A focus semantics for echo questions

In: Ágnes Bende-Farkas and Arndt Riester (eds.), Workshop on Information Structure in Context, pp. 98–107. IMS, University of Stuttgart, 2002. Echo questions are interpreted through focus semantics. Echo questions must be entailed by previous discourse; focus is therefore not needed to mark givenness, and instead it is used to compute the question denotation: the questioned element, marked with a pitch accent, is a focus constituent, and the alternative set of the echo question is its question denotation, i.e. the set of possible answers. The focus strategy exempts echo questions from locality restrictions (“islands”), allows echo questions on parts of words, and allows second-order echo questions which denote sets of questions.