Rooth, Mats (1985), Association with focus, PhD dissertation, Amherst.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....al. 1991; Tancredi, 1992; Fiengo and May, 1994; Schwarzschild, 1999) among many others) In this paper, we will assume Rooth s (1992) formalization of this idea, which he applies to ellipsis (complete phonological reduction) as well as to deaccenting (a milder form of phonological reduction) (Rooth, 1985) defines the focus value of an expression a as the set of denotations constructed as follows: 4) a. If a is a non focused lexical item, then F(a a . b. If a is a focused lexical item, then F(a D s , where s is the type of a. c. If the node a has the daughters b and g (order ....

Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of MassachusettsAmherst, 1985.

....supply the appropriate ln[ensioual Logic translation to this function only, the equivalent In[ensional Logic ex preions for then results, shown in (32) 32) a. Vz[introduced (j , z, s ) z = b l b. V[introduced (j , b , x = s ] There are problems with this kind of naive approach. See Rooth[9] and volt Stechow[11] for rome criticisms and poible extensions. liere, however, we will simply mume that dake immediately follows its focus element. 5.2,2 1Iow Do They Interact in Semantics Bow much of thc difference in meaning bctween p dake sentences and dake p sentences can we account for in ....

Rooth, M.E.: 1985. Association with Focus. PhD. Dissertation, UMass.

.... information structure are also realized with particular intonational contours [Wilson and Sperber, 1979] One important type of information structure marking is the marking of variable containing propositions, which have been called OPEN PROPOSITIONS [Prince, 1981a; Prince, 1986] or PSKELETONS [Rooth, 1985]. Variables in an open proposition can either be marked by syntactic forms with a gap, such as topicalizations or questions [Prince, 1986] or by intonational contour, in which the location of the variable is marked as FOCAL by prosodic accents of various kinds [Ward and Hirschberg, 1985; Wilson ....

Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, Linguistics Dept, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985.

....derstand (5) as John kicked Bill s dog, and Ibm kicked lbm s dog, for example. The particle too typically is sensitive to h)cused objects. In words, too(qS) a proposition, pro supposes , with ) a proposition derived from 0 with the focused items in 5 replaced by their Mternatives. We follow Rooth [Rooth, 1985] in taking the function of tbcus to be evoking alter native sets. Focus determines in that respect an additional sentantic value .I. Ordinary semantic values . 0 are not affe, ted l)y focus, 7) qbmL kicked his dog] f = the set of pro positions of the Ol l[l aX kicked x s dog (8) TolnLt ....

Mats Rooth. Association with Fo- cus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985.

....focus involves hypothetical reasoning as well (see [10] for an attempt to spell this idea out in a multi modal framework) Accordingly, we find bound readings and Crossover e#ects if the antecedent of a pronoun is focused. The latter observation was initially made in [1] Example (10) is from [19]. 9) Only JOHN hates his mother (10) a. We only expect HIM to be betrayed by the woman he loves b. We only expect him to be betrayed by the woman HE loves The pronoun in sentence (9) can be bound, i.e. the sentence can mean John is the only x such that x loves x s mother. Example (10) ....

Rooth, M.: Association with Focus. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1985)

....iff jA Bj jB Cj ; suitable for sentences such as (11) 11) Many lawyers are criminals, as compared to doctors. But what do we do with sentences that do not spell out a comparison set C A framework eliciting missing arguments from context is the alternative semantics for focus of Rooth [12]. The idea is that an utterance of a sentence specifies an expression in focus (written between brackets [ Delta] F ) that is (somehow) assigned a set A of alternatives, relative to which the truth of the sentence is evaluated. For example, Lappin [10] s interpretations of (11) amount to an ....

....of logical form and model. That is, the demarcation between vagueness and ambiguity varies with different notions of logical form and model which can get quite confusing when it is not clear just what can be put into the logical form. For example, adding the annotation [ Delta] F from Rooth [12] leads to (a) ambiguity because it can be attached to different expressions in a sentence, and to (b) vagueness insofar as there is a choice in the alternative set to interpret a fixed attachment. As for the probabilistic analyses presented above, the Intensionality Hypothesis in x2:3 says that ....

Mats Rooth. Association with focus. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985.

