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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

NICOLE GOTZNER ,
ISABELL WARTENBURGER  and
KATHARINA SPALEK
NICOLE GOTZNER*
Affiliation:
ZAS and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
ISABELL WARTENBURGER
Affiliation:
Universität Potsdam
KATHARINA SPALEK
Affiliation:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
*
†Address for correspondence: Nicole Gotzner, ZAS, Schützenstr. 18, 10117 Berlin, Germany. e-mail: gotzner@zas.gwz-berlin.de>
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Abstract

The 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 first 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 effects for mentioned and unmentioned alternatives (compared with an unrelated condition) while focus particles caused additional interference effects. 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.

Keywords

focus particlesalternative-set semanticsprobe recognition tasklexical decision taskcompetitive inhibition
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 59 - 95
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Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2016 

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