Rhematizers revisited

The specific function of certain particles from the point of view of the bipartition of the sentence was noted first by Jan Firbas (1957), who later called them 'rhematizers'. The same class of words was studied in detail in the context of formal semantics by Math Rooth (1985) in relation to the prosodic prominence of the words that followed them; he called this class 'focalizers'. Both terms refer to the apparent function of these particles, namely as being 'associated' with the focus of the sentence. Since then, Rooth's approach has been followed by several specialists in formal semantics. However, the assumption of such an exclusive function of these particles has been found to be too simplistic, an analogy with a semantic analysis of negation was claimed to be a more adequate approach (Hajičová, 1995) and a distinction has been made between 'the (global) focus' of the sentence and 'the focus' of the focalizer by Hajičová, Partee and Sgall (1998). Based on the observations of Kateřina Veselá, who has devoted considerable attention to the issue of the scope of focalizers as reflected in the richly annotated corpus of Czech (Prague Dependency Treebank) and a similarly based annotation of English in the socalled Prague English Dependency Treebank, in our contribution we single out some complicated (and intricate) cases concerning first of all the occurrence of focalizers with a restricted freedom of position, with a distant placement of focalizers and their possible postposition, and the semantic scope of focalizers.