Abstract
The analysis of contrastive topics introduced in Büring 1997b and further developed in Büring 2003 relies on distinguishing two types of constituents that introduce alternatives: the sentence focus, which is marked by a FOC feature, and the contrastive topic, which is marked by a CT feature. A non-compositional rule of interpretation that refers to these features is used to derive a topic semantic value, a nested set of sets of propositions. This paper presents evidence for a correlation between the restrictive syntax of nested focus operators and the syntax of contrastive topics, a correlation which is unexpected under this analysis. A compositional analysis is proposed that only makes use of the flatter focus semantic values introduced by focus operators. The analysis aims at integrating insights from the original analysis while at the same time capturing the observed syntactic restrictions. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.8 BibTeX info
Highlights
The analysis of contrastive topics introduced in Büring 1997b and further developed in Büring 2003 relies on distinguishing two types of constituents that introduce alternatives: the sentence focus, which is marked by a FOC feature, and the contrastive topic, which is marked by a CT feature
Which constituent acts as a contrastive topic and which as a sentence focus is taken to be reflected in their intonation: Büring (1997b, 2003), following Jackendoff (1972), characterizes CTs in English as constituents marked by background accents, or ‘B-Accents’
While a compositional analysis deriving a semantics for contrastive topics involving a nested topic semantic value as in in Büring 1997b and Büring 2003 is conceivable, the analysis presented here makes use of the simpler focus semantic value only
Summary
In the analysis of Büring 1997b, contrastive topics are identified by the contexts they occur in, by the implicatures that accompany them, and by their intonational correlates. The analyses in Büring 1997b and Büring 2003 make use of the alternatives theory of sentential focus (Rooth 1992), in which a focused constituent evokes contrasting alternatives that serve to form a set of alternative propositions, the ‘focus semantic value’ In this theory, the focus semantic value has to be congruent with the question under discussion. Contrastive topics are claimed to come with a pragmatic implicature, the ‘disputability implicature’, according to which there must still be an open (or disputable) question in the topic’s semantics value after the assertion has been added to the common ground This non-compositional two-step procedure predicts a free distribution of CT and FOC throughout the sentence. The last part of the paper, explores how the compositional analysis fares in accounting for the well-known effects of contrastive topics on scope, which are closely tied to their pragmatic import
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