On Wednesday Oct 29th Michael Wagner gave a colloquium talk at the University of Ottawa, titled Prosodic focus and syntactic alternative projection.
Abstract: Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and are taken to play a crucial role in explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, as well as constraining scalar implicatures and the alternatives seen by only and other focus-sensitive operators. This talk revisits uses of prosodic focus that appear to flag phonological contrasts (such as Títanic with stress on tí to contrast with Britannic, as reported in Ladd 2008). Closer scrutiny shows that they actually encode semantic contrasts between the meanings of phonologically contrasting words (cf. Artstein 2002). This rules out a purely phonological account of phonologically-motivated focus-marking, and constitutes a puzzle for Alternative Semantics. The data can be made sense of if prosodic focus introduces sets of alternative expressions (rather than alternative meanings), which then project in a pointwise way in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions, sometimes before these expressions receive their meaning. This analysis is further supported by evidence from focus marking within initialisms. A comparison with how alternatives in the domain of only are restricted suggests that the notions of “alternative” involved in prosodic focus and in “association with focus” do not coincide.