Taisuke Nishigauchi: Short Answers as Focus

by Taisuke Nishigauchi

In this article the nature of short answers is examined. On the analysis of this work, short answers are derived from the result of focus movement, followed by deletion of everything except the focus.

Various aspects of connectivity associated with short answers are captured in terms of focus movement. This analysis also shows that the derivation of short answers involve ellipsis. On the other hand, not all short answers exhibit properties related with movement and ellipsis: We show that short answers have another source, which we will call the bare-copular frame. However, functional answers and pair-list answers cannot be derived from the latter source and exhibit connectivity and diagnostics of ellipsis.