Focusing and background operators

For a Structured Meaning Account of Questions and Answers

“…Both the proposition set approach and the structured meaning approach relate the meaning of questions to the meaning of congruent answers to those questions (a term coined by von Stechow 1990). That is, the meaning of a question like (1a) is traced back to the meaning of answers like (1b).…”

“…von Stechow 1981, Jacobs 1984, Krifka 1992; for application to question-answer relations, see von Stechow 1990). Focus leads to a partition of the semantic material of an expression into a background part and a focus part, which I render here as a pair 〈B, F〉: (27) Notice that when we apply the background B to the focus F to form the meaning B(F), we arrive at the regular interpretation.…”

“…It has been developed by Hull (1975), Tichy (1978), Hausser & Zaefferer (1979), von Stechow & Zimmermann (1984), von Stechow (1990) and Ginzburg (1992). Generalizing over a number of important differences between the theories that follow this approach, the basic idea is this:…”

“…On the other hand, I will show that the main argument brought forward against the structured meaning framework, namely that it does not give us an elegant way to account for embedded questions, does not withstand closer scrutiny. In this I will take up an issue raised in von Stechow (1990), namely, that the greater expressive power of the structured meaning approach might be necessary for the proper treatment of semantic phenomena like question formation and focusation.…”

Syntactic doubling and deletion as a source of variation

“…32 The semantics of focus particles is more complex than can be discussed in this paper that concentrates on syntactic variation. For semantic analyses of focus particles see Rooth (1985), von Stechow 1991, Krifka 1992. Cf.…”