The Dimensions of VERUM

In this paper we study the semantics of so-called verum focus from the point of view of a multi-dimensional semantic model. As coined by Höhle (1992), verum focus is non-contrastive focus on the verb or a complementizer located in C in German, and it is a way of realizing the corresponding operator VERUM. In the small amount of previous literature, VERUM has been treated as a pure semantic operator. In contrast, we show that those one-dimensional treatments make the wrong predictions about the truth-conditions of an utterance involving verum focus as well as about its discourse contribution. Equipped with a multidimen-sional semantic framework, we treat VERUM as an expressive function that oper-ates at the use-conditional dimension. It takes as argument a proposition p and expresses the interpretational instruction to downdate the corresponding ques-tion?p from the question under discussion. We show that this approach to VERUM can account for the distribution of verum focus, and its discourse contribution.