[PLing] TLC talk by Michael Wagner, 2 Oct, 17:00

[Iva Kovač]

Dear PLingers,

We would like to invite you to our next talk within the Theoretical 
Linguistics Colloquium.

Speaker: Michael Wagner (McGill University)

Date/venue: 2 October, 17-18:30, Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Vienna, 
Seminarraum 8

Upcoming events as well as further information can be found on our 
website:
https://sites.google.com/view/totlvienna/upcoming

We are looking forward to seeing many of you at the talk,
Valerie Wurm, Magdalena Lohninger, and Iva Kovač
The TLC organizers

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Prosodic focus and syntactic alternative projection

Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which 
alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative 
meanings can then compose pointwise, and play a crucial role in 
explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, but also constrain 
scalar implicatures, focus association, and related phenomena. This talk 
presents evidence that prosodic focus in fact relies on a syntactic 
mechanism of alternative generation. Focused constituents introduce a 
set of alternative expressions, which then 'project' in a pointwise way 
in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions. Syntactic 
alternative projection sheds new light on a number of oddball phenomena, 
such as focus below the word level, metalinguistic uses of focus, 
expletive insertion within words, and echo questions, building the 
pioneering work on these phenomena by Artstein (2002). When looking at 
association with 'only" or scalar implicatures, however, it's not clear 
that these tap the same notion of alternatives. Instead, what we find 
looks more like semantic domain restriction.
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