Focus
Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives

This collection of papers examines the theoretical, psychological and descriptive approaches to focus.

Peter Bosch (Edited by), Rob van der Sandt (Edited by)

9780521583053, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 November 1998

388 pages
23.7 x 16.1 x 2.6 cm, 0.715 kg

This book presents a collection of papers on the issue of focus in its broadest sense. While commonly being considered as related to phenomena such as presupposition and anaphora, focusing is much more widely spread, and it is this pervasiveness that this collection addresses. The volume explicitly aims to bring together theoretical, psychological, and descriptive approaches to focus, at the same time maintaining the overall interest in how these notions apply to the larger problem of evolving some formal representation of the semantic aspects of linguistic content. The contributed papers to this volume have been reworked from a selection of original work presented at a conference held in 1994 in Schloss Wolfsbrunnen in Germany.

List of contributors
Preface Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt
Part I. SURFACE REALISATION OF FOCUS: 1. Contrastive stress, contrariety and focus Kees van Deemter
2. The processing of information structure Carsten Günther, Claudia Maienborn, and Andrea Schopp
3. On the limits of focus projection in English Carlos Gussenhoven
4. Informational autonomy Joachim Jacobs
5. Subject-prodrop in Yiddish Ellen F. Prince
Part II. SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION OF FOCUS PHENOMENA: 6. What is the alternative? The computation of focus alternatives from lexical and sortal information Peter I. Blok and Kurt Eberle
7. The treatment of focusing particles in underspecified discourse representations Johan Bos
8. Topic Daniel Büring
9. Focus with nominal quantifiers Regine Eckardt
10. Topic, focus and weak quantifiers Gerhard Jäger
11. Focus, quantification, and semantics-pragmatics issues Barbara H. Partee
12. Association with focus or association with presupposition Mats Rooth
Part III. The Function of Focus in Discourse: 13. Discourse and the focus/background distinction Nicholas Asher
14. Domain restriction Bart Geurts and Rob van de Sandt
15. On different kinds of focus Jeanette K. Gundel
16. Stressed and unstressed pronouns: complementary preferences Megumi Kameyama
17. Discourse linking and discourse subordination Kjell Johan Sæbø
18. Position and meaning: time adverbials in context Henrietta de Swart
Name index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Computational linguistics [CFX]