1.2
• The phenomenon of focus sensitivity has repercussions not only for semantics, but also for the issue of how and where intonation should be represented in grammar.
Sense and sensitivity: explorations on the interface between focus and meaning.
• Is focus sensitivity lexically encoded? Is it semantically or pragmatically mediated? If it is semantically mediated, then compositional interpretation must have access to focus at some representational level.
David Beaver
[email protected] Stanford University TLS, March 2004
• Rooth (1985), Jacobs (1983), Krifka (1992) and von Stechow (1985/1989) have suggested focus sensitivity is lexically encoded and semantically mediated: theories such as these Rooth terms strong.
Various parts of this work were conducted jointly with Brady Clark, Edward Flemming, Florian Jaeger and Maria Wolters.
1
• Dryer (1994), Roberts (1996), Schwarzschild (1997), Vallduv´ı (1990) and Williams (1997), argue for pragmatic (weak) accounts .
Introduction • Sometimes, the sense of an utterance is affected by the position of focus:
(1)
I only wore a party hat [on my birthday]F.
(2)
I only wore [a party hat]F on my birthday.
Goal • Semantic accounts typically predict that the dependency of some expressions on focus is obligatory, while purely pragmatic accounts would lead us to expect optionality. • I will examine the following question: is focus dependency optional or obligatory?
• In these examples, “only” is the culprit, a focus sensitive expression. 1.1
The extent of the phenomenon
Expressions which have been described as focus sensitive include: Exclusives (“only”, “just”, “merely”, . . . ) Additives (“too”, “also”,. . . ) Scalar additives (“even”) Particularizers (“in particular”, “e.g.”,. . . ) Intensifiers (“really”, “totally”,. . . ) Quantificational adverbs (“always”,. . . ) Determiners (“many”, “most”) Connectives (“because”, “if-then”) Emotives (“regret”, “be glad”,. . . ) Also: superlatives, comparatives, negation, questions. . . See Hajiˆcov´a et al. (1998) and Rooth (1996a) for partial summaries. 1
Past Analyses of Focus Sensitivity
Plan of action • In the first part of the talk, I will present acoustic evidence concerning the main phenomenon that has been used to argue for optionality of focus sensitivity, second occurrence focus. • In the second part, I will introduce distributional and interpretational evidence which puts the question of whether focus dependency is optional or obligatory in a new light.
2
Second Occurrence Focus
2.1
Basic example
• When a focused element is repeated the pitch accent may be absent: 2
(3)
A: Everyone already knew that Mary only eats [vegetables] F. B: If even Paul knew that Mary only eats [vegetables]SOF, then he should have suggested a different [restaurant]F. (Partee 1999)
2.5
The SOF mission
• To use a systematic, objective instrumental methodology to answer the following questions: 1. Are there any intonational correlates of second occurrence focus?
2.2
The argument from SOF
2. What are those correlates?
A. Semantic theories require focus marked elements in the scope of focus sensitive expressions. B. In the case of second occurrence focus there is no such element. C. Therefore focus sensitivity is optional and pragmatically mediated. 2.3
Previous experimental studies: Bartels
• Bartels (1997) studied various correlates of prominence (relative syllable lengthening and amplitude) on second occurrence expressions. • She demonstrated that a systematic experimental approach to focus phenomena was possible, and found significant differences between marking of first and second occurrences. • Bartels did not add controls in which the test words were not in focus at all (neither focus nor secondary focus). • The experiment therefore does not determine whether expressions in second occurrence focus are intonationally marked. 2.4
Previous experimental studies: Rooth
• Rooth (1996b) recorded himself uttering (4,5) and found extended duration on SOF. (4)
A: Do you want Sue to only [name]F Manny today? B: No. I only want [Eva]F to only [name]SOF Manny today.
(5)
3. Are hearers sensitive to the effects? 2.6
A production experiment
• A multi-speaker multi-discourse production experiment was performed. • The goal was to examine whether words in second occurrence focus are intonationally distinct from non-focal occurrences of the same words. • A number of possible intonational correlates of focus were examined, including maximal and minimal (f0) pitch, pitch range, word duration and r.m.s. intensity. 2.7
Experimental details
• The production experiment was based on 14 written texts made up of 7 minimal pairs. • Each member of a minimal pair ends with the same sentence in written form, but prior context means that different elements are in second occurrence focus. • 20 native U.S. English speakers read all the texts twice, along with filler discourses. • The positions of onsets and offsets of relevant expressions were ‘hand’ annotated, and pitch and intensity information was automatically extracted for statistical analysis.
A: Do you want Sue to only name [Manny]F today? B: No. I only want [Eva]F to only name [Manny]SOF today.
