Workshop 4 (Saturday, March 31)
Association with focus

Organizers: Malte Zimmermann and Mira Grubic.

Keynote speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin).

Program: to be announced.

Description: Research on focus has always been linked to research on focus-sensitive elements. One central area of research is concerned with the nature of this sensitivity. Is it semantic, and therefore encoded into the lexical meaning of these elements (Rooth 1985, Jacobs 1983)? Or is it pragmatic (Rooth 1992, 1996, von Fintel 1994)? Or are there different kinds of focus-sensitivity, as proposed in Beaver and Clark (2008)? In the case of pragmatic association with focus, must the particles rely on focus, or can they also associate with alternatives provided by other elements such as e.g. contrastive topics (Krifka 1999)? What role does accenting on the focus-sensitive elements themselves play in interpretation?

The second area of research concerns the meaning contribution of focus-sensitive elements. What meanings, across languages, do focus-sensitive elements contribute? In most cases, the contributed meaning components are non-truth-conditional. What is the nature of these meaning components? If e.g. the prejacent of only and the additive component of also are both presupposed (as suggested e.g. in König 1991), why do the presuppositions said to be triggered by also/even differ from those said to be triggered by only: uttering a sentence with also is not permissible unless its presupposition is already in the Common Ground (the presupposition cannot be accommodated), whereas the presupposition of only is easily, and most often, accommodated; see. e.g. the classification of projective meanings by Tonhauser et al. 2011)? A third area of research concerns the function of these particles in discourse. It has been suggested that the function of some focus-sensitive particles lies in discourse structuring, e.g. by marking an utterance as unexpected, unlikely, or surprising (e.g. Karttunen and Peters 1979 for even, Zeevat 2009 and Beaver and Clark 2008 for only). But whose surprise is marked by these particles? That of the hearer, or that of the speaker? And what does this mean for a more fine-grained model of the Common Ground that keeps track of speaker/hearer commitments?

Questions to be discussed include, but are not limited to, the following:



References:

Beaver, David, and Brady Clark. 2008. Sense and sensitivity: how focus determines meaning. Oxford: Blackwell.

von Fintel, Kai. 1994. Restrictions on quantifier domains. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amhersts.

Jacobs, Joachim. 1983. Fokus und Skalen. Zur Syntax und Semantik der Gradpartikeln im Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Karttunen, Lauri, and Stanley Peters. 1979. Conventional implicature. In Oh and Dineen (eds.) Syntax and semantics 11: presupposition, 1-56. New York: Academic Press.

König, Ekkehard. 1991. The meaning of focus particles: a comparative perspective. New York: Routledge.

Krifka, Manfred. 1999. Additive particles under stress. Proceedings of SALT 8, 111-128.

Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1:75-116.

Rooth, Mats. 1996. Focus. In Lappin (ed.) The handbook of contemporary semantic theory, 271-297. Oxford: Blackwell.

Tonhauser, Judith, David Beaver, Mandy Simons, and Craige Roberts. 2011. Towards a taxonomy of projective content. Ms., The Ohio State University, University of Texas at Austin, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Thurmair, Maria. 1989. Modalpartikeln und ihre Kombinationen. Linguistische Arbeiten 223. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Zeevat, Henk. 2009. Only as a mirative particle. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 33:179-196.