Open AccessVerum accent IS VERUM, but not always focus
Author(s) -
Cory Bill,
Todor Koev
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
proceedings of the linguistic society of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2473-8689
DOI - 10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4959
Subject(s) - stress (linguistics) , interrogative word , polarity (international relations) , focus (optics) , sentence , linguistics , pitch accent , psychology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , prosody , philosophy , physics , chemistry , biochemistry , optics , cell
This paper studies the occurrence of verum accent in declaratives and polar interrogatives. Verum accent exhibits two kinds of interpretational effect: (i) it requires an epistemic conflict across sentence types and (ii) it may also convey a negative speaker bias in polar interrogatives. We argue that the former effect is due to a presuppositional VERUM operator and that the latter effect arises from the possibility of said operator carrying polarity focus. Our proposal implies that verum accenting and polarity focus are two distinct phenomena that interact in interesting ways.