Recent work in formal semantics argues that the interpretation of a number of logico-semantic operators is crucially defined in function of the traditional focus-ground partition. For this proposal to hold, one needs to assume that sentences with more than one of these operators contain multiple focus-ground partitions in an overlapping or recursive fashion. This paper shows that such an assumption is unwarranted. A careful analysis of the English facts and a contrastive look at languages that realize focus-ground syntactically, like Catalan, reveal that not all accented constituents are foci in a focus ground partition but that operators can nevertheless associate with them.
Vallduví, Enric and Ron Zacharski. 1994. Accenting phenomena, association with focus, and the recursiveness of focus-ground. Paper presented at the Ninth Amsterdam Colloquium. (pdf).