• Language and Information
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.27-52
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• 2004

This paper attempts to define various notions involving focus and topic found in Korean and also employs phonetic measures to verify the plausibility of those notions that are theoretically argued for. This paper crucially relies on Prince (1981) for the notion of familiarity and its pragmatic significance, and adopts Rooth's (1985) notion of alternative set and utilizes it in the light of pragmatic interpretation. The basic idea of this paper is to decompose the notion alternative set into finer-grained components and to assign various levels of familiarity to those finer components, thereby helping define different kinds of focus and topic according to the properties of those sub-components.