Focus and the semantics of desire predicates and directive verbs

In this dissertation, we investigate the semantics of attitude predicates in terms of how they interact with focus. We look at two kinds of focus data: minimal pairs where the focus structure of the complement varies ('Sofia wants to WORK on Saturday' vs. 'Sofia wants to work on SATURDAY'); and minimal pairs where one utterance in a sequence of utterances varies according to whether it has focus-marking ('Sofia wants to eat the chicken. Sofia wants to eat the beef.' vs. 'Sofia wants to eat the CHICKEN. Sofia wants to eat the beef.'). The goal is to provide an ordering semantics analysis for attitude predicates that accounts for such data. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).