| Sumario: | I develop a framework for the compositional semantics of focus association that differs minimally from Rooth (Nat Lang Semant 1:75–116, 1992) in letting focus-sensitive operators optionally pass up evaluated focus alternatives. My proposal is informed by prior work on various complex constructions involving multiple alternative-sensitive operators and alternative sources—including multiple association with a single focus, multiple overlapping associations with separate foci, focus intervention effects in wh-questions, and focus association with wh-phrases—all of which I show can be accurately modeled in my framework. The framework allows us to maintain the idea due to Beck (Nat Lang Semant 14:1–56, 2006) that alternatives computed for the semantics of questions (Hamblin in Found Lang 10:41–53, 1973, a.o.) and of focus (Rooth in Association with focus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985, a.o.) are formally the same objects, defusing the argument in Li and Law (Linguist Philos 39:201–245, 2016) against such unification.
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