Verum, focus, and certainty

Verum Focus is known as a prosodic pattern that places stress on verbs or auxiliaries and conveys certainty in a statement’s truth value. Previous literature is conflicted as to whether the effect of certainty arrives from a covert ‘truth’ operator, and to what extent focus alternatives are involved in the process. I show that focus alternatives and covert operators are independent mechanisms in Verum Focus utterances, which jointly trigger an inference of speaker’s certainty through a scalar implicature.