Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2020 / Verum focus is verum, not focus: Cross-linguistic evidence

Verum focus is verum, not focus: Cross-linguistic evidence

Paper · 2020 · Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Hartmann and Lisa Matthewson

Summary

The paper asks whether so-called "verum focus" (the stress on an auxiliary that insists a proposition is true, e.g. Peter DID kick the dog) really involves focus. The authors contrast two analyses. The focus accent thesis (Fat), going back to Höhle (1992), treats the accent as ordinary alternative focus on a hidden verum predicate. The lexical operator thesis (Lot) treats verum as a lexical conversational operator that links the proposition to a question under discussion. German and English data alone can barely separate the two, so the authors derive explicit, contrasting predictions and test them on fieldwork data from the Chadic languages Bura and South Marghi and the Tsimshianic language Gitksan, with a short look at Kwak'wala. In none of the fieldwork languages is verum expressed the same way as ordinary focus. Patterns of co-occurrence and of verum's semantic contribution also lean toward the Lot. The authors therefore argue that the label "verum focus" should be dropped, because the resemblance to focus is superficial and the label may hide verum strategies in non-European languages.

Key points

  • Two analyses are compared. Under the Fat, the accent is focus marking on a covert verum predicate, modeled as an identity function on propositions (λpλw.p(w)). Under the Lot, verum is a lexical operator connected to the QUD, an approach developed by Romero and Han (2004), Gutzmann and Castroviejo Miró (2011), and Repp (2013).
  • Three predictions are tested, with weak and strong versions of the Fat:
    • (P1) verum and focus share the same realization;
    • (P2) verum–focus co-occurrence correlates with whether multiple foci are allowed;
    • (P3) verum is obligatory.
  • Data sources:
    • Bura (about 250,000 speakers, Garkida variety);
    • South Marghi (about 166,000 speakers, largely undescribed);
    • Gitksan (about 500 fluent speakers, three dialects);
    • Kwak'wala (from Littell 2016).
  • Main finding: in Bura, South Marghi and Gitksan, verum marking differs from the marking of ordinary alternative focus. Overall the results favor the Lot over the Fat.
  • New terminology: verum marking for the observable phenomenon, verum accent for the German/English stress pattern, and verum for the concept itself.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When two theories fit the familiar data equally well, write out where their predictions diverge and test each divergence in data where they can actually differ.
  • I2. Keep separate names for the surface form, the language-specific realization, and the underlying concept, so that a superficial resemblance does not decide the analysis.
  • I3. Verum can be modeled as a move that relates a proposition to the current question under discussion, rather than as a truth operator that adds nothing.
  • I4. A diagnostic for whether two labels belong to one category: if they were one category, limits on multiple instances should govern their co-occurrence.
  • I5. An operator posited in every sentence that is semantically vacuous unless marked is a suspicious design, because the effect really comes from the marking.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): when two witness parsers or repair rules disagree, list the inputs where their outputs must differ and use those as targeted negative controls instead of aggregate scores.
  • I2 (frames): tag emphatic do/stressed auxiliaries as a verum marker in prag, distinct from contrastive focus, even when both appear as the same token-level cue.
  • I3 (frames): treat an emphatic DID as confirming a disputed proposition, linking it to the earlier doubt or denial in the dialogue, which supports speech-act and implicature labels.
  • I4 (tree): when deciding whether to merge two constructions during UD dialect conversion, check whether their co-occurrence behavior matches what a single shared label would predict.
  • I5 (world): avoid adding vacuous default nodes to the text world, and record a verum/emphasis state only when the text overtly marks it.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of British ColumbiaVancouver · Canada46 works · 33,673 citations🎓Goethe University FrankfurtFrankfurt am Main · Germany13 works · 349 citations🎓University of CologneCologne · Germany5 works · 353 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 works

Cite

Cite as Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Hartmann and Lisa Matthewson. 2020. Verum focus is verum, not focus: Cross-linguistic evidence. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.347

