I. Information Structure and Contrastiveness.- 1. Contrastive Topic, Contrastive Focus, Alternatives and Scalar Implicatures by Chungmin Lee.- 2. Partition Semantics and Pragmatics of Contrastive Topic by Katsuhiko Yabushita.- 3. Deriving the Properties of Structural Focus by Katalin É. Kiss.- 4. Topic, Focus, and Exhaustive Interpretation by Robert van Rooij.- 5. The Interpretation of a “contrast-marking” Particle by Gyuris, Beáta.- 6. Scalar Implicatures, Presuppositions, and Discourse Particles: Colloquial Russian –to,že, and ved’ in Combination by Svetlana McCoy-Rusanova.- II. Polarity, Alternatives, Exhaustivity and Implicatures.- 7. Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese by Angelika Kratzer and Junko Shimoyama.- 8. Free Choiceness without Domain-widening by Jinyoung Choi.- 9. Expletive Negation and Polarity Alternatives by Yoonhee Choi and Chungmin Lee.- 10. On the Distribution and the Semantics of the Korean Focus Particle –lato by Dongsik Lim.- 11. Disjunction and Implicatures: Some Notes on Recent Developments by Uli Sauerland.- 12. Scalar Implicatures with Alternative Semantics by Ezra Keshet.- III. Quantificational Expressions.- 13. Almost et al.:Scalar Adverbs Revisited by Laurence R. Horn.- 14. Interpretations of Numerals and Structured Contexts by Jae-Il Yeom.- 15. Scales and Non-scales in (Hebrew) Child Language by Leah R. Paltiel-Gedalyovich & Jeannette Schaeffer.- 16. Negative Implicatum, Positive Implicatum by Mingya Liu.- 17. Focus, Contrast, and the Syntax-phonology Interface: The Case of French Cleft-sentences by Fatima Hamlaoui.- 18. Focus Particle Mo and Many/Few Implicatures on Numerals in Japanese by Chidori Nakamura.- IV. Questions and Speech Acts.- 19. Negated Polarity Questions as Denegations of Assertions by Manfred Krifka.- 20. Intonation of Wh- and Yes/No-question in Tokyo Japanese by Shinichiro Ishihara
A group of authors containing both leading authorities and young researchers addresses a number of issues of contrastiveness, polarity items and exhaustivity, quantificational expressions and the implicatures they generate, and the interaction between semantic operators and speech acts. The 19 contributions provide insights on the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. The volume’s reach is cross-linguistic and takes an unorthodox multi-paradigm approach. Languages studied range from European languages including Hungarian and Russian to East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean, with rich data on focus and discourse particles. This volume contributes to a major area of research in linguistics of the last decade, and provides novel, state-of-the-art views on some of the central topics in linguistic research, and will appeal to an audience of graduate and advanced undergraduate researchers in linguistics, philosophy of language and computational linguistics.