The derivation and interpretation of polar questions with a fronted focus

•We analyze polar questions characterized by the fronting of a focal constituent.•We reject the hypothesis that the ‘open polarity’ of the question obtains via movement of a polarity operator.•Focus fronting does not affect the question denotation and contributes non-at-issue content (i.e. a conventional implicature or a presupposition).•The Polar Question operator is directly inserted on top of the compositional structure.

In this paper we discuss a kind of polar questions featuring the fronting of a focal constituent to a left-peripheral position. We argue that this ‘focus fronting’ does not affect the question denotation, but rather contributes some non-at-issue meaning, i.e. either a conventional implicature or a presupposition, whose interpretation is based on the set of alternative propositions provided by the focus structure. We also show that the syntactic well-formedness of focus fronting and the generation of alternative propositions are hardly compatible with the hypothesis that the ‘open polarity’ of the question obtains via movement of a polarity operator from within the sentence radical. We therefore conclude that the Polar Question operator is directly inserted on top of the compositional structure.