Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, to appear.
“Focus intervention, multiple association, and the unity of focus and wh alternatives.”
Linguistics and Philosophy.
I develop a framework for the compositional semantics of focus association that differs minimally from Rooth 1992 in letting focus-sensitive operators optionally pass up evaluated focus alternatives. My proposal is informed by prior work on various complex constructions involving multiple alternative-sensitive operators and alternative sources including multiple association with a single focus, multiple overlapping associations with separate foci, focus intervention effects in wh-questions, and focus association with wh-phrases — all of which I show can be accurately modeled in my framework. The framework allows us to maintain the idea due to Beck (2006) that alternatives computed for the semantics of questions (Hamblin 1973 a.o.) and of focus (Rooth 1985 a.o.) are formally identical objects, defusing the argument in Li & Law 2016 against such unification.