[PLing] Talk by Roni Katzir April 17

[Valerie Wurm]

Dear colleagues,

this is a reminder of our upcoming talk by Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv 
University).

Date and venue: Friday, April 17, 11:45, Sensengasse 3A, Seminarraum 2

Title and abstract: The roles of grammar and pragmatics in focus 
dependencies

Focus dependencies, including question–answer congruence, free focus, 
and association with focus, are often treated in terms of grammatical 
and pragmatic mechanisms that rely on (a) focus-semantic values along a 
second semantic dimension, and (b) an anaphoric operator, ~, that is 
sensitive to these values and can communicate them to various processes. 
I argue against this view and in favor of a purely pragmatic treatment 
of focus in which there are no focus semantic values within the grammar, 
let alone operators sensitive to such values. Instead of ~, I propose a 
unification of focus dependencies through a pragmatic condition: an 
utterance is felicitous only if it is a good answer to a good (explicit 
or accommodated) question. Good answers must be relevant to the question 
they address, with relevance understood, following Lewis (1988), 
relative to a question-induced partition of the context set.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the talk,
Iva Kovač & Valerie Wurm