@article{gutzmann2020verum,
  title = {{Verum focus is verum, not focus: Cross-linguistic evidence}},
  author = {Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Hartmann and Lisa Matthewson},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.347},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.347}
}

References

55 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Beck, Sigrid & Hotze Rullmann. 1999. A flexible approach to exhaustivity in questions. Natural Language Semantics 7. 249–298. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:100837 3224343 Bicevskis, Katie, Henry Davis & Lisa Matthewson. 2017. Quantification in Gitksan. In Denis Paperno & Edward Keenan (eds.), Handbook of quantification in natural languages. Volume II, 281–382. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44330-0_6 ↗
  2. Breitbarth, Anne, Karen De Clercq & Liliane Haegeman (eds.). 2013. Polarity emphasis: distribution and locus of licensing. Vol. 128. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013. 02.004 Brown, Colin. 2014. A quick look at wh-indefinites in Gitksan. Ms. McGill University. ↗
  3. Büring, Daniel. 1997. The meaning of topic and focus: The 59th street bridge accent (Routledge Studies in German Linguistics 3). London: Routledge. find
  4. Büring, Daniel. 2003. On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26. 511–545. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025887707652 ↗
  5. Büring, Daniel. 2006. Intonation und Informationsstruktur: Grammatik und darüber hinaus. In Hardarik Blühdorn, Eva Breindl & Ulrich Hermann Waßner (eds.), Text — Verstehen, 144–163. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. find
  6. Davis, Christopher & Elin McCready. 2016. Expressives in questions. Proceedings of SALT 26. 1119–1138. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v26i0.3878 ↗
  7. Davis, Henry. 2018. Only connect! Determiners, case and agreement in Tsimshianic. International Journal of American Linguistics 84. 471–511. DOI: https://doi.org/10. 1086/698854 Davis, Henry & Jason Brown. 2011. On A′-dependencies in Gitksan. UBC Working Papers in Linguistics 30. 43–80. ↗
  8. Dunlop, Britt, Suzanne Gessner, Tracey Herbert & Aliana Parker. 2018. Report on the status of B.C. First Nations languages. Brentwood Bay, B.C.: First Peoples’ Cultural Council. find
  9. Farkas, Donka F. & Floris Roelofsen. 2015. Polarity particle responses as a window onto the interpretation of questions and assertions. Language 91. 359–414. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2015.0017 Farkas, Donka F. & Kim B. Bruce. 2010. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27(1). 81–118. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffp010 ↗
  10. Féry, Caroline & Vieri Samek-Lodovici. 2006. Focus projection and prosodic prominence in nested foci. Language 82. 131–150. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2006.0031 ↗
  11. Gutzmann, Daniel. 2010. Betonte Modalpartikeln und Verumfokus. In Elke Hentschel & Theo Harden (eds.), 40 Jahre Partikelforschung, 119–138. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. find
  12. Gutzmann, Daniel. 2012. Verum – Fokus – Verum-Fokus? Fokus-basierte und lexikalische Ansätze. In Hardarik Blühdorn & Horst Lohnstein (eds.), Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation, 67–103. Hamburg: Buske. find
  13. Gutzmann, Daniel. 2015. Use-conditional meaning: Studies in multidimensional semantics (Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics 6). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198723820.001.0001 ↗
  14. Gutzmann, Daniel & Elena Castroviejo Miró. 2011. The dimensions of verum. In Olivier Bonami & Patricia Cabredo-Hofherr (eds.), 8. 143–165. find
  15. Hamblin, Charles L. 1958. Questions. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 36(3). 159–168. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00048405885200211 ↗
  16. Hamblin, Charles L. 1973. Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language, 10(41–53). find
  17. Hartmann, Katharina. 2013. Verum intervention effects in Chadic languages. Lingua 136. 103–124. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.008 ↗
  18. Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2012. Focus marking in Bura: Semantic uniformity matches syntactic heterogeneity. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30(4). 1061–1108. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9174-4 ↗
