Exploring the focus-morphology interface: morpho-syntactic aspects of non prosodic focus: Selected Proceedings of the 2007 Mid American Linguistics Conference

This paper claims that a constraint-based theory (i.e, OT) can best account for the many manifestations of Focus in typologically diverse languages. We propose an interaction between Discourse Representation Theory (hereafter DRT) (Kamp, 1981; Kamp and Reyle, 1993) and Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004) to best account for these facts, maintaining that constraint-ranking is the best way to achieve a descriptive and explanatorily adequate analysis of natural data. In particular, we provide a novel sketch of a theoretical account of natural languages that mark Focus morphologically but not prosodically