Rooth, Mats (1992), `A theory of focus interpretation', Natural Language Semantics, 1: 75-116.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....F # E# where E is the domain of individuals) with at least two members the denotation of HE (##HE## ) and at least one more contrasting individual [Kame99, p. 308] This constraint is due to the semantic focus interpretation of the (narrow focus) pitch accent itself, as described by Rooth [Rooth92] Kameyama implicitly assumes that the type of intonational prominence on a stressed pronoun is the same as a narrow focus, or contrastive , pitch accent. This hypothesis is consistent with the characterization of accented pronouns in the previous literature as contrastively stressed ....

.... role, such an account predicts the incorrect interpretation of an accented (or unaccented) pronoun in object position in parallel structures such as John The function and distribution of narrow focus pitch accents has been discussed extensively in the intonation literature: see Rooth [Rooth92] Bolinger (e.g. Bol61] Ladd (e.g. Ladd80] among many many others. Note however that in other recent studies, there is some debate about what the exact nature of this intonational prominence is. Cahn suggests that the pitch accent must be L H [Cahn, Cahn95] while Nakatani claims that ....

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Mats Rooth. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1(1):75--116, 1992.

....strongly constrained by discourse structure. Our point of departure is the following two background claims: Matching Condition on Ellipsis Resolution: Ellipsis resolution requires that a matching relation holds between a containing clause E and some antecedent clause A. Dalrymple et al. 1991; Rooth, 1992) Discourse Structure: Clauses in a discourse are structured according to discourse relations; ellipsis resolution (and other anaphora resolution) occurs as a side effect of establishing discourse relations. Hobbs, 1979; Asher, 1993; Prust et al. 1994; Kehler, 2000; Asher et al. 2001; Webber ....

....approaches, we show that it is not quite as restrictive as one might think, since the matching may often be performed at different levels. Furthermore, we examine cases in which the matching process must be sensitive to implicit material. 2 Background 2. 1 Ellipsis Resolution as Matching (Rooth, 1992) argues that ellipsis involves a matching relation that is not restricted to the minimal clause containing the ellipsis. See also (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 ....

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Mats Rooth. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75--116, 1992.

....apply. Note that the Matching Condition above states that A is or contextually implies a member of F(E) The following examples illustrates this: As a special case, ellipsis across question and answer is governed by the general matching condition independent of ellipsis that (Rooth, 1992b) proposes for Question Answer pairs. This condition is given in 7 and illustrated below: 7) Matching Condition for Q A pairs: Given a question answer sequence Q A, must be a subset of F(A) 8) Q: Which student called ] S1 A: JOHN (called) s2 . x called: x is a student ....

Mats Rooth. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75--116, 1992.

....other than Bertha who Clyde married, he did not inherit anything. 2b 0 ) If what Clyde did with Bertha was something other than marrying her, he did not inherit anything. We argue that the di erences in interpretation demonstrated above can be captured formally in terms of alternative sets [13, 14], the alternative set semantics of IS [18] and IS sensitive context updating [6, 7, 18] This supercedes the analysis we presented in [8] ....

Mats Rooth. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75-116, 1992.

....other than Bertha who Clyde married, he did not inherit anything. 2b 0 ) If what Clyde did with Bertha was something other than marrying her, he did not inherit anything. We argue that the di erences in interpretation demonstrated above can be captured formally in terms of alternative sets [13, 14], the alternative set semantics of IS [18] and IS sensitive context updating [6, 7, 18] This supercedes the analysis we presented in [8] ....

Mats Rooth. A Theory of Focus Interpretation. Ph.d. thesis, Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1985.

.... distribution of sloppy and strict readings in the so called Many Clause Puzzle (Dahl, 1974; Fiengo and May, 1994) We assume that a matching relation must hold between a clause E which contains the ellipsis occurrence, and some antecedent clause A (Dalrymple et al. 1991; Fiengo and May, 1994; Rooth, 1992) The MATCH relation, as de ned in Rooth (92) constructs a Background set of propositions by replacing focused elements in E with other elements of the same type; then, it requires for A to be or imply a proposition in that Background set. We also assume, following an extensive literature on ....

Mats Rooth. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75-116, 1992.

