The impact of focus particles on the recognition and rejection of contrastive alternatives

Abstract

a b st r a c tThe semantics of focus particles like only requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992 ). In two experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that are mentioned in the prior context or unmentioned. The fi rst experiment used a probe recognition task and showed that focus particles interfere with the recognition of mentioned alternatives and the rejection of unmentioned alternatives relative to a condition without a particle. A second lexical decision experiment demonstrated priming eff ects for mentioned and unmentioned alternatives (compared with an unrelated condition) while focus particles caused additional interference eff ects. Overall, our results indicate that focus particles trigger an active search for alternatives and lead to a competition between mentioned alternatives, unmentioned alternatives, and the focused element.k e y w o r d s : focus particles , alternative-set semantics , probe recognition task , lexical decision task , competitive inhibition .[ * ] We are grateful to

The life and times of focus alternatives: Tracing the activation of alternatives to a focused constituent in language comprehension

“…In the lexical decision task, we replicated the semantic priming effects found by Gotzner et al, but only for the condition without a particle (see Figure ). In the condition with only , in turn, the mentioned and unmentioned alternatives were detected equally fast, and there was only a marginal priming effect comparing both kinds of alternatives to unrelated items.…”

“…Gotzner et al () investigated whether or not a focus particle affected the early activation of focus alternatives. Additionally, the authors manipulated whether the probe word was a mentioned or an unmentioned but possible alternative in order to gain insight on the content of the alternative set.…”

“…The only difference was the time when the probe word was presented: We wanted to test the retrieval of alternatives at the offset of the focused element (while the discourse continued), to gain a comprehensive overview of the time‐course of the effects. We used the same materials as Gotzner et al (; see also Example 7). Appendix A presents a detailed overview of the methods, here only a summary is provided.…”

“…For the probe recognition study, no effect of the presence vs. absence of the focus particle was observed and no interaction with focus particle either. Note, however, that the expected response differs for the conditions (mentioned alternatives: YES, unmentioned alternatives: NO); therefore, the direct comparison has to be taken with caution (see Gotzner et al, for extensive discussion of differences between lexical decision and probe recognition studies).…”

“…Finally, Gotzner, Spalek, and Wartenburger () investigated the interplay of focus particles with contrastive pitch accents. In this study, an alternative set with two elements was presented, an example is given in (8).…”