TY  - JOUR
A1  - Skopeteas, Stavros
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
T1  - Focus and the exclusion of alternatives on the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference
JF  - Lingua : international review of general linguistics
N2  - 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.
KW  - Focus
KW  - Word order
KW  - Pseudocleft
KW  - Exclusion of alternatives
KW  - Pragmatic inference
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2011.05.005
SN  - 0024-3841
VL  - 121
IS  - 11
SP  - 1693
EP  - 1706
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -