Focus particles have been one of the spotlights of linguistic research during the last fifty years. They have been studied mainly from a syntactic and semantic perspective, in formal and functional approaches. However, in the last years new insights in this field have been developed through pragmatic and textual approaches. From that perspective, focus particles can be considered as a type of discourse particles, as far as their semantic nature and their pragmatic function are concerned. In this paper, we claim that experiments on text processing may help to support this view: by analyzing eye movements during reading and by testing the effective comprehension of utterances, we can demonstrate the key role of the Spanish scalar additive particle incluso ('even') in the process of information retrieval.
is paper o ers an experimental analysis of how additive discourse relations are processed in Spanish. e processing data were obtained from an eye-tracking reading experiment on utterances in which the focus operator incluso 'even' and the additive connective además 'furthermore' were either absent or present. Incluso acts fundamentally on the level of the information structure, whereas además is generally found in argumentative relations. Results show that, despite some di erences during semantic and syntactic integration, the presence of a discourse marker a ects principally high-level processing. ese results seem to underpin theoretical studies that claim for a mainly procedural meaning of discourse markers.
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