Topic, Focus and Quantification

Topic-focus and Salience

Most of the current work on corpus annotation is concentrated on morphemics, lexical semantics and sentence structure. However, it becomes more and more obvious that attention should and can be also paid to phenomena that reflect the links between a sentence and its context, i.e. the discourse anchoring of utterances. If conceived in this way, an annotated corpus can be used as a resource for l...

Focus and Topic Sensitive Operators

Sentences like “Anna only gave BILL chocolate” are commonly analyzed as involving a dependency between the placement of intonational focus and the division of material between the restriction and scope of focus sensitive particles (FSP) like only. A word is focus sensitive if its semantics involves essential reference to the information structure of the sentence containing it. A number of lexic...

Topic, Focus and Weak Quantifiers

The paper tries to establish dynamic semantics, in particular Groenendijk/Stokhof/Veltman's['94] Dynamic Modal Predicate Logic, as a tool for the analysis of information structure phenomena. It is argued that the common distinction between familiar and novel discourse referents/file cards, as it can be found in DRT, File Change Semantics, or Dynamic Predicate Logic, is not fine-grained enough t...

Topic, Focus, and Exhaustive Interpretation

In this paper we propose that a sentence like ‘JohnT ate broccoliF ’ should pragmatically be interpreted as follows: (a) Focus should be interpreted exhaustively; John ate only broccoli; (b) Topic must be interpreted exhaustively: Only John ate (only) broccoli; and (c) The speaker takes it to be possible (or even knows, if he is competent) that at least one alternative of the form ‘x ate y’ not...

Topic and Focus in a Formal Framework