Topic, Focus and the Logic of Language

Abstract

The terms topic and focus are used by many theoreticians, but they often mean different things. In the most usual informal sense, topic is what an utterance is about (as contrasted to comment), and focus is what is emphasized in the utterance (as contrasted to background). Let us consider how this intuition can be sharpened

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Dynamic predicate logic.Jeroen Groenendijk & Martin Stokhof - 1991 - Linguistics and Philosophy 14 (1):39-100.
Topic-Focus Articulation as Generalized Quantification.Jaroslav Peregrin - 1995 - In Peter Bosch & Rob van der Sandt (eds.), Focus and Natural Language Processing. Ibm Deutschland. pp. 49--57.

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