An inquisitive stroll in commitment spaces

The target article by Kamali and Krifka proposes a novel theory of focus and contrastive topic within the framework of Commitment Space Semantics. The key intuitions are similar to some prominent ideas discussed in the literature. Focus in an utterance> signals that the discourse state it updates involves an open question that is congruent to >, as chiefly advocated in Roberts (1996) and Beaver and Clark (2008). Contrastive topic signals that there are additional open questions of a certain type in discourse, as suggested, e. g. in Büring (2003). However, the theory is ontologically more appealing than its competitors because it does not require complicated structures built from questions to explicate notions of information structure such as sets of questions and entire trees of questions; entities whose ontological and logical properties are little understood. Moreover, the way the compositional system is set up is such that all important aspects of the Turkish data (which widely transpose to other discourse-configurational languages such as Hungarian) appear to fall in place very naturally and elegantly. Given my record on information structure, e. g. Velleman et al. (2012) or Onea (2016), I have no choice but to applaud the main ideas of the paper. In fact, this would be an ideal point at which I could stop this comment, as I have nothing of substance to add to the applause. Instead, I ended up intrigued by the properties of the theoretical framework the authors outline in the target article. In the continuation of this paper, I present the insights that I gathered. In particular, in Section 1, I suggest a simpler notation for Commitment Space Semantics that I dub Alternative Commitment Space Semantics (not because it is another theory, but because we need a name for the notational variant). The point of this exercise is to allow simpler comparison to other, more familiar frameworks. In Section 2, I briefly compare Commitment Space Semantics to a particular implementation of Inquisitive Semantics as a framework to represent discourse updates, questions and focus as suggested in Onea (2016). Finally, in Section 3, I make a small observation about the way focus-congruence works in commitment space semantics as compared to Alternative Semantics (Hamblin 1973; Rooth 1992) and question based discourse models following Roberts (1996).