ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several proposals made within the framework regarding concepts such as focus and presupposition. It examines early proposals for the analysis of focus within the interpretive theory of grammar, specifically those made in Chomsky and Jackendoff. The framework developed in both articles is essentially the same. The central assumption of the framework is that focus and presupposition are a necessary part of semantic representation. The chapter argues that this assumption is unmotivated, and presents a suggestion for incorporating presuppositions into a more comprehensive theory of language use. The notion 'presupposition' can effectively be subsumed under the notion 'conventional implicature'. Focus and presupposition are described as elements of grammatical theory by Chomsky. The main thrust of his initial arguments is that focus is determined on categories at surface structure, thereby ruling out a theory in which focus is determined at deep structure, either on the basis of clefted structures, or on the basis of more abstract deep structures.
