Notions of at-issueness

Upon hearing the sentence Messi, who once scored a goal with his hand, won the Ballon d'Or, the addressee is likely to interpret the main clause as conveying the “main point” and view the appositive relative clause as contributing secondary information. The intuition that some part of the utterance conveys the main point has recently been discussed in formal semantics and pragmatics under the label of “at-issueness.” However, this label has been used in a variety of ways, and there is often little clarity as to what is meant by it. This survey tries to clear things up by identifying and spelling out three specific notions of at-issueness, i.e. Q(uestion)-at-issueness, P(roposal)-at-issueness, and C(oherence)-at-issueness. After looking into what they say about similar kinds of data, I conclude that while these notions appear to capture facets of the same broad intuition, they are truly distinct. The paper also discusses potential connections of at-issueness to projection and commitment strength.