Focus on what’s not at issue: gestures, presuppositions, appositives under contrastive focus

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to systematically investigate how contrastive focus interacts
with various types of not-at-issue content (co-speech and post-speech gestures, lexical presuppositions,
and appositives). I look, in particular, at when focus forces at-issue interpretations
of typically not-at-issue content, when it does not, and when such at-issue interpretations are
impossible even to satisfy focus-related requirements. I conclude that the main factors affecting
how a given type of content aligns along these dimensions are its prosodic (in)dependence and
level of attachment in the syntax. The two factors also interact in a non-trivial way, in particular
for gestures, which I use as a basis for an analysis of gestures that does not assume that their
temporal alignment directly determines their semantics (contra Ebert and Ebert, 2014; Ebert,
2017; Schlenker, 2018), but instead relies on syntax/semantics and syntax/prosody interaction.
Keywords: focus, not-at-issue content, gestures, presuppositions, appositives.