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  1. Desambiguación de presuposiciones anafóricas: el caso de ‘también’.William Jimenez Leal & Tomas Barrero - forthcoming - Signos.
    Este trabajo analiza los patrones de desambiguación de presuposiciones que se pueden considerar anafóricas y son generadas por partículas indexicales. En contraste con teorías recientes sobre la presuposición que privilegian la información lexical proponemos un análisis perspectivo de la presuposición según el cual la inferencia por defecto sobre este tipo de información hace uso de la perspectiva de los hablantes. En dos estudios exploramos el patrón de desambiguación de oraciones que contienen la palabra ‘también’ en contextos donde se usa el (...)
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  2. GIVENness, AVOIDF, and constraints on the placement of focus.Roger Schwarzschild - forthcoming - Natural Language Semantics.
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  3. Hungarian 'focus position'and English it-clefts: the semantic underspecification of 'focus' readings.Daniel Wedgwood, Gergely Petho & Ronnie Cann - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
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  4. Focused true–true counterfactuals. Da Fan - 2023 - Philosophical Forum 54 (3):121-141.
    Any counterfactual with a true antecedent and a true consequent is invariably predicted to be true by the standard Stalnaker–Lewis semantics. But many such true–true counterfactuals appear false to ordinary speakers, which is considered by many authors as evidence that the standard semantics should be revised. However, Walters and Williams prove that allowing true–true counterfactuals to be false would unacceptably invalidate some very plausible logical principles. The objective of this paper is to provide a pragmatic account of seemingly false true–true (...)
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  5. Configuración hispánica de los conceptos de utopía y anarquía en la Literatura. Entrevista a Rocío Hernández Arias.Jesús Miguel Delgado Del Aguila - 2023 - Frontería. Revista Do Programa de Pós-Graduação Em Literatura Comparada 4 (1):156-166.
    En esta entrevista, Rocío Hernández Arias explica la conceptualización de utopía y las subclasificaciones que se derivan de ella. Para ello, fue esencial precisar la orientación que ha tenido para poder discernir en cuanto al significado de estos postulados. En un primer instante, distingue sus respectivos campos semánticos y los arguye desde un recuento histórico. Por ejemplo, hace referencia a la utopía literaria, la utopía empírica y la utopía hispánica. Luego de diferenciarlos, comenta acerca de uno de sus hallazgos relevantes, (...)
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  6. From contrastivism back to contextualism.Da Fan - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-23.
    Contrastivism is the view that knowledge is a ternary relation between an agent, a content proposition, and a contrast, and it explains that a binary knowledge ascription sentence appears to be context-sensitive because different contexts can implicitly fill the contrast with different values. This view is purportedly supported by certain linguistic evidence. An objective of this paper is to argue that contrastivism is not empirically adequate, as there are examples that favor its contextualist cousin. Thereafter, I shall develop a contextualist (...)
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  7. A Genre Analysis of Chinese Abstracts from SOOCHOW JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES(臺灣西方哲學論文語體探討:以東吳哲學學報摘要為例).Lian Jr-Jiun & 連 祉鈞 - 2023 - Dissertation, National Chung Cheng University Translated by Lian Jr-Jiun.
    This study aimed to explore the rhetorical moves of article abstracts in Taiwanese Chinese philosophy journals. The most common theory for the discourse analysis of research abstracts is proposed by Hyland(2000). Most of the research abstracts in the field of social sciences and natural sciences are composed of Hyland’s five rhetorical moves: introduction, purpose, method, results, and conclusion. Therefore, the question to be explored in this research is how to compose the rhetorical moves of abstracts of Chinese philosophy journal articles. (...)
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  8. Focus on slurs.Poppy Mankowitz & Ashley Shaw - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):693-710.
    Slurring expressions display puzzling behaviour when embedded, such as under negation and in attitude and speech reports. They frequently appear to retain their characteristic qualities, like offensiveness and propensity to derogate. Yet it is sometimes possible to understand them as lacking these qualities. A theory of slurring expressions should explain this variability. We develop an explanation that deploys the linguistic notion of focus. Our proposal is that a speaker can conversationally implicate metalinguistic claims about the aptness of a focused slurring (...)
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  9. Salience and metaphysical explanation.Phil Corkum - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10771-10792.
    Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive to our epistemic situation and so are not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties are distributed over an extension. For example, the property of being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is distributed over a surface. Similar properties have been put to work in a variety of explanatory tasks in recent metaphysics, including: providing an (...)
