Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University)
Title: On the roles of anaphoricity and questions in free focus
Time: Friday, February 14th, 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract: The sensitivity of focus to context has often been analyzed in terms of anaphoric relations between sentences and surrounding discourse. I will suggest that we abandon this anaphoric view. Instead of anaphoric felicity conditions, I propose that focus leads to infelicity only indirectly, when the processes that it feeds — in particular, exhaustification and question formation —- make an inappropriate contribution to discourse. I outline such an account, incorporating insights from Büring (2019) and Fox (2019). A challenge to this account comes from cases where anaphoricity seems needed either to block deaccenting that would be licensed by a question or to allow local deaccenting that is not warranted by a question. Such cases appear to support recent anaphoric proposals such as Schwarzschild (2020) and Goodhue (2022). I argue that this potential motivation for anaphoricity is only apparent and that where anaphoric conditions on focus are not inert they are in fact harmful.