A focus semantics for echo questions
Ron Artstein · 2002
Echo questions are interpreted through focus seman-tics. Echo questions must be entailed by previous dis-course; focus is therefore not needed to mark given-ness, and instead it is used to compute the question denotation: the questioned element, marked with a pitch accent, is a focus constituent, and the alterna-tive set of the echo question is its question denota-tion, i.e. the set of possible answers. The focus strat-egy exempts echo questions from locality restrictions (“islands”), allows echo questions on parts of words, and allows second-order echo questions which denote sets of questions. 1