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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.732-740
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 05 Aug 2023 Revised 27 Aug 2023 Accepted 16 Sep 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202309.732

Focus and Binding

Kwang-sup Kim
Professor, Dept. of English, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Tel: 031-330-4294 kwangsup@hufs.ac.kr


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study explores the possibility of providing a principled account for the effects of focus on binding. There is a consensus that focused phrases do not conform to Binding Condition C, but there is variation among speakers as to whether they do not obey Binding Condition B. The major claim made here is two-fold: (i) the suppression of Binding Condition C follows from the fact that focus can be syntactically realized as the head of a focus phrase, and (ii) the speaker variation with respect to the suppression of Binding Condition B arises from a Gricean implicature.

Keywords:

focus, binding condition A, binding condition B, Gricean implicature

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the research fund (2023) of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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