Maximal backgrounding = focus without (necessary) focus encoding

Abstract

Based on data from a range of geographically and genealogically diverse African languages this article describes a little recognized strategy for expressing focus. It is based on marking all material of an utterance as background except for the single focus constituent. This kind of “maximal backgrounding” thus renders focus without overt focus marking, called accordingly “indirect focalization”. It is argued that the recognition of this strategy has several repercussions for the general modeling of focus, and information structure in general.

Approaches to Hungarian

“…Those constructions are anaphoric devices triggering an existence presupposition. EXH-inferences are not obligatory in such constructions in English, German, or Hungarian, against some previous literature (Percus 1997;, but in line with pragmatic analyses of EXH-inferences in clefts (Horn 1981(Horn , 2016Pollard & Yasavul 2016). The cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of EXH-inferences are attributed to properties of the Hungarian number marking system.…”

“…To explain our findings, we analyze focus partitioning structures as anaphoric devices with specific discourse-semantic use conditions, which are identical across languages, following ideas in Horn (1981Horn ( , 2016, Delin (1992), Onea & Beaver (2009), Velleman et al (2012), Pollard & Yasavul (2016), De Veaugh-Geiss et al (2017. We claim that such constructions semantically encode an ∃-inference, often explicitly marked by means of givenness or anaphoricity markers (deaccenting, demonstratives, definites, relative markers, etc.).…”

“…A common assumption -articulated in Szabolcsi (1981) and É. Kiss ( , 1999 -is that the two construction types share important interpretive properties, irrespective of their different morphosyntactic realization, e.g., existence presuppositions (∃) and exhaustivity (EXH) inferences (e.g., Horn 1981;Percus 1997;Kenesei 1986;.…”

“…The latter are commonly taken as a semantic property of focus partitioning; see, e.g., Percus (1997), , on clefts and Szabolcsi (1981, É. , i.a., on Hungarian focus. An opposing view is found in Horn (1981Horn ( , 2016, Wedgwood et al (2006), and Onea & Beaver (2009), who all analyze EXHinferences with focus partitioning as optional pragmatic implicatures. In line with pragmatic analyses, our results suggest that EXH-inferences are neither obligatory with focus-background clefts nor with Hungarian preverbal focus.…”

“…As indicated in Section 1, there are different theoretical analyses of clefts that differ vastly in empirical predictions when it comes to the robustness of the EXHinference with clefts and Hungarian preverbal focus as well as to the parallels with definite pseudoclefts. The available accounts sub-divide into three classes: (i) pragmatic analyses as in, e.g., Horn (1981Horn ( , 2016 for clefts and Wedgwood et al (2006) and Onea & Beaver (2009) for Hungarian preverbal focus; (ii) semantic analyses treating clefts and definite descriptions alike (Percus 1997;; (iii) semantic analyses treating clefts as expressing a not-at-issue maximality inference, which is unconnected to definite descriptions (Velleman et al 2012). On Horn's (1981) pragmatic account, the use of the structurally marked cleft It is a that BGs, with the existence presupposition (11a) and the canonical meaning BG(a), triggers the pragmatic EXH-inference as a generalized conversational implicature (11b): The pragmatic account does not predict EXH-inferences to be consistent, robust, or systematic across speakers and trials.…”