Focus, Presupposition, and Propositional Attitude

Abstract

A focus in an uttered sentence is the word of greatest prosodic prominence in the sentence. Most formal frameworks of focus are based on Hamblin’s theory of questions, which represents a question as the set of possible answers (cf. [2]). Contrary to these approaches, this paper proposes a formal theory of focus in which propositional attitudes of communication partners play a crucial role. The central hypothesis of this theory is the following:

S uses focus either for information supply or for correction, namely

(a) in order to give H particular information that H would need or

(b) in order to point out something false about H’s belief.

Hence, when S uses focus,

(a) S presupposes that H lacks particular information or

(b) S presupposes that H believes something false.

These speaker’s presuppositions can be specified by using discourse congruence, namely question-answer congruence indicates presupposition (a) and binary contrast indicates presupposition (b). In this paper, I will show how to describe problems related to interpretation of focus, such as question-answer congruence, binary contrast, contrast in discourse structure, partial negation, and focal presupposition.