This article1 deals with a well-known but still ill-explained fact about German, namely scope inversion under a particular accent contour, as illustrated with the following examples, where “/” and “\” stand for rising and falling accent: (a) Mindestens ein Stu- dent hat jeden Roman gelesen, lit. ‘at least one student has every novel read’, with the reading “For at least one student x: x read every book”, and (b) Mindestens /EIN Student hat \JEDen Roman gelesen, with the additional reading “For (...) every novel y: at least one student read y”. I will derive the scope inversion in this reading from general principles of scope assignment and focus marking in German. In particular, I will argue that focus is assigned to constituents that precede the verbal predicate, which leads to syntactic configurations that in turn result in ambiguous interpretations. This explanation must be couched in a framework of derivational economy that favors shorter derivations. It is argued that the relevant comparison class is defined with respect to phonological form, not, as has been suggested for English, with respect t o identity of semantic interpretation, and that this may be a general property of “free” word order languages. (shrink)

This volume examines explicitly the question of how the semantics and pragmatics of a number of expressions might be responsibly discussed. In the past, the temptation has been for the expressions in question to be discussed either in terms of the semantics, or in terms of the pragmatics, but extremely rarely in terms of both. This book shows how revealing analyses for this interface can be provided for the expressions in question. In specially commissioned chapters from leading authors, the points (...) of view represented include linguistics, logic, computational linguistics, and philosophy. (shrink)

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...) Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

This paper strives to characterize the relation between accent placement and discourse in terms of independent constraints operating at the interface between syntax and interpretation. The Givenness Constraint requires un-F-marked constituents to be given. Key here is our definition of givenness, which synthesizes insights from the literature on the semantics of focus with older views on information structure. AvoidF requires speakers to economize on F-marking. A third constraint requires a subset of F-markers to dominate accents.The characteristic prominence patterns of "novelty (...) focus" and "contrastive focus" both arise from a combination of the Givenness Constraint and AvoidF. Patterns of prominence in questions as well as in answers to questions are explained in terms of the constraints, thanks in part to the way in which the Givenness relation is defined. Head/argument asymmetries noted in the literature on Focus Projection are placed in the phonology-syntax interface, independent of discourse conditions. Deaccenting follows when AvoidF is ranked higher than constraint(s) governing head/argument asymmetries. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the semantics and pragmatics of contrastive topics vis-à-vis focus. A semi-formal characterization of its main properties is given, using the techniques of alternative semantics and questions under discussion. This treatment is compared to various analyses proposed in the literature for contrastive topics and arguably related constructions, such as the English rise–fall–rise contour. Finally a brief discussion of non-contrastive topics is provided.