Sense And Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning

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E-Book Overview

Sense and Sensitivity advances a novel research proposal in the nascent field of formal pragmatics, exploring in detail the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language discourse. The authors develop a new account of focus sensitivity, and show that what has hitherto been regarded as a uniform phenomenon in fact results from three different mechanisms. The book
  • Makes a major contribution to ongoing research in the area of focus sensitivity – a field exploring interactions between sound and meaning, specifically the dependency some words have on the effects of focus, such as ''she only LIKES me'' (i.e. nothing deeper) compared to ''she only likes ME'' (i.e. nobody else)
  • Discusses the features of the QFC theory (Quasi association, Free association, and Conventional association), a new account of focus implying a tripartite typology of focus-sensitive expressions
  • Presents novel cross-linguistic data on focus and focus sensitivity that will be relevant across a range of linguistic sub-fields: semantics and pragmatics, syntax, and intonational phonology
  • Concludes with a case study of exclusives (like “only”), arguing that the entire existing literature has missed crucial generalizations, and for the first time explaining the focus sensitivity of these expressions in terms of their meaning and discourse function

E-Book Content

“beaver” — 2008/5/19 — 16:57 — page i — #1 Sense and Sensitivity Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning. David I . Beaver and Brady Z. Clark © 2008 David I. Beaver and Brady Z. Clark. ISBN: 978-1-405-11263-5 “beaver” — 2008/5/19 — 16:57 — page ii — #2 Explorations in Semantics Series Editor: Susan Rothstein Editorial Board Ruth Kempson, King’s College, London Angelika Kratzer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University; Zentrum f¨ ur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin Fred Landman, Tel Aviv University Luigi Rizzi, University of Siena Robert Stalnaker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology This exciting series features important new research by leading scholars in the field of semantics. Each volume focuses on a topic or topics central to the field, including dynamic semantics, aspect, focus, anaphora, and type-shifting, and offers a pedagogical component designed to introduce the topics addressed and situate the new research in the context of the field and previous research. The presentational style emphasizes student accessibility without compromising the sophistication of the research involved. Explorations in Semantics is an excellent series for students and researchers in the field, as well as scholars in adjacent areas such as syntax, philosophy of language, and computational linguistics. 1 Compositionality in Formal Semantics: Selected Papers of Barbara H. Partee Barbara H. Partee 2 Structuring Events: A Study in the Semantics of Lexical Aspect Susan Rothstein 3 Indefinites and the Type of Sets Fred Landman 4 The Proper Treatment of Events Michiel van Lambalgen and Fritz Hamm 5 Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning David I. Beaver and Brady L. Clark “beaver” — 2008/5/19 — 16:57 — page iii — #3 Sense and Sensitivity How Focus Determines Meaning David I. Beaver and Brady Z. Clark A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication “beaver” — 2008/5/19 — 16:57 — page iv — #4 This edition first published 2008 c 2008 David I. Beaver and Brady Z. Clark Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West