Exhaustivity of focus and anti-exhaustivity of contrastive topic

Abstract

Themain concept that guides through this commentary is exhaustivity associated with focus. Although this issue is not central to the authors’ analysis, I believe that it leads to intriguing and puzzling questions that are worth considering. In their discussion in 4.3, Kamali and Krifka (henceforth, K & K) analyze focus exhaustivity by using the notion of ‘denegation’, the speech act version of negation. Informally speaking, the denegation of a speech act a is the refraining from engaging a. What is not clear to me is whether denegation is strong enough to guarantee the exhaustivity effect of focus. To illustrate this point, let us compare the two focalization strategies: focus and contrastive topic.