Full Description
This book presents a collection of papers on the issue of focus in its broadest sense. While commonly being considered as related to phenomena such as presupposition and anaphora, focusing is much more widely spread, and it is this pervasiveness that this collection addresses. The volume explicitly aims to bring together theoretical, psychological, and descriptive approaches to focus, at the same time maintaining the overall interest in how these notions apply to the larger problem of evolving some formal representation of the semantic aspects of linguistic content. The contributed papers to this volume have been reworked from a selection of original work presented at a conference held in 1994 in Schloss Wolfsbrunnen in Germany.
Contents
List of contributors; Preface Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt; Part I. SURFACE REALISATION OF FOCUS: 1. Contrastive stress, contrariety and focus Kees van Deemter; 2. The processing of information structure Carsten Günther, Claudia Maienborn, and Andrea Schopp; 3. On the limits of focus projection in English Carlos Gussenhoven; 4. Informational autonomy Joachim Jacobs; 5. Subject-prodrop in Yiddish Ellen F. Prince; Part II. SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION OF FOCUS PHENOMENA: 6. What is the alternative? The computation of focus alternatives from lexical and sortal information Peter I. Blok and Kurt Eberle; 7. The treatment of focusing particles in underspecified discourse representations Johan Bos; 8. Topic Daniel Büring; 9. Focus with nominal quantifiers Regine Eckardt; 10. Topic, focus and weak quantifiers Gerhard Jäger; 11. Focus, quantification, and semantics-pragmatics issues Barbara H. Partee; 12. Association with focus or association with presupposition Mats Rooth; Part III. The Function of Focus in Discourse: 13. Discourse and the focus/background distinction Nicholas Asher; 14. Domain restriction Bart Geurts and Rob van de Sandt; 15. On different kinds of focus Jeanette K. Gundel; 16. Stressed and unstressed pronouns: complementary preferences Megumi Kameyama; 17. Discourse linking and discourse subordination Kjell Johan Sæbø; 18. Position and meaning: time adverbials in context Henrietta de Swart; Name index; Subject index.
