Krifka on Focus

Manfred Krifka has two new papers on focus-related issues:

  • “The semantics of questions and the focusation of answers”:http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/QuestionsSantaBarbara.pdf. To appear in Chungmin Lee (ed.).

bq. In Krifka (2001) I argued that three distinct phenomena of question semantics – alternative questions like Did it rain or not?, multiple constituent questions with pair-list readings like Who bought what? and the focus patterns of answers to constituent questions – cannot be dealt with adequately within the framework of Alternative Semantics. In Krifka (to appear) I argue that Alternative Semantics also is problematic as a framework for focus semantics in general; in particular, it makes wrong predictions in case focus occurs in syntactic islands.
In this paper I will take up an issue of Krifka (2001) again, concentrating specifically on focus patterns in answers to constituent questions. Büring (2002) argued that the discussion of phenomena in Krifka (2001) was inconclusive, and that Alternative Semantics actually does not have problems with the data put forward there. I agree with the first point, but I will also show that on closer inspection, Alternative Semantics does not predict the correct patterns of answer focus. I will also show that the same holds for the theory of Schwarzschild (1999) which works with Givenness instead of a semantic notion of Focus. The Structured Meaning theory, on the other hand, does not have these problems.

  • “Association with focus phrases”:http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/FocusPhrases.pdf. To appear in Valerie Molnar and Susanne Winkler, Architecture of Focus, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

bq. In this article we have discussed two grammatical architectures of association with focus phenomena: Structured Meanings and Alternative Semantics. While the simplicity and parsimony of AS makes this the null hypothesis, there are certain phenomena that indicate that the additional features of SM are required. We then turned to a phenomenon that argues against SM, and for AS, the apparent lack of island restrictions with association with focus. We have discussed potential evidence that association with focus is, as a matter of fact, subject to such restrictions. Three arguments turned out to be inconclusive on closer inspection: Overt focus movement, explicit restrictions of alternatives, and the de re / de dicto ambiguity in association with focus. But three other arguments provided more solid evidence for island restrictions in association with focus: Explicit contrasts, multiple foci in syntactic islands and elliptical answers to questions. Our conclusion, then, is that structured meanings are better suited than alternative semantics to represent association with focus. As we have also noticed that focus can be arbitrarily deeply embedded within a syntactic island, a hybrid theory of association with focus which works with structured meanings and projection of alternatives in the style of AS seemed to capture the observed phenomena best.

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