UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation aims to show how existing behavioral evidence regarding the processing of focus can be brought more in line with an alternative-based understanding of focus as proposed in theoretical semantics, without loosing sight of the way general comprehension pressures may shape its interpretation. Throughout, I argue that this is possible by studying how the mental representations involved in the processing of focus are incrementally constructed during sentence comprehension. Reading measures obtained in a series of Maze experiments show that comprehenders arrive at a final interpretation of a focus by combining multiple sources of evidence, including lexical, conceptual and world-knowledge, as well as fine-grained linguistic representations that guide the incremental interpretation of focus independently from such general knowledge. These findings allow for a unified understanding of the inconsistent results previously found in the reading of focus, while also explaining how alternatives and discourse context are involved in the prioritization and anticipation of foci.

Experiments 1-4 show, first, that the comprehension of focus generally induces a processing cost because reading times on foci are longer than on non-foci. It then shows that this cost is reduced when contrastive alternatives to the focus are mentioned in the preceding context, suggesting that the representation of contrastive alternatives is indeed involved in the comprehension of focus. The presence of focus marking induces a cost that is separable from a cost of interpreting newly introduced information, and that the presence of alternatives provides a reading benefit that is separable from a benefit due to semantic priming. Together, these findings suggest that contrastive alternatives must somehow be involved in the processing of focus, and that its cost cannot be explained in terms of a general cost for new material.

Experiments 5-7 investigate how discourse context is used to assign a focus structure to a sentence in incremental sentence comprehension. It shows that the presence of contrasting material in the context is used by comprehenders to assign focus marking to subsequent sentences, suggesting that representations of contextual contrasts are utilized to anticipate the location of an upcoming focus. Again, results indicate that these behavioral effects of focus are separable from effects of newness or the predictability of upcoming material in general. This suggests that it is crucially the fact that comprehenders encode abstract representations of contextual contrasts that gives rise to these behavioral effects of focus, not the presumed communicative importance of foci or unpredictability alone.

Finally, experiments 8-10 study what information comprehenders rely on in constructing an alternative set to a focus. This chapter again provides evidence for the claim that abstract linguistic representations of the discourse context are used to either rule in or rule out potential members of the alternative set to a focus. It shows that the deployment of these types of representations is fast, and independent from the use of general conceptual knowledge or the use of domain-general mechanisms such as semantic priming. I thus propose that comprehenders rapidly revisit semantic representations of the discourse context in constructing the alternative set to a focus.