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  10. What a Clause Does: Raising Its Question and Answering It Too.Da Fan - 2021 - Dissertation, University of California, Davis
  11. How to have a metalinguistic dispute.Poppy Mankowitz - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5603-5622.
    There has been recent interest in the idea that speakers who appear to be having a verbal dispute may in fact be engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation: they are communicating information about how they believe an expression should be used. For example, individuals involved in a dispute about whether a racehorse is an athlete might be communicating their diverging views about how ‘athlete’ should be used. While many have argued that metalinguistic negotiation is a pervasive feature of philosophical and everyday (...)
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  12. Expressions in Focus.Poppy Mankowitz - 2020 - Semantics and Pragmatics 13 (13).
    It is commonly claimed that, when a constituent is the focus of an occurrence of a sentence, certain alternatives to that constituent are relevant to our understanding of the sentence. Normally these are alternatives to the denotation of the focused constituent. However, Krifka (2007) briefly discusses the notion of expression focus, where the alternatives are linguistic items. Yet an adequate account of expression focus has not been given within the literature. This is despite the fact that it holds the potential (...)
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  13. Understanding Focus: Pitch, Placement and Coherence.Julian J. Schlöder & Alex Lascarides - 2020 - Semantics and Pragmatics.
    This paper presents a novel account of focal stress and pitch contour in English dialogue. We argue that one should analyse and treat focus and pitch contour jointly, since (i) some pragmatic interpretations vary with contour (e.g., whether an utterance accepts or rejects; or whether it implicates a positive or negative answer); and (ii) there are utterances with identical prosodic focus that in the same context are infelicitous with one contour, but felicitous with another. We offer an account of two (...)
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  14. A revised, gradability-based semantics for even.Yael Greenberg - 2018 - Natural Language Semantics 26 (1):51-83.
    This paper concentrates on giving precise content to the general wisdom on the scalar presupposition of even, according to which the prejacent of even, p, is stronger than its relevant focus alternatives, q. To that end I first examine both familiar challenges for the popular ‘comparative likelihood’ view of the ‘stronger than’ relation, as well as novel challenges, having to do with the context dependency of even and with its sensitivity to standards of comparison. To overcome these challenges and to (...)
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  15. Priscianvs minor: Teoría gramatical per figvram Y técnica compositiva.Marco A. Gutiérrez - 2018 - Argos 41:e0004.
    En el presente artículo damos cuenta pormenorizada de los ejemplos per figuram obtenidos a través de un novedoso método de trabajo plasmado en decotgrel. De esta forma hemos podido sistematizar todos los ‘usos especiales’ documentados en el así llamado Priscianus minor. De esta manera hemos podido encontrar consideraciones que van más allá de lo meramente normativo y que tienen un gran interés tanto para el conocimiento de la lengua en cuestión como para el análisis de la evolución de los conceptos (...)
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  16. Спроба оцінки й контекстуалізації помилок у мові української преси (на прикладі видання «Газета по-українськи»).Michael Moser - 2017 - Language: Classic – Modern – Postmodern 3:235-249.
    У статті досліджено мовні помилки, що трапляються в одній із українських інтернет-газет упродовж одного (випадково вибраного) дня цього (2017) року. Указано на високу частотність помилок, на те, що правильність текстів в українських інтернет-ЗМІ значною мірою залежить від мовного оформлення їх безпосереднього джерела, і на те, що в інтернет-ЗМІ часто трапляються найтиповіші помилки сучасної української мови. Доведено, що багато з цих помилок далі поширюють різними веб-порталами (бо часто просто копіюють) без будь-якого мовного редагування. Наголошено на слушності мовного моніторингу українських інтернет-ЗМІ не (...)
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  17. Dretske on Self-Knowledge and Contrastive Focus: How to Understand Dretske’s Theory, and Why It Matters.Michael Roche & William Roche - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (5):975-992.
    Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge is interesting but peculiar and can seem implausible. He denies that we can know by introspection that we have thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But he allows that we can know by introspection what we think, feel, and experience. We consider two puzzles. The first puzzle, PUZZLE 1, is interpretive. Is there a way of understanding Dretske’s theory on which the knowledge affirmed by its positive side is different than the knowledge denied by its negative side? The (...)
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  18. Alternatives in different dimensions: a case study of focus intervention.Haoze Li & Jess H.-K. Law - 2016 - Linguistics and Philosophy 39 (3):201-245.
