ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between contextual notions like focus and affective conditioned inversion constructions such as those discussed in Klima and Liberman. It refers here to Subject Aux Inversion (SAI) after negative, or more generally, to use a term suggested by Klima, "affective" phrases. Liberman claims that Klima's analysis is inconsistent with the Thesis of Autonomy of Syntax, since the triggering feature for the application of SAI in these cases is the feature, which has semantic and not syntactic motivation. Liberman's prime contention with Klima's analysis was that the feature 'affective' received semantic and not syntactic motivation, thus violating the thesis of autonomous syntax. This approach gives a much better indication of how intonation breaks and Liberman's concept of assertability interact. Assertability is closely tied to intonation characteristics of the sentence and the intonation characteristics of sentences are strongly determined by stress factors of the particular cases involved.
