Abstract
This paper compares two different theories of focus. On the one hand, alternative semantics, introduced in Rooth 1985, postulates a semantic interpretation of focus according to which the focus of a sentence is interpreted as a set of alternative propositions to the actual one. On the other hand, a representational approach to focus has been developed in SDRT (Asher 1995, Gomez Txurruka 1997) within which the focus/background structure introduces a partition of the representation contributed by the utterance. We first introduce both approaches and then attempt to use them to analyze the focus-discourse interface. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between focus and the discourse relation of Question-Answer Pair.
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