Quantificational contrastive topics with verum/falsum focus

Contrastive Focus and Contrastive Topics in Greek

This paper puts forward the idea that in Greek contrast is an independent feature, represented in syntax by a preverbal position. Contrast can be assigned to diierent sorts of entities, topics and foci, once a set/list of contrasting alternatives/entities has been introduced or directly implied by the discourse. Evidence for an independent treatment of contrast is provided by similarities in th...

Contrastive Focus

The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as ...

Contrastive Topic and/or Contrastive Focus

Coherence Relations, Ellipsis and Contrastive Topics

A highly pervasive phenomenon in natural languages is ellipsis. It is commonly believed that the presence of ellipsis is one of the main reasons why natural language is as ambiguous as it is. If lexical material is left unpronounced, a hearer must rely on other parts of the sentence, on contextual information and on intonation to recover the unpronounced material. Because there may be different...

Contrastive Topic/focus and Polarity in Discourse

The information structure categories of Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus are examined to see their crucial roles in polarity and (conventional) implicature generation and implicature suspension and their respective correlatins with PA and SN conjunctions on one hand and descriptive (denotational) negation and metalinguistic negation on the other. The underlying notion of concessivity inv...