The paper discusses the question whether focus, as marked by prosodic prominence in Standard English, generally introduces presuppositions. It argues that some, but not all, types of focus do. If there is a focusing/backgrounding mechanism related to mere givenness, it is not obvious that we are dealing with presuppositions in the usual sense. The inferences contributed by such backgrounding just don’t seem to behave like run-of-the-mill presuppositions. They project and compose differently. Wha…
Read moreThe paper discusses the question whether focus, as marked by prosodic prominence in Standard English, generally introduces presuppositions. It argues that some, but not all, types of focus do. If there is a focusing/backgrounding mechanism related to mere givenness, it is not obvious that we are dealing with presuppositions in the usual sense. The inferences contributed by such backgrounding just don’t seem to behave like run-of-the-mill presuppositions. They project and compose differently. What we are seeing might be expressive meanings. While expressive meanings are often lumped together with presuppositions in the literature, this is a mistake, as argued most persuasively in Potts (2003).
This issue is taken up in much more detail in Kratzer and Selkirk's 2020 paper 'Deconstructing Information Structure'.
