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 ....

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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 ....

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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 ....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rooth, Mats (1985), Association with Focus, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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

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