The Locality of Focusing and the Coherence of Anaphors

Edwin Williams (Princeton)

edwin@princeton.edu

I will present a system of focus interpretation which differs on 3 key points from standard systems such as Rooth (1992). First, there is no entity (called 'Focus') which mediates the distribution of pitch motions and such things as answerhood, constrast, etc.; second, the laws that govern the contribution of pitch motion are strictly local, limited to the prominence relations of sisters making no use of formulas with variables like 'X gave Y to Z'; and third, the laws do not assign values to focused constituents, but rather impose anaphoric commitments on them.