Strategies of inquiry: Focus and contrastive topic in polar questions

The target paper by Beste Kamali and Manfred Krifka, “Focus and contrastive topic in questions and answers, with particular reference to Turkish”, draws a fundamental distinction between focus and contrastive topic: Whereas focus introduces disjunctive alternatives as a restriction on the input context, contrastive topic introduces conjunctive alternatives as a restriction on the input context. For instance, a polar question with focus like (1a) presupposes the disjoined question in (1b). In Commitment Space Semantics, the disjoined polar question is equivalent to a constituent question whose wh-constituent triggers disjunctive alternatives.