New information focus may involve a single constituent (narrow focus) or more than one (broad focus). When the focus is narrow it is often placed at the end of the sentence, where the pitch accent is more prominent, as illustrated in examples (a) and (b) below. In example (a) the subject, which is expressing the focus, is placed at the end of the sentence. In example (b) the object is also focalized, and it is again placed in final position. In both examples, the basic word order (SOV) [SYNTAX 2.3.1] is altered to express the focus of the sentence.
a) clothes t-shirt 3give1 [father]F
‘FATHER gave me the shirt.’
(© Alexandra Navarrete-González, 2016. Reprinted with permission from Navarrete-González 2016: 25)
b) eat [bread]F
‘(I) eat BREAD.’
(© Alexandra Navarrete-González, 2016. Reprinted with permission from Navarrete-González, 2016: 28)
Moreover, some instances of narrow information focus are expressed without any deviation of the basic word order. In these cases, focus is marked by non-manual prosody [PRAGMATICS 4.3.1].
In broad information focus, all the elements of the sentence are expressed maintaining the basic word order SOV, except in the cases where the basic word order is altered by other factors, such as the type of verb [SYNTAX 2.3.3.5].
In some cases, new information focus may also be expressed by question-answer pairs (also known as wh-clefts or rhetorical questions), as illustrated in the example below.
re
title what, frog where are you
‘The title is “Frog, where are you?”’
(based on an example from the LSC corpus, cited in Navarrete-González, 2019: 26)