nonfocalized

Nonfocalized is an adjective used in several technical domains to indicate that a thing is not in focus or not marked for focus. The most common usage is in linguistics, where focus is a grammatical or prosodic category marking the element of a sentence that is being emphasized. In this sense, nonfocalized refers to constituents or constructions that do not bear focus; the information structure remains neutral or broad.

In linguistics, focus signals information structure—highlighting new, contrastive, or topic-related elements. A nonfocalized constituent does not receive special emphasis in prosody, morphology, or syntax, and the sentence as a whole presents information without a highlighted element. Nonfocalization can interact with givenness, topic, and discourse context, and the term is sometimes used to describe languages or constructions where focus marking is optional or absent.

An example usage is context-dependent. In English, a sentence with no clearly contrasted element may be described as nonfocalized: for instance, a neutral statement like "The cat slept on the rug" may lack a marked focus on any particular word.

Outside linguistics, nonfocalized has occasional uses in optics or photography to describe light or images that are not brought to a single focal point, i.e., defocused. However, this usage is less common and not standardized; more typical terms are defocused or out of focus.

Overall, there is no universally accepted definition of nonfocalized; the term’s meaning varies by domain and author. It is best encountered in field-specific literature on focus and information structure.