TY  - JOUR
AB  - The claim that focus evokes a set of alternatives is a central issue in several accounts of the effects of focus on interpretation. This article presents two empirical studies that examine whether this property of focus is independent of contextual conditions. The syntactic operation at issue is object-fronting in German, Spanish, Greek, and Hungarian licensed by contexts involving focus on the object constituent. This operation evokes the intuition that the fronted referent excludes some or all relevant alternatives. The presented experiments deal with the question whether this interpretative property obligatorily accompanies the operation at issue or not. The empirical findings show that in German, Spanish, and Greek this intuition depends on properties of the context and is sensitive to the interaction with further discourse factors (in particular, the predictability of the referent). Hungarian displays a different data pattern: our data does not provide evidence that the syntactic operation at issue depends on the context or interacts with further discourse factors. This finding is in line with the view that evoking alternatives is inherent part of constituent-fronting in this language.
DA  - 2011
DO  - 10.1016/j.lingua.2011.05.005
KW  - exclusion of alternatives
KW  - pragmatic inference
KW  - focus
KW  - word order
KW  - pseudocleft
LA  - eng
IS  - 11
M2  - 1693
PY  - 2011
SN  - 0024-3841
SP  - 1693-1706
T2  - Lingua
TI  - Focus and the exclusion of alternatives: On the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-20949648
Y2  - 2024-11-21T21:15:15
ER  -