Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the effects of deaccenting--the removal of phonological accent from a constituent--on interpretation. In general, deaccenting of an element is possible only if that element is salient in the discourse context. Salience alone, however, is not a sufficient condition for deaccenting. ;I propose that deaccenting plays a role in identifying the focus-related topic of a sentence, where it is a necessary condition for a sentence to be felicitous in a given context that the focus-related topic of that sentence be instantiated in the context. The focus-related topic of a sentence is generated by replacing all focused constituents by variables and combining the resulting structure so as to end up with the smallest structure within which all properties of the remaining lexical elements are satisfied. The resulting structure will be instantiated in a context if there is another element in the context with which it is non-distinct, where variables count as non-distinct from other elements of the same semantic type. ;The felicity or infelicity of a sentence in a larger discourse context is based upon the focus structure of the sentence and the composition of the context. While the analysis of this phenomenon is of some interest by itself, even more important is the use to which the analysis can be put in accounting for certain phenomena typically associated with VP deletion. Since Sag and Williams , it has standardly been assumed that restrictions on pronominal interpretations in VP deletion contexts are to be explained in terms of the mechanism that assigns an interpretation to an empty VP. However, we find that identical restrictions appear in contexts in which a VP has been deaccented but not deleted