On narrow focus in situ and ex situ in German and English

Abstract

This paper argues, against the position recently advocated by Fanselow & Lenertová (2011), that German has a functional phrase (FocP) in the clausal left periphery whose specifier position is dedicated to hosting a focus expression. It provides novel evidence that two sentences that are minimally different in that one has an in situ focus expression while the other has an ex situ (preposed) focus expression are different in semantically relevant ways in pre-spell-out syntax. An ex situ (identificational) focus expression E′ is semantically different from an otherwise identical in situ (informational) focus expression E in that the former employs the most complex and the latter the simplest semantic type that is available for E/E′ and licenses semantic composition by functional application. While such a difference in employment of semantic types for expressions does not result in a difference in truth conditions in most cases, it does have truth-conditional effects in some cases and focus-structural effects that prevent optionality between focus in situ and ex situ even without truth-conditional effects in still other cases. The paper discusses problems of applying the argumentation concerning German to English, but suggests that it holds for English as well.

Keywords

• syntax
• semantics
• focus
• topic
• german
• english