....(7) as John kicked Bill s dog, and Tom kicked Tom s dog, for example. The particle too typically is sensitive to focused objects. In words, too(OE) OE a proposition, presupposes , with a proposition derived from OE with the focused items in OE replaced by their alternatives. We follow Rooth (Rooth, 1985) in taking the function of focus to be evoking alternative sets. Focus determines in that respect an additional semantic value [ f . Ordinary semantic values [ 0 are not affected by focus. Tom f;1 kicked his 1 dog] f = the set of propositions of the form x kicked x s dog ....

Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985.

....attempts to determine a common semantic background to the ellipsis and antecedent clause, while the Parallel Dependencies approach places rather involved constraints on the structural material connecting dependent expressions with antecedents. Background Matching was originally formulated by (Rooth, 1985) as an account of focus, and it thus has clear motivation independent of its application to ellipsis. Parallel Dependencies, on the other hand, appears to be tailor made to account for complex cases of ellipsis, and it is not clear whether it can be given independent, general motivation. ....

Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1985.

....to refer to the background is problematic. The open proposition is, according to Prince, what the speaker assumes to be the knowledge of the hearer. If the speaker utters 2.2a s he assumes that the hearer believes 2.2b to be true. The focus is then the instantiation of the variable x. In Rooth (1985, 1992) a refinement of Jackendoff s analysis suggests that focussing an element x provides a set of alternatives. Focussing shirt, for example, indicates that CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION PACKAGING 22 there is a set of alternatives (p set) of the form give (m,x,h) Prince s open proposition is ....

....with exhaustiveness, identification and CHAPTER 2. INFORMATION PACKAGING 29 [ New] Topic Tail Contrastive Focus Completive Focus [ Prom] Prom] New] Figure 2.1. The Features of Discourse Functions (Choi 1996) contrastiveness and involves the generation of membership sets in the sense of Rooth (1985). Kontrasts, unlike rhemes, can be thematic as well, as in the following example, where the rheme is indicated by the square brackets and the kontrastive theme is in bold font: 2.12) The first 100m she ran [in a record TIME] Vallduv i Vilkuna s kontrast is therefore very similar to Choi s ....

Rooth, Mats, 1985. Association with Focus . University of Massachusetts dissertation. PhD thesis published by GLSA Publications, Amherst, Ma.

.... ( the speaker s knowledge that Ronald, as opposed to other possible candidates the addressee might have in mind, is the right selection for this role. In that sense, Ronald contrasts with a limited number of alternatives in the listener s consciousness. Similar ideas are formalized in Rooth (1985) s alternative semantics and in Prevost (1995) s theory of contrast, which is based on 4 Rooth s work. A major issue is the size and the determination of the set of alternatives. According to some (e.g. Bolinger 1961, Schmerling 1976, Prevost 1995) this problem of restricting the set of ....

....Prevost 1995) this problem of restricting the set of alternatives is a main stumbling block in formalizing the notion of contrast (but see Van Deemter 1999) To illustrate, consider the following example, from Blok (1993) 2) John only swims. Blok notes that the alternative set, as defined by Rooth (1985), would contain all properties that John has. On the basis of similar examples, Schmerling (1976) concludes that contrast is merely a matter of degree, while Bolinger (1961) reasoning along similar lines, concludes that the size of the set of alternatives is inversely proportional to the ....

Rooth, M., 1985. Association with Focus. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

....as the when clause in (13a) is actually more complicated than would appear from our discussion. In many cases, such adverbs can go into either the restrictor or the nuclear scope. The mechanism which determines their placement might reduce to focus along the lines of Section 2.3. 2, as suggested in Rooth (1985) (but see Johnston 1994) However, the precise analysis is not crucial for the issues discussed in this paper. 6 We use the term adverbial quantifiers to refer to quantificational elements outside the DP, what Barbara Partee calls A quantification (as apposed to D quantification) For a ....

....For a discussion of the way in which focal stress determines semantic focus, see Selkirk (1995) ILLUSIVE SCOPE OF UNIVERSAL QUANTIFIERS 7 How do we account for these focus effects This question has been a topic of much debate. For presentational purposes, we can adopt the system developed in Rooth (1985). In this system, every clause has a focus value, which includes all alternative assertions to the one actually made by the clause: 16) For every clause C, the focus value F(C) of C is the set of the semantic values of the alternatives to C, where alternatives to C are derived by replacing the ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, Mats. 1985. Association with Focus. Amherst: University of Massachusetts dissertation.

