Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives

by Peter Bosch, Rob van der Sandt

Overview

This book presents a collection of papers on the issue of focus in its broadest sense. While commonly considered as being related to phenomena such as presupposition and anaphora, focusing is much more widely spread, and it is this pervasiveness that the current collection addresses. The work loosely originates from a conference held in 1994 in Schloss Wolfsbrunnen in Germany, although only a small subpart of the proceedings papers presented are included here. The contributed papers have been reworked for the current volume to present a coherent study of the subject.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521168502
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/14/2011
Series:	Studies in Natural Language Processing
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	388
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.87(d)

Table of Contents

List of contributors; Preface Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt; Part I. SURFACE REALISATION OF FOCUS: 1. Contrastive stress, contrariety and focus Kees van Deemter; 2. The processing of information structure Carsten Günther, Claudia Maienborn, and Andrea Schopp; 3. On the limits of focus projection in English Carlos Gussenhoven; 4. Informational autonomy Joachim Jacobs; 5. Subject-prodrop in Yiddish Ellen F. Prince; Part II. SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION OF FOCUS PHENOMENA: 6. What is the alternative? The computation of focus alternatives from lexical and sortal information Peter I. Blok and Kurt Eberle; 7. The treatment of focusing particles in underspecified discourse representations Johan Bos; 8. Topic Daniel Büring; 9. Focus with nominal quantifiers Regine Eckardt; 10. Topic, focus and weak quantifiers Gerhard Jäger; 11. Focus, quantification, and semantics-pragmatics issues Barbara H. Partee; 12. Association with focus or association with presupposition Mats Rooth; Part III. The Function of Focus in Discourse: 13. Discourse and the focus/background distinction Nicholas Asher; 14. Domain restriction Bart Geurts and Rob van de Sandt; 15. On different kinds of focus Jeanette K. Gundel; 16. Stressed and unstressed pronouns: complementary preferences Megumi Kameyama; 17. Discourse linking and discourse subordination Kjell Johan Sæbø; 18. Position and meaning: time adverbials in context Henrietta de Swart; Name index; Subject index.