This study will consider the notion of focus in a pragmatic perspective, focussing on information, enunciation and discourse. In this frame of reference, the focus is regarded as the most important element in the message, either because it conveys the main piece of information from an informational or dialogical viewpoint, or because it plays a key role in articulation and discourse cohesion. In this respect, our study, which is based on the intonosyntactic markers that are mobilized to carry out this pragmatic function in the discourse, revolves around the following point : the focal marking of adverbial phrases in post-verbal position.
This study, which rests on an inductive protocol, falls into three parts :
(i) the phonetic analysis of prosodic events;
(ii) the phonological modelling of the evidence;
(iii) the symbolical interpretation.
The last part of this work, which is founded on the core notions of communicative dynamism and focal scale, presents various elementary principles for the matching of forms in language and which are necessary for placing information into perspective.