....as a de nite description, so (3) should be interpreted the same way as (4) 4) The patrolman 1 who arrested a burglar 2 interrogated the burglar he 1 arrested. Detective Wilson 3 did too. interrogated the burglar he 3 arrested For VP resolution, we follow (Tomioka, 1999) and many other authors (Rooth, 1992; Hardt, 1992; Fiengo and May, 1994) in assuming that the antecedent VP is copied to the ellipsis site, permitting free change of indices, subject to general constraints such as focus background, general plausibility, and the like. The problem for the Etype approach is that the pronoun he 1 ....

Mats Rooth. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75-116, 1992.

.... has a Focus semantic value, also called Focus set of alternatives (##:## F ) The Focus semantic value of a sentence is the set of alternative propo WCCFL 20 sitions construed by replacing the denotation of the focused expression with an object of the same semantic type ( Rooth, 1985) (Rooth, 1992)) For example, the ordinary semantic value of (18) is the single proposition in (19) whereas its Focus semantic value is a set of propositions as in (20) 1 (18) John visited SUE for Christmas. 19) Semantic value: ##John visited SUE for Christmas## = #w:John visited Sue for Christmas inw ....

.... in w : x 2 D e g = f that John visited Sue for Christmas , that John visited Mary for Christmas , that John visited Tonia for Christmas g For Focus stress to be felicitous, the adequate Focus set of alternatives has to be salient in the discourse (or else it is accommodated) Following Rooth (1985, 1992), this Focus may have two main functions, depending on how the uttered sentence is understood against the salient set of alternatives: exhaustive Focus (subset condition) and contrastive Focus (membership condition) We have exhaustive Focus when the function of the phonological stress is to ....

Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75--116.

....drei nicht aufgefallen. As for spelling mistakes there were even three that he didn t recognize. How this contrastive usage could be explained is unanswered. Note that this usage is by no means exceptional according to the recent semantic theory of topic in Bring 1995, which builds on top of Rooth s (1992) alternative semantics, all usages of an s topic (sentence topic) can be reduced to the contrastive case: the s topic picks out one element of a contextually constrained set of alternative questions. Apparently, the assumption that both NPs involved in SNP are necessarily of type property is too ....

....a red one for him. ii) Jones didn t own a Porsche. Ann sold it for a lot of money. In Discourse Representation Theory (DRT; Kamp Reyle 1993) this could be captured by assuming that property referents are not introduced in the local universe, but at some higher level, like proper names (cf. Rooth 1992:87, fn. 8) 21. However, where no adjective appears in the elliptical NP, one is not required: i) I saw some two many none. 19 inchen rabbits from the first sentence of (37) supplies additional copies of its meaning constructor under the of course connective: 39) Kaninchen: X. s ....

ROOTH, MATS. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1: 75-116.

....about the partition of the sentence into theme or rheme and about whether or not the theme is contrastive. In (9) on the other hand, the clause medial position of however correlates with stress on John and appears to convey that John and Mary are elements of an alternative set (in the sense of (Rooth, 1992)) that is, that John serves as a contrastive theme. This comes out more strongly in Examples (10) and (11) 10) is infelicitous because medial however flags the subject as contrastive theme, but this subject is a coreferential (unstressed) pronoun and cannot serve as a contrastive theme. ....

Rooth, Mats (1992). A Theory of Focus Interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1, pp. 75--116.

....the interpretation of a given intonational pattern. Interestingly, recent years have seen an increasing awareness of the influence of context on meaning, and this has prompted various linguists to propose formal, context dependent interpretations associated with contrastive accents (e.g. Rooth 1992, Hendriks and Dekker 1995, van Deemter 1999, 18 Piwek 1998) In this paper, a different, more fundamental question was addressed, namely whether a separately identifiable contrastive intonation exists in the first place. Even though no acoustic evidence for a separate contrastive accent was ....

....presuppositions behave just like anaphors looking for an antecedent. The idea that contrastiveness triggers anaphoric presuppositions can also be found in Piwek (1998) where a synthesis is offered of contrastive and newness accents in that both are assumed to trigger alternative assertions (cf. Rooth 1992). While Piwek s analysis of contrastive accents is certainly interesting, we disagree with the claim that both kinds of accents trigger presuppositions about alternatives. In our opinion this only holds for contrastive accents. This is confirmed by results from a pilot test which indicated that ....

