Verum accent IS VERUM, but not always focus

This paper studies the occurrence of verum accent in declaratives and polar interrogatives. Verum exhibits two kinds interpretational effect: (i) it requires an epistemic conflict across sentence types (ii) may also convey a negative speaker bias We argue that former effect is due to presuppositional VERUM operator latter arises from possibility said carrying polarity focus. Our proposal implies accenting focus are distinct phenomena interact interesting ways.