What Counts: Focus and Quantification (review)

This book, a substantially revised version of the author’s dissertation, explores how focus affects meaning and the quantificational structure of a sentence. Herburger claims that a neo-Davidsonian stance—that is, a structured Davidsonian decomposition—can account for the truth-conditional and pragmatic effects of focus.

There are five chapters in the book. Ch. 1, ‘Overview and background’ (1–10), begins by demonstrating how focus changes the interpretation of a sentence. Next, various arguments justifying the view that sentences are descriptions of events are discussed, starting with Donald Davidson’s classical argument that sentences are descriptions of events and that adverbs are direct predicates of events, and followed by more recent arguments for treating the arguments of the verbs as forming their own conjuncts. H goes beyond Davidson’s original arguments and assumes even more decompositions, suggesting that arguments of a verb should also be interpreted as separate conjuncts.

In Ch. 2, ‘Negated and non-negated sentences’ (11–58), H concentrates on focus and its effect on quantification, assuming that every sentence has a syntactically represented adverbial quantifier. Sometimes it is overtly realized, but most often it is tacit. The focus, she claims, imposes a structure on the event quantification in the following way: ‘All the nonfocused material in the scope of the event quantifier Q also restricts Q’ (18). She calls this ‘structured Davidsonian decomposition’. The interaction between focus and negation is discussed elaborately within this framework. Negation remains a univocal propositional operator, and it is proposed that where ‘structure’ is not overtly manifested, LF should disambiguate scope. Her analysis does not rely on the notion of semantic presupposition, which, according to H, cannot be phrased in terms of entailment.

In Ch. 3, ‘Adverbial quantifiers’ (59–84), H examines those quantifiers over events which are realized overtly, viz. usually, always, rarely, never, sometimes, and the like, and which are determiner-like in many respects. After showing how the quantificational structure of adverbs is affected by focus, H discusses the quantificational variability effect (QVE) exhibited by indefinite noun phrases, arguing that QVE depends on the quantificational structure of adverbs, which in turn varies with the assignment of focus.

Ch. 4, ‘Only and even’ (85–122), addresses various questions regarding the semantics of these two quantifiers. Just like adverbial quantifiers and weak determiners, only and even are quantifiers whose quantificational structure is highly sensitive to focus. The analysis once again relies heavily on the structuring effect of focus. A new component of the analysis is Q-raising. Although only has various interpretations and its syntactic category is not obvious, quantificational only must always have a focused element in its c-command domain. This analysis is extended to only’s partner even.

Ch. 5, ‘Determiners’ (123–39), investigates how focus affects the interpretation of determiners, showing that determiners sometimes pattern with only and even. Determiners behave like adverbial quantifiers in that the NP that is their internal argument does not have to be interpreted as their restriction. Rather, their restriction and scope depend only on focus. In line with the analysis of only and even, it is proposed that these ‘focus affected’ readings involve Q-raising.