Focus on embedded adverbials Focus on adverbials in ... - Linguistics

<strong>Focus</strong> on embedded adverbials
<strong>Focus</strong> on adverbials in dependent clauses can induce interesting semantic effects in German
(and probably many other languages as well). (1a) and (1b) only differ in accent placement
(and hence focus structure). Both assert that Alex thinks/doubts that Bea is leaving today, but
(1b) additionally conveys (presupposes) that Bea is actually leaving (at some time). In effect,
(1b) says that Bea is leaving and Alex thinks/doubts that it’s happening today.
(1) a. Alex glaubt/bezweifelt dass [Bea heute ABreist] F
Alex thinks/doubts that Bea today leaves
b. Alex glaubt/bezweifelt dass Bea [HEUte] F abreist
Classes of adverbials However, this effect is not found with all kinds of adverbials. We
systematically test the effects of focus on six types of adverbials (distinguishable by their syntactic
base position, as argued by Frey & Pittner (1998)): (A1) process-related (e.g. manner
adverbials), (A2) event-internal (e.g. local), (A3) event-related (e.g. temporal), (A4) frame
adverbials, (A5) sentence adverbials and (A6) speech act adverbials. It turns out that the syntactic
base position of an adverbial correlates with its ability to bear informational focus (IF) or
contrastive focus (CF) (as distinguished by Kiss (1998)) and with its embeddability.
Findings The effect of focus illustrated in (1) is only found with embedded IF, hence restricted
to classes (A1) – (A3). While (1) is an example for an adverbial of class (A3), (2a) and
(2b) illustrate the same effect for classes (A1) and (A2):
(2) a. Alex glaubt dass Bea das Buch [SORGfaeltig] F gelesen hat
Alex thinks that Bea the book carefully read has
b. Alex glaubt dass Bea das Fenster [mit dem HAMmer] F zerschlagen hat
Alex thinks that Bea the window with the hammer battered has
In contrast, classes (A4) and (A5) cannot bear IF: (3a) and (3b) are only felicitous with contrastive
focus. In addition, the embeddability of class (A5) adverbials depends on a combination
of factors including the type of embedding predicate and properties of the adverb itself.
(3) a. Alex glaubt dass Bea [ökoLOGisch betrachtet] F ein Verbrechen begangen hat
Alex thinks that Bea from-an-environmental-perspective a crime committed has
b. Alex glaubt dass Bea [KLUgerweise] F das Buch gelesen hat
Alex thinks that Bea wisely the book read has
Finally, it is not possible to place any focus accent on speech act adverbials (A6), and they are
not embeddable at all, cf. (4).
(4) *Alex glaubt dass ehrlich gesagt Bea das Buch gelesen hat
Alex thinks that honestly Bea the book read has
These findings reflect a genuine distinction between proposition-internal adverbials (classes
(A1–3)) and proposition-external adverbials (classes (A4–6)). IF and its semantic effect illustrated
in (1) is restricted to proposition-internal adverbials. This restriction automatically falls
out of our analysis of IF effects.
Analysis The semantic effect of IF on proposition-internal adverbials can be explained in an
elegant way by a natural extension of the presupposition theory of focus proposed by Geurts
& van der Sandt (2004), building on the binding theory of presupposition (van der Sandt 1992;
Geurts 1999).
The analysis is illustrated in (5) for (1b), in particular for think. (5a) is the preliminary
discourse representation structure (DRS) prior to presupposition resolution. The backgrounded
material in the complement in (1b) introduces a presuppositional DRS (underlined). Since the
presupposition cannot be bound in this context, it will be accommodated as high as possible
(cf. Geurts (1999)), in this case in the global DRS. The resulting final DRS in (5b) exactly
reflects the actual reading of (1b): Bea is leaving and Alex believes that it happens today.
(5) a. [a: Alex(a), think(a,[b e: today(e), Bea(b), e:leave(b)])]
b. [a b e: Alex(a), Bea(b), e:leave(b), believe(a,[:today(e)])]
In (1a), in contrast, the whole VP ‘Bea heute abreist’ is in focus, hence not presupposed, which
means that the conditions ‘Bea(b)’ and ‘e:leave(b)’ are directly generated in their local DRS
without escape potential. The resulting reading is exactly as desired, lacking the presupposition
that Bea is leaving.

References
FREY, WERNER & KARIN PITTNER. 1998. Zur Positionierung der Adverbiale im deutschen
Mittelfeld. Linguistische Berichte, 176, 489?534.
GEURTS, BART. 1999. Presuppositions and Pronouns. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
GEURTS, BART & ROB VAN DER SANDT. 2004. Interpreting <strong>Focus</strong>. Theoretical Linguistics,
30(1), 1–44.
KISS, K. E. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language, 74, 245–273.
VAN DER SANDT, R.A. 1992. Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution. Journal of
Semantics, 9, 333–377.