WHO:	Craige Roberts , Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University
TOPIC:	Relating attention to intention in Information Structure
ABSTRACT:	Focus is a pragmatic phenomenon that clearly has conventional reflexes in human language. As its name suggests, it has been taken to pertain to what speakers intend addressees to attend to during interpretation. But there are various views about the grammatical status of focus and its role in compositional interpretation. I will argue for a particular view of how focus contributes to utterance meaning: It conventionally triggers a presupposition about the question under discussion which the utterance is intended to address. This hypothesis is realized in the Information Structure framework for pragmatic analysis, and I explore its interaction with other pragmatic factors, including presupposition and the semantics and pragmatics of questions and answers. I also consider briefly the realization of focus cross-linguistically, and review earlier work in which I argued against representing focus with a distinct level of syntactic structure. ›
WHEN:	2/7/2003 3:30:00 PM
WHERE:	Lattimore 513

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