Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantic Content

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Introduction

   • Eva Hajičová, Barbara H. Partee, Petr Sgall

   Pages 1-12

3. Towards an Investigation of the Relation between Topic-Focus Articulation and Tripartite Structures

   • Eva Hajičová, Barbara H. Partee, Petr Sgall

   Pages 13-78

4. Remarks on Common Background and Shared Assumptions

   • Eva Hajičová, Barbara H. Partee, Petr Sgall

   Pages 79-89

5. Obstacles to Joint Work

   • Eva Hajičová, Barbara H. Partee, Petr Sgall

   Pages 91-101

6. Dialogue, Progressing Towards a Common Basis for Discussion

   • Eva Hajičová, Barbara H. Partee, Petr Sgall

   Pages 103-127

7. Some Hypotheses Proposed and Examined

   • Eva Hajičová, Barbara H. Partee, Petr Sgall

   Pages 129-169

8. Future Directions

   • Eva Hajičová, Barbara H. Partee, Petr Sgall

   Pages 171-177

9. Back Matter

   Pages 179-218

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1. 1 OBJECTIVES The main objective of this joint work is to bring together some ideas that have played central roles in two disparate theoretical traditions in order to con­ tribute to a better understanding of the relationship between focus and the syn­ tactic and semantic structure of sentences. Within the Prague School tradition and the branch of its contemporary development represented by Hajicova and Sgall (HS in the sequel), topic-focus articulation has long been a central object of study, and it has long been a tenet of Prague school linguistics that topic-focus structure has systematic relevance to meaning. Within the formal semantics tradition represented by Partee (BHP in the sequel), focus has much more recently become an area of concerted investigation, but a number of the semantic phenomena to which focus is relevant have been extensively investi­ gated and given explicit compositional semantic-analyses. The emergence of 'tripartite structures' (see Chapter 2) in formal semantics and the partial simi­ larities that can be readily observed between some aspects of tripartite structures and some aspects of Praguian topic-focus articulation have led us to expect that a closer investigation of the similarities and differences in these different theoretical constructs would be a rewarding undertaking with mutual benefits for the further development of our respective theories and potential benefit for the study of semantic effects of focus in other theories as well.

• computational linguistics
• pragmatics
• semantic
• semantics

'The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in semantics, pragmatics, comparative English-Slavic structure, semantic typology, computational linguistics, and general linguistics theory.'
Folia Linguistica, XXXVI (2002)

• Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

  Eva Hajičová, Petr Sgall

• Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, USA

  Barbara H. Partee

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