Wiley-Blackwell Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning: 8 (Explorations in Semantics)

Sense and Sensitivity advances a novel research proposal in the nascent field of formal pragmatics, exploring in detail the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language discourse. The authors develop a new account of focus sensitivity, and show that what has hitherto been regarded as a uniform phenomenon in fact results from three different mechanisms. The book Makes a major contribution to ongoing research in the area of focus sensitivity – a field exploring interactions between sound and meaning, specifically the dependency some words have on the effects of focus, such as "she only LIKES me" (i.e. nothing deeper) compared to "she only likes ME" (i.e. nobody else)Discusses the features of the QFC theory (Quasi association, Free association, and Conventional association), a new account of focus implying a tripartite typology of focus-sensitive expressionsPresents novel cross-linguistic data on focus and focus sensitivity that will be relevant across a range of linguistic sub-fields: semantics and pragmatics, syntax, and intonational phonologyConcludes with a case study of exclusives (like “only”), arguing that the entire existing literature has missed crucial generalizations, and for the first time explaining the focus sensitivity of these expressions in terms of their meaning and discourse function Review "Move over, Austen--and Austin. Prodigiously comprehensive and engagingly presented, Beaver and Clark's rich and subtle study of focus is essential reading on intonational meaning, scalar particles, implicature, presupposition, polarity licensing, and alternative semantics. This is sensitivity training of the highest order." Laurence Horn, Yale University "Sense and Sensitivity merits a close reading by anyone interested in contemporary pragmatic theory. It is clearly written and accessible, and offers a carefully reasoned case for lexical sensitivity to focus. Beaver and Clark's thesis is sure to serve as a touchstone for further work on the subject." Craige Roberts, Ohio State University Review "Move over, Austen--and Austin. Prodigiously comprehensive and engagingly presented, Beaver and Clark's rich and subtle study of focus is essential reading on intonational meaning, scalar particles, implicature, presupposition, polarity licensing, and alternative semantics. This is sensitivity training of the highest order." –Laurence Horn, Yale University "Sense and Sensitivity merits a close reading by anyone interested in contemporary pragmatic theory. It is clearly written and accessible, and offers a carefully reasoned case for lexical sensitivity to focus. Beaver and Clark's thesis is sure to serve as a touchstone for further work on the subject." –Craige Roberts, Ohio State University From the Inside Flap Sense and Sensitivity explores the semantic and pragmatic effects of focus in natural language discourse. The book concentrates on focus sensitivity, the remarkable dependency some words have on the effects of focus. An example is "only": compare "She only LIKES me" (i.e. nothing deeper) to "She only likes ME" (i.e. nobody else). Such interactions between sound and meaning highlight the importance of focus as an interface topic in contemporary linguistic theory, and the book presents results that will be of interest across the gamut of linguistic subfields from phonetics and phonology through syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse studies. The centerpiece of the book is a new account of focus sensitivity, the QFC theory, which involves a three-way distinction between different effects of focus: Quasi association, a special type of pragmatic inference; Free association, the resolution of a free variable; and Conventional association, a grammatical dependency on the current question under discussion. Prior to this new account, it had generally been assumed that focus is a uniform phenomenon; Beaver and Clark refute this with a series of new diagnostic tests,