Some analytical possibilities- Blaming focus

One natural analytical intuition that quickly arises with respect to these facts – particularly in their adverbial form – is that this phenomenon is ultimately an effect of focus: focused modifiers are restrictive; non-focused ones are nonrestrictive (Gobbel 2004).

Certainly, there seems to be a connection here, and prosodic considerations more generally seem to be relevant. But this kind of explanation, at least in its most obvious form, doesn’t seem to be sufficient on its own to explain the contrasts.

Wrong predictions One difficulty is that no matter how one manipulates focus in the betting example with a postverbal adverb in (19), I lose:¹

If the restrictive reading were only possible when the adverb is focused, it would be necessary to suppose that easily is in fact focused in all of these examples, and indeed that it is not possible not to focus it in this position. This seems undesirable.

Some adjectives require focus? Perhaps what’s happening here, as Gobbel’s (2004) approach might imply, is that phrasal prosody is somehow directly driving the placement of focus. But there does not appear to be any phonological difference between English and Spanish that would suffice to achieve this

Some adjectives forbid focus? An account that relies entirely on focus would require that prenominal adjectives in Spanish and Italian generally cannot be focused, since these are generally nonrestrictive. Such a uniformban would be quite odd, and would in itself require some kind of explanation.²

Feels like more than focus A final argument against a purely focus-based account is simply that these effects involve intuitions that don’t seem to be the ones ordinarily evoked by focus. These effects are typically described using terms like “nonrestrictive,” “double assertion” (Peterson 1997), or “parenthetical,” and they are naturally paraphrased using incidentally or by the way. This is not how expressions that simply lack focus are normally described. So on these grounds too, much more would have to be said. Whatever role focus ought to play in the analysis, then, it seems likely that it could not be a substitute for some independent assumptions about how nonrestrictive meaning is computed.

1 Barbara Abbott (p.c.) points out that this argument is built around contrastive focus, which may not be the variety of focus that would be involved here – and indeed perhaps distinguishing more finely among different varieties of focus might diminish the force of the other arguments presented below as well. I leave this to future research.

2Certainly, it is not clear that this result would follow purely from facts about the distribution of phrasal stress, for example.