    In Beck, focus intervention is used as an argument for reducing Hamblin’s semantics for questions to Rooth’s focus semantics. Drawing on novel empirical evidence from Mandarin and English, we argue that this reduction is unwarranted. Maintaining both Hamblin’s original semantics and Rooth’s focus semantics not only allows for a more adequate account for focus intervention in questions, but also correctly predicts that focus intervention is a very general phenomenon caused by interaction of alternatives in different dimensions.
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  19. A note on contrast.Roni Katzir - 2013 - Natural Language Semantics 21 (4):333-343.
    The semantics of association with focus and the pragmatic conditions governing the appropriateness of focus in discourse are usually taken to depend on focus alternatives. According to a common view, these alternatives are generated by a permissive process. This permissive view has been challenged by Michael Wagner, who has noted that certain alternatives are systematically excluded from consideration. Wagner describes a more restrictive view, on which only contrastive alternatives are relevant for association with focus and for the appropriateness of focus (...)
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  20. Focus and uninformativity in Yucatec Maya questions.Scott AnderBois - 2012 - Natural Language Semantics 20 (4):349-390.
    Crosslinguistically, questions frequently make crucial use of morphosyntactic elements which also occur outside of questions. Chief among these are focus, disjunctions, and wh-words with indefinite semantics. This paper provides a compositional account of the semantics of wh-, alternative, and polar questions in Yucatec Maya (YM), which are composed primarily of these elements. Key to the account is a theory of disjunctions and indefinites (extending work by others) which recognizes the inherently inquisitive nature of these elements. While disjunctions and indefinites are (...)
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  21. English rise-fall-rise: a study in the semantics and pragmatics of intonation. [REVIEW]Noah Constant - 2012 - Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (5):407-442.
    This paper provides a semantic analysis of English rise-fall-rise (RFR) intonation as a focus quantifier over assertable alternative propositions. I locate RFR meaning in the conventional implicature dimension, and propose that its effect is calculated late within a dynamic model. With a minimum of machinery, this account captures disambiguation and scalar effects, as well as interactions with other focus operators like ‘only’ and clefts. Double focus data further support the analysis, and lead to a rejection of Ward and Hirschberg’s (Language (...)
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  22. Clefts and their relatives.Matthew Reeve - 2012 - Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
    Introduction -- The syntax of English clefts -- Clefts and the licensing of relative clauses -- Clefts in Slavonic languages -- The syntax of specificational sentences -- Conclusion.
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  23. The role of focus, semantic overlap and discourse function in noun-phrase anaphor resolution.H. W. Cowles & A. Garnham - 2011 - In Edward Gibson & Neal J. Pearlmutter (eds.), The Processing and Acquisition of Reference. MIT Press.
    One area of language research that has received a great deal of attention, both theoretical and empirical, is the use of anaphoric expressions. Such expressions can be thought of as serving two functions: the primary function is to refer back to a referent from previous discourse, and the secondary, but no less important, function is to help provide discourse coherence and structure. Third person pronouns such as he or she are anaphoric expressions par excellence, but fuller anaphoric expressions, including demonstrative (...)
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  24. On the characterization of alternatives.Danny Fox & Roni Katzir - 2011 - Natural Language Semantics 19 (1):87-107.
    We present an argument for revising the theory of alternatives for Scalar Implicatures and for Association with Focus. We argue that in both cases the alternatives are determined in the same way, as a contextual restriction of the focus value of the sentence, which, in turn, is defined in structure-sensitive terms. We provide evidence that contextual restriction is subject to a constraint that prevents it from discriminating between alternatives when they stand in a particular logical relationship with the assertion or (...)
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  25. Without 'Focus'.Nirit Kadmon & Aldo Sevi - 2011 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6:18.
    It is widely accepted that a notion of 'focus', more or less as conceived of in Jackendoff , must be incorporated into our theory of grammar, as a means of accounting for certain observed correlations between prosodic facts and semantic/pragmatic facts. In this paper, we put forth the somewhat radical idea that the time has come to give up this customary view, and eliminate 'focus' from our theory of grammar. We argue that such a move is both economical and fruitful.Research (...)
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  26. Ncsbn focus.Nancy Spector & Marcy Echternacht - 2010 - Jona's Healthcare Law, Ethics, and Regulation 12 (1):12-14.
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  27. Structurally Defined Alternatives and Lexicalizations of XOR.Eric Swanson - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (1):31-36.
    In his recent paper on the symmetry problem Roni Katzir argues that the only relevant factor for the calculation of any Quantity implicature is syntactic structure. I first refute Katzir’s thesis with three examples that show that structural complexity is irrelevant to the calculation of some Quantity implicatures. I then argue that it is inadvisable to assume—as Katzir and others do—that exactly one factor is relevant to the calculation of any Quantity implicature.
