Although it is widely agreed, if often only tacitly, that there is a close connection between focus and presupposition, recent research has tended to shy away from the null hypothesis, which is that focus is systematically associated with presupposition along the following lines: The Background-Presupposition Rule (BPR) Whenever focusing gives rise to a background λx.φ(x), there is a presupposi...

This paper proposes an approach to the interpretation of copular sentences in English that analyses be as a one-place predicate with underspecified semantic content. The interpretation of a copula clause is determined through the interaction of syntactic and pragmatic processes and depends on the properties of expressions collocated with be and general contextual factors, both local and non-loc...