Contrastive focus on polarity or tense

Polarity

Sometimes the speaker wants to emphasize the polarity (= the quality of being either positive or negative) of a verb, or its tense. In both cases this may cause the nucleus to go on an auxiliary or modal verb.

When we deny the truth of an assertion made by the other speaker, we can focus on negative word (if the thing being deny is positive). This is a mark negative. The negative goes either on the word not or on the word containing the negation, e.g contracted negative such as won't:

To deny the truth of a negative proposition, we focus on the word that indicates positive polarity. This is a marked negative. The nucleus usually goes on a form of the verb to be or on a modal or auxiliary verb: The pro-form do receives the nucleus when it signals a change of polarity (positive to negative or negative to positive): Or there may just be the restatement of an existing polarity: In the following example, an ambiguity in the written form is resolved by appropriate focus, shown in speech by intonation:

Here, response (i) means 'if you organize a collection', while response (ii) means 'if you make a donation'.

If the assertion being denied is negative, so that our denial is positive, we focus on auxiliary or modal verb (often in the form of emphatic do)

Note, however, that if the negation word is followed by a 'new' lexical item the nucleus goes (as normal) on that new lexical item, even though the speaker's main intent may be negation. Where there is a contrast involving the subject of the clause as well as one involving polarity, English often focus on the subject while - illogically? - not accenting the actual polarity word. This pattern usually involves a fall-rise (see

2.7

on correction)

There is also another possible reason for placing the nucleus on the word that carries the indication of polarity: namely, as a device for adding emphasis to an exclamation. This is a kind of contrastive focus, though the contrast is implicit: In the last example there may have been no previous mention of hat or what is being worn

Tense

As with polarity, so with tense. We focus on an auxiliary or modal verb to emphasize that we are talking about the past not the present, or future not the past:

Notice that in these examples various repeated words could have been ellipted (= omitted). The same meaning could alternatively be expressed as follows: Contrastive focus is the commonest reason for a function word to receive a nucleus... but not the only one.