.... 1988, Davis and Hirschberg, 1988, Hirschberg, 1990, Zacharski et al. 1993] Earlier incarnations of the present theory were demonstrated by a program that produced spoken responses to database queries, altering the intonation patterns based on the knowledge base, an alternative set semantics [Rooth, 1985] , and a simple discourse model that related the information structure and semantics of question answer pairs. The present implementation, which produces spoken descriptions of objects in a limited domain, expands upon the previous work by including a richer variety of intonational tunes, and a ....

Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985.

....way that the information conveyed by a statement is packaged in order to facilitate the addition of information to the hearer s knowledge store (Vallduv i 1990) Information articulation at a statement level is concerned with the topic comment structure and the focus background structure. Since Rooth (1985), the effect of focus to the interpretation of a statement, in particular its truth conditional effect has been much discussed in the literature. While the topic comment structure has been the main concern of discourse analyses or syntactic analyses from the point of view of functional grammar, ....

....been in the relationship between Mel and the supporters , but means that in every relevant situation or all the time, some problem or other has existed between Mel and the supporters . The correlation between information articulation and adverbial quantification has been noted in the literature. Rooth (1985, 1995) shows focus can affect the interpretation of sentences with adverbs of quantification. The sentences in (34)a and (34)b have different truth conditions. 34) a. Mary usually took JohnF to the movies. When Mary took someone to the movies, she usually took John. b. MaryF usually took ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, Mats E. 1985. Association with Focus. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

....here because unification forces existence. If we declare some contextual content, this content will be introduced in the context by the mechanism of unification, whereas we want it to be retrieved from the context. There are two mains options to augment unification. One is to use 4 See (Rooth 1985,1992) Krifka 1992) Bonomi Casalegno 1993) Nlke 1983) for some descriptive and formal properties of such adverbs. 5 Any candidate definition for this predicate should incorporate the observation that parallelism and alternativeness extend beyond simple argument structure correspondence. ....

Rooth, M. (1985). Association with Focus, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

....as in the bolded phrase above where other licenses the inference that better and faster are comparatives. Keywords: alternative set semantics, inference, presupposition 1 Introduction An alternative set is a set of propositions which di er with respect to how one or more arguments are lled [11, 17, 18]. For example, the alternative set flike(mary; jen) like(mary; bob) g, summarized as X:like(mary; X) represents the entities that Mary likes. Rooth uses the concept of alternative sets to describe the semantics of the focus particles even and only. Only involves the restriction of an ....

Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985.

....A LETTER TO HER MOTHER, but she did not SEND A PRESENT TO HER FATHER. 16 This focus projection is comparable to the focus association phenomenon with such adverbs as only and even in English. i) a. I only ate [CABBAGE]F . b. I only [ate CABBAGE]F . See Jackendoff (1972) Selkirk (1984) Rooth (1985), and Diesing (1992) for discussions of this phenomenon. CHAPTER 2. PHRASE STRUCTURE AND CONFIGURATIONALITY 55 However, it is hard to get a reading like (53) for (51c) 53) MARY WROTE A LETTER TO HER MOTHER, but JOHN did not SEND A PRESENT TO HER FATHER. As such, the focus projection with ....

.... books is focused and contrasted with Zigaretten cigarettes , and here again Bucher books does not have to be specific, partitive, or generic. Moltmann (1990:15) further notes that adverbs such as nur only or sogar even , which have been noted as associated with focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1985, 1992) allow indefinite NPs to scramble and also to be interpreted nonspecifically. This is illustrated in (17) 17) a. weil Hans NUR ein BUCH dem Mann gegeben hat because Hans only a book(Acc) the man(Dat) given has because Hans only gave a book to the man b. weil Hans SOGAR ein BUCH dem ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, Mats E. 1985. Association with Focus. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

....same logical scope for PRT, provided XP is a semantic functor. As we will see in later sections, predicted ambiguities arise whenever XP is neither a semantic functor nor a syntactic argument. Appendix The framework we adopt for our analysis is the theory of alternative semantics as developed in Rooth 1985 and 1992. Let us briefly present the basic idea of this theory: focus on a constituent Y is indicated via a focus feature F. Phonetically, this feature is realized as a pitch accent on the main stress bearing syllable of Y. Semantically, each node X receives two different translations, its ....

