Alternative Sets In Language Processing

Alternative Sets in Language Processing

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as ‘only’ shape the representation of alternatives in a listener’s mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.

The Role of Alternatives in Language

Alternatives in Grammar and Cognition

This edited book brings together research investigating foundational issues relating to the generation and restriction of alternative sets from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It includes contributions from noted scholars in the field to provide theoretical arguments, opinionated perspectives synthesizing existing positions, and empirical evidence from experimentation and fieldwork in support of a theoretical framework. Alternatives have come to occupy a central place in formal semantic theory, and are referenced in notable accounts of various phenomena, including focus, negation, implicature, modality, counterfactuals, and contrastive topics, among others. More recently, experimental investigations have addressed the mental activation and availability of alternatives in sentence comprehension and memory representations, finding that alternative meanings are computed during incremental processing, and persist in memory after sentence completion for a limited amount of time. The diverse perspectives represented in this volume will serve to clarify and guide the major avenues available in future research on the topic, and the book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in fields such as linguistics (especially psycholinguistics and experimental pragmatics), philosophy and cognitive science.