Work

Verum, focus, and certainty

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: Verum Focus is known as a prosodic pattern that places stress on verbs or auxiliaries and conveys certainty in a statement’s truth value. Previous literature is conflicted as to whether the effect of certainty arrives from a covert ‘truth’ operator, and to what extent focus alternatives are involved in the process. I show that focus alternatives and covert operators are independent mechanisms in Verum Focus utterances, which jointly trigger an inference of speaker’s certainty through a scalar implicature.

Source: Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory

DOI: 10.3765/18cddt86

Author: Noa Bassel

Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: Israel Science Foundation

Award: G3958488290