Focus and the exclusion of alternatives: On the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference

Skopeteas, Stavros; Fanselow, Gisbert

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.05.005

Cited by 23 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Nevertheless, projection out of the cleft pivot appears not to be possible. exhaustivity implicatures can be replaced by other implicatures, such as mirativity or unexpectedness (see Skopeteas & Fanselow 2011;Destruel & Velleman 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contradicting (not-)at-issueness in exclusives and clefts: An empirical study

DeVeaugh-Geiss

Zimmermann

Onea

et al. 2015

SALT

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We present two empirical studies on exclusives, it-clefts, and pseudoclefts (i.e., identity statements with a definite description) in which the at-issue and not-at-issue content-a factor that has not been properly controlled for in prior experimental work on cleft exhaustivity-were teased apart systematically. The results show that violations of exhaustivity in it-clefts, a not-at-issue inference, patterned differently from the necessary presupposition failures of the not-at-issue semantic inferences. These findings pose a new experimental challenge to semantic accounts of exhaustivity in it-clefts, while being in line with pragmatic accounts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contradicting (not-)at-issueness in exclusives and clefts: An empirical study

DeVeaugh-Geiss

Zimmermann

Onea

et al. 2015

SALT

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“…These features of the experimental set-up rule out typical attempts at explaining exhaustivity violations away as only apparent (É. Kiss 2010, Skopeteas & Fanselow 2011. The explanation for the split behavior of participants in the cleft and definite pseudocleft conditions must lie elsewhere.…”

Section: Evaluation Of the Theoretical Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 61%

That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non‑)exhaustivity in clefts

Veaugh-Geiss

Tönnis

Onea

et al. 2018

S&P

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“…The effect of FOCUS DOMAIN involves an asymmetry between subject and object focus, which is reminiscent of the reported findings in a large number of languages (see references at the beginning of this section) and confirms the expectations of the hypothesis in (34). A different type of asymmetry between subject and object focus is obtained through the same experimental procedure in American English and Québec French cleft constructions (Skopeteas and Fanselow 2010). In the same contexts, American English and Québec French speakers never use cleft constructions in object focus and use a proportion of cleft constructions in subject focus (which in the context "correction" is 28.5% for American English and 74% for Québec French).…”

Section: (34) Influence Of Focus Domainsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…The absence of a significant effect of CONTEXT TYPE is informative if we compare it with the corresponding results in American English, Québec French, and Hungarian. Native speakers of these languages participated in the same experiment (same instructions, same experimental material, data reported in Skopeteas and Fanselow 2010). For American English, we obtained cleft constructions only in the contexts inducing subject focus.…”

Section: (34) Influence Of Focus Domainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Licensing Focus Constructions In Yucatec Maya

Verhoeven¹,

Skopeteas

2015

International Journal of American Linguistics

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An important challenge in the study of focus constructions is teasing out the properties of the layers of linguistic structure that are involved, in particular identifying which interpretational properties are associated with the syntactic operation at issue, which properties arise through inferential processes, and which properties can be deduced on the basis of the prosodic structure. This article undertakes this challenge in a language with a structurally identifiable left-peripheral position which is employed for the expression of focus, namely, Yucatec Maya. This syntactic configuration comes with a focus interpretation and we show that the occurrence of this construction is not restricted to a subtype of focus corresponding to a truth-conditionally relevant operator. The properties of the syntax-prosody mapping indicate that focus fronting is a syntactic operation that places the material in focus in the maximally prominent partition of the prosodic constituent that contains the predicate.[KEYWORDS: focus, exhaustivity, word order, prosodic phrasing, information structure]1. Preliminaries. Licensing focus.A fundamental question in studies on focus is whether the focus interpretation that we identify for certain constructions is an inherent property of particular operations in syntax or an effect of the interaction between the context and some surface properties of syntactic constructions, in particular their linear order and its relation to prosodic structure.The first view is explicitly formulated in accounts that assume a formto-function association between focus and constituent structure (Dik 1997, Rizzi 1997, É. Kiss 1998Drubig 2003). For instance, É. Kiss (1998:267-68) assumes that operators such as [+ contrastive] and [+ exhaustive] are associated with focus positions in different languages. In a different grammatical framework, Dik et al. (1981) and Dik (1997) assume a hierarchy of focus subtypes, such as completive, selective, and corrective, which corresponds to different types of contexts relating to the asserted information, an 1 We are grateful to Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Féry, Frank Kügler, and Malte Zimmermann for comments on presentations of this study. We received detailed comments from Judith Aissen, Jürgen Bohnemeyer, and an IJAL Associate Editor, which contributed substantially to the final account presented here. We are grateful to Joseph P. DeVeaugh-Geiss for editing the final draft.

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Focus and the exclusion of alternatives: On the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference

Cited by 23 publications

References 17 publications

Contradicting (not-)at-issueness in exclusives and clefts: An empirical study

Contradicting (not-)at-issueness in exclusives and clefts: An empirical study

That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non‑)exhaustivity in clefts

Licensing Focus Constructions In Yucatec Maya

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