• So perhaps second occurrence focus has prosodic correlates other than pitch movement. 3
2.8 (6)
A minimal pair a.
Both Sid and his accomplices should have been named in this morning’s court session. 4
b. But the defendant only named Sid in court today.
(7)
c.
Even the state prosecutor only named Sid in court today.
a.
Defense and Prosecution had agreed to implicate Sid both in court and on television.
2.12
• Subjects distinguished SOF significantly above chance (mean=64%; p < .001). • We investigated whether acoustical measures from the production analysis could predict perception results using stepwise multiple linear regression.
b. Still, the defense attorney only named Sid in court today. c. 2.9
Even the state prosecutor only named Sid in court today.
• Energy is a predictor (44% of variation), intensity and duration can also be used, but none of the f0 measures are predictors.
Production results (minF0 repeated measures analysis)
• There are significant main effects for duration (p = 0.039) and energy (p = 0.027): SOF expressions average 6 msecs longer than non-focal expressions and receive more energy.
2.13
• The effects are small but perceptible. So the information status of SOF is marked grammatically.
• No main effect of maximum and mean pitch could be found.
• If not, the marking of second occurrence foci obviously could not influence interpretation, and the argument from second occurrence focus might survive. 2.11
• Thus, SOF does not demonstrate optionality of focus, and this argument against semantic theories of focus is bogus.
Production is only half the story
• The production experiment yielded significant effects, but they are small. Are these effects large enough to be perceptible?
A perception experiment
• To test perceptual sensitivity, 15 native speakers judged prominence of words in 40 sentence pairs differing only in SOF. • The pairs were spliced from the production data without discourse context (i.e. last sentence only). • The production pairs used were chosen pseudo-randomly to establish balance of conditions, discourses and speakers, but without regard to the acoustic measurements above.
5
Conclusions: second occurrence focus
• There is an acoustic correlate of SOF, at least in the classic form of the phenomenon (repeated foci in post-nuclear position).
• There are marginal main effects for r.m.s. intensity (p = 0.07), minimum pitch (p = 0.08), and pitch range (p = 0.06).
2.10
Perception results
3
The Two Faces of Focus Sensitivity
3.1
Introduction
• The main argument for optionality of focus effects fails, but can we find direct evidence of compulsory association with focus? • I will show that association is compulsory for some but not all expressions that are described as focus sensitive. 3.2
Only and Always
• “Only” is a prototypical exclusive (Nevalainen 1991), while we take “always”, in its non-temporal reading as a paradigmatic quantificational adverb. • Both are universals for which the quantificational structure is not (need not be) marked syntactically, and for which there is a correlation between focus and quantificational structure. 6
3.3
Only and Always: the analysis
• We follow Bonomi and Casalegno (1993) and Herburger (2000) in analyzing “only” as quantifying over events, and e.g. von Fintel (1994) for an event-based analysis of “always”, yielding a uniform presentation of the two operators. • We take background to be a property of events which satisfy the nonfocal material in the sentence, and focus to be a property of events which satisfy the focal material. The variable O is a set of events determined pragmatically. Interpreting “only” (8)
“NP only VP” 7→ ∂(∃e (background(e)))∧ ∀e (background(e) → focus(e))
• Here background is a property of events given by the subject and all non-focal material in the VP.
(11)
3.4
“Sandy only feeds Fido [Nutrapup]F” 7→ ∂(∃e feeding(e) ∧ agent(e) = sandy ∧ goal(e) = fido) ∧ ∀e ((feeding(e) ∧ agent(e) = sandy ∧ goal(e) = fido) → theme(e) = nutrapup)
Association with Presupposition
• Sometimes focus sensitive elements appear to associate with presupposition, not focus. • Some have suggested that instead of association with focus, all focus sensitivity should be explained as association with presupposition (Rooth 1999; Cohen 1999). • However, standard examples of the phenomenon involve either generics or quantificational adverbs, not e.g. exclusives. (12)
Kim always beats Sandy at [ping-pong]F. a.
• The predicate focus is a property of events given by focal material in the VP. (9)
“Sandy always feeds Fido [Nutrapup]F” 7→ ∂(∃e O(e))∧ ∀e (O(e) → feeding(e) ∧ agent(e) = sandy ∧ goal(e) = fido ∧ theme(e) = nutrapup)
b. ? “When Kim beats Sandy at something, it is invariably ping-pong.” 3.5 (13)
Exclusives behave differently... Kim only beats Sandy at [ping-pong]F. a.