....in the domain of X. Particles like only are focus sensitive quantificational elements which can be interpreted in situ. Adapting Roothian semantics, we let only take an element of an arbitrary type as its argument, as long as this type ends in t . A general rule is sketched in (22) unlike Rooth 1985 we interpret directly without intermediate translation procedure intensional logic; we will give predicate calculus paraphrases below for perspicuity, though) 22) If A is of type #,t , only A is of type #,t , too, and only A is the set of all B of type # such that B has the property A (i.e. ....

Rooth, Mats (1985) Association with Focus. PhD dissertation. University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

....semantic formalisms, the choice of the NLG tool may a#ect what semantic information is available for the prosody generation component. The semantic information we mentioned before is mostly surface semantics. We are also interested in other deep semantic information, such as semantic focus [ Rooth, 1985; 1992 ] Semantic focus is used to describe prosodic prominence serving pragmatic and semantic functions. Therefore, semantic focus has both phonetic as well as semantic and pragmatic interpretation. Modeling semantic focus has not been very successful. Other semantic constraints of this kind ....

Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985.

....the following two points. First, phonological prominence is explicitly associated with contrastive semantics. Second, the contrastive semantics of wa is analyzed as a form of contrast stronger than the contrast without wa. The analysis is formulated within the framework of alternative semantics of Rooth (1985). Area of study: Semantics, Pragmatics 3 1. Introduction. The Japanese ADVERBIAL PARTICLE wa is argued to have topic (or thematic) and contrastive functions (e.g. Kuno, 1972) as in the examples shown below. In these and later examples, SMALL CAPITALS are used to indicate PHONOLOGICAL PROMINENCE ....

....for this asymmetry. This paper begins with the idea that a phonological prominence is associated with the basic contrastive meaning, and analyzes that wa interacts with such a contrast, resulting in a stronger contrast. The idea can be formulated within the framework of ALTERNATIVE SEMANTICS (Rooth, 1985). This develops into a precise and accurate analysis of contrastive wa, leading to a solution to the two problems introduced above. Since Japanese wa is closely related to the Korean counterpart n(un) we will also cite analyses for Korean. This paper is organized as follows: The next section ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, Mats E. 1985. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

....The information structure (IS) of an utterance concerns partition of the semantic information between discourse functions that have variously been termed theme (or topic) rheme (or comment) focus, etc. Vallduv i, 1990) Under suitable formal definitions related to alternative semantics (Rooth, 1985) or structured meanings (Cresswell, 1985) information structural analyses have been successfully applied to generation of contextually appropriate utterances: Prevost, 1995) for English prosody and (Hoffman, 1995) for Turkish word order. In Japanese, particles wa and ga have close association ....

Rooth, Mats E. 1985. Association with Focus. Ph.D. thesis, UMass.

....work. Following work by von Stechow (1981, 1991) Krifka 1991 92 suggests that focus ground provides a structured meaning ( ff; fi ) which in later work (Krifka 1992, 1993) he equates to the restrictor, nucleus partition of quantification structures that Partee 1991 defends. In contrast, for Rooth 1985, 1992, focus on an element x provides a set of alternatives for x (alt(x) which determines the domain of quantification for the operator that associates with x. Given this view of focusground, it is imperative that focus sensitive operators undergo association with focus, since they crucially ....

....nucleus is realized with nuclear stress. The claim that nuclei must be spelled out by a pitch accent is quite standard in the semantic literature on association with focus, as illustrated by the following two quotes: Thus a pitch accent is the phonological interpretation of the focus feature. (Rooth 1985:19) In phonology, the focus feature is spelled out by sentence accent. Krifka 1991:17) 3 It is unclear whether the validity of (6c) extends to languages like Navajo (Schauber 1978) which realize focus ground morphologically. Japanese, which makes at least partial use of morphology to ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, Mats: 1985, Association with focus , unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts.

