Ā-Movement and conventional implicatures: About the grammatical encoding of emphasis in German

The paper argues that the notion of emphasis has to be part of the grammar of German. It is demonstrated that in German, Ā-movement to the left periphery of a declarative clause is associated with a conventional implicature which encodes the emphatic interpretation of the moved item. The appropriate notion of emphasis is characterized and it is shown how it differs from a coarse concept of contrast. The paper also studies some IP-internal constructions whose elements’ interpretation has been assumed to be related to emphasis/contrast. It is argued that for the description of these phenomena, the standard notion of focus is adequate. The paper concludes that the syntactic marking of emphasis is a characteristic feature of Ā-movement.