Discourse new, F-marking, and normal stress

Abstract My main goal in this paper is to argue that English grammar makes a distinction between two notions of focus, focus-as-new (NEW) and focus-as-alternatives (FOCUS). The arguments center around the claim that if FOCUS is F-marked, then NEW cannot be. A review is made of two proposals for F-marking, one liberal (marking both FOCUS and NEW), and one conservative (marking FOCUS only). The conclusion is that if grammar employs F-marking, it must be conservative rather than liberal. For conservative F-marking to achieve descriptive parity with liberal F-marking, appeal must be made to a mechanism of normal stress that determines the distribution of phrase stress in NEW and in all-GIVEN phrases. The properties of such a mechanism are spelled out and representative proposals from the literature are assessed. A new proposal is made, in the form of GIVENness accommodation, to capture the most recalcitrant classical problems for normal stress – the predicates of thetic sentences and the possibility for unaccented NEW constituents generally, where found.