TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kasimir, Elke
T1  - Question-answer test and givenness
BT  - some question marks
JF  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632
N2  - In order to investigate the empirical properties of focus, it is necessary to diagnose focus (or: "what is focused") in particular linguistic examples. It is often taken for granted that the application of one single diagnostic tool, the so-called question-answer test, which roughly says that whatever a question asks for is focused in the answer, is a fool-proof test for focus. This paper investigates one example class where such uncritical belief in the question-answer test has led to the assumption of rather complex focus projection rules: in these examples, pitch accent placement has been claimed to depend on certain parts of the focused constituents being given or not. It is demonstrated that such focus projection rules are unnecessarily complex and in turn require the assumption of unnecessarily complicated meaning rules, not to speak of the difficulties to give a precise semantic/pragmatic definition of the allegedly involved givenness property. For the sake of the argument, an alternative analysis is put forward which relies solely on alternative sets following Mats Rooth's work, and avoids any recourse to givenness. As it turns out, this alternative analysis is not only simpler but also makes in a critical case the better predictions.
KW  - focus
KW  - givenness
Y1  - 2005
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8698
SN  - 1866-4725
SN  - 1614-4708
IS  - 3
SP  - 1
EP  - 52
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Weskott, Thomas
T1  - Stop bashing givenness!
BT  - A note on Elke Kasimir's "Questions-Answers Test and Givenness"
JF  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632
N2  - Elke Kasimir’s paper (in this volume) argues against employing the notion of Givenness in the explanation of accent assignment. I will claim that the arguments against Givenness put forward by Kasimir are inconclusive because they beg the question of the role of Givenness. It is concluded that, more generally, arguments against Givenness as a diagnostic for information structural partitions should not be accepted offhand, since the notion of Givenness of discourse referents is (a) theoretically simple, (b) readily observable and quantifiable, and (c) bears cognitive significance.
KW  - givenness
Y1  - 2005
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8718
SN  - 1866-4725
SN  - 1614-4708
IS  - 3
SP  - 53
EP  - 62
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Abusch, Dorit
T1  - Focus presuppositions
N2  - This paper reviews notions related to focus and presupposition and addresses the hypothesis that focus triggers an existential presupposition. Presupposition projection behavior in certain examples appears to favor a presuppositional analysis of focus. It is argued that these examples are open to a different analysis using givenness theory. Overall, the analysis favors a weak semantics for focus not including an existential presupposition.
KW  - focus
KW  - presupposition
KW  - alternative semantics presupposition projection
KW  - givenness
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19663
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Selkirk, Elisabeth
T1  - Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “Discourse-New”
N2  - New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given.
KW  - contrastive focus
KW  - givenness
KW  - second occurrence focus
KW  - F-marking
KW  - G-marking
KW  - prosody
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19670
ER  -