Focus, Sensitivity, and the Currency of the Question

According to Beaver and Clark (2008), a closed class of items, primarily particles like even or only, are systematically sensitive to focus, encoding a dependency on the Current Question (the CQ). This theory appears to give wrong predictions for exclusive particles like only in some cases where intuitively, what the particle associates with is not the (only) constituent in focus, – something else can be in focus instead or as well, even it itself. I conclude that while both focus itself and exclusive particles always address a Question, they do not always address the same.

The explicative genitive and close apposition

The genitive in languages like Czech, German, Japanese or Latin is notoriously multiply ambiguous. Some senses (partitive, possessive, relational, objective) are more or less well-studied, but one, in particular, is understudied: the explicative genitive (also called the genitive of apposition or of definition). I discuss this genitive across several languages and argue that it encodes the inverse of the function that the definite article is standardly taken to encode. Like the definite article, the explicative genitive (also: the EG) is polymorphic, taking arguments of a wide range of logical types. I further argue that many cases of apposition involve the EG meaning, more specifically, that so-called close apposition should be modeled in terms of a covert EG

Self Intensification and Focus Interpretation

Standardly (Safir, 2004), the “complex reflexive'' SIG+SELF in Dutch or Scandinavian is treated as a special species of anaphora, stronger than SIG alone. This approach has a number of disadvantages, descriptive and theoretical. Theoretically, it is desirable to treat SELF the same as when it modifies another element. Bergeton (2004) argues that a uniform analysis of SELF as an intensifier is feasible and that the descriptive shortcomings of standard treatments can be overcome if intensification is severed from binding (SIG). However, his account is incomplete in a few regards. Building on a formal theory of focus (Rooth, 1992), I show that the distribution of simple and complex reflexives -- almost complementary in Dutch and Scandinavian, freer in German -- can be more fully explained on the basis of a theory of intensification (Eckardt, 2001) supplemented by Bidirectional OT (Blutner, 1998-06)

A, The, Another: A Game of Same and Different

Indefinites face competition at two levels: Presupposition and content. The antipresupposition hypothesis predicts that they signal the opposite of familiarity, or uniqueness, namely, novelty, or non-uniqueness. At the level of descriptive content, they are pressured from two sides: definites expressing identity and another-phrases expressing difference, and Gricean reasoning predicts that indefinites signal both difference and identity and are infelicitous when definites and another-phrases are felicitous. However, occasionally a space opens between the and another, for a to fill. This is in part due to conditions handicapping the or another semantically, in part to another’s phonological handicap. The division of labor between determiners in the field of difference and sameness is thus the result of an intricate competition. We model this competition in a version of game-theoretic pragmatics

To Finish in German and Mainland Scandinavian: Telicity and Incrementality

Among the words that describe initial or final parts of events, words describing finishing stand out in a number of ways: in a language like English, there is a transitive verb which is singularly flexible regarding the type of event retrievable from the context; in a language like German, there is no verb but there is a verbal particle; in either case, there is a requirement of telicity and there is a requirement of theme incrementality. The present paper documents these facts and offers an analysis of the verbal particle