Doctoral Dissertation Research: Tracking alternatives: Experimental investigations into focus and scalar inference

In human communication, conversational participants not only use language based on their knowledge of sound patterns, word meanings, and grammar, but they also reason about and draw inferences from their interlocutors’ language use. That is, speakers communicate more than just the literal content of the words they say; and conversely, listeners make inferences beyond what is literally said by their interlocutor.

There exist multiple well-known linguistic phenomena in which the meaning conveyed by a sentence depends on things that are relevant, but were not explicitly mentioned. These relevant things that were left unsaid are called alternatives. This project will investigate how alternative-sensitive phenomena are understood by hearers, and how they are processed in real time by the human mind.

The current project investigates alternatives evoked in semantic computation (e.g. in the lexical semantics of focus-sensitive expressions such as only) and pragmatic reasoning (e.g. in scalar inference). The first research goal is to develop experimental paradigms to track the alternatives that are evoked in these two empirical domains. To do so, the project will utilize the psycholinguistic reflexes of alternatives and alternative-sensitive expressions – building on paradigms used in existing work on focus and focus alternatives.

Second, it is an open question how and to what extent context constrains the space of relevant alternatives. This project will therefore also investigate the effect of context on the activation of focus and scalar alternatives. A series of experiments using offline behavioral judgments tasks, cross-modal semantic priming, and visual world eye-tracking will be conducted.

The general logic of the experiments will be to track the activation of (focus or scalar) alternatives upon encountering a target: a focused element or weaker scalar term. In both empirical domains, we will first look at the effect of local context (i.e. sentence-level properties), and then at the effect of broader discourse context.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.