  19. Hartmann, Katharina, Peggy Jacob & Malte Zimmermann. 2008. Asymmetric focus marking in Bura. Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 10. 45–92. find
  20. Heim, Irene. 1994. Interrogative semantics and Karttunen’s semantics for know. Proceedings of IATL 1, 128–144. find
  21. Hoffmann, Carl Friedrich. 1955. Untersuchungen zur Struktur und sprachlichen Stellung des Bura. Universität Hamburg dissertation. find
  22. Hoffmann, Carl Friedrich. 1963. A grammar of the Margi language. London: Oxford University Press for International African Institute. find
  23. Höhle, Tilman N. 1992. Über Verum-Fokus im Deutschen. In Joachim Jacobs (ed.), Informationsstruktur und Grammatik, 112–141. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-12176-3_5 Hunt, Katharine. 1993. Clause structure, agreement, and case in Gitksan. University of B ritish Columbia dissertation. ↗
  24. Hyman, Larry M. & John R. Watters. 1984. Auxiliary focus. Studies in African Linguistics 15(3). 233–273. find
  25. Karttunen, Lauri. 1977. The syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 1. 3–44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00351935 ↗
  26. Katz, Jonah & Elisabeth Selkirk. 2011. Contrastive focus vs. discourse-new: Evidence from phonetic prominence in English. Language 87(4). 771–816. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2011.0076 ↗
  27. Kratzer, Angelika. 2004. Interpreting focus: Presupposed or expressive meanings? A comment on Geurts and van der Sandt. Theoretical Linguistics 30(1). 123–136. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/thli.2004.002 Kratzer, Angelika & Elisabeth Selkirk. 2009. Distinguishing contrastive, new and given information. Talk given at the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning. September 17, 2009. Barcelona. ↗
  28. Krifka, Manfred. 1992. A compositional semantics for multiple focus constructions. In Joachim Jacobs (ed.), Informationsstruktur und Grammatik (Linguistische Berichte Sonderhefte), 17–53. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-12176-3_2 Krifka, Manfred. 2001. For a structured meaning account of questions and answers. In Caroline Féry & Wolfgang Sternefeld (eds.), Audiatur vox sapientia: A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow (studia grammatica 52), 287–319. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. ↗
  29. Littell, Patrick William. 2016. Focus, predication, and polarity in Kwak’wala. University of British Columbia dissertation. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/57609. ↗
  30. Lohnstein, Horst. 2012. Verumfokus – Satzmodus – Wahrheit. In Hardarik Blühdorn & Horst Lohnstein (eds.), Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation, 31–66. Hamburg: Buske. find
  31. Lohnstein, Horst. 2016. Verum focus. In Caroline Féry & Shinishiro Ishihara (eds.), The Oxford handbook of information structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.33 Matthewson, Lisa, Li-Anne Ko, Sandy Park & Raiane Salles. 2017. Micro-variation in the pragmatics of verum. Talk given at the Cross–Linguistics Pragmatics Workshop. Berlin: Leibniz-Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS). January 27, 2017. ↗
  32. Neeleman, Ad & Kriszta Szendroi. 2004. Superman sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 35. 149– 159. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2004.35.1.149 ↗
  33. Onea, Edgar. 2016. Potential questions at the semantics-pragmatics interface (Current Research in the Semantics Pragmatics-Interface (CRiSPI) 33). Leiden: Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004217935 Onea, Edgar & Malte Zimmermann. 2019. Questions in discourse: An overview. In Klaus von Heusinger, Malte Zimmermann & Edgar Onea (eds.), Questions in discourse: Volume 1: Semantics. Leiden: Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004378322_002 ↗
  34. Potts, Christopher. 2004. Lexicalized intonational meaning. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers (UMOP) 30. 129–146. http://www.stanford.edu/~cgpotts/papers/ potts-umop30.pdf. ↗
  35. Potts, Christopher. 2005. The logic of conventional implicature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  36. Potts, Christopher. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33(2). 165– 197. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/TL.2007.011 ↗
