A group of authors containing both leading authorities and young researchers addresses a number of issues of contrastiveness, polarity items and exhaustivity, quantificational expressions and the implicatures they generate, and the interaction between semantic operators and speech acts. The 19 contributions provide insights on the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. The volume's reach is cross-linguistic and takes an unorthodox multi-paradigm approach. Languages studied range from European languages including Hungarian and Russian to East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean, with rich data on focus and discourse particles. This volume contributes to a major area of research in linguistics of the last decade, and provides novel, state-of-the-art views on some of the central topics in linguistic research, and will appeal to an audience of graduate and advanced undergraduate researchers in linguistics, philosophy of language and computational linguistics.

I. Information Structure and Contrastiveness.- 1. Contrastive Topic, Contrastive Focus, Alternatives and Scalar Implicatures.- 2. Partition Semantics and Pragmatics of Contrastive Topic.- 3. Deriving the Properties of Structural Focus.- 4. Topic, Focus, and Exhaustive Interpretation.- 5. The Interpretation of a "contrast-marking" Particle.- 6. Scalar Implicatures, Presuppositions, and Discourse Particles: Colloquial Russian -to, ze, and ved' in Combination.-Rusanova.- II. Polarity, Alternatives, Exhaustivity and Implicatures.- 7. Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese.- 8. Free Choiceness without Domain-widening.- 9. Expletive Negation and Polarity Alternatives.- 10. On the Distribution and the Semantics of the Korean Focus Particle -lato.- 11. Disjunction and Implicatures: Some Notes on Recent Developments.- 12. Scalar Implicatures with Alternative Semantics.- III. Quantificational Expressions.- 13. Almost et al.: Scalar Adverbs Revisited.- 14. Interpretations of Numerals and Structured Contexts.- 15. Scales and Non-scales in (Hebrew) Child Language.- 16. Negative Implicatum, Positive Implicatum.- 17. Focus, Contrast, and the Syntax-phonology Interface: The Case of French Cleft-sentences.- 18. Focus Particle Mo and Many/Few Implicatures on Numerals in Japanese.- IV. Questions and Speech Acts.- 19. Negated Polarity Questions as Denegations of Assertions.- 20. Intonation of Wh- and Yes/No-question in Tokyo Japanese.