The term Focus Dependency describes an important phenomenon at the syntax-semantics interface: Elided material can exhibit bound-variable-like behavior when its antecedent is a focussed phrase in the same sentence. In the past, focus dependency has been analyzed as actual binding or by means of copying. This paper presents a new account of focus dependency that relies on the syntactic idea of structure-sharing. Structure-sharing allows sub-phrases to be syntactically linked to more than one position of a phrase marker. The proposal better explains focus dependency than existing accounts considering data from sentence-boundedness, insensitivity to c-command, extraction from the focus-dependent material, and the formal link to the antecedent. It also achieves a theoretical unification with other phenomena where structure sharing has been made use of, specifically movement.
2020. AgainstTanglewoodby Focus Movement: A Reply to Erlewine and Kotek 2018. Linguistic Inquiry 51:3 ► pp. 579 ff.
Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka & Hadas Kotek
2018. Focus Association by Movement: Evidence from Tanglewood. Linguistic Inquiry 49:3 ► pp. 441 ff.
Citko, Barbara
2017. Right Node Raising. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition, ► pp. 1 ff.
Fӑlӑuş, Anamaria
2013. Introduction: Alternatives in Semantics and Pragmatics. In Alternatives in Semantics, ► pp. 1 ff.
Charlow, Simon
2012. Cross-Categorial Donkeys. In Logic, Language and Meaning [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7218], ► pp. 261 ff.
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