On Focus and Contrastive Topic: Climbing Bürings D-Tree, looking for Beans and B-Accents

Abstract

All publications by Daniel Büring seem to have some very positive properties in common: they take up burning questions of linguistic research; they are well-written and persuasive; they generate inspiration in the reader and an inclination to respond — and also, admittedly, to protest. My present paper can be seen as one such response. It is an attempt to compare the map of contrastive topic and focus outlined in Bürings article On D-Trees, Beans, and B-Accents, with the terrain it sets out to describe, i.e. the intonation patterns of spoken English. I shall also try to trace some lines from Bürings (1997) monograph On the Meaning of Topic and Focus: the 59th Street Bridge accent, via Roberts (1996), to Burings (2003) paper.