Interpreting “always”
“NP always VP” 7→ ∂(∃e O(e))∧ ∀e (O(e) → npvp(e))
3.6 (14)
7
Differing Associations (“manage”) Mary always managed to complete her [exams]F. a.
• Focus sensitivity of “always” is explained by the fact that non-focal material is typically under discussion, in which case the set of occasions described by non-focal material is available as an antecedent. • The predicate npvp is a property of events given by all the material in the sentence apart from “always”, i.e. background∪focus.
* “What Kim does when playing a game of ping-pong with Sandy is beat her and do nothing else.”
b. “Kim beats Sandy at ping-pong and nothing else.”
• We also analyze “always” as quantifying over events: (10)
“When Kim plays ping-pong with Sandy, Kim invariably beats Sandy.”
‘Whenever Mary took exams, she completed them.’
b. ? ‘Whenever Mary completed something, it was invariably an exam.’ (15)
Mary only managed to complete her [exams]F. 8
a.
* “What Mary did when taking exams was complete them and do nothing else.”
b. “What Mary completed was an exam and nothing else.” 3.7 (16)
b. Drivers and riders should only stop still at pedestrian crossings. . . . (20)
I always stop to look at death. [Eroica Mildmay, Lucker and Tiffany peel out. Serpent’s Tail, London, 1993.]
Differing Associations (Italian) Maria sempre batte Antonio [ping-pong]F. Maria always beat Antonio ping-pong ‘Maria always beats Antonio at ping-pong.’
a.
b. I only stop to look at death. (21)
a.
It’s a high-speed collision sport and a prop forward always takes the brunt of the punishment. [The Daily Mirror, Mirror Group Newspapers, London 1992]
a.
‘When Maria plays ping-pong with Antonio, Maria invariably beats him.’
b. * ‘When Maria beats Antonio at something, it is invariably ping-pong.’ (17)
b. A prop forward only takes the brunt of the punishment. (22)
Maria solo batte Antonio [ping-pong]F. Maria only beat Antonio ping-pong ‘Maria only beats Antonio at ping-pong.’ a. * ‘What Maria does when playing a game of ping-pong with Antonio is beat him and do nothing else.’
b. We only manage to get them rehomed. (23)
• Artificial minimal pairs with “only” lack the relevant reading. (18)
a.
More important, you could get medicine guaranteed to cure you, whereas God didn’t always answer your prayers. [K. Carmichael, Ceremony of innocence., Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Bas-
a.
Slachtoffers hebben altijd gelijk.
[Dutch] [Ted de Hoog, De ramp, de
rituelen, De Groene Amsterdammer, 27 May 2000]
‘Victims are always right.’ b. ? Slachtoffers hebben alleen maar gelijk. ‘Victims are only right.’
Differing Associations (corpora, internet)
• Corpora yielded many examples where “always” does not associate with the (assumed) focus.
Technically, if they’re not claimed within seven days, then they should be put to sleep, but we always manage to get them rehomed. [Dogs Today. Burlington Publishing Company Ltd, Windsor, 1992.]
b. ‘Maria beats Antonio at ping-pong and nothing else.’ 3.8
a.
3.9
Conclusions from Presupposition Data
• We have looked at cases where, as a result of presupposition, simple association with focus produces implausible readings. • In these cases, adverbs of quantification do not associate with focus: their quantificational domain is calculated by a pragmatic process which respects presuppositional requirements.
ingstoke, 1991]
b. God didn’t only answer your prayers. (19)
a.
Drivers and riders should always stop still at pedestrian crossings, and not pull forwards until the person is safely on the pavement.
• However, exclusives are obligatorily constrained by focus even when presuppositions suggest much more plausible alternatives. • This is as predicted if exclusives, unlike quantificational adverbs, lexically encode their dependency on focus.
[Vivian Grisogono and Mary Lynch, Strokes and head injuries. Murray (Publishers) Ltd., London, 1991.]
9
10
3.10
Reducing and Removing Foci
(27)
• If focus dependency is obligatory, then we should expect that phonetically reduced material would never become the semantic focus of a focus sensitive operator. • Likewise, material which is completely absent from the syntactic domain of the focus sensitive operator should not become the semantic focus. • Obviously, no such relationship is expected if focus dependency is optional.
[Italian] (28)
(29)
• We now consider phonetic reduction (realization as a leaner) and extraction, for each of which we predict quite different effects for “only” and “always”. 3.11
Leaners (Dutch)
(24)
? Ik had’t alleen maar over’m met Sandy, en ook had ik’t alleen maar over’m met Kim “I only discussed’im with Sandy and also only discussed’im with Kim.” (cannot mean: ‘I discussed Fred and no one else with Sandy, and I also discussed Fred and no one else with Kim.’)
