The class will provide a comprehensive overview of the meaning contribution of focus accenting and morpho-syntactic focus marking and of the formal tools to analyse such meaning components.
We will discuss different ways of factoring in the meaning of focus into truth-conditional semantic analyses, most importantly the structured proposition framework and the alternative semantics framework of Rooth (1985, 1992, 1996). We will also discuss the discourse-semantic function of focus as highlighting the at-issue content of an utterance in response to a Question under Discussion (Beaver & Clark 2008, Roberts 2012, Tonhauser et al 2013).
In the second part of the class, we will expand out empirical investigations to instances of contrastive topics (Büring 2003) and to the meaning of focus-sensitive expressions, such a focus particles (only, also, even) and quantificational adverbials (always, mostly, ...). Drwaing on Beaver & Clark (2008), we will show that these expressions do not constitute a homogeneous class, but split in conventionally and freely focus-associating elements.
We will also investigate the phenomenon of not-at issue exhaustivity inferences with syntactic and morphological focus marking
Throughout, we will illustrate the semantic phenomena with data from focus-accenting European languages and from non-accenting non-European languages from Afirca and East Asia, such as Akan (Kwa), Medumba & Awing (Grassfields Bantu), Ngamo/Hausa (Chadic), and Vietnamese.
Background Literature:
Rooth, Mats (1996). Focus. In Handbook of Conempoary Theory. Blackwell.
Beaver, David & Brady Clark (2008). Sense and sensitivity. Oxford: OUP.
Zimmermann, Malte & Edgar Onea (2011). Focus Marking und Focus Interpretation. Lingua 121: 1651-1670. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.002
- Kursleiter*in: Prof. Dr. Malte Zimmermann