Abstract
This paper tracks recent developments of focus semantics, emanating from Schwarzschild’s (1999) convertible examples. It discusses the theoretical impact of the various variations on these examples. The paper ends up arguing that we need contrastive focusing as a precondition for deaccenting, but that, in turn, we need to give up the idea that focusing is anaphoric. This, in turn, opens up crucial gaps in our coverage of the data, which should be closed by making deaccenting—but not backgrounding in general—subject to: a givenness condition.
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Notes
- 1.
Which is said to be similar to one in an earlier handout of mine. Said handout has since disappeared into the Orcus of obsolete file formats, so I cannot trace this back any further; as hinted at in the introduction, neither Roger nor I are so sure anymore that my earlier example wasn’t in turn inspired by a yet earlier one of his.
- 2.
I took up the task of bolstering this argument in Büring (2006), concluding that F-projection was even less restricted than assumed at the end of COPA. I concluded from that that F-markers weren’t needed for purposes of ‘traffic ruling’ F-projection in the way Selkirk, Rochemont, or von Stechow and Uhmann had assumed. In recent work (Büring 2015, 2016a) I embarked on the logical follow-up step to that, to eliminate F-markers completely; once again the way there had been paved significantly earlier in the brilliant Schwarzschild 1997.
- 3.
I will argue below that there is, in fact, no identifiable contrasting alternative to ‘buy’ in Can we please buy a convertible? at all in this context, so that even if the focus is allowed to target something non-salient, deaccenting in these examples remains odd.
- 4.
As long as both are of the same semantic type. While one might have doubts about that in the case of red and cheap—cheap is not intersective, but red presumably is—I do not think that something similar could save us in the general case; replace, for example, red by fast or big, neither of which is, I believe, intersective either; the (in)felicity of the examples does not change.
- 5.
See Büring (2016b), ch. 5.3 for a summary of the discussion.
- 6.
Other cases involve shifting the nuclear pitch accent to the right, onto a functional element or a predicate:
Here saw and her hair have been prosodically demoted, even though they still may bear a (pre-nuclear) pitch accent. As far as I can see, these cases, too, require saw and her hair to be given.
- 7.
(23-a) from John Harris, Early Language Development, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1990, and (23-b) from Stephen Lincoln, Mark Daly, and Eric Lander, Constructing Genetic Linkage Maps with MAPMAKER/EXP Version 3.0: A Tutorial and Reference Manual, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research Technical Report, January 1993, both via Beaver and Clark (2002, p. 330). (23-c) from C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, via Horn (1996, p. 8), attributed to Jacobsson (1951).
- 8.
There shouldn’t be a problem with the contrast requirement here, because one can say We EXPECTED him to bring a HIGH-end convertible, but he DIDn’t. One can also utter the sentence as written in (33), continuing for example with ... but no-one had imagined the custom made top edge model he actually ended up bringing, but only if one treats it as contextually known—not just ‘salient’—that the uncle brought a high-end convertible.
- 9.
Daniel Altshuler, p.c. suggested to me that prosodic demotion in this respect behaves like true anaphora (i.e., it is hard to ‘accommodate’ a missing antecedent for, say, a pronoun), while the requirement for a focal targets is more akin to presuppositions, which we know can be rather easily accommodated if it is clear what their content is. In the present paper, I thought of constructing a focal target as an entirely free process, unrestricted by context other than general considerations of plausibility, i.e., non-presuppositional. Perhaps, however, a status like ‘easily accommodable presupposition’ would fit even better here, though this would hinge on a) a formal theory of the anaphora/presupposition distinction, and b) a precise understanding of what exactly would need to be accommodated, considering that the focal targets need not, and in most cases should not, be taken to be true.
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Büring, D. (2019). Topless and Salient—Convertibles in the Theory of Focus. In: Altshuler, D., Rett, J. (eds) The Semantics of Plurals, Focus, Degrees, and Times. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04438-1_7
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