* Juan no solo ve la [estrella]F, pero yo solo la veo. Juan no only see the star but I only it see ‘Juan doesn’t only see the star, but I only see it.’
3.13
Extraction (Dutch)
(30)
Wat denk jij dat Kim alleen maar haar moeder geeft? “What do you think Kim only gives his mother?” a.
* ‘What is the thing such that you believe that Kim gives that thing (and nothing else) to his mother?’
b. ‘What do you believe that Kim gives his mother (and nobody else)?’ (31)
3.12
Leaners (Italian, Spanish)
3.14
(26)
Maria [saluta]F sempre, e anche Giulia lo fa sempre. Maria salutes always and too Giulia it does always ‘Maria always salutes, and Giulia always does too.’ [Italian]
11
Juan no siempre ve la [estrella]F, pero yo siempre la veo. Juan no only see the star but I only it see ‘Juan doesn’t always see the star, but I always see it.’ [Spanish]
[Spanish]
Ik had’t altijd over’m met Sandy, en ook had ik’t altijd over’m met Kim. “I always discussed’im with Sandy and also always discussed’im with Kim.” (can mean: ‘Whenever I discussed someone with Sandy, I discussed Fred, and whenever I discussed someone with Kim, I discussed Fred.’)
(25)
* Maria [saluta]F solo, e anche Giulia lo fa solo. Maria salutes only and too Giulia it does only ‘Maria only salutes, and Giulia only does too.’
Wat denk jij dat Kim altijd haar moeder geeft? “What do you think Kim always gives his mother?” a.
‘What is the thing such that you believe that Kim gives that thing (and nothing else) to his mother?’
b. ‘What do you believe that Kim gives his mother (and nobody else)?’ Conclusions from reduction and extraction
• Exclusives do not associate with reduced or extracted material. • This conforms to the earlier semantics of “only”. On the assumption that leaners and gaps do not bear focus, all such material is interpreted in the quantificational restrictor.
12
• These effects provide evidence that exclusives have obligatory association with focus.
(36)
• For quantificational adverbs the analysis predicts that reduction or extraction of material cannot directly affect the quantificational restrictor, which is set pragmatically. • Thus we correctly predict the availability of readings for quantificational adverbs that are excluded for only. 3.15
[http://www.socalm.org/crank/crank199609.pt1.html — email in WWW archive.]
(37)
NPI Distribution
• One final piece of evidence for the split between exclusives and quantificational adverbs involves NPI distribution. • The proposal says that for “only”, non-focal material is interpreted in the restrictor of a universal quantifier. But for “always” all material is interpreted in the scope.
(32)
(38)
(33) (34)
[http://www.acc.umu.se/ oscar/pinball/gbook/guestbook.html — A page for
(39)
Well, I certainly don’t give a damn. I only [/?always] gave a damn because I thought you did. [Jamie Malankowski, Five Finales: How to wrap up Seinfeld? We offer some suggestions, Time Magazine vol. 151 no. 17, May 4 1998. ]
We only [/?always] ever had cream of mushroom.
If you were a kid in Cleveland (then), you only [/?always] gave a damn about two things – the Beatles and Ghoulardi.
[The first fifty, Muriel Gray. Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 1990.]
[Mike Olszewski, quoted in the Akron Beacon Journal, October 9, 1998.]
The central problem is that it is only [/?always] ever possible to sample a child’s language over a fixed period of time and within a finite number of situations.
(40)
(41)
[Early language development, John Harris. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1990.]
(35)
. . . if the left flipper is too weak for a bearkick, as it often is because people who run arcades are usually assholes and only [/?always] give a shit about their street fighter shit games, use that left flipper to send the ball back into the swamp. pinball lovers.]
Stuart would only [/?always] lift a finger to [pick his nose]F or [write a book]F. [If You’re Feeling Sinister (Sleeve Notes), Belle and Sebastien, 1996.]
The only words coming out of my mouth is a lyrical thang So please back tha fuck up off my screen tho Since i was four you was known to be the enemy Like rintintin you only [/?always] give a shit for me The community took four steps higher 86ing motherfuckas working for the suppliers [“Interrogation”, The Coup, on Genocide and Juice (CD).]
• Since a universal restrictor is downward monotone, but the scope is upward monotone, we predict that NPIs are licensed in non-focal material in the scope of “only”, but not in the scope of “always”. • This is confirmed by large amounts of corpus data, e.g.:
According to his viewpoint, the Miatas are prone to this partly because they don’t accumulate miles the way most cars do. The timing belt should be changed at 60,000 miles OR 60 months, and most people only [/?always] bother with the mileage.
