Kiss (1998), on the basis of the language material from Hungarian and English, has claimed that information focus has no syntactic relevance and has no distinguished position in the sentence. This paper, however, shows that her claim may not hold in the languages such as Korean, which actively employs scrambling for the purposes of shifting information and prosodic structures in varying speech contexts. Languages of this type use scrambling (or syntactic detachments) to dislocate both the non-focal and the focal entities (which represent a topic and a contrastive constituent, respectively) away from their canonical positions. Scrambling, on the other hand, does not affect constituents bearing all-new information focus; they stay in-situ, and are typically anchored to the position immediately before the verb in the sentence. This observation is made on the basis of (i) relative degree of phonetic prominence of the two types of focus (Rochemont 1986, Pierrehumbert & Beckmann 1988, Kratzer & Selkirk 2007, etc.), and (ii) the default position occupied by the constituents bearing information focus from the viewpoint of information structure, which was first proposed by Vallduví 1992 and has been widely discussed in literature (Kiss 1998, Vallduví & Engdahl 1998, and Tomioka 2007, among many others).

• Gwangrak Son(Kyungpook Natinal University)