  37. Repp, Sophie. 2013. Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and verum. In Daniel Gutzmann & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.), Beyond expressives: Explorations in use-conditional meaning, 231–274. Leiden: Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004183988_008 Rigsby, Bruce. 1986. Gitksan grammar. Unpublished manuscript. Roberts, Craige. 1996/1998. Information structure. Towards an integrated theory of formal pragmatics. In Jae-Hak Yoon & Andreas Kathol (eds.), OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 49: Papers in Semantics, 91–136. Revised version, 1998. Columbus, Ohio. http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~croberts/infostr.pdf. ↗
  38. Rochemont, Michael. 2013. Discourse new, F-marking, and normal stress. Lingua 136. 38–62. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.016 ↗
  39. Roelofsen, Floris & S. van Gool. 2010. Disjunctive questions, intonation and highlighting. In M. Aloni, H. Bastiaanse, T. de Jager & K. Schulz (eds.), Logic, language and meaning: Selected papers from the seventeenth Amsterdam Colloquium, 384–394. Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14287-1_39 ↗
  40. Romero, Maribel. 2005. Two approaches to biased yes/no questions. Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL). 352–360. http://www.lin-gref.com/cpp/wccfl/24/paper1241.pdf. ↗
  41. Romero, Maribel. 2015. High negation in subjunctive conditionals and polar questions. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 19. 499–516. find
  42. Romero, Maribel & Chunghye Han. 2004. On negative yes/no questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 27. 609–658. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:LING.0000033850.15705.94 ↗
  43. Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1(1). 75–116. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02342617 ↗
  44. Schmitz, Hans-Christian. 2008. Accentuation and interpretation (Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language, and Cognition). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. find
  45. Schwarz, Anne. 2010. Verb-and-predication focus marking in Gur. In Ines Fiedler & Anne Schwarz (eds.), The expression of information structure. A documentation of its diversity across Africa, 287–314. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ tsl.91.11sch Schwarzschild, Roger. 1999. GIVENness, AvoidF, and other constraints on the placement of accent. Natural Language Semantics 7(2). 141–177. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/ A:1008370902407 Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2008. Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “discourse-new”. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55(3–4). 1–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/ ALing.55.2008.3-4.8 Stalnaker, Robert. 1978. Assertion. In Peter Cole (ed.), Pragmatics (Syntax and Semantics 9), 315–332. New York: Academic Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368873_013 ↗
  46. Stommel, Hildegard. 2012. Verum-Fokus als Kontrast-Fokus. In Hardarik Blühdorn & Horst Lohnstein (eds.), Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation, 15–29. Hamburg: Buske. find
  47. Sudhoff, Stefan. 2012. Negation der Negation – Verumfokus und die niederländische Polaritätspartikel wel. In Hardarik Blühdorn & Horst Lohnstein (eds.), Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation, 105–136. Hamburg: Buske. find
  48. Uegaki, Wataru. 2019. The semantics of question-embedding predicates. Language and Linguistics Compass 13(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12308 ↗
  49. Zimmermann, Malte. 2014. Was glaubt EDE, wer der Mörder ist? On D-trees, embedded foci, and indirect scope marking. In Daniel Gutzmann, Jan Köpping & Cécile Meier (eds.), Approaches to meaning: Composition, values, and interpretation, 306–340. Leiden: Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004279377_014 ↗
  50. Zimmermann, Malte. 2016. Predicate focus. In Caroline Féry & Shinishiro Ishihara (eds.), The Oxford handbook of information structure, 314–335. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.26 ↗
  51. Zimmermann, Malte & Daniel Hole. 2008. Predicate focus, verum focus, verb focus: Similarities and difference. Talk at the Potsdam-London IS Meeting. 12.12.2008. find
  52. How to cite this article: Gutzmann, Daniel, Katharina Hartmann and Lisa Matthewson. 2020. Verum focus is verum, not focus: Cross-linguistic evidence. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 51. 1–48. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ gjgl.347 ↗
  53. Submitted: 17 February 2017 find
  54. Accepted: 26 December 2019 find
  55. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/gutzmann-2020-verum-focus-is-verum-not/