Because we found one order of this group to be much more likely than any other, we probably only [/?always] care to see the map distances for this single order.
You may think faeries are sweet, good and kind, but they’re not. They’re vicious, greedy buggers who’d only [/?always] lift a finger to save their best friend if they thought they’d profit from it. They have sharp teeth too and, as many people have found out, won’t hesitate to use them. [Online text at http://www.angelfire.com/me/Spero/folks.html.]
4
Conclusion
[ Constructing Genetic Linkage Maps with MAPMAKER/EXP Version 3.0: A Tutorial and Reference Manual, Stephen Lincoln, Mark Daly and Eric Lander, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research Technical Report, January, 1993]
13
• We saw that the main argument used to show that focus dependency is optional is bogus. 14
• But we also considered a number of phenomena can be used as diagnostics to test for optionality of focus dependency. • So is focus dependency optional or obligatory? • Yes. • That is, some expressions which have been analyzed as focus sensitive do involve obligatory dependency on focus, while others do not. • This means (a) that we need a strong theory of focus sensitivity, but (b) that we have to be very careful in deciding where to use it. 4.1
References Bartels, Christine. 1997. Acoustic Correlates of ‘Second Occurrence’ Focus: Towards an Experimental Investigation. In Context-dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic MeaningXS, ed. by Hans Kamp and Barbara Partee, 11–30, University of Stuttgart. Institut fuer maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung. Bonomi, Andrea, and Paolo Casalegno. 1993. Only: Association with Focus in Event Semantics. Natural Language Semantics 2.1–45. Cohen, Ariel. 1999. How Are Alternatives Computed? Journal of Semantics 16.43–65. Dryer, Matthew S. 1994. The pragmatics of association with only. Paper presented at the 1994 Winter Meeting of the L.S.A. Boston, Massachusetts, ms. ˆova ´ , Eva, Barbara H. Partee, and Petr Sgall. 1998. Topic-focus articulation, Hajic tripartite structures, and semantic content. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
and speculation...
Herburger, Elena. 2000. What Counts: Focus and Quantification. MIT Press.
• We are just starting to apply similar argumentation more widely. Simplifying the picture and making some huge leaps, we seem to be heading for something like this: Semantically sensitive exclusives additives scalar additives particularizers intensifiers negation? 4.2
Pragmatically sensitive quantificational adverbs sentence connectives superlatives, comparatives emotive predicates questions “tolf”!
and generalizations that would follow. . .
• Semantically sensitive expressions are discourse functional, marking the status of an assertion, and are poly-categorial.
Jacobs, Joachim. 1983. Fokus und Skalen. T¨ ubingen: Niemeyer. Krifka, Manfred. 1992. A compositional semantics for multiple focus constructions. Informationsstruktur und Grammatik 4. Nevalainen, Terttu. 1991. But, Only, Just: Focusing Adverbial Change in Modern English 1500-1900. Helsinki: Soci´et´e N´eophilologique. Partee, Barbara H. 1999. Focus, Quantification, and Semantics-Pragmatics Issues. In Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, ed. by Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt, 213–231. Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Craige. 1996. Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of Pragmatics. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 49. Papers in Semantics. Rooth, Mats. 1985. Association with focus. Graduate Linguistics Students Association. ——. 1996a. Focus. In The handbook of contemporary semantic theory, ed. by Shalom Lappin, 271–297. London: Basil Blackwell. ——. 1996b. On the interface principles for intonational focus. In SALT VI, ed. by Teresa Galloway and Justin Spence, 202–226, Ithaca, NY. Cornell University.
• Pragmatically sensitive expressions are typically modal or quantificational, involving a free parameter for a quantificational domain, and have narrow syntactic distributions.
——. 1999. Association with Focus or Association with Presupposition? In Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, ed. by Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt, 232–244. Cambridge University Press.
• Semantic sensitivity emerges in an advanced stage of grammaticalization as an expression becomes discourse functional.
Vallduv´ı, Enric. 1990. The Information Component. University of Pennsylvania dissertation.
• Syntactic distributional properties may follow from the fact that focus sensitive expressions typically arise within the NP, but are midway in a process that may lead to them being sentential modifiers. (cf. English “but”.) 15
Schwarzschild, Roger, 1997. Why some foci must associate. unpublished.
von Fintel, Kai. 1994. Restrictions on Quantifier Domains. UMass Amherst dissertation. von Stechow, Arnim. 1985/1989. Focusing and backgrounding operators. Technical report, Universit¨at Konstanz. Williams, Edwin. 1997. Blocking and Anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry 28.577–628.
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