Rooth, M., 1992. A theory of focus interpretation, Natural Language Semantics 1, 75-116.

....the interpretation of a given intonational pattern. 7 Interestingly, recent years have seen an increasing awareness of the influence of context on meaning, and this has prompted various semanticists to propose formal, context dependent interpretations associated with contrastive accents (e.g. Rooth 1992, Hendriks and Dekker 1995, van Deemter 1999, Piwek 1998) Here, a different, more fundamental question was addressed, namely whether a separately identifiable contrastive intonation exists in the first place. Even though no acoustic evidence for a separate contrastive accent was found, the data ....

Rooth, M., 1992. A theory of focus interpretation, Natural Language Semantics 1: 75-116.

....in a positive way. Interestingly, when we come to apply the q operator to comparatives in section 2.5, closing o the binding potential of inde nites under the scope of the q operator will be exactly what we wish to do. 2.4. 2 Scalar implicatures Accounts of scalar implicatures (Gazdar 1979, Rooth 1992) have traditionally relied on the notion of a linguistic scale, and have been thought to arise from the Gricean maxim of quantity : make your contribution as informative as is required, and not more so. Thus, if a speaker asserts (54) 54) John met four people. then a scalar implicature is ....

Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1:75-116.

....a syllable in a word means, we can build up a theory of focus similar to standard accounts at the word and phrase level. The main point of this paper is developing a semantics for parts of words that will enable a theory of focus to generalize below the word level. In the next section I look at Rooth s (1992) theory of focus interpretation and the way it deals with association with focus, and why it fails when an adverb like only has to associate with focus that is narrower than a word. Following that, I develop the semantics for syllables that will enable the theory to deal with sub lexical focus (I ....

....level) The remaining sections deal with other issues that arise from this line of inquiry: focus projection, the phonology of focus, the semantics of metalinguistic expressions, and an interesting parallel with theories of sentence processing. 2 Rooth s theory of association with focus In Rooth s (1992) theory of focus interpretation, association of an adverb like only with a focused element is mediated by a context variable: only is interpreted relative to the context variable, and the context variable itself is constrained by the focus interpretation operator . A sentence such as (4) can have ....

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Rooth, Mats. 1992. A Theory of Focus Interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1, pp. 75--116.

....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. For ....

Rooth, M. (1992). A Theory of Focus Interpretation, Natural Language Semantics 1, 75--116.

....rules in accordance to information structure. However, it remained unclear how they would be handled by a discourse update function. In this paper we argue that all the di erences due to information structure can be captured formally in terms of Rooth s notion of an alternative set [Rooth, 1985, Rooth, 1992] and the alternative set semantics of information structure worked out in [Steedman, 2000, Steedman, 2001] We also extend the analysis to include concessive opposition. 2 The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we summarize some existing approaches to concession, including the ....

....which are explained below. Pitch accents in Theme is entail contrast with a previous Theme is , and the AS thus contains more than one element. 7 Without pitch accents in Theme is , and thus without contrast, the AS would be a singleton set. Elaborating on Rooth s alternative semantics [Rooth, 1992], the semantics assigned to IS in Steedman s approach is (cf. Steedman, 2001] Theme is presupposes a Rheme is alternative set ( AS) Focus is within Rheme is restricts the AS to the singleton set corresponding to the asserted proposition. Theme is also presupposes a ....

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Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75-116.

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Rooth, Mats (1992), `A theory of focus interpretation', Natural Language Semantics, 1: 75-116.

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Rooth, M., 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1), 75--116.

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Rooth, M.: 1992. A Theory of Focus Interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, Vol. 1, pp. 75-116.

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Rooth, M. (1992). `A Theory of Focus Interpretation'. Natural Language Semantics 1, 75--116.

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Rooth, M., 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1), 75--116.

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Mats Rooth. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75-- 116, 1992.

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Mats Rooth. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1:75-116, 1992.

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Rooth, M. (1992), `A theory of focus interpretation', Natural Language Semantics, 1, 75-116.

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Rooth, Mats (1992). A Theory of Focus Interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1, pp. 75--116.

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