UCLA

This thesis undertakes a new investigation in the semantics of English additive particle too. I discuss various properties of too that have been noticed by scholars in the last four decades, and present some novel data that has not been discussed yet. These data, as we shall see, pose problems for the existing accounts of too. A new analysis is developed here to provide solutions to a range of problems. It is rooted in Rooth's (1992) alternative semantics, following the spirit of Beck's (2006) analysis of again. I treat too as a propositional operator that relates the proposition expressed by the sentence containing it to some contextually salient proposition from a set restricted by the interpretation of focus.