Larry Horn delivering a keynote at Brown University

May 9, 2013

Larry Horn will be presenting a keynote address today at a mini-conference on semantics-pragmatics boundary disputes at Brown University. Titled Exhaustivity and focus: semantics or pragmatics? His talk will address the question of whether clefts and their fellow structural (or “identificational”) focus markers in various languages entail, presuppose, or merely implicate exhaustivity. Could It’s Sam who passed entail without asserting that nobody other than Sam passed? To address this question, he covers recent work on  the behavior of the exhaustiveness implication with respect to contexts of cancellation and question-answer pairs. Based on these studies and on other arguments summarized in the presentation, he concludes that the derivation of exhaustivity in focus constructions is a pragmatic phenomenon not linked to the truth-conditional contribution of clefts and related constructions.    

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