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  28. On the pragmatics of post focal material in Italian (left peripheral focus looked at from the other side).Lisa Brunetti - 2009 - In Denis Apothéloz, Bernard Combettes & Franck Neveu (eds.), Les Linguistiques du Détachement: Actes du Colloque International de Nancy (7-9 Juin 2006). P. Lang. pp. 151--62.
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  29. Ncsbn focus.Nancy Spector - 2009 - Jona's Healthcare Law, Ethics, and Regulation 11 (4):116-119.
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  30. Sense and sensitivity: how focus determines meaning.David I. Beaver - 2008 - Malden, MA: Blackwell. Edited by Brady Z. Clark.
    Sense and Sensitivity explores the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language discourse, advancing a new account of focus sensitivity which posits a three-way distinction between different effects of focus. Makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing research in the field of focus sensitivity Discusses the features of QFC, an original theory of focus implying a new typology of focus-sensitive expressions Presents novel cross-linguistic data on focus and focus sensitivity Concludes with a case study of exclusives (like “only”), arguing (...)
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  31. Descriptions and pressupositions: Strawson vs. Russell.Murali Ramachandran - 2008 - South African Journal of Philosophy 27 (3):242-257.
    A Russellian theory of (definite) descriptions takes an utterance of the form ‘The F is G' to express a purely general proposition that affirms the existence of a (contextually) unique F: there is exactly one F [which is C] and it is G. Strawson, by contrast, takes the utterer to presuppose in some sense that there is exactly one salient F, but this is not part of what is asserted; rather, when the presupposition is not met the utterance simply fails (...)
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  32. Notions of Focus Anaphoricity.Mats Rooth - 2008 - Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55 (3-4):277--285.
    This article reviews some of the theoretical notions and empirical phenomena which figure in current formal-semantic theories of focus. It also develops the connection between “alternative semantics” and “givenness” accounts of focus interpretation.
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  33. Linguistic and cognitive prominence in anaphor resolution: Topic, contrastive focus and pronouns.H. Wind Cowles, Matthew Walenski & Robert Kluender - 2007 - Topoi 26 (1):3-18.
    This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in (...)
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  34. On the meaning of some focus-sensitive particles.Michela Ippolito - 2007 - Natural Language Semantics 15 (1):1-34.
    In this paper, I argue that the aspectual, marginality, and concessive uses of the grading particles still and already can be reduced to the fol lowing three classes of focus sensitive-grading particles: additive particles like too, scalar particles like even, and exclusive particles like only. The meaning differences among the occurrences of still (and already) are mostly reduced to the differences among these three classes of grading particles. In turn, these differences are shown to correlate with what type of object (...)
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  35. Intervention Effects Follow from Focus Interpretation.Sigrid Beck - 2006 - Natural Language Semantics 14 (1):1-56.
    The paper provides a semantic analysis of intervention effects in wh-questions. The interpretation component of the grammar derives uninterpretability, hence ungrammaticality, of the intervention data. In the system of compositional interpretation that I suggest, wh-phrases play the same role as focused phrases, introducing alternatives into the computation. Unlike focus, wh-phrases make no ordinary semantic contribution. An intervention effect occurs whenever a focus-sensitive operator other than the question operator tries to evaluate a constituent containing a wh-phrase. It is argued that this (...)
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  36. Focus interpretation in thetic statements: Alternative semantics and optimality theory pragmatics. [REVIEW]Kjell Johan Sæbø - 2006 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 16 (1):15-33.
    Broad focus (or informational integration or nonautonomy) is lexically and contextually constrained, but these constraints are not well understood. On a standard theory of focus interpretation, the presupposition of a broad focus is verified whenever those of two narrow foci are. I argue that to account for cases where two narrow foci are preferred, it is necessary to assume that broad focus competes with two narrow foci and implicates the opposite of what they presuppose. Central constraints on thetic statements are (...)
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  37. Case Focus.LaTonia Denise Wright - 2006 - Jona's Healthcare Law, Ethics, and Regulation 8 (3):69-71.
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  38. Focus on again.Sigrid Beck - 2005 - Linguistics and Philosophy 29 (3):277 - 314.
    This paper examines the effect that focus has on repetitive versus restitutive again. It is argued that a pragmatic explanation of the effect is the right strategy. The explanation builds largely on a standard focus semantics. To this we add an anaphoric analysis of again’s presupposition and a detailed analysis of the alternatives triggered when focus falls on again.