....(in T 8 ) goes a long way towards an explanation of the information structure of the second clause in the text ( Bob was looking] T [fresh as a daisy] F ) Topic and focus are frequently analysed in terms of a question answer structure. For instance, in the alternative semantics of Rooth (see e.g. Rooth, 1985; 1995) a sentence with topic focus structure is to be interpreted relative to a set of propositions which constitute the possible answers to a question: the focussed element of the sentence is the one which speci es which of these alternatives is found to obtain. As well as providing the ....

Rooth, M. (1985). Association with Focus . Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

....nasty my SON is very good, it s only the daughter who s nasty The focus on chele son now picks out and contrasts chele as opposed to other objects that may belong to the narrow set al..ready created by amar. The other members of the MY set each denote alternative sets in the sense of Rooth (1985). However, at the moment of calculating the focus, only one of the alternative sets is picked out by the denotation of the NP. This state of affairs is represented as follows: 23) Stage I Stage II The diagram in (23) seems to imply that both Poss and Focus act as restrictive modifiers on a ....

Rooth, Mats. 1985. Association with Focus. Amherst: University of Massachusetts diss.

....the interaction between the lexical semantics of these words and general pragmatic phenomena relevant for interpreting the sentences whichinvolve them. 1 1.1. Only and prepositions It has often been observed that only can in general precede prepositions, but cannot follow them. For instance, Rooth (1985:p.93) notes: If [only John] and [even John] are NPs, we expect them to have the distribution of NPs. But even and only are marginal or impossible in PP: 14) a. At the party, John spoke to only Mary. b. The children play in only the common. c. The library is closed on only Sunday. d. ....

....or impossible in PP: 14) a. At the party, John spoke to only Mary. b. The children play in only the common. c. The library is closed on only Sunday. d. They joked about even the flood. There are several exceptions to this generalization. Immediately after the statement quoted above, Rooth (1985:p.94) makes the following remark. 2 Taglicht (1984) points out that what he calls scalar occurrences of only are exceptions to the restriction on only even in PP: 1 Since our main interest is in semantics and pragmatics, we will givevery limited exposition of the syntactic behavior of ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, M.E. (1985) Association with Focus, PhD. Dissertation, Universityof Massachusetts, Amherst.

.... out by von Stechow (1996) the facts presented there do not argue for movement of the whole island in the general case, only in the cases in which a pronoun needs to be bound by something which does not c command it on the surface (an criticism which itself is based on a parallel criticism made by Rooth 1985 against Weak Crossover evidence for movement based accounts of focus interpretation) 19 As alluded to in footnote 1, Kishimoto (1998) takes a view much closer to that proposed here, although he does not explicitly argue against his proposal from 1992. His more recent work proposes that d is ....

Rooth, Mats (1985). Association with focus. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

.... out by von Stechow (1996) the facts presented there do not argue for movement of the whole island in the general case, only in the cases in which a pronoun needs to be bound by something which does not c command it on the surface (a criticism which itself is based on a parallel criticism made by Rooth 1985 against Weak Crossover evidence for movement based accounts of focus interpretation) 27 As mentioned in footnote 1, Kishimoto (1998) takes a view much closer to that proposed here, although he does not explicitly argue against his previous proposal. He proposes that d is a clitic which moves ....

Rooth, Mats (1985). Association with focus. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

....Logic translation to this function only, the equivalentIntensional Logic expressions for them results, as shown in (32) 32) a. 8x[introduced 0 (j 0 ;x;s 0 ) x = b 0 ] b. 8x[introduced 0 (j 0 ;b 0 ;x) x = s 0 ] There are problems with this kind of naive approach. See Rooth[9] and von Stechow[11] for some criticisms and possible extensions. Here, however, we will simply assume that dake immediately follows its focus element. 5.2.2 How Do They Interact in Semantics How much of the difference in meaning between p dake sentences and dake p sentences can we account for ....

Rooth, M.E.: 1985. Association with Focus. PhD. Dissertation, UMass.

.... out by von Stechow (1996) the facts presented there do not argue for movement of the whole island in the general case, only in the cases in which a pronoun needs to be bound by something which does not c command it on the surface (a criticism which itself is based on a parallel criticism made by Rooth 1985 against Weak Crossover evidence for movement based accounts of focus interpretation) 16 Kishimoto (1998) takes a view much closer to that proposed here, although he does not explicitly argue against his previous proposal. He proposes that d is a clitic which moves to fix the scope of ....

