Focus is a kind of prominence in a sentence, usually marked by stress. Recent research has shown focus to be a locus of interaction between semantics and pragmatics. This chapter surveys some of this research and draws three morals. First, it provides an example of how the appearance that something is merely pragmatic can be deceptive. Second, the fact that something is realized in linguistic structure, such as logical form, does not preclude its semantics triggering extremely complex pragmatic processes. Third, the kind of context-dependence involved in focus is different from the familiar sort involved in, e.g., demonstratives.
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