Should I move for focus or for contrastive topic?

Abstract

Kamali and Krifka (“K&K”) propose an analysis of focus and contrastive topic in declaratives and in questions, based on data from Turkish, within the framework of commitment space semantics (Krifka 2015). Turkish is relevant because focus and contrastive topic are marked differently from one another in polar questions: prosodically and with a segmental morpheme -mI for focus, only prosodically for contrastive topic (Kamali and Büring 2011). And while focus and contrastive topic have been studied in detail in declaratives, they have received less attention in other types of sentences. This is a gap that K&K propose to fill. The task of accounting for the morphophonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of focus and contrastive topic is by no means an easy challenge and the authors are able to cover the empirical ground that they set out to cover, and they do so in a technically elegant way (albeit one with a learning curve). This commentary is thereby less of a rebuttal than an extension of K&K’s system to novel cases and an exploration of the consequences of doing so. I concentrate on an asymmetry in K&K’s treatment of focus and contrastive topic, which is that the former is handled in situ, while the latter involves movement. The first observation that I make is that expressions of many syntactic categories and semantic types may be contrastive topic marked (adjectives, sentences, etc.). All such expressions have to be moved, and the resulting structures, interpreted. While this is technically feasible, not all contrastive topic marked expressions move, and moreover, we would need a very flexible semantics for contrastive topic for the composition to work out. The second question that I raise is whether this asymmetry has to be that way, especially given evidence (and K&K’s assumptions) that it might rather be contrastive topic that should be treated in situ in Turkish, and focus through movement. Indeed, contrastive topic