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Understanding focus: Pitch, placement and coherence

Paper · 2020 · Julian J Schlöder and Alex Lascarides

Summary

The paper argues that English prosodic focus (where the nuclear accent falls) cannot be analysed apart from the overall pitch contour. Some replies with identical accent placement are acceptable with one tune and odd with another. For example, "Nobody likes Michael" with stress on Michael works as a fall–rise reply to "Who likes Michael?" but fails with a plain fall. Using constructed examples recorded as audio and inspected in Praat, the authors show that established accounts reject replies that are actually acceptable. These accounts rely on question-answer congruence, contrasting alternatives or givenness, and some of them silently assume different contours for different examples.

Their proposal, formalised in SDRT, treats focus as a presupposition trigger whose content and resolution depend on the contour. An utterance is ruled out when the coherent resolution of its presupposition already entails what it asserts, because the asserted content is then not interesting. Otherwise the resolution can produce implicatures. The model covers more felicity judgements and implicatures than earlier formal accounts and derives them formally.

Key points

  • Only two contours are modelled. One is the falling contour (rise on the focal word, then a fall). The other is the fall–rise (fall, then a steep rise on the focal word, with a final rise). All data are constructed, and audio for each example is hosted at an OSF repository.
  • With a falling contour, the presupposition must be linked to the foreground by Continuation or Elaboration. With a fall–rise, the link must be Contrast, and the presupposition's modality is left open (true, false or possible).
  • The "interest test" makes a reply infelicitous if resolving its focus presupposition entails its proffered content. This is Bolinger's idea that obvious material cannot be focal, restated as "focal material cannot be presupposed."
  • Resolving the open modality toward maximal contrast yields "as-opposed-to" implicatures and corrections. An example is reading "I live in New York City" (fall–rise) as "not in Cleveland, but NYC." In SDRT, complete answers outrank partial ones during resolution.
  • The paper leaves several things aside: focus-sensitive operators like only, prenuclear accents, languages other than English, and the "I thought you knew" effect of the fall–rise.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Felicity is checked by asking whether the coherently resolved background already entails what the speaker asserts; if it does, the move adds nothing and is flagged as anomalous.
  • I2. Some semantic slots stay deliberately underspecified, such as whether a presupposed proposition is true, false or merely possible. They are fixed only by choosing the most coherent discourse attachment, with no extra lexical ambiguity added.
  • I3. Resolving an open element toward maximal contrast with the asserted content produces "X, as opposed to Y" implicatures and corrections of a question's presupposition.
  • I4. When choosing among interpretations, a full answer to the question under discussion is ranked above partial ones.
  • I5. The methodological warning is that judgements collected without annotating a relevant dimension (here, contour) can quietly mix incompatible assumptions and make a theory look wrong or right by accident.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): A speech-act layer could run the same entailment check against the presupposed part of a frame. This would mark redundant or uninformative utterances and trigger a search for an indirect reading instead.
  • I2 (world): Entity states could carry an unresolved modality tag that coherence reasoning settles later. This keeps every resolution step traceable rather than committing early.
  • I3 (frames): The implicature module could generate contrast alternatives this way. For example, it could read a reply as a correction when it denies what the question took for granted.
  • I4 (answer): QA readers on fables and tests could use this as an explicit, explainable tie-breaker when several candidate attachments of a sentence to a question are possible.
  • I5 (learn): Evaluation sets should record every factor that can flip a judgement, such as context or register, and include negative controls that vary only that factor.

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 EdinburghEdinburgh · United Kingdom255 works · 68,771 citations🎓University of AmsterdamAmsterdam · Netherlands89 works · 81,337 citations

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Julian J Schlöder and Alex Lascarides. 2020. Understanding focus: Pitch, placement and coherence. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.13.1

@article{schloder2020understanding,
  title = {{Understanding focus: Pitch, placement and coherence}},
  author = {Julian J Schlöder and Alex Lascarides},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.13.1},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.1}
}

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