@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{DrenhausZimmermannVasishth2011,
  author    = {Drenhaus, Heiner and Zimmermann, Malte and Vasishth, Shravan},
  title     = {Exhaustiveness effects in clefts are not truth-functional},
  series = {Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience},
  volume    = {24},
  journal   = {Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience},
  number    = {3},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Oxford},
  issn      = {0911-6044},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.jneuroling.2010.10.004},
  pages     = {320 -- 337},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {While it is widely acknowledged in the formal semantic literature that both the truth-functional focus particle only and it-clefts convey exhaustiveness, the nature and source of exhaustiveness effects with it-clefts remain contested. We describe a questionnaire study (n = 80) and an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study (n = 16) that investigated the violation of exhaustiveness in German only-foci versus it-clefts. The offline study showed that a violation of exhaustivity with only is less acceptable than the violation with it-clefts, suggesting a difference in the nature of exhaustivity interpretation in the two environments. The ERP-results confirm that this difference can be seen in online processing as well: a violation of exhaustiveness in only-foci elicited a centro-posterior positivity (600-800ms), whereas a violation in it-clefts induced a globally distributed N400 pattern (400-600ms). The positivity can be interpreted as a reanalysis process and more generally as a process of context updating. The N400 effect in it-clefts is interpreted as indexing a cancelation process that is functionally distinct from the only case. The ERP study is, to our knowledge, the first evidence from an online experimental paradigm which shows that the violation of exhaustiveness involves different underlying processes in the two structural environments.},
  language  = {en}
}