Abstract
This paper takes seriously the idea that a single expression can be simultaneously marked as given and as a focus, and works out some of the consequences of that assumption. I adopt Katz and Selkirk’s (2011) suggestion that givenness is the flip side of newness rather than of focus, and argue that neither Rooth’s semantics of focus nor Schwarzschild’s analysis of givenness is by itself sufficient to account for a range of novel observations. I then show how both analyses can be maintained provided that the syntactic and phonological assumptions about focus/givenness marking and pitch accent assignment are appropriately revised.
I would like to thank Daniel Büring, Makoto Kanazawa, and Michael Wagner for comments on an earlier draft of this paper that have led to improvements. Remaining errors are of course my own.
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Notes
- 1.
See Schwarzschild (1999) for details and below for a somewhat simplified discussion.
- 2.
The ordering of existential type shifting before existential F-closure is unnecessary in the official formalization proposed in Schwarzschild (1999), which makes no explicit use of variables in interpreting F-marked expressions. The simplification used here (and by Schwarzschild himself) does not affect any of the arguments in this paper.
- 3.
I treat talk with here as a single lexical item for simplification.
- 4.
As we will see below, the focus antecedent can follow rather than precede the interpretation of focus, something that is not possible for givenness. This is problematic for an analysis like Rooth’s that reduces givenness to focus.
- 5.
For the QAC example, pronouncing Mary with a pitch accent is possible in the context given, though doing so gives the impression that the answerer is ignoring the first sentence and relating the answer exclusively to the question. Since Mary is not given with respect to the question, accentuation would be expected in this case. This same accenting option is not available for an anaphorically interpreted her in this context, presumably because the anaphora makes it impossible to exclude the first sentence from the relevant discourse context.
- 6.
Below I will analyze connectedness of givenness in terms of Givenness Semantic Values. I thus use this term to refer to the semantic properties of a sentence being interpreted, not to the properties of an appropriate antecedent.
- 7.
There are additional accenting possibilities here and in examples throughout the paper. In the discourse: A: John went dancing. B: Then, HE drank BEER(, though everyone else drank wine), for example, the accent on he in the second sentence is perfectly acceptable. Since it does not contrast with anything that precedes, does not answer a wh-question and is not the associate of a particle like only, it is plausible to analyze it not as a focus but as a topic. Consideration of topics is not possible within the length limitations of the current paper, and so these possibilities are systematically set aside.
- 8.
Schwarzschild does not give rules for how to locate a pitch accent within a focus, so in principle it would be possible under his analysis for the single pitch accent to surface on the subject as in #MARY kissed Bill, or on the verb as in #Mary KISSED Bill. The fact that both of these variants are unacceptable in the context of (17) shows that the problem with (17a) is not merely one of accent location.
- 9.
Parallel to Schwarzschild’s analysis, existential closure (Schwarzschild’s existential F-closure) binds variables substituted for non-G-marked (Schwarzschild’s F-marked) expressions, whereas existential type shifting binds unsaturated argument positions.
- 10.
A more plausible assumption would be that the verb only heads the VP, with the subject generated within the VP and raised to its surface position. Adopting this assumption would require relating Givenness to traces/copies. Though I do not see any inherent problems with doing so, I put off consideration of movement effects for a separate occasion.
- 11.
If focus is interpreted at a higher constituent than where it is marked, then the semantics of focus will in effect still give rise to a kind of givenness effect since the focus antecedent will still have to contain the non-focused parts of the higher constituent. However, this effect differs from that derived from G-marking in that it can in principle be cataphoric and need not result in deaccenting, as in the second sentence in: John came to my party. He only MET MARY there, though. He didn’t meet TOM. To get only to associate intuitively with Mary, Mary has to be analyzed as the focus, with met being new and focus interpreted at the level of the VP. Such an analysis requires an antecedent for the VP that includes meeting, though met in the second sentence does not thereby count as given. Only the third sentence satisfies the antecedent requirement for the focus.
- 12.
While adequate to the task of explaining the examples in this paper, the phonological analysis given here is insufficient for handling other problems of accent location. Addressing the inadequacies, however, is not possible within the length limitations of this paper, so I address them instead in a companion paper, Tancredi (2015), where I give a more comprehensive phonological analysis of accent location.
- 13.
Here and below, ω is the level of prosodic words and φ the level of P-phrases, and xφ is the head of a P-phrase.
- 14.
The accent on Bill in (27b) comes from its not being able to be marked as given when both saw and her are so marked. It need not be analyzed as a focus or as a topic. Formally, absence of either F- or G-marking identifies Bill as discourse new. I take that here to mean that it is new with respect to its givenness antecedent (i.e. the first sentence), not necessarily with respect to the focus antecedent (the second sentence).
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Tancredi, C. (2015). Focus and Givenness Across the Grammar. In: Murata, T., Mineshima, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9067. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48119-6_15
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