Linguistics Department Colloquium:

Manfred Krifka, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

“Focus and Contrastive Topics in Assertions and Questions” (joint work with Beste Kamali, University of Bielefeld & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Abstract:

We provide an account for focus and contrastive topic in assertions and polar and constituent questions, with the aim of providing a general theory for focus and contrastive topic in speech acts. This is couched in the framework of Commitment Spaces (cf. Krifka 2015, SALT), a framework that allows for the modeling of questions as restrictions for the future development of the common ground. In particular, polar (yes-no) questions can be modeled as requests to the addressee to perform the assertion of an answer, and constituent (wh) questions can be modeled as disjunctions of such polar questions. Focus in polar questions signals the presence of alternative polar questions, which amounts to a constituent question, just as focus in assertions signals the presence of alternative assertions, and hence, also a background question. Contrastive topics, on the other hand, signal the presence of a conjoined question. The main empirical domain will be on questions in Turkish, which has a focus-sensitive marker for polar questions.