@article{SkopeteasFanselow2011,
  author    = {Skopeteas, Stavros and Fanselow, Gisbert},
  title     = {Focus and the exclusion of alternatives on the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference},
  series = {Lingua : international review of general linguistics},
  volume    = {121},
  journal   = {Lingua : international review of general linguistics},
  number    = {11},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {0024-3841},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.lingua.2011.05.005},
  pages     = {1693 -- 1706},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {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.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{ZimmermannOnea2011,
  author    = {Zimmermann, Malte and Onea, Edgar},
  title     = {Focus marking and focus interpretation},
  series = {LINGUA},
  volume    = {121},
  journal   = {LINGUA},
  number    = {11},
  publisher = {ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV},
  address   = {AMSTERDAM},
  issn      = {0024-3841},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.002},
  pages     = {1651 -- 1670},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {The languages of the world exhibit a range of formal phenomena (e.g. accenting, syntactic reordering and morphological marking) that are commonly linked to the information-structural notion of focus. Crucially, there does not seem to be a one-to-one mapping between particular formal features (focus marking devices) and focus, neither from a cross-linguistic perspective, nor within individual languages. This raises the question of what is actually being expressed if we say that a constituent is focused in a particular language, and whether, or to what extent, the same semantic or pragmatic content is formally expressed by focus-marking across languages. This special issue addresses the question of focus and its grammatical realization from a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives. In this introductory article we elaborate on this question by making an explicit proposal about what we take to be the correct way of thinking about the information-structural category of focus and its formal realization. In the first part, we introduce a unified semantico-pragmatic perspective on focus in terms of alternatives and possible worlds. In the second part, we present a cursory cross-linguistic overview of focus marking strategies as found in the languages of the world. Finally, in the third part, we discuss the connection between the notion of focus, different pragmatic uses of focus and different focus marking strategies employed in the grammars of natural languages. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{FanselowLenertova2011,
  author    = {Fanselow, Gisbert and Lenertova, Denisa},
  title     = {Left peripheral focus mismatches between syntax and information structure},
  series = {Natural language \& linguistic theory},
  volume    = {29},
  journal   = {Natural language \& linguistic theory},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {Dordrecht},
  issn      = {0167-806X},
  doi       = {10.1007/s11049-010-9109-x},
  pages     = {169 -- 209},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {In Czech, German, and many other languages, part of the semantic focus of the utterance can be moved to the left periphery of the clause. The main generalization is that only the leftmost accented part of the semantic focus can be moved. We propose that movement to the left periphery is generally triggered by an unspecific edge feature of C (Chomsky 2008) and its restrictions can be attributed to requirements of cyclic linearization, modifying the theory of cyclic linearization developed by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). The crucial assumption is that structural accent is a direct consequence of being linearized at merge, thus it is indirectly relevant for (locality restrictions on) movement. The absence of structural accent correlates with givenness. Given elements may later receive (topic or contrastive) accents, which accounts for fronting in multiple focus/contrastive topic constructions. Without any additional assumptions, the model can account for movement of pragmatically unmarked elements to the left periphery ('formal fronting', Frey 2005). Crucially, the analysis makes no reference at all to concepts of information structure in the syntax, in line with the claim of Chomsky (2008) that UG specifies no direct link between syntax and information structure.},
  language  = {en}
}