Focus, uniqueness and soft presupposition triggers

Abstract

Von Heusinger (2007) shows that the definite article's uniqueness presupposition causes problems in a standard account of focus alternatives. He solves this problem by proposing a new lexical entry for the definite article, a solution adopted by Riester and Kamp (2010). This paper shows that the observed behavior is not limited to the definite article, making such a solution undesirable. Our argument is based on two observations: (1) The definite article is a soft presupposition trigger with respect to uniqueness and (2) soft presupposition triggers have a special behavior in focus alternatives. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.