Refine
Year of publication
- 2018 (4) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (4)
Language
- English (4)
Has Fulltext
- yes (4)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (4)
Keywords
- focus (4) (remove)
This paper presents a new account of the generalization that focused elements cannot be elided, framed within Unalternative Semantics, a framework that does away with syntactic F-marking. We propose the mirror image of the generalization: what is elided cannot introduce alternatives. We implement this as a focus restriction in UAS and then go on to show how to account for MAXELIDE effects using the same technique, without making reference to any transderivational constraints.
Alternative Questions with "or not" (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is not found with they polar counterparts (PQ). This effect has been claimed to consist of two parts (Biezma 2009): NAQs (i) cannot be used discourse-initially and (ii) they do not license followup questions/subquestions.
In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of cornering linked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? We explore the issue by comparing the behavior of NAQs to Complement Alternative Questions (CAQ), a type of question that, like NAQs, presents logically opposite alternatives but, unlike NAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts of cornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles, which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions.
This paper is an attempt to systematically investigate how contrastive focus interacts with various types of not-at-issue content (co-speech and post-speech gestures, lexical presuppositions, and appositives). I look, in particular, at when focus forces at-issue interpretations of typically not-at-issue content, when it does not, and when such at-issue interpretations are impossible even to satisfy focus-related requirements.
I conclude that the main factors affecting how a given type of content aligns along these dimensions are its prosodic (in)dependence and level of attachment in the syntax. The two factors also interact in a non-trivial way, in particular for gestures, which I use as a basis for an analysis of gestures that does not assume that their temporal alignment directly determines their semantics (contra Ebert and Ebert, 2014; Ebert, 2017; Schlenker, 2018), but instead relies on syntax/semantics and syntax/prosody interaction.
This paper deals with topic markers interacting with discourse information in imperatives. It compares two topic markers from Slovenian (‘pa’) and Japanese (‘-wa’) and shows that while they mostly match in terms of the foci they associate with, their functions differ in imperatives: only ‘pa’ may yield a concessive imperative reading. It is shown that this reading can be derived while keeping a single entry for ‘pa’ by making attitudes of discourse participants part of the focus ‘pa’ associates with. The split between Slovenian and Japanese can then be attributed to minor differences in terms of which foci ‘pa’ and ‘-wa’ may associate with.