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  39. Focus: A case study on the semantics–pragmatics boundary.Michael Glanzberg - 2005 - In Zoltan Gendler Szabo (ed.), Semantics Versus Pragmatics. Oxford University Press. pp. 72--110.
  40. Context and focus projection. A compositional, intonation-based account of focus interpretation.Arndt Riester - 2005 - In Emar Maier, Corien Bary & Janneke Huitink (eds.), Proceedings of Sub9. pp. 299--313.
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  41. Focus Below the Word Level.Ron Artstein - 2004 - Natural Language Semantics 12 (1):1-22.
    Intonational focus can be observed on parts of words that appear to lack intrinsic meaning, and triggers alternatives that are similar in form. In order to provide a unified treatment of focus above and below the word level (they do, after all, behave the same in most respects), I develop a theory of denotations for arbitrary word parts in which focused word parts denote their own sound and the unfocused parts are functions from sounds to word meanings. This allows focus (...)
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  42. Interpreting Focus: Presupposed or Expressive Meanings? A Comment on Geurts and Van der Sandt.Angelika Kratzer - 2004 - Theoretical Linguistics 30:123--136.
    The BPR assumes that we already know how sentences are partitioned into focused and backgrounded material, and this is quite legitimate, given the literature on the topic , von Stechow ). If the BPR was true, no more would have to be said about the meaning of focus. The behavior of whatever inferences are generated by backgrounding could be taken care of by theories dealing with the projection of presuppositions of the familiar kind, the presuppositions of definite descriptions, clefts, or (...)
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  43. Always and Only: Why Not All Focus-Sensitive Operators Are Alike. [REVIEW]David Beaver & Brady Clark - 2003 - Natural Language Semantics 11 (4):323-362.
    We discuss focus sensitivity in English, the phenomenon whereby interpretation of some expressions is affected by placement of intonational focus. We concentrate in particular on the interpretation of always and only, both of which are interpreted as universal quantifiers, and both of which are focus sensitive. Using both naturally occurring and constructed data we explore the interaction of these operators with negative polarity items, with presupposition, with prosodically reduced elements, and with syntactic extraction. On the basis of this data we (...)
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  44. On d-trees, beans, and b-accents.Daniel Büring - 2003 - Linguistics and Philosophy 26 (5):511 - 545.
    This paper presents a comprehensive pragmatic theory of contrastive topic and its relation to focus in English. In discussing various constructions involving contrastive topics, it argues that they make reference to complex, hierarchical aspects of discourse structure. In this, it follows and spells out a proposal sketched in Roberts (1996, p. 121ff),using the formal tools found in Büring (1994,1997b). It improves on existing accounts in the accuracy with which it predicts the non-occurrence of the accent patterns associated with focus and (...)
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  45. Topic, Focus, and the Interpretation of Bare Plurals.Ariel Cohen & Nomi Erteschik-Shir - 2002 - Natural Language Semantics 10 (2):125-165.
    In this paper we show that focus structure determines the interpretation of bare plurals in English: topic bare plurals are interpreted generically, focused bare plurals are interpreted existentially. When bare plurals are topics they must be specific, i.e. they refer to kinds. After type-shifting they introduce variables which can be bound by the generic quantifier, yielding characterizing generics. Existentially interpreted bare plurals are not variables, but denote properties that are incorporated into the predicate.The type of predicate determines the interpretation of (...)
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  46. Superlative expressions, context, and focus.Yael Sharvit & Penka Stateva - 2002 - Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (4):453-504.
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  47. Davldson ln focus.de Caro Mar1o - 1999 - In Mario De Caro (ed.), Interpretations and Causes: New Perspectives on Donald Davidson's Philosophy. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 1.
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  48. Focus and Negative Polarity in Hindi.Utpal Lahiri - 1998 - Natural Language Semantics 6 (1):57-123.
    This paper presents an analysis of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi. It is noted that NPIs in this language are composed of a (weak) indefinite plus a particle bhii meaning ‘even’. It is argued that the compositional semantics of this combination explains their behavior as NPIs as well as their behavior as free choice (FC) items. I assume that weak Hindi indefinites like ek and koi are to be viewed as a predicate that I call one, a predicate that (...)
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  49. Focus and weak noun phrases.Elena Herburger - 1997 - Natural Language Semantics 5 (1):53-78.
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  50. Focus and higher order unification.Stephen Pulman - 1997 - Linguistics and Philosophy 20.
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