Title: The implications of quantification for the role of focus in discourse structure
Abstract: This paper shows that first order logic does not translate one-to-one into distinct readings with respect to quantificational interpretation, nor does the semantic interpretation of a DP uniquely determine its role in quantification. Turkish data demonstrate that it is discourse structuring that is crucial to quantificational dependencies (QDs), also countering proposals of the importance of linearity, operators or (c)overt movement. Only New/Focus Information DPs that are locally bound can multiply while Given Information DPs with text-level binding have a fixed quantity for the duration of the Speech Act. This is in opposition to the claim that the semantics of the DP determines if it is Novel/New/Focus or Given/Familiar Information (Heim, I.R., 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases, PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst). The binding that shapes discourse structure is not only anaphoric but also indirect, i.e. D(iscourse)-Linking [Pesetsky, D., 1987. Wh-in-situ: movement and unselective binding. In: Reuland, E.J., ter Meulen, A.G.B. (Eds.), The Representation of (In)definiteness. Cambridge, MIT Press, pp. 98–129]. Both the functional predicate relation under QDs and the definition of New Information exert a locality constraint on QDs, where 'local' is the predicate domain. Then quantificational interpretation directly reflects discourse structuring.
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 21
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