Without \u27Focus\u27

It is widely accepted that a notion of \u27focus\u27, more or less as conceived of in Jackendoff (1972), 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 \u27focus\u27 from our theory of grammar. We argue that such a move is both economical and fruitful. Research over the years has revealed that the correlations between prosody, \u27focus\u27, and the alleged semantic/pragmatic effects of focus are much less clear and systematic than we may have initially hoped. First we argue that this state of affairs detracts significantly from the utility of our notion of \u27focus\u27, to the point of calling into question the very motivation for including it in the grammar. Then we look at some of the central data, and show how they might be analyzed without recourse to a notion of \u27focus\u27. We concentrate on (i) the effect of pitch accent placement on discourse congruence, and (ii) the choice of \u27associate\u27 for the so-called \u27focus sensitive\u27 adverb only. We argue that our focus-free approach to the data improves empirical coverage, and begins to reveal patterns that have previously been obscured by preconceptions about \u27focus\u27

Quantifier scope in sentence prosody? : A view from production

Logical scope interpretation and sentence prosody exhibit intricate, yet scarcely studied interrelations across a variety of languages and constructions. Despite these observable interrelations, it is not clear whether quantifier scope by itself is able to directly affect prosodic form. Information structure is a key potential confounding factor, as it appears to richly interact both with scope interpretation and with prosodic form. To address this complication, the current study investigates, based on data from Hungarian, whether quantifier scope is expressed prosodically if information structure is kept in check. A production experiment is presented that investigates grammatically scope ambiguous doubly quantified sentences with varied focus structures, while lacking a syntactically marked topic or focus. In contrast to the information structural manipulation, which is manifest in the analysis of the acoustic data, the results reveal no prosodic effect of quantifier scope, nor the interaction of scope with information structure. This finding casts doubt on the notion that logical scope can receive direct prosodic expression, and it indirectly corroborates the restrictive view instead that scope interpretation is encoded in prosody only in cases in which it is a free rider on information structure