Semantics circle: On the roles of anaphoricity and questions in free focus

Abstract

The sensitivity of focus to context has often been analyzed in terms of focus-based anaphoric relations between sentences and surrounding discourse. In this talk 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 semantic processes that it feeds --- in particular,  exhaustification and question formation --- make an inappropriate contribution to discourse. I outline such an account, in line with Roberts (1996) and incorporating recent insights from Büring (2019) and Fox (2019). This account, which I motivate on conceptual grounds, has no anaphoric conditions on focus placement and has only an economy condition as a potential felicity condition on focus. However, there are cases where the fine control offered by 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), Wagner (2020), and Goodhue (2022). I argue that this potential motivation for anaphoricity is only apparent and that to the extent that anaphoric conditions on focus from the literature are not inert they are in fact harmful.