Sætningskløvninger koder fokus og non-fokus i dansk

Abstract

It is a central claim in most Danish grammars that the Danish cleft construction encodes the clefted constituent with the function focus and that other sentence types do not have any grammatical focus encoding. This article will argue that not only does clefts encode focus, the construction also encodes the other part of the cleft – the cleft clause – with the anti-function of focus, non-focus. Further it will argue that while non-clefted sentence do not encode focus, they do encode both potential focus in one part and anti-focus in another part of the sentence. Thus, the article will show that focus structure in Danish consists of four different encodings making focus structure coding relevant for all sentence types in Danish.