Discourse new, F-marking, and normal stress

•Focus-as-alternatives (FOCUS) is F-marked, discourse new (NEW) is not.•Normal stress determines accent placement in all-NEW and all-GIVEN domains.•NEW is grammatically unmarked and is not an Information Structure trigger.•Thetic predicates and other unaccented NEW phrases must be GIVENness accommodated.

My main goal in this paper is to argue that English grammar makes a distinction between two notions of focus, focus-as-new (NEW) and focus-as-alternatives (FOCUS). The arguments center around the claim that if FOCUS is F-marked, then NEW cannot be. A review is made of two proposals for F-marking, one liberal (marking both FOCUS and NEW), and one conservative (marking FOCUS only). The conclusion is that if grammar employs F-marking, it must be conservative rather than liberal. For conservative F-marking to achieve descriptive parity with liberal F-marking, appeal must be made to a mechanism of normal stress that determines the distribution of phrase stress in NEW and in all-GIVEN phrases. The properties of such a mechanism are spelled out and representative proposals from the literature are assessed. A new proposal is made, in the form of GIVENness accommodation, to capture the most recalcitrant classical problems for normal stress – the predicates of thetic sentences and the possibility for unaccented NEW constituents generally, where found.