Sentence-Final Only and the Interpretation of Focus

In this paper I document the complex interactions between the Mandarin sentence-final only item éryǐ and the focus marker shì. Following work on Chinese Sentence-Final Particles (SFP), éryǐ syntactically is in the CPdomain and thus should scope above TP-level operators such as negation, and this is indeed normally the case. However, the introduction of the focus marker shì can force the sentence-final éryǐ to take scope below the TP-level negation, creating a problem for the theory of Mandarin SFP. I propose that shì unambiguously marks the semantic scope of Mandarin focus-sensitive operators which involve Association With Focus. I show how this analysis preserves the expected syntactic cartography while computing the correct semantic scope. A compositional syntax/semantics utilizing focus movement is also presented.