Abstract
The sensitivity of focus to context has often been analyzed in terms of focus-based anaphoric relations between sentences and surrounding discourse. The literature, however, has also noted empirical difficulties for the anaphoric approach, and my goal in the present paper is to investigate what happens if we abandon the anaphoric view altogether. Instead of anaphoric felicity conditions, I propose that focus leads to infelicity only indirectly, when the semantic processes that it feeds—in particular, exhaustification and question formation—make an inappropriate contribution to discourse. I outline such an account, in line with Roberts (In Papers in semantics, Vol. 49 of Working papers in linguistics, 91–136, The Ohio State University, 1996) and incorporating recent insights from Büring (In Questions in discourse, Vol. 36 of Current research in the semantics/pragmatics interface, 6–44, Leiden: Brill, 2019) and Fox (In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, 403–434, 2019). This account, which I motivate on conceptual grounds, has no anaphoric conditions on focus placement and has only an economy condition as a potential felicity condition on focus. However, there are cases where the fine control offered by anaphoricity seems needed, either to block deaccenting that would be licensed by a question or to allow local deaccenting that is not warranted by a question. Such cases challenge non-anaphoric accounts such as the present one and appear to support recent anaphoric proposals such as Schwarzschild (In Making worlds accessible. Essays in honor of Angelika Kratzer, 167–192, 2020), Wagner (In The Wiley Blackwell companion to semantics, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), and Goodhue (Journal of Semantics 39: 117–158, 2022). I argue that this potential motivation for anaphoricity is only apparent and that to the extent that anaphoric conditions on focus from the literature are not inert, they are in fact harmful.
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Notes
See Halliday (1967), Chomsky (1969), Bolinger (1972), Dretske (1972), Jackendoff (1972), von Stechow (1981), Selkirk (1984), Rochemont (1986), Rooth (1992), Williams (1997), and Schwarzschild (1999), among many other works. For recent overviews and further developments see Büring (2016) and Wagner (2020).
For early observations regarding contrast and a proposal that incorporates a contrastive requirement on focus see Jackendoff (1972, pp. 242–245).
In the context of Exh, the alternatives are not of the entire assertion (which includes Exh) but rather of the argument of Exh, often referred to as the prejacent. For presentational convenience I talk about the alternatives of an assertion rather than of a prejacent, but this is not meant to imply a position as to whether a given example should be parsed with Exh.
The roots of this assumption go back at least to Jackendoff (1972, p. 246).
As far as I can tell, Roberts’s (1996) original account is fully compatible with the kinds of non-salient questions assumed here. More recently, Büring (2019) provides an explicit argument that non-salient questions can be focal targets.
As usual, a partition of a set S is a set of nonempty, disjoint sets—sometimes referred to as cells—whose union is S.
Büring (2019) proposes a different condition on good questions that I believe aims at capturing a very similar intuition to that expressed by Partition-by-Exhaustification. In terms of technical implementation, Büring’s (2019) condition differs from Partition-by-Exhaustification in disallowing entailment between elements of the question denotation and therefore rules out questions such as {“She saw some of the convertibles”, “She saw all of the convertibles”}. This is problematic in view of arguments in the literature that entailment relations are possible between the elements of question denotations and that it is only in the pragmatics that these entailment relations are eliminated (see Fox 2019 and references therein). Partition-by-Exhaustification is a principled way to avoid this worry while maintaining Büring’s view that questions are how contrast effects in focus should be understood.
For example, suppose that the answer in (10) had ‘most’ instead of ‘all’ and that the target question were {“She brought some of her convertibles”, “She brought most of her convertibles”, “She brought all of her convertibles”}. Obtaining the inference that she brought most but not all of her convertibles would involve exhaustifying the answer (in addition to the exhaustification of the elements of the question in order to satisfy Partition-by-Exhaustification).
This is a non-exhaustive list. Among other things it does not include F-to-Accent, which as mentioned above I have set aside in the present discussion. It also does not include the accommodation of an expectation, which is an ingredient that I argue for in Sect. 5 below. The table also does not mark connections between ingredients (e.g., that both F-to-Exhaustification and F-to-Question rely on the focus alternatives of F-to-Semantics).
In the present section the examples are provided without F-marking so as to avoid prejudging the question of whether the adjective, the noun, or both are F-marked.
A different and much-discussed illustration of apparent local anaphoric deaccenting is Rooth’s (1992) farmer-example:
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i.
An American/American farmer met a Canadian farmer
I do not attempt a full account of (i) here and will only mention that as far as I can see the support it offers to Anaphoricity is considerably weaker than it seems. An anaphoric approach, as outlined by Rooth (1992), could let the subject and the direct object be each other’s anaphoric antecedents (possibly with material internal to each of these arguments serving as antecedents to material in the other). But if that were possible, consider what would happen if ‘American’ and ‘Canadian’ were absent. In that case, the two arguments would be identical, so if mutual antecedence were possible, each argument would be given by virtue of the other, and the sentence should have the accent pattern #“A farmer met a farmer” (cf. “He saw you”, where the given constituents are the two pronouns and nothing else), contrary to fact. Note also that the accent pattern in (i) holds even if we change ‘Canadian’ to ‘American’ so as to make the entire direct object given, as in the following continuation of (i):
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ii.
(The following evening…) an American/American farmer met an American farmer
Since the direct-object DP ‘an American farmer’ is given in (ii), there is no need to F-mark ‘American’ for anaphoric purposes, so by Minimality it should not be F-marked. And yet, F-marking of ‘American’ seems required in this case, just as it was in (i). I conclude that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, farmer-sentences do not furnish an argument for Anaphoricity, at least not as currently formulated in the literature.
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i.
I thank Danny Fox for discussion of this matter.
As before, I set aside the possibility that the assertion is parsed with an exhaustivity operator. Specifically, it is conceivable that the assertion itself has an F-marker on the entire DP and an exhaustivity operator that associates with it, in addition to its question-related narrow F-marker on the adjective.
In particular, Büring (2019) notes that naive accommodation of a question can lead to overgeneration. He uses such cases to support his claim that deaccenting requires a salient antecedent. As mentioned above, this claim is not about F-marking being anaphoric and is therefore compatible in principle with the present account.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Moysh Bar-Lev, Daniel Büring, Danny Fox, Florian Schwarz, and Roger Schwarzschild for their patient and extremely helpful comments on multiple revisions of this paper. I am also very grateful to Itai Bassi, Aya Chayat, Luka Crnič, Milica Denić, Dan Goodhue, Aron Hirsch, Manfred Krifka, Fereshteh Modarresi, Ezer Rasin, Aviv Schoenfeld, Raj Singh, Giorgos Spathas, Yasu Sudo, Tue Trinh, and Michael Wagner, as well as the audiences at MIT, McGill, CNRS, Leipzig University, Tel Aviv University, ZAS, the University of Göttingen, the ENS, and HUJI.
Funding
This work has been supported by a TAU Breakthrough/Schmidt Futures grant and by a Leibniz ZAS Visiting Fellowship.
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Katzir, R. On the roles of anaphoricity and questions in free focus. Nat Lang Semantics 32, 65–92 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09214-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09214-z