1.1 Background

In spoken languages, focus (i) is normally realized by phonological prominence, which in English is effected by higher pitch, greater loudness, and longer duration (e.g., Katz and Selkirk 2011). Semantically, it (ii) signals the activation of alternatives (e.g., Rooth 1996) and (iii) has diverse effects, ranging from contrastive (as in (1a)) to exhaustive (as in (1b)).1

(1) a. I’ll introduce John to Mary, and then I’ll introduce BILL to her. b. If you invite John OR Mary, the party will be a success. ⇒ no inference that the party will be a success if the addressee invites John AND Mary

Finally, it has been speculated that (iv) the realization of focus is driven by a biological ‘‘effort code’’ whereby greater pitch excursions (and thus greater effort on the speaker’s part) are associated with greater emphasis/importance (Gussenhoven 2001, 2004).2

Following Wilbur (2012), as well as Crasborn and Van der Kooij (2013) and Kimmelman (2014), we argue that versions of all four properties hold of focus in American Sign Language (ASL) and Langue des Signes Français (LSF), which suggests that focus has a unified semantics and to some extent a unified semantics/phonology interface across modalities; in particular, contrastive and exhaustive focus can be realized by the same prosodic means. Earlier studies emphasized the diversity of focus realization in ASL and the importance of syntactic movement (Wilbur 2012), which made it hard to isolate the role of prosody. By contrast, detailed production studies of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) and Russian Sign Language (RSL) displayed in-situ strategies of (corrective and informational) focus marking involving modulations of sign speed, size, and duration, combined with nonmanual markers in NGT (Crasborn and Van der Kooij 2013, Kimmelman 2014; see also Kimmelman and Pfau to appear). We complement Wilbur’s findings by studying particularly simple paradigms in which movement is inapplicable, showing that in these cases ASL and LSF sign modulations and nonmanuals may also suffice to mark focus, with diverse semantic effects, ranging from contrastive to exhaustive, as in spoken language. Following in part Crasborn and Van der Kooij (2013), we suggest that a version of the ‘‘effort code’’ is arguably at work in ASL and LSF, focused signs being realized not just with raised eyebrows (as is standard), but also with greater amplitude, speed acceleration, and longer hold times, among others. Since ASL and LSF are both descended from Old French Sign Language, some important similarities between them are of course to be expected; but we still note some differences in our data, particularly the presence of forward leans in ASL but not in LSF (which, however, includes head nods).

Following the typology of Vallduví (1992), Wilbur (1999) establishes that in ASL ‘‘the primary indicator of stress marking is the significant increase in peak velocity of prominent signs’’ (p. 236)3,and that as in English ‘‘a single prominence is assigned to the right-most lexical item in the phrase’’ (p. 237), but that (unlike in English) prominence cannot be moved, with the result that focus is preferably realized by movement; in Wilbur’s (and Vallduví’s) terms, with respect to focus realization ASL is ‘‘[– plastic],’’ unlike English but like Catalan. In contrast to Wilbur’s analysis of ASL, in production experiments Crasborn and Van der Kooij (2013) (studying NGT) and Kimmelman (2014) (studying NGT and RSL) emphasized the role of non-movement-based strategies, in particular of prosody. In both studies, focus appeared in question-answer pairs or in corrective contexts (as in The woman is eating chocolate, right? – The woman is eating ice cream F (Kimmelman 2014) or Is your car red? – No, my car is blue F (Crasborn and Van der Kooij 2013)). In Kimmelman’s summary of his comparative data (p. 130), RSL focus primarily involves manual prosody, with modulations of size, speed, and duration, as well as repetitions. NGT also uses these strategies (with different frequencies), but in addition it makes use of nonmanual prosody, involving eyebrow raising, backward head tilt, and head nod.

While Wilbur emphasizes the diversity of strategies of focus realization in ASL, we complement her observations by showing that in a subset of ASL and LSF cases in which movement is inapplicable, prominence and nonmanuals alone—including forward leans—can realize both contrastive and exhaustive focus, which makes for a particularly minimal comparison with English (some cases of in-situ focus also appear in Wilbur and Patschke 1998 and Lillo-Martin and Quadros 2008). We selected two cases of focus that are semantically very different: instances of contrastive focus that do not involve association with any operator and that could be analyzed in terms of simple constraints on givenness (Schwarzschild 1999); and instances of embedded focused elements that trigger exhaustive readings in the scope of other operators and that would require, in the analysis of Chierchia, Fox, and Spector(2012), the insertion of exhaustivity operators—with clear truth-conditional consequences. Importantly, we will show that despite these semantic differences, these two types of focus can be realized with the same prosodic means.