Abstract
In this paper, we propose that a sentence like John \(_T\) ate broccoli \(_F\) 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 entailed by the sentence is true. It will be shown that in terms of this analysis we can also account for all the scope-inversion data of Büring (Linguist Philos 20: 175–194, 1997), without giving rise to some of the problems of the latter analysis.
The ideas in Sects. 1–4 and 6 of this paper were presented during the 2007-Contrastiveness and Scalar Implicatures workshop of CIL 18 in Seoul. The ideas and even the writing of Sects. 2–5 date back to 2004. The ideas presented in Sect. 6 were developed in cooperation with Yurie Hara to improve on some ideas of Hara (2005) and discussed in a joint draft that was never published. We would like to thank Yurie Hara for her ‘intellectual’ contribution to this paper. Furthermore, we would like to thank Chungmin Lee, an anonymous reviewer, and the participants of the workshop for their comments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Only later we will discuss another theory that is perhaps not so popular.
- 2.
This rule slightly differs from the one given explicitly by Krifka in that we assume that Alt(F) is closed under conjunction (group-forming), instead of Krifka’s assumption that \(F'\) can be any subset of Alt(F). This does not seem to make any difference, though.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
As stressed by Chungmin Lee (1999, and personal communication), it is now generally assumed that a difference should be made between non-contrastive thematic topic (with no focal component) and contrastive topic with focal component. In this paper, we always refer to the latter type of topical construction.
- 6.
Recall that already Reinhart (1981) proposed a referential analysis of sentential topics.
- 7.
The suggestion that for the interpretation of topical accent, we need to make use of diccourse referents is not new. Vallduvi (1994, p. 7), for instance, claims that “[...] the internal structure of information states which is, in fact, crucially exploited by the different information-packaging strategies used by speakers in pursuing communicative efficiency is at least a system of file cards connected by pointers.”
- 8.
In this explicit representation, ‘Exh’ is used as an operator that can be used freely in the representation of the sentence. This way of representing things here is only for convenience, however. In Rooij and Schulz (2006) a dynamic exhaustivity operator is defined that takes scope over the whole sentence (and in particular over the existential quantifier), but is interpreted just as (16) should intuitively be interpreted. Thus, our proposal is still completely compatible with a Gricean global analysis of implicatures.
- 9.
This seems compatible with Féry’s first constraint on when we can replace a hat-pattern with two times focus accent.
- 10.
This does not mean that as a result the topical expressions should always have wide scope. If so, it would give rise to the prediction that [Alle] \(_T\) Politiker sind [nicht] \(_F\) korrupt. receives the small-scope reading of negation, which is wrong as made clear by Büring’s (1997). We will come back to this example in the next section.
- 11.
However, if the theme is totally predictable (i.e., has zero entropy), the ordering does not affect the information balance. Examples like Q: Who knows the secret? A: Peter \(_F\) knows it, which are problematic for more naive ‘old things first’-hypotheses, can now be accounted for.
- 12.
The most obvious way to formally account for our extra topical inference of \(\phi \) = “[John]\(_T\) ate [broccoli]\(_F\)” is as follows: \( \exists \psi \in \{Ate(x,y): x \in T \ \& \ y \in F \ \& \ \phi \nvDash Ate(x,y)\}: \Diamond \psi \), with T and F the set of topical and focal alternatives to John and broccoli, respectively. However, there are reasons to prefer the following formulation of basically the same idea: \( \exists \psi \in \{Ate(x,y): x \in (T - \{j\}) \ \& \ y \in (F-\{b\}) \ \& \ \phi \nvDash Ate(x,y) \}: \Diamond \psi \). The main reason for preferring this alternative is that in this way we can easily explain why a sentence like “John did [not\(]_T\) eat [five\(]_F\) apples” seems to implicate that John ate at least one apple (without it being required that he ate exactly four apples). The reason is that the predicted topical inference is now that the speaker thinks it is possible that John ate at least one apple, which after strengthening gives the desired result.
- 13.
References
Bolinger, Dwight. 1986. Intonation and its parts: Melody in spoken English. London: Edward Arnold.
Büring, Daniel. 1997. The great scope inversion conspiracy. Linguistics and Philosophy 20: 175–194.
Büring, Daniel. 2003. On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26: 511–545.
Chierchia, Genaro, Dany Fox, and Benjamin Spector. 2012. The grammatical view of scalar implicatures and the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. In An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning Semantics, eds. P. Portner, C. Maienborn and K. von Heusinger, Mouton de Gruyter.
Féry, Caroline. 1992. Focus, Topic and Intonation in German. SFB papier 340, Stuttgart/Tübingen.
Groenendijk, Jeroen and Martin Stokhof. 1984. Studies in the Semantics of Questions and the Pragmatics of Answers. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam.
Hamblin, Charles. 1973. Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language 10: 41–53.
Hara, Yurie. 2005. Contrastives and gricean principles. In Fifteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, ed. Paul Dekker and Michael Franke, 101–106. Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacobs, J. 1983. Focus und Skalen. Niemeyer, Tübingen: Zur Syntax and Semantik von Gradpartikeln im Deutschen.
Kadmon, Nirit. 2001. Formal pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Komagata, Noga. 2003. Contextual effects on word-order. In Modeling and Using Context, ed. P. Blackburn et. al., vol. 2680/2003, 190–203. Berlin/Heidelberg, Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Springer.
Krahmer, Emiel and Marc Swerts. 2007. Perceiving Focus. In Topic and Focus: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Intonation and Meaning, ed. C. Lee, M. Gordon and D. Bring (eds.), 121–138. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy Series.
Krifka, Manfred. 1995. The semantics and pragmatics of polarity items linguistic. Analysis 25: 209–258.
Lee, Chungmin. 1999. Contrastive topic: a locus of the interface evidence from Korean and English. In The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View, vol. 1, ed. K. Turner. Elsevier Science.
McCarthy, J. 1980. Circumscription—a form of non-monotonic reasoning. Artificial Intelligence 13: 27–39.
Reinhart, Tanya. 1981. Pragmatics and linguistics. An Analysis of Sentence Topics. Philosophica 27: 53–94.
Roberts, Craige. 1996. Information Structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In OSUWPL Volume 49: Papers in Semantics, eds. Jae Hak Yoon and Andreas Kathol, The Ohio State University: Ohio.
Rooth, Matts. 1985. Association with Focus. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1: 75–116.
Sauerland, Uli. 2004. Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 363–391.
Schulz, Katrin, and Robert van Rooij. 2006. Pragmatic meaning and non-monotonic reasoning: the case of exhaustive interpretation. Linguistics and Philosophy 29: 205–250.
Spector, Benjamin. 2003. Scalar implicatures: exhaustivity and gricean reasoning. In Proceedings of the ESSLLI’03 Student Session, ed. B. ten Cate.
Soames, Scott. 1982. How presuppositions are inherited: A solution to the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry 13: 483–545.
Valduvi, Enrich. 1994. The dynamics of information packaging. In Integrating information structure into constraint-based categorial approaches, ed. E. Engdahl, 4–26. University of Edinburgh: HCRC Publications.
van Rooij, Robert, and Katrin Schulz. 2004. Exhaustive interpretation of complex sentences. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13: 491–519.
von Stechow, Arnim. 1991. Focusing and background operators. In Discourse particles, ed. W. Araba, 37–84. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wagner, Michael. 2007. A Compositional Analysis of Contrastive Topics. Handout presented at NELS 38.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
van Rooij, R., Schulz, K. (2017). Topic, Focus, and Exhaustive Interpretation. In: Lee, C., Kiefer, F., Krifka, M. (eds) Contrastiveness in Information Structure, Alternatives and Scalar Implicatures. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 91. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10106-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10106-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10105-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10106-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)