standard generative approaches to grammar argue that phonology and semantics cannot exchange information directly ("see fig. 1"). therefore, syntactic mechanisms including features and transformations include prosodic information regarding focus that is passed to the semantics and phonology. focus may be highlighted either prosodically or syntactically or both, depending on the language. in syntax this can be done assigning focus markers, as shown in (1), or by preposing as shown in (2):