Context-driven expectations about focus alternatives

Cognition
Christina S KimJeffrey T Runner

Abstract

What is conveyed by a sentence frequently depends not only on the descriptive content carried by its words, but also on implicit alternatives determined by the context of use. Four visual world eye-tracking experiments examined how alternatives are generated based on aspects of the discourse context and used in interpreting sentences containing the focus operators only and also. Experiment 1 builds on previous reading time studies showing that the interpretations of only sentences are constrained by alternatives explicitly mentioned in the preceding discourse, providing fine-grained time course information about the expectations triggered by only. Experiments 2 and 3 show that, in the absence of explicitly mentioned alternatives, lexical and situation-based categories evoked by the context are possible sources of alternatives. While Experiments 1-3 all demonstrate the discourse dependence of alternatives, only explicit mention triggered expectations about alternatives that were specific to sentences with only. By comparing only with also, Experiment 4 begins to disentangle expectations linked to the meanings of specific operators from those generalizable to the class of focus-sensitive operators. Together, these findings show t...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jul 13, 2017·Language and Speech·John M TomlinsonLewis Bott
Sep 24, 2019·Frontiers in Psychology·Mengzhu Yan, Sasha Calhoun
Jul 21, 2020·The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology : QJEP·Shuang ChenLijing Chen

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