Rooth, Mats (1985). Association with focus. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

....question is derived by replacing the focus by an appropriate wh word (ignoring yes no questions) Formally, the question is the set of propositions we get by replacing the meaning of the Focus in the sentence meaning with (contextually salient and plausible) type identical alternatives. Following Rooth 1985 we call this set of propositions the Focus Value of sentence S, S f . Question answer matching then is nothing more than the requirement that S f equal the D Topic. 6) Discourse Appropriateness Condition (preliminary) For a question answer pair Q A to be wellformed, it must hold that Q ....

....f # V o ) ALL(# N f # V o ) N o ) Cases of SQ FN such as (46c) now require a modification of truth conditions. 43) and (45) jointly cause (46c) to be interpreted as in (46d) However, one can plausibly argue that only in (46b) and (46c) is not a determiner, but an NP modifier (cf. Rooth 1985). At least in cases like (47) which show the same truth conditional effects as (46c) this is clearly the right analysis. 47) Only the some few two SWISS linguists drink excessively. Analyzing only SWISS linguists as [ NP only [ NP SWISS linguists] we can derive the correct interpretation ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, M. (1985) Association with Focus. PhD dissertation. University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

....Accented believe is used to limit the speaker s accountability for the embedded proposition. Contrast based semantic accounts fail to capture the natural interpretation because they propose an interpretation in which believe is selected from among some contextually relevant set of alternatives [4] [5] However it is not obvious what the alternatives would be in this case and intuitively contrast does not seem to be part of the natural interpretation. Information based pragmatic accounts also fail because they would predict that the accented item is the most informative in the utterance ....

M. Rooth. 1985. Association with Focus. Ph.D thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

....insinuates one meaning into the discourse by mentioning another closely related one. The process of insinuation is spelled out in terms of generalized entailment. 1. Discourse Phenomena Affecting Intonation Halliday(1967) took intonational prominence to be an indication that the material 2 Rooth(1985,1992) is cited for details on how these alternatives are used in the semantics of various constructions. In the theory of Rooth(1992) focus constitutes part of a complex anaphor. This anaphor requires the presence of alternatives in the discourse, it doesn t introduce them. This is much closer ....

....though it is meaning based, more along the lines of Rochemont(1986) for example. The Attentiveness Maxim does roughly the same job as the minimality clause in the Contrast Constraint of Schwarzschild(1994) Matching functions are a kind of secondary interpretation and as such resemble Rooth(1985) s focus interpretation. Two important differences between background matching and focus interpretation are worth noting, however. First, when a matching function assigns a meaning, it must be something already present in the discourse, whereas a focus interpretation assigns a set of meanings most ....

Rooth, M. (1985) Association with Focus, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Distributed by GLSA, Amherst.

....to c but to no other salient alternatives. Given a sufficiently rich logical language, the meaning of a natural language sentence can be represented as a description in this sense, by assuming sentences refer to entities in a DISCOURSE MODEL, cf. alternative semantics (Karttunen and Peters, 1979; Rooth, 1985). Pragmatic analyses of referring expressions model speakers as PLANNING those expressions to achieve several different kinds of intentions (Donellan, 1966; Appelt, 1985; Kronfeld, 1986) Given a set of entities to describe and a set of intentions to achieve in describing them, a plan is ....

M. Rooth. 1985. Association with focus. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts.

....object of until: ii. Joe didn t sleep until NOON; he slept until THREE. I believe that treating negation as a generalized complementation operator (as Keenan and Faltz [1985] do) may also explain these cases; however, given that focus phenomena are still poorly understood (see, however, Rooth [1985], Krifka [1991] and Partee [1991] I won t discuss this issue further. 6 Moens and Steedman refer to activities as processes. ....

Rooth, Mats (1985). Association with Focus. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

....as the intermediary, Chapter 4 describes the algorithms that process discourse information and build the semantic and information structural representations. The algorithms handle the issue of referential contrastive stress by appealing to sets of alternatives inspired by the discourse model (cf. Rooth 1985), and tracking the succession of themes and rhemes throughout the discourse. In Chapter 5, the structural congruence between intonation and information structure, which is clearly evident in Example 1.1, forms the basis for the selection of CCG as the syntactic framework for the present research. ....

....by Pierrehumbert (1980) Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) Selkirk (1984) Bolinger (1972) Schmerling (1976) Gussenhoven (1983a) Ladd (1980) Terken (1984) Beckman (1986) Bird (1991) Cruttendon (1986) and Fuchs (1984) among others. Focus has also been examined in formal semantics by Rooth (1985,1992) Krifka (1992) and Jacobs (1991) While much of the formal semantics work concentrates on focusing particles such as even and only, Rooth s (1985) alternative set semantics, which associates discourse entities with groups of likely alternative entities from the discourse model, forms ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, M. (1985). Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

....the desired form, the constraint introduced by focus interpretation is satisfied. Obviously, getting to this constraint requires access to focus sensitive semantic material from the phrase where focus is interpreted. The semantics for is stated in terms of the alternative semantics for focus ([Roo85], vS89] Kra91] which makes available, in addition to the usual proposition as the semantics for [ S [ NP she] F beats me d often] an additional focus semantic value. In this case, the focus semantic value is the set of propositions of the form y beats me d often . In [Roo92] I applied a ....

....to obtain a focus determined constraint dictating a contrasting proposition of the form x is less than or equal to x , rather than one of the form x is less than or equal to 7 , the first occurrence of [ NP 7] must be scoped. This is a result of the recursive semantics for focus proposed in [Roo85]. Note that the reading just discussed is descriptively a sloppy interpretation of the prosodic reduction, since reference in the position of the object of to varies. So, prosodic reduction is subject to sloppy interpretations, just like ellipsis. A difference arises when we substitute a proper ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, GLSA, Dept. of Linguistics, South College, UMASS, Amherst MA 01003, 1985.

....as a set of alternatives from which the ordinary semantic value is drawn, or a set of propositions which potentially contrast with the ordinary semantic value. As I define things, the ordinary semantic value is always an element of the focus semantic value. 1 The semantic theory is introduced in (Rooth, 1985); von Stechow, 1989) is the source of the term alternative semantics , which is pronounced with compound stress. There are several proposals on how to derive [ f . Rooth, 1985) gives a recursive definition using the notion of the image of a semantic function operating on a subset of its ....

....semantic value is always an element of the focus semantic value. 1 The semantic theory is introduced in (Rooth, 1985) von Stechow, 1989) is the source of the term alternative semantics , which is pronounced with compound stress. There are several proposals on how to derive [ f . (Rooth, 1985) gives a recursive definition using the notion of the image of a semantic function operating on a subset of its domain, while (Kratzer, 1991) introduces a distinguished set of focus variables in terms of which substitution instances are defined. Something which is relevant here is that the ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Rooth, M. (1985). Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, GLSA, Dept. of Linguistics, South College, UMASS, Amherst MA 01003.

No context found.

Rooth, Mats (1985), Association with focus, PhD dissertation, Amherst.

No context found.

Rooth, M. (1985). Association with Focus. Ph.D. Dissertation University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

No context found.

Rooth, Mats (1985), Association with Focus, Ph.D. thesis, University of Amherst, Massachusetts.

No context found.

Rooth (1985), Association with focus, PhD dissertation, Amherst.

No context found.

Rooth, M. (1985), Association with Focus, Ph.D. thesis, University of Amherst, Massachusetts.

No context found.

Rooth (1985), Association with focus, PhD dissertation, Amherst.

No context found.

Mats Rooth. 1985. Association with Focus. Ph.D.

No context found.

Rooth, Mats (1985), Association with Focus, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

No context found.

Mats Rooth. 1985. Association with Focus. Ph.D. Dissertation.

No context found.

References / 45 Rooth, M. 1985. Association with Focus. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

No context found.

Mats E. Rooth. 1985. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

No context found.

Rooth, M. (1985). Association with Focus. Ph.D. Dissertation University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

No context found.

Rooth, Mats: 1985 Association with Focus, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Distributed by GLSA, Amherst.

No context found.

Mats Rooth. 1985. Association with Focus. Ph.D. thesis, Linguistics Dept, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

First 50 documents  Next 50

Online articles have much greater impact   More about CiteSeer.IST   Add search form to your site   Submit documents   Feedback  

CiteSeer.IST - Copyright Penn State and NEC