Contrastive Topic/Focus and Polarity in Discourse

The information structure categories of Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus are examined to see their crucial roles in polarity and (conventional) implicature generation and implicature suspension and their respective correlatins with PA and SN conjunctions on one hand and descriptive (denotational) negation and metalinguistic negation on the other. The underlying notion of concessivity involved in both Contrastive Topic and Concessive and thereby derived scalarity are exemplified. Their role in quantifiers and quantifier positions on the Square of Opposition are also investigated. So far the role of information structure has not been duly entertained in the semantics and/or pragmatics of implicature and polarity or rather in the “border war” (Horn in this volume) between the two. Korean, English and some crosslinguistic data are employed to seek general principles.

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