Focus and Higher--Order Unification
Author: Claire Gardent and Michael Kohlhase
Editor:
Pulman has shown that Higher--Order Unification (HOU)
can be used to model the interpretation of focus. In this paper,
we extend the unification--based approach to cases which are
often seen as a test--bed for focus theory: utterances with
multiple focus operators and second occurrence expressions. We
then show that the resulting analysis favourably compares with
two prominent theories of focus (namely, Rooth's Alternative
Semantics and Krifka's Structured Meanings theory) in that it
correctly generates interpretations which these alternative
theories cannot yield. Finally, we discuss the formal properties
of the approach and argue that even though HOU need not
terminate, for the class of unification--problems dealt with in
this paper, HOU avoids this shortcoming and is in fact
computationally tractable.
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