LSA.129 | The Semantics and Pragmatics of Focus

David Beaver
TR 2:55-4:35
location: 32-123
course web site: http://mv.ezproxy.com.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/Class/129

Focus affects meaning, but how? Consider "David only wears a bow tie when TEACHING," which means something different from "David only wears a BOW TIE when teaching."How does stress on TEACHING or BOW TIE change the truth conditions? More generally, in what way are the effects of focus constrained, how does intonational focus in English relate to focus in other languages, and how does the interpretation of focus relate to that of other information structural categories like topic, given, new and presupposition? This three week course will start with a high level introduction to work on information structure and the relationship between intonation and meaning. Next will be an introduction to Rooth's Alternative Semantics for focus, to be contrasted with Structured Semantics, as proposed by von Stechow, Krifka and Steedman, and pragmatic approaches like those of Roberts, Schwarzschild and Buring. Topics for the final week will be the potential for an integrated account of focus, focus sensitivity and presupposition, and consideration of how we might work towards a typology of expressions which depend for their interpretation on information structure.