Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantic Content

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This marks the outcome of an unusual collaborative effort by leading scholars of two distinguished linguistic traditions, combining formal and functional approaches to semantics. Eva Hajicova and Petr Sgall are the leaders of the most ‘formal’ branch of the contemporary functional Prague School tradition, while Barbara H. Partee is one of the founders of formal semantics and one of its leading contributors. In this work the authors jointly explore the relationship between theories of topic-focus structure, principally as developed in the Prague School, and the tripartite structure approach to quantification and other focus-sensitive constructions which has emerged from work in formal semantics by Heim, Kamp, Rooth, Partee, Von Finkel, Krifka, and others. The book provides a brief introduction to the most relevant aspects of both traditions, then proceeds through a dialogue between the two approaches, culminating in a synthesis in which a set of jointly developed hypotheses are examined and applied to a broad range of examples. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in semantics, pragmatics, comparative English-Slavic structure, semantic typology, computational linguistics, and general linguistics theory.