not open to a listener. Accurate listening appears to be heavily dependent upon the extent to which an individual carries forward a set of items and concepts which are foregrounded in the current discourse.
See also: Inference, Meaning construction
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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