Contrastive focus picks out one element as prominent new information (Choi 1996 and references therein). In Russian contrastive focus is encoded intonationally, not via the phrase structure (Junghanns and Zybatov 1995). That is, there is no one phrase structure position associated with contrastive focus, although contrastively focused arguments and adjuncts tend to occur immediately before the verb (King 1995). In (9) the verb procitala `read' is contrastively focused. The heavy stress on the verb, indicating its focus status, is indicated by small caps.
(9)
Contrastive focus assignment can be captured by annotating the
c-structure node containing the focused material and assigning the
appropriate stress. The question is what the appropriate annotation
should be. Using 
( 
FOC) will result in too wide a scope
because it will focus the entire f-structure, as with the li
yes-no questions, and will also create the same circularity found with
these.
The other alternative is to
use ( PRED) ( FOC). This gives rise to the f-structure in
(10).
(10)
The problem is that by focusing the head `read;SPMlt;SUBJ,OBJ;SPMgt;' not only is the core meaning of the PRED focused, but so are its arguments, the subject `she' and the object `book'. However, the interpretation of contrastive focus on the verb excludes focus of any material other than the verb itself. This is particularly problematic since the arguments have other discourse functions which clash with the assigned focus role.