In pragmatics, focus is the foregrounding of part of the message — typically what is new or contrastive or otherwise important — and the backgrounding of everything else. It is realized in intonation as the presence of accented syllables, i.e. syllables that are not only rhythmically but also intonationally prominent (pitch-prominent). Identifying the beginning of each intonational ‘focus phrase’ or ‘focus domain’ is sometimes tricky, but identifying the end is easy: it ends at the end of the word in which the nuclear accent appears (= the last accented syllable in the intonation phrase).
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