REVIEWS David I. Beaver & Brady Clark, Sense and sensitivity: How focus determines meaning (Explorations in Semantics). Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Pp. xiv+307

Judging from the title, Sense and sensitivity: How focus determines meaning, this monograph might seem to offer a general theory of focus; however, as a matter of fact, it constitutes a theory of FOCUS SENSITIVITY, also known as ASSOCIATION WITH FOCUS, which is one of the most studied and debated phenomena at the semantics–pragmatics interface. Sense and sensitivity develops a novel approach to focus sensitivity in distinguishing three degrees of association with focus. These different types of association with focus have a common semantic core, but they are claimed to be conceptually, grammatically and technically distinct phenomena. Most importantly, the authors argue that only one type of association with focus is indeed conventional, i.e. grammatically coded. This conventional association is mediated by a common discourse–pragmatic function shared by focus and the lexical meaning of a class of particles such as only, even, too, etc. Other expressions that exhibit typical semantic effects of association with focus achieve these by different semantic machineries not involving any specific grammatical connection between their lexical meaning and the notion of focus. These expressions are, for example, negation and quantificational adverbs (usually, always). For a number of reasons to be discussed in the following, we think that this book will become a standard starting point for any discussion of focus sensitivity in the next few years. A theory of focus sensitivity requires a theory of focus, a theory of focus sensitivity proper and a detailed case study that shows the empirical, conceptual and technical merits of the new theory. This is precisely what this monograph offers :