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Information focuses, characters reflected in the language utilization, refers to changes in the level of discourse and other suprasegmental features such as stress and pause, which play a key role in the interpretation and understanding of an everyday discourse. The influence is mainly embodied in different levels and aspects, including attitudes expression, the creation of communicative context, highlighting emphasized information and the distribution of information structure and focus and discourse functions.
Focus, originally an optical concept, has now become an important concept of contemporary linguistics, and has a relationship with pragmatics, text linguistics, syntax, and phonology. It is has been a foreign key research topics in semantics. Focus is also called the focus of expression or the center of gravity or expression, which is the word of the most important information of the speaker conveyed to the listener. This paper takes a broad understanding of the focus of the sentence. Focus is the part of sentences which is given the most intensive information, and is what speakers want the hearer to pay special attention to. That is to say, focus refers to a kind of corresponding relation between the most intensive information and an independent sentence component. Namely, the syntactic structure of the sentence is related to the most intensive information.
Information focus is reflected in the use of language features, while pragmatics studies the utilization of a common language, which is to say that this two disciplines shares the same target in the nature. Therefore, it is feasible and necessary to combine the two disciplines.
1.2 Research Aim
This paper mainly focuses on the influence of different information focuses on the understanding of the same everyday discourse. That is to say, the materials in the papers are selected from everyday discourse, and the study primarily consists of different information focuses for the effects of understanding discourse, and how the effects are produced. Through this paper, it can be better show the importance of information focus in language communication, and understand the underlined meaning of everyday discourse.
2 Literature Review
Halliday(1980) paid more attention to the form of the focus. But he thought that the focus is a comprehensive term used to describe significant information through voice and means to achieve syntactic distribution.
Focus has its own means of expression, and it reflects some general tendencies in different languages. This makes people convince that the focus are semantic in nature. Xu Liejiong (2003) mentioned, if the focus is just a pragmatic concept embodied without form, it is probably not so many people were interested in it. Possible the important reason is a variety of forms of the focus, especially rhythm and features and syntactic position, which are in line with the characteristics of grammarians’ hot problems and their way of thinking, so that they can study of grammar framework under its own in-depth.
In everyday conversation, the information focus (pitch changes, stress and pauses, etc.) plays a vital role for the listener to get the true meaning of the text information. Among the studies of information focus, Chinese famous scholar Xu Shenghuan (1987) studied the information focus more profoundly and completely. He pointed out that the focus is pragmatic tips provided by the speaker's intention limited by the particular context and these tips also reflect the focus of discourse. General information focus should have three characteristics: the overall effect, different significant focus at different levels, and its effects on the use of syntactic structure. He also pointed out that the nature of the information content, information focus, the means of discourse have special relationship to the participants in the communication process and information focus also serves as a pragmatic purpose.
The so-called true meaning of the text and its role of information focus is actually a speaker spoke words which have literal meaning and implicated meaning. When people talk with the expression ability of implication, the listeners also possess with the ability to understand the implication. There are some implicated meanings of words is the "immobilized" result of literal meaning. The productivity of literal meaning defined not only pragmatic factors also cognitive factors. To predict the implication, it is necessary to study the cognitive approach. To truly understand the meaning of human thought processes of derivation of the implication. Therefore, pragmatic development of linguistics and cognitive science has taken a welcome step in this regard. (Shen Xuan, 1997)