..., Cinque proposes a universal sentence stress rule which will apply in every language provided that we know what the direction of recursion is in a language, and by using the concept of "most embeddedness". Cinque's algorithm may be informally formulated as follows:
The main stress of a sentence falls on the most embedded element on the recursive side of the tree.
... This, in a head-initial language (VO), the complement will count as most embedded in a SVO order, since the complement is selected by the verb. Likewise, in a V-final language, the most embedded element in SOV order will also be the complement, as the language is left-branching. As a result, in both types of languages the complement receives the main sentence stress,
as is conformed by the followwing data from Spanish (VO) and Basque
(OV) (the words in bold face indicate the constituent bearing neutral
stress):
(29a) Hoy los niños han cantado dos canciones nuevas.
(29b) Gaur umeek abesti berri bi abestu dituzte.
The main sentence stress borne on the direct object in both sentences in (29) is tipically found in sentences occurring in the neutral order. As is well kwoun, neutral order is pronounced whith a neutral focus intonation (which we may now identify as main stress),...
(29b) represents the unmarked or neutral word order for the constituents of a simple transitive clause in Basque, SOV.
[Oinoharra ganik Arantzazu Elordieta: Keep in mind that I use the term "unmarked" in the sense of neutral order in relation to the information structure of the sentence; in other words, when no constituent is understood to be more prominent or informative than the other constituents in the sentence.]
(29b) has an interpretation according to which the entire sentence can be viewed as the focus phrase. But, in addition (29b) can also have two further interpretations, according to which only the VP abesti berri bi abestu 'sing two songs' represents the new information of the sentence, and a third reading, in which only the object phrase abesti berri bi
'two new songs' is interpreted as the information focus of the
sentence. The three readings are given below (the intended focused
constituent in each reading is marked in italics):
(30) Gaur umeek abesti berri bi abestu dituzte.
I. "Today the children sang two new songs"
II. "Today the children sang two new songs"
III. "Today the children sang two new songs"
In fact, the paradigm illustrated in (30) is the typical pattern observed in 'wide focus' utterances in many languages,
as discussed in Cinque (1993) and Zubizarreta (1998), namely, that
under the same neutral focus intonation, all of the constituents in a
sentence can be interpreted as focus. [Arantzazu Elordieta,
2001:130-131]
