Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantic Content

This marks the outcome of a collaborative effort by leading scholars of two linguistic traditions, combining formal and functional approaches to semantics. The authors jointly explore the relationship between theories of topic-focus structure, principally as developed in the Prague School, and the tripartite structure approach to quantification and other focus-sensitive constructions which has emerged from work in formal semantics by Heim, Kamp, Rooth, Partee, Von Finkel, Krifka, andothers. The text provides an introduction to the most relevant aspects of both traditions, then proceeds through a dialogue between the two approaches, culminating in a synthesis in which a set of jointly developed hypotheses are examined and applied to a broad range of examples. The book should be of interest to researchers and advanced students in semantics, pragmatics, comparative English-Slavic structure, semantic typology, computational linguistics, and general linguistics theory.