Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics (Nov 2016)
On the interpretation of focus fronting in Romanian
Abstract
I discuss the semantics of a sub-type of focus fronting in Romanian, which is neither associated to focal particles nor mirative or exclamative. I show that this type is not “contrastive” in the sense of involving a closed set of contextually identifiable alternatives, as has been claimed in previous studies, and does not necessarily have a corrective import. The conditions this type is subject to are: (i) the fronted constituent is a true focus (in the sense of an element introducing alternatives in the interpretation, see Rooth 1992, Krifka 2008) and not just new information; (ii) an exhaustivity presupposition or implicature (described as rejection of all other alternatives) and an existential presupposition (one alternative is true) are introduced, in a way similar to English it-clefts, as discussed by Büring and Križ (2013). I further present some differences with respect to English clefts. Finally, I discuss the status of the negation that precedes a fronted focus, arguing for a sentential negation analysis.
