Michael Wagner: Focus and Givenness: A Unified Approach

Theories about information structure differ in treating focus-, contrast-, and givenness-marking as either a single phenomenon or as distinct phenomena. This paper argues for a unified approach, in particular a unified approach based on local alternatives (Wagner 2005, 2006b). The basic insights of the local alternatives approach are captured using a new formalization,which aims to fix several problems in the original proposal noted Büring (2008). The unified approach is compared with alternative approaches that invoke separate mechanisms for givenness and focus: The disanaphora approach (Williams, 1997), the F-Projection account (Selkirk, 1984, 1995) and the and the reference set approach in Szendröi (2001) and Reinhart (2006). All of these approaches face problems, and the requisite revisions render them equivalent to the local alternatives approach.

Keywords: alternatives, focus, givenness, prosody, contrast, information structure

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Draft August 1st 2009. Comments Welcome.