Proceedings of the ESSLLI’05 Workshop on Empirical Challenges and Analytical Alternatives to Strict Compositionality

French syntactic focus constructions and Japanese lexical ones involving a particle NANKA may indicate either that the focalized item is a representative member among a set of alternatives (exemplification meaning), or that, according to the speaker’s prediction, the focalized item is not included among a set of alternatives (surprise meaning). This paper examines this intriguing ambiguity from compositionality perspectives. It is argued that a pragmatic principle requiring that the informative value of a statement be maximal plays an important part in the derivation of the surprise meaning. Further, taking into account the presence or absence of a matrix existential clause in French cases and the internal composition of the particle NANKA including an existential or interrogative operator KA in Japanese cases, it is suggested that, if we adopte a view that the compositional computation of a sentence meaning may be effected after the interaction with pragmatics, both of the exemplification and surprise meanings may be derived compositionally.