Towards a Taxonomy of Focus Types. The case of Information Foci and Contrastive Foci in Italian

This paper investigates the semantics of Information focus and Contrastive focus in Italian. Throughout the literature, there have been some recent attempts to show that they both have the same semantic representation at LF. After arguing against these theories, I propose a semantic model for the interpretation of Information Focus and Contrastive Focus, according to which the latter is a subtype of the former, specified for exhaustivity. The model aims to bring together the theoretical advantages of both Rooth’s theory for the interpretation of focus and Horvath’s proposal about the intervention of an exhaustivity operator in the derivation of Hungarian Contrastive Foci. The purported differences between Italian and Hungarian are explainedin terms of constraints on the type of objects which can enter in the domain of application of the exhaustivity operator.