WordNet is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current

More or less final version. To appear in Natural Language Semantics. According to the alternative semantics for focus, the semantic reflex of intonational focus is a second semantic value, which in the case of a sentence is a set of propositions. We examine a range of semantic and pragmatic applications of the theory, and extract a unitary principle specifying how the focus semantic value interacts with semantic and pragmatic processes. A strong version of the theory has the effect of making lexical or construction-specific stipulation of a focus-related effect in association with focus constructions impossible. Furthermore, while focus has a uniform import, the sources of meaning differences in association with focus are various.

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The paper proposes a theory relating syntax, semantics, and intonational prosody, and covering a wide range of English intonational tunes and their semantic interpretation in terms of focus and information structure. The theory is based on a version of combinatory categorial grammar which directly pairs phonological and logical forms without intermediary representational levels.

this paper as well as the competence and interests of its author. Rather, I shall look at just one feature: how subjects differ from nonsubjects in the text. More specifically, I shall investigate the differences between subjects and nonsubjects with respect to one formal phenomenon, definiteness, and one discourse phenomenon, the information-status of the entities that the subjects and nonsubjects represent.

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This dissertation examines the "free" word order or scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory. To overcome the problems raised in single-component analyses in explaining word order variation, I propose an `interface' approach in which the constraints from several different components of grammar participate, compete, and interact with one another. That is, various word orders are considered to be motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles of these languages. As the constraints from different modules of grammar are highly conflicting, I utilize Optimality Theory to demonstrate how the constraints interact and resolve conflicts among one another. In this approach, each scrambled variant, i.e. a sentence with a particular word order, is conceived of as the "optimal" output, which instantiates the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-contextual information given in the input....

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this paper, more specifically a subset of the inferences that correlate with the syntactic form of a sentence uttered. Beginning with the early functional syntax studies by Kuno, Bolinger, and others more than a decade ago, a good deal of research has been carried out that shows that particular syntactic forms correlate with particular non-truth-conditional inferences. Understandably, the work has been mostly descriptive in nature, more concerned with the necessary first steps of establishing what sorts of inferences may correlate with linguistic form than with finding general principles of such correlations. Thus the picture that one currently has is a very fragmented one, within a single language as well as cross-linguistically or universally. That is, it seems as though any syntactic form can in principle correlate with any understanding. This may of course be the case; however, one would like to investigate the possibility that there do exist general principles underlying such correlations, perhaps of a universal nature. In what follows, I shall very tentatively propose one possible universal generalization concerning syntactic form and non-truth-conditional understanding. And my tentativeness is real, not simply a nervously modest hedge: what I shall propose is rough hewn and requires deep crosslinguistic research, but, as I shall try to show, it is plausible on the basis of a sampling of the data and it provides an agenda for further research